President Donald Trump was likely pleased with the statements made by three of America’s premiere conservative thinkers at a Thursday evening panel at CPAC. Even as they denounced so-called persecution of Republicans under Democratic presidents, all three of them — including a Trump administration official —called for former special counsel Jack Smith and former CIA Director John Brennan to be arrested for doing their jobs in ways Trump disliked.

"Jack Smith is very familiar with 18 USC Section 241, Conspiracy Against Rights,” attorney Mike Davis, founder and president of the far right Article III Project, said to the moderator and TV host Ben Ferguson and Trump’s US special envoy to Belarus, John Coale. “It's one of the bogus charges he brought against President Trump for the non-crime of objecting to a presidential election, which is allowed by the First Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887.”

The three men proceeded to incorrectly claim that President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden ”politicized and weaponized intel agencies and law enforcement” to go after him, even though their investigations into Trump’s ties to the Russian government were proved to be sound by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. “That is textbook Conspiracy Against Rights under 18 USC Section 241, a very serious federal civil rights felony. And this is ongoing because it's an ongoing conspiracy, so they're not going to be able to hide from the statute of limitations."

Davis later laid into Brennan, who Trump has falsely accused of perjuring himself for not going along with the MAGA narrative about Trump’s subsequently-proven collaboration with the Russian government.

"I would say to people like John Brennan: your days as a free man may be numbered,” Davis said. “I think there's pretty good evidence that John Brennan perjured himself, and I think it's pretty slam dunk. We just saw that the House Intel Committee released the transcripts on this. Like I said, I think John Brennan's days as a free man are numbered."

Even though Davis’ organization and the entire panel in theory oppose “lawfare,” or the practice of using bogus legal cases to target one’s political enemies, Ferguson argued an exception could be made in the case of Trump’s enemies because what they did “has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with right and wrong”

Near the end of the conversation Coale also admitted that, when trying to discuss the Constitution with Trump at one point, the president spurted out, "What the F— is the Eighth Amendment?" The audience laughed as the panelists and crowd seemed to agree that the story seemed characteristic of Trump.

The Eighth Amendment says, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Brennan is currently fighting to not have his case presided over by U. S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed in 2020 and who has been accused of misusing her power to make politically-motivated rulings in Trump’s favor. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, who is representing Brennan, pointed out that Trump had managed to "manipulate grand jury and case assignment procedures" to guarantee Brennan’s case was tried by Cannon, as she is notorious for her pro-Trump rulings.

"[W]ere we in a normal time, we might hesitate to question the propriety of the government's actions in the grand jury process. However, we are no longer in a normal time," Wainstein wrote. "We are now in a time when the Justice Department has surrendered much of its independence and the President is directly commanding his Attorney General and her leadership team to use their prosecutorial authorities against his perceived political adversaries."

Smith, whose prosecuted Trump for allegedly improperly taking classified documents from the White House, had his own case destroyed by Cannon’s unbroken string of pro-Trump rulings. Despite the CPAC panelists claiming that Smith was discredited, a recent report revealed Smith determined Trump had retained "secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests," potentially revealing that he planned to profit from nationally classified information by retaining them illegally.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” the memo explained. “We must have those documents.”

President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that America’s war in Iran is not in fact a war — but he contradicts that in his own rhetoric.

“President Trump said Wednesday he won't call the conflict in Iran a ‘war’ because ‘you are supposed to get approval,’ suggesting the label itself could trigger congressional authority the administration says it doesn't need,” Axios’ Avery Lotz wrote on Thursday. Yet she noted that on that very same day the president referred to the conflict himself as a “war,” such as when he used that term to describe his military offenses in Iran and Venezuela.

At one point during this Thursday address he even said that the "war essentially ended a few days after we went in." Earlier, during a Monday speech in Memphis, he similarly said that Democrats call it a “war” and he calls it a “military operation,” but then noted that he had Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s title changed to Secretary of War because "we like the sound of it better."

Lotz listed other terms Trump has used to describe his mission including “major combat operations," "a little excursion,” "an excursion that will keep us out of a war” and “OUR HOSTILITIES [with Iran] IN THE MIDDLE EAST."

Trump’s own MAGA movement is turning against him because of the Iran war. For example right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan, a prominent Trump supporter who backed him during the 2024 election, admitted shortly after Trump invaded Iran that many of the president’s antiwar supporters felt “betrayed.”

Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan said. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

Joe Kent, President Donald Trump’s former National Counterterrorism Center Director, clearly felt the same way, resigning earlier in March from his post on the grounds that the war in Iran was immoral. On Wednesday he told right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson the war occurred because of Israel and a “foreign nexus” assassinated the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“Things really got going on Tuesday when Kent told conservative writer (and two-time failed California gubernatorial candidate) Michael Shellenberger he’d be willing to testify in accused Kirk murderer Tyler Robinson’s defense that the FBI botched the investigation,” wrote The Bulwark's conservative pundit Will Sommer about Kent. “Kent told Shellenberger he was warned his own inquiry into Kirk’s murder—which he operated from his government post, separately from the FBI—could hurt the prosecution against Robinson.”

Kent then told Carlson, “I was definitely warned of that over and over again. If I end up having to [be called as a witness], then I’ll do it. It’s not something I’m seeking.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2026 midterm elections is in trouble, at least if the most relevant election results are to be believed.

“After Democrats snagged a likely House seat in Salt Lake City County, Utah, in February, the GOP was furious,” The New Republic’s Finn Hartnett reported on Thursday. “Republicans control all four House districts in Utah, and despite about 40 percent of residents voting Democrat in 2024, they considered losing even one unacceptable.”

Then when Republicans tried to use a local referendum to overturn the gerrymandered district, it “flopped,” although the results were close, Hartnett added. Despite spending $4.35 million on “professional signature gathering” and exceeding the 141,000-signature threshold by almost 30,000, “the petition also needed at least 8 percent of signatures in 26 out of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts, to show that voters across the state wanted the issue brought to the ballot. It was here that Republicans failed. After a nonprofit backing the new maps, Better Boundaries, convinced about 7,000 voters to remove their names from the petition, it fell just short of the 26-district threshold.”

In addition to boding poorly for Utah Republicans, the failure also has ominous implications for Trump overall.

“Since 2025, Republicans have redistricted in an attempt to add seats in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri,” Hartnett explained. “Dems have countered through redistricting in California and now, officially, in Utah. Trump may add an extra layer of complication to the midterms by suppressing the vote before them and attempting to overturn the results if his party loses.”

Hartnett concluded, “We can only hope the public’s general lack of support for the Trump administration will be strong enough that Democrats can pull through.”

Veteran journalist and author Michael Wolff also argued during a Wednesday episode of his podcast for The Daily Beast that Trump is intentionally sowing misinformation about the election and trying to pass unnecessarily restrictive legislation because he knows that it will help him discredit any results that do not work to his advantage.

“It’s just what is to his advantage is just the narrative that the election system in the United States is broken,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “And chaos is to his advantage, and to create a bubble of uncertainty and controversy around that, no matter what happens, reverts to his advantage.”

Wolff continued: "Let’s assume this [bill] is not going to pass. So why is he doing this? The reason he is doing this is to set up and to continue the narrative when he loses the midterms. This then becomes the reason he lost the midterms, and he lost the midterms illegitimately… we’ve set up the enemy here."

Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him has been definitively discredited. A conservative think tank called The Heritage Foundation tracked election fraud cases for more than two decades and found a rate of 0.0000845 percent, with no cases of ballot fraud ever changing a result. Similarly a 2022 report by eight conservatives — including two former Republican senators, a former Republican solicitor general, three former federal appellate judges and two Republican election law specialists — examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed by Trump and his supporters during their 2020-2021 coup attempt. He only succeeded in .016 percent of those cases.

Vice presidents are traditionally the heir apparent when the president prepares to leave office, but a new report suggests President Donald Trump has soured on Vice President JD Vance.

Based on a report by Zeteo, Trump repeatedly makes “snide, annoyed comments” about both Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for being less openly supportive of the Iran war than others in the administration. Vance in particular is described as “skeptical,” and his reluctance to publicly support the war as much as he has other administration initiatives has apparently rubbed Trump the wrong way.

“Some in the White House were taken aback by Trump’s comments about his VP, ‘if only because they had not heard the president talk that way about Vance in the past year and a half,’” wrote The Daily Beast. The White House also described Zeteo’s reporting as “totally false” in a statement to The Daily Beast.

Yet Zeteo is not alone in reporting Iran-related tensions between Trump and Vance. Writing earlier in March for USA Today, conservative columnist Dace Potas pointed out that Vance praised Trump repeatedly during the 2024 election for his supposed unwillingness to get involved in new wars.

“Trump invoked the rhetoric of isolationism on the reelection campaign trail, promising no new wars to MAGA voters who rallied around that aspect of the ‘America First’ brand,” Potas wrote, explaining that the president’s invasions of Venezuela and Iran “run counter to what Trump promised MAGA heading into the 2024 election.” Vance clearly knows this, and is therefore stuck in the position of needing to stick by a president who craves loyalty while not losing the support of his own isolationist base.

“Vance is a more talented candidate than Harris, but I’m not sure that’s enough to overcome his involvement in an unpopular administration,” Potas wrote. “Nor is it all that clear how he reconciles his intellectual opposition to interventionist foreign policy with his involvement in an administration active in that arena.”

In addition to souring Trump against Vance, the vice president’s dissatisfaction with the Iran war could elevate the presidential ambitions of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for whom Trump has previously expressed great fondness.

“The 2028 election is more than 2½ years away, but it is very much on Trump’s mind, as he casts about for a suitable heir to his MAGA empire,” The Wall Street Journal wrote earlier in March. “For months, the president has privately polled advisers, donors and friends about the political strengths and weaknesses of his vice president and secretary of state, pitting the two young, ambitious Republicans against each other—whether they like it or not.”

The Journal added, “Less than a day after the U.S. began bombing Iran, President Trump met with two dozen donors at his Mar-a-Lago club. As attendees dined on jumbo crab and rib-eye steaks, Trump asked the crowd: What do you think of JD Vance and Marco Rubio? The guests applauded louder for Rubio, according to people in the room.”

President Donald Trump and his administration are “really freaked out” as it becomes increasingly clear that the US could lose hundreds of billions in Gulf Arab investments as a result of his unprovoked war against Iran.

“What has really freaked people out is that the Gulf Arabs have warned that they’re a couple weeks away from having to repatriate tens of billions of dollars in investments from the United States,” someone familiar with internal conversations at the White House told Politico. “When these guys do that, it is going to be immensely destabilizing and contradictory to the president’s investment goals.”

Although Trump facilitated hundreds of billions in Gulf Arab state investments in U.S.-based tech startups, investment firms and big businesses — many of which already heavily relied on those countries anyway — all of that is in danger if Iran continues to keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed.

“Any pullback on investments from Middle Eastern governments will limit the amount of capital available to that have come to rely on the region’s sovereign wealth funds and government-backed investment vehicles as a key source of cash,” Politico reported. “But the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has largely choked off oil and gas revenue that support Gulf-based financial institutions that are a major source of global capital.”

Politico added, “And Iran’s attacks on critical infrastructure and flashy highrises have brought tourism to high-dollar destinations like Dubai and Doha to a standstill.”

Writing for AlterNet earlier in March, journalist John Stoehr also observed a sense of “panic” in the White House, especially as it becomes clear that other nations are not going to readily come to bail the US out of it Iran quagmire.

“He said ‘hopefully’ other nations like China, Japan, South Korea, France and the UK would send warships to secure the strait,” Stoehr wrote. “By Monday, he was threatening allies in Europe. ‘It will be very bad for the future of NATO’ if they do not join the effort, he said. Just three days prior, he admitted to knowing that NATO’s enemy, Russia, was helping Iran. He rewarded that effort by lifting sanctions on Russian oil. Perhaps as a result, NATO allies told him you’re on your own.”

As one White House source admitted to Politico, “[The Iranians] hold the cards now. They decide how long we’re involved — and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Another source said: “The terms have changed. The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

Even Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress, who normally are loyal to him, admit to “frustration” with the progress of America’s military campaign there.

"The reaction to the closed-door briefing is the latest example that cracks are emerging among congressional Republicans over the Iran war as lawmakers are growing increasingly skeptical about spending billions of dollars to prolong the conflict," CNN reported earlier in March. "Several Republicans have said they will refuse to support any more money for the war without a clear White House strategy."

“There was no plan, no strategy, no endgame shared and they didn’t give any answers," an anonymous official later told NBC News. "It’s unclear if there isn’t a plan or if there is a plan and they wouldn’t share it with members."

Joe Kent, President Donald Trump’s former National Counterterrorism Center Director, told right wing commentator Tucker Carlson on Wednesday that he believes a “foreign nexus” was behind the assassination of the late right-wing advocate Charlie Kirk.

“Things really got going on Tuesday when Kent told conservative writer (and two-time failed California gubernatorial candidate) Michael Shellenberger he’d be willing to testify in accused Kirk murderer Tyler Robinson’s defense that the FBI botched the investigation,” wrote The Bulwark's conservative pundit Will Sommer in an analysis of Kent’s comments. “Kent told Shellenberger he was warned his own inquiry into Kirk’s murder—which he operated from his government post, separately from the FBI—could hurt the prosecution against Robinson.”

Kent then told Carlson, “I was definitely warned of that over and over again. If I end up having to [be called as a witness], then I’ll do it. It’s not something I’m seeking.”

As Sommer pointed out, FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly was concerned about Kent’s investment in conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination as far back as October. Now that Kent has gone public with his accusations, he has become a “public player” in the ongoing debate.

“Kent’s recent theorizing about the case has raised questions about how Owens got her hands on group-chat messages Kirk sent just a few days before his death,” Sommer wrote. “Speculation that Kent was her source is now rampant. Those text messages, which Owens published last October, featured Kirk complaining to friends that Jewish donors were pressing him to support Israel in various ways, including banning Tucker Carlson from a TPUSA conference. They provided Owens with evidence for her earliest allegations that Kirk was killed by Israel.”

Separate from the role Kent has played in spreading these conspiracy theories, Sommer concluded that “the controversy itself signals that the right’s divide over Kirk’s death isn’t going away. In fact, the fissures could become completely unbridgeable if Kent’s comments about Kirk’s killing end up materially impacting” the trial of Tyler Robinson, Kent’s alleged assassin.

Historian Max Boot expressed concern for The Washington Post earlier this month that Kent will fan the flames of anti-Semitism by claiming Israel is responsible for the US war in Iran. He resigned as Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center Director earlier in March to protest Israel’s supposed involvement.

“As so often happens, the Jews — or, if you prefer a polite euphemism, ‘Zionists’ or ‘the Israel lobby’ — make a handy fall guy,” Boot explained. “What the right-wing fringe once whispered — that this was ‘a war for Israel’ — suddenly burst onto the front pages last week thanks to Joe Kent’s resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a blistering public letter, Kent wrote that ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation’ and that ‘we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."

Speaking with AlterNet on the subject, Jonathan Sarna, emeritus professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of “Lincoln and the Jews: A History” and “When General Grant Expelled the Jews,” told AlterNet that he shares Boot’s concerns, particularly when it comes to how the conspiracy theories parallel an infamous 1903 hoax, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

“If you go back to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — the great antisemitic forgery of the turn of the last century — that really began this sense that Jews are all-powerful, that they operate behind the scenes, and that whatever happens is ultimately their fault,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Before then, for centuries, the prevailing view was that Jews were persecuted and lowly because they had killed Christ, and that was what they deserved — they were powerless. That was their punishment. But ‘The Protocols’ flipped that.”

President Donald Trump “defends the Epstein class” and is taking the entire Republican Party down with him, warned a former Republican lawmaker and ex-staunch Trump supporter on Wednesday.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Wednesday slammed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Mark Levin, Laura Loomer and other Republicans for what she called “leading Republicans into the slaughter before the midterms.”

“I never changed,” declared former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on a social media post on the platform X. “Trump and the GOP betrayed their voters and took in the trash we threw out of the party.” Singling out supporters of the Iran war like influencer Laura Loomer, radio host Mark Levin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Greene said they “are the BEST political consultants the Democrat Party could ever imagine!!!”

Mentioning that Florida Democrats recently won a special election in a Republican district where Trump himself happens to live, Greene added that overall Democrats have flipped 12 state legislative seats in special elections throughout 2025 and 2026. When Greene resigned from Congress to protest Trump and what she claimed was his destruction of the Republican Party, she said that she would not “fight for Trump and the Republican Party that defends the Epstein class, wages pointless foreign wars, and pursues America LAST.”

Earlier this month Greene told CNN’s Pamela Brown that Trump had committed a “complete betrayal” of his MAGA base by going to war with Iran.

"It makes absolutely no sense, Pamela, going into midterm elections," Greene argued. "Let's remove Donald Trump out of it. Let's just put any president in there. Why would an American president lead his political party into the midterms, waging a full-scale major war, completely unprovoked on Iran, on behalf of Israel? And that's the way most Americans see it. They see this is for Israel, not for America."

Greene concluded: "Why would an American president do that, which is forcing gas prices to hike right here going into spring break, where families are going to be driving out of town, going into summer? Declaring and waging a major full-scale war that seems to have no end in sight. That is not de-escalating. It's escalating every single day. And it just doesn't make sense... I went to, I can't even tell you, countless rallies all over the country for President Trump, campaigning for him and Republicans, because we wanted to win. And we said on every single rally stage, no more foreign wars, no more regime change. It's time to put America first, and this is a complete betrayal of those campaign promises."

Greene is not the only MAGA Republican to claim Trump abandoned the values for which he stood during the 2024 election. In February Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told NOTUS that he too is loyal to the values Trump ran on in 2024 rather than what he has done since starting his second term.

“My constituents already know I’m ‘America First,’ I’m not for starting another war,” Massie argued. “I’m not for deficit spending. And I led the charge to expose a bunch of rich and powerful and politically connected men in the Epstein files. Those are the areas that I’ve differed with the president. So where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president.”

Similarly, after Trump invaded Iran in March, right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan admitted that a lot of Trump supporters felt “betrayed” by his flip-flop on the issue of staying out of wars.

“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan argued. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

President Donald Trump is continuing his “improper revenge campaign” against New York Attorney General Letitia James — and she is fighting it actively.

“President Donald Trump’s top housing official Bill Pulte issued two new criminal referrals for New York Attorney General Letitia James on Wednesday, attempting to revive the administration’s ongoing legal pursuit of one of his political opponents,” reported CNN on Wednesday, adding that the referrals were sent to Illinois and Florida for “suspected homeowners insurance fraud.” The Justice Department confirmed to CNN that “referrals were received by our US Attorney Offices,” while James' attorney Abbe Lowell accused Trump of continuing his “improper revenge campaign instead of helping bring down the rising cost of living in this country.”

The lawyer added in a statement to CNN, “Frustrated by repeated failures, where judges and grand juries have rejected their attempts to charge Attorney General James, Trump and his political enablers keep abusing their power to pursue a vendetta against her by trying to rename, refile, and repeat baseless allegations. They continue this improper revenge campaign instead of helping bring down the rising cost of living in this country.”

Lowell also predicted that “these desperate tactics will fail — just as every previous attempt has failed — and exposes an Administration that has abandoned its responsibility to the American people in favor of petty political payback.”

Among the “previous attempts” mentioned by Lowell was an October indictment on one count of making false statements to a financial institution and one count of bank fraud. A judge dismissed that case after Trump’s appointment of interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan in Alexandria, Va. was deemed invalid. Other Trump prosecutions of his political enemies have also failed.

“This is how grand juries were meant to work,” UC Berkeley Criminal Justice Center Director Chesa Boudin and UC Davis Law Professor Eric S. Fish wrote in The New York Times about Trump’s failures to prosecute people he dislikes for political reasons such as James, adding that “a primary security to the innocent against hasty, malicious and oppressive persecution.” When U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed Trump’s attempted prosecution of another political enemy, former FBI Director James Comey, in November, she made it clear she had done so because of the sloppy methods Trump used to prosecute the case.

“Because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, I will grant Mr. Comey’s motion and dismiss the indictment without prejudice,” Currie explained.

Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge, told The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi Schalit that when grand juries reject Trump’s attempted prosecutions, they do so to defy an overreach of power.

“The grand jury would have to totally reject the whole premise of the case that’s being presented to them by the United States attorney because, remember, there are typically no witnesses appearing before the grand jury to dispute the facts,” Jones told Schalit. “The grand jury is clearly saying, ‘Even accepting the facts you’re putting before us as true, we don’t think under these circumstances this case is worthy of a federal indictment.’”

President Donald Trump does not have many Republican critics left in Congress — but one of the few who remains recently told The New York Times that he views his upcoming primary as a “litmus test” for his own party.

“He told me that he thinks if he wins, it will embolden his colleagues to oppose Trump on policy issues they truly care about,” the Times’ Catie Edmondson told Katie Gleuck in a Wednesday interview. Edmondson was discussing her recent interview with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has been an outspoken critic of Trump for invading Iran and concealing files related to the late convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. “That being said, and what I hope came through in the piece, is that Massie, and his relationship to his district, are unique. Even if he wins, I’m not sure how many of his colleagues would rush to follow his lead given how much outside money is being spent against him.”

Massie is not alone among Republicans in Congress who stand up to Trump, although he belongs to an increasingly rare breed. Edmondson observed that in Louisiana, incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy is being primaried by Rep. Julia Letlow because Cassidy voted to convict Trump over his conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

“I remember talking to Cassidy right after he cast that vote and being struck by how angered he was by the violence he witnessed at the Capitol that day,” Edmondson said.

This is not the first time that the Times has profiled Massie for his stance against Gallrein. Earlier in March, reporter Tim Balk interviewed Massie over his willingness to stand up to Gallrein on issues like Iran and Epstein.

In an article published on March 8, the New York Times Tim Balk stresses that a GOP congressional primary battle in Kentucky — one that finds incumbent Massie up against Trump loyalist Ed Gallrein.

"My Republican colleagues, over and over, are being forced to choose between President Trump's position now and his position on the campaign trail. And I'm sticking with his positions on the campaign trail,” Massie told Balk.

The Kentuckian also told Reason Magazine in February that he believes in the near future, people currently holding office will be judged on where they stood on the Epstein issue.

"The question a few years from now will be, 'where were you on the Epstein issue?'" Massie said. "... Were you for releasing the files, or were you calling it a hoax, or were you just too chicken to come out and say anything?"

He continued, "And I think unfortunately, a lot of the politicians right now who are being considered the future of the GOP are either in the category of agreeing that it's a hoax, or just keeping their mouth shut, because they don't have the courage and the political will to do the right thing. And so I don't think you should trust those people later."

Also in February, Massie told NOTUS that he is loyal not to Trump’s second term agenda, but the platform on which he was reelected in 2024.

“My constituents already know I’m ‘America First,’ I’m not for starting another war,” Massie said. “I’m not for deficit spending. And I led the charge to expose a bunch of rich and powerful and politically connected men in the Epstein files. Those are the areas that I’ve differed with the president. So where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president.”

President Donald Trump’s war against Iran has politically “backfired” terribly, a prominent centrist think tank scholar and columnist argued on Wednesday.

“When the current war began, public support was lower than for any other major conflict undertaken in nearly a century,” explained Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston. “Before attacking Iran, however, Mr. Trump offered only a cursory rationale to Congress and the American people. The need for surprise might conceivably have justified his near-silence on such a grave matter.”

He added, “But there is no justification for his failure to offer a systematic and sustained case for the war once it began,” describing Trump’s unilateral approach to global conflict as having “backfired” with average support for the war falling to 39 percent.

“The American people don’t think that the president has clearly explained the goals of the war, and the share who think he has done so is smaller today than it was at the beginning,” Galston said. “Americans have concluded that the war will weaken the economy and leave the country less safe. They believe that it is a war of choice, not necessity, and that it is going badly. And despite the administration’s call for short-term sacrifice, people reject paying more for gasoline as their patriotic duty by a margin of 2 to 1.”

Lest anyone doubt the immediate political implications of these findings for Trump, Galston pointed out that the president is losing support among precisely those groups that gravitated toward him in 2024.

“One quarter of the Americans who voted for him in 2024 disapprove of his Iran policy, and this disapproval is especially high among groups who moved strongly toward him during that election: 56% among young adults, 62% for Hispanics and independents,” Galston wrote. “These statistics signal more than a political threat for Mr. Trump and the Republicans who must face voters this fall. They represent a challenge to the democratic legitimacy of the most solemn decision that a nation can make.”

He ultimately opined, “It’s up to the president to conclude this war in the way that does the least damage to our national interest—and to the people’s waning confidence in their public institutions.”

Influential conservative thought leaders are also turning on the Iran war. Megyn Kelly reported that she had “serious doubts” shortly after the invasion, while former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested Trump had literally gone insane. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused Trump of going to war for Israel, saying “this happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war,” adding that “this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence—and other foreign countries’ intelligence, but certainly by Israeli intelligence.” He was joined by the pro-Trump Hodge Twins, a pair of popular MAGA influencers, similarly said that “we are at war for Israel. Thanks for confirming.”

Finally popular right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan said after Trump invaded Iran that “it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.” Meanwhile former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), a former Trump supporter, cited the invasion as proof that Trump supporters are in a cult.

“And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters?” Walsh argued. “What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

He wrapped it up, “You’ve got no argument against people calling you a cult. And if he takes us to war against Iran, and you clap and applaud and throw him flowers, Trump supporters, I will be at the front of the parade calling you a cult.”

President Donald Trump is so unpopular, even his donors are unpopular — as evidenced by a Democrat who recently won in a crowded primary in part by linking his challengers to a pro-Israel lobby that is also full of MAGA mega-contributors.

“Since late summer/early fall, it became clear that AIPAC [a pro-Israel lobby] had a candidate in this race, and I was clear that I was not prepared to sign on to a no-strings-attached blank check of military aid to Israel,” Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss told conservative commentator Lauren Egan from The Bulwark to discuss his win in a crowded Democratic primary for Illinois' 9th Congressional District. “That's their litmus test.”

Biss went on to describe how AIPAC set up a shell super PAC with a benign name, Elect Chicago Women, that “spent something in excess of $7 million on the campaign, which basically dwarfed the amount of money that everybody else was able to spend” to stop Biss. Even though Biss is Jewish and descended from Holocaust survivors, his refusal to be entirely pro-Israel was initially a liability — until his campaign decided to turn it into an asset, in part by shining a light on the groups behind the shell super PAC.

“We made a decision pretty early on that we were going to make this the issue,” Biss explained. “We were going to lay the groundwork to explain what AIPAC was doing and who they were. So to say: hey, this is money from AIPAC and Trump donors — because there's a lot of Trump donor money mixed up in all that.” Additionally, Biss pointed out that these donors wanted to give a “no-strings-attached military aid” package to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which is unpopular in America, and that they were doing this secretly.

“All three of those stories together really helped make it the issue,” Biss said. “And then, amazingly, by the time Election Day came, their preferred candidate finished a distant third. My predominant opponent on Election Day — the person who came in a close second — was someone who is actually much more anti-Israel than I am.”

Trump donors are particularly unpopular right now as they align behind the president’s agenda while the rest of the country moves away from it.

"Determined to get a piece of the action, the very wealthy are lining up in droves," pundit Thomas Edsall wrote in a recent New York Times editorial. "Despite Trump’s having lost ground in almost every demographic during his second term, one group stands firmly in the president’s camp: the superrich who have their wallets open."

As of 2026 Federal Reserve data showed the top 0.1 percent now holds 14.4 percent of U.S. wealth, up from 8.6 percent in 1989. Concurrent with this recent data point, wealthy donors shifted sharply toward Republicans in the 2024 election, with critics attributing the trend to Trump's economic policies exacerbating income inequality.

"Contributions by the very rich to Republicans grew from roughly $300 million in 2022 to just under a billion in 2024, while donations to Democrats fell from roughly $300 million to less than $200 million,” Edsall wrote.

Politically speaking, it is the beginning of the end for President Donald Trump, warned a former aide to a Republican president from recent history in a Wednesday Substack post.

Trump is “unmasked, naked and despised” before the world because of the Iran war, rising gas prices, his humanitarian atrocities and the corruption in his administration, Schmidt warned. Instead of falling as Trump previously promised gas prices “are going to go much higher. The first dead Americans have started to come home, but the story of American casualties is just beginning as the 82nd Airborne and US Marine expeditionary units prepare for an assault on Iranian territory.”

He added, “Prices are rising, airports have gone off the rails, gas is sky high, and America is losing a war to Iran because it was planned by fools. Everywhere there is disaster, and it has not gone unnoticed by the American people.”

For this reason, Democrats have won in every special election where there was a contested race since Trump’s 2024 election victory, and have also flipped many districts they were not expected to win; Republicans have not had a single upset.

“The walls are closing in, and yes, there will be elections,” Schmidt wrote. “A few months back I predicted that Donald would be hovering around 30% approval by the end of March. This is where the deranged 79-year-old is headed.” Explaining that Trump is unpopular with everyone in America except “the MAGA nihilists,” he predicted that “all across the country the American people are going to act against MAGA with ruthless glee. Trump is going to be rebuked at the polls like no president has been in the modern era. It will be a crushing blow, a historic landslide, a knockout.”

The ex-presidential adviser concluded that Trump’s “MAGA emperor” phase is nearing its end as “he is unmasked, naked and despised. Soon, he will be defeated. The dancing at Mar-a-Lago is about to end.”

Earlier in March, shortly after Trump’s unprovoked invasion of Iran, Schmidt noted the irony of Trump demanding a Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 and suggested the president is sufficiently petty that bitterness over losing may have at least partially motivated his attacks.

“He wanted the Peace Prize, and when he couldn’t get it, Trump lost his mind,” Schmidt argued, quoting a letter he wrote Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in which he said “considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Adding that “I’m no longer interested in it [the Peace Prize]," Schmidt denounced Trump by writing that “no man of violence and venom can resist the siren song of modern warfare, which, after all, is just a game,” using “game” facetiously.

As conservative columnist Jim Geraghty wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday, polls that consistently find Trump in the 30s with his approval ratings suggest he has indeed lost support among all except his hardcore base of MAGA admirers. After one recent poll found 36 percent of Americans identify as MAGA, he explained that this is a revealing statistic.

“Aligning with MAGA is probably closely correlated to how people feel about the state of the country and their approval of Trump,” Geraghty observed. “When they think he’s doing well, they identify as MAGA; when he isn’t, they don’t.”

If President Donald Trump wants more money for his un-Constitutional war in Iran, Congress should audit it, at least according to a prominent right-leaning pundit.

Commenting on Trump’s request for $200 billion in additional funding Eric Boehm, a pundit at the right-leaning Reason Magazine, wrote on Tuesday that “the war in Iran has now entered its fourth week, and there is still little indication of any long-term plan or strategic goal for the conflict. The entire war has unfolded without congressional authorization for the use of force or a declaration of war.”

Boehm’s overall thesis was that “if you want to have a war, you have to find a way to pay for it,” which historically has required either “raising taxes or generating revenue via ‘war bonds’ and other such mechanisms. America drifted away from that principle in the late 20th century and has never looked back. The past 20 years have been marked by wars abroad and tax cuts at home. The post-9/11 wars in the Middle East cost about $8 trillion, and nearly all of that amount was borrowed and added to the debt.”

To answer the question as to whether doing more of this would be a good day, Boehm asked members of Congress to inquire of their constituents if they would prefer “a tax break, a health insurance subsidy, or another war in the Middle East. I have a pretty good idea about which option would finish last in that poll.”

In closing, Boehm praised Rep. Eric Burlison (R–Mo.) “for finding the most novel and responsible approach. Burlison told CNN last week that the Pentagon should ‘pass an audit’ before Congress votes for any supplemental war funding. ‘Then I'll know that at least they're keeping track of the dollars,’ he added.”

Boehm concluded, “Sounds like a fair deal to me.”

Compared to other conservative critics of Trump’s war, Boehm’s editorial is practically tame. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused Trump of being manipulated by Israel, arguing “Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war” and claiming “this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence—and other foreign countries’ intelligence, but certainly by Israeli intelligence.”

Similarly right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan, one of Trump’s biggest supporters during the 2024 presidential election, denounced Trump’s invasion of Iran as a “betrayal” of the anti-war policies he promised during the campaign.

“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan said. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

President Donald Trump’s approval rating is already in a “catastrophic” situation and will only get worse as his base starts to feel “real pain,” warned three pundits at the conservative website The Bulwark on Tuesday.

“The best case scenario economically is where we're at now, which is real pain for people to experience,” commentator Tim Miller said in a panel that included his colleagues Jonathan V. Last and Sam Stein. “I don't think that 90% of the MAGA folks are going to stay with them. I really don't. It's hard to tell in the polls right now because there's a lag.”

A little later he added, “Yes, self-described MAGA folks, 90% of them are supportive of Iran, but that's just people who are self-described MAGA folks. I mean, how many people in those polls don't self-define as MAGA folks anymore because of what's happening? As we are sitting here,

literally as we are sitting here, the Marquette University law poll, which is like the gold standard in Wisconsin, they put out a poll today. Trump's net approval rating is minus 14%. which is, ‘the lowest net approval figure for him in both of his terms as president.’ I mean, these numbers are, who knows? They're catastrophic.”

When Last opined that he felt they should be even lower, Miller noted that the bottom has likely not yet been reached.

“I think it's getting worse,” Miller said. “I think it's getting worse. I guess my point. And I guess the point that I keep coming back to is I believe that because I believe that the actual environment, the people cannot accurately see the environment around them. And if you, if you are just right, and if you're just living your life in Green Bay and the real, the only real damage you've had to your life right now is that you filled your gas tank up one or two times, it's been more expensive.” But what happens when that same family can no longer afford to go on vacation or in other ways make ends meet?

At that point, Miller speculated, the bottom will fall out of Trump’s support. Last expressed a similar view earlier on the same day in his own Substack column.

“At root, there are only two possible explanations for the Trump era,” Last wrote. “A controlling plurality of Americans affirmatively want Trump and the Republican party’s post-liberal, authoritarian vision. Or, Americans don’t want post-liberalism—not really. They don’t even know what post-liberalism means. They’ve just voted for Trump because his terrible governance hasn’t impacted their lives. If they felt the real-world consequences of Trumpism, then they’d reject its illiberalism.”

If the latter scenario transpires, “our fellow Americans are capable of changing their minds from getting burnt by the stove,” meaning “we are all going to have to absorb the pain.”

By contrast Ashley St. Clair, a former anti-transgender activist and lover to X CEO Elon Musk, warned The Bulwark’s Cameron Kasky that it can be hard to get through to Trump supporters because his movement has become like a cult.

"It is a cult,” St. Clair told Kasky. “And what you have to understand is that in any abusive relationship, your access to other people is cut off. You're isolated. Your access to information is cut off. Your access to people who might have rational perspectives on what you're involved in — that's cut off too.”

She concluded, “These people are told it's all fake news. The only things you can trust are Twitter and Truth Social. And for better or worse, they actually believe that. They believe that established outlets are lying to them, that nothing those outlets publish can be true."

President Donald Trump already destroyed the White House’s historic East Wing to build his ballroom, and now he has announced plans to rip out a fixture installed by one of America’s most iconic founding fathers, President Thomas Jefferson.

The Republican announced a "beautiful, black granite" installation to replace the Tennessee Flagstone pavers on the West Wing Colonnade, according to a Tuesday White House pool report covered by People Magazine. The president said he will pay for the installation himself, with the Jeffersonian originals being sent to a nursery for safekeeping.

"Thanks to the Builder-in-Chief, the White House will be properly glorified and remain in excellent condition for generations to come," White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told PEOPLE in a statement. Originally commissioned by Jefferson for an ice house and servants’ bedrooms, it is now best known as a “45-second commute” between the West Wing and Executive Mansion.

When Trump last destroyed part of the White House without public approval, a former Trump supporter exploded in rage.

"This jack—— in the f—— White House is destroying a permanent structure that can't come back," former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said on his Substack earlier in March. "He can't do this on his own! There's a rigorous, rigorous process to mess with the restructuring, structural changes of the White House, and he just blows right through all of that!"

Walsh was not alone. After the White House announced its decision to demolish the East Wing, they received over 9,000 pages of public comments with “barely any supportive missives.” The remarks included comments like "complete DISASTER,” "NO GAUDY FAKE GOLD STUFF ALL OVER THE PLACE,” “no one wants to be in an adjunct building in a large crowd with lengthened security protocols,” “eyesore,” “abomination” and “appalling.”

Even a sitting Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), expressed dismay at the East Wing’s destruction.

"The stark images of the East Wing demolished in mere days were deeply disturbing to Americans who cherish preservation of our nation's history," Turner wrote in the comments.

Trump’s disrespect toward Jefferson himself is also consistent with an anti-Jeffersonian thrust in his administration. While Trump openly aligns with Christian nationalists, Jefferson — who co-authored the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and is one of America’s most influential founding thinkers — was avowedly secular. While serving as president from 1801 to 1809, he famously wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists that “believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

In his personal time, Jefferson also rewrote the New Testament to retell Jesus Christ’s story as that of a secular philosopher rather than a religious leader. He finished the so-called “Jefferson Bible,” which was officially titled “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” in 1820 and argued Christ’s teachings were better when all supernatural and religious elements were removed from them.

Unlike Trump, who opposes scientific education and the ideas proved through the scientific method by established institutions, Jefferson advocated promulgating the sciences throughout American life.

"His 'empire of liberty' offered the potential to dismantle the artificial hierarchies inherited from the past and imbue all aspects of life with the promise of freedom and happiness," Dean Caivano, an assistant professor of political theory at Lehigh University and author of "A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy," told this author for Salon Magazine in 2024. "Although this idealized image of a free and harmonious American society is undeniably marred by the institution and legacy of slavery, overlooking the role of education and science as prerequisites for freedom and equality diminishes our ability to assess the historical and contemporary limits of American democracy critically."

By comparison, Trump’s philosophy toward science "relies on reactionary, draconian, and dogmatic thinking. By launching a direct assault on the scientific community, Project 2025 undermines the foundation of an enlightened citizenry that Jefferson held in high regard. The project advocates for dramatic cuts to research and development, promotes climate denialism, and seeks to hyper-politicize public health and STEM fields."

A longtime conservative writer is not quite ready to give up on President Donald Trump’s war in Iran — but even he admits that the Republican is acting like “a lame duck and getting lamer.”

In a Tuesday editorial that labeled America’s 45th and 47th president as a “wild card,” Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. argued that Trump is a “lame duck and getting lamer” who, as a result, is “betting on luck” to get him a series of major policy achievements.

“His war aims run athwart the Napoleonic dictum: If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna,” Jenkins explained. “Disapprove of George W. Bush but he took steps and mobilized the resources to make sure he met his stated goals in Iraq. And luck cuts both ways. Like history’s most notorious foreign-policy gamblers, Mr. Trump is unlikely to quit while ahead.”

When Trump’s anti-war supporters express bafflement at his sudden warmongering, Jenkins observed that Trump was never actually an isolationist, but rather exults in the opportunity to show off American military might. In this same vein, he cares primarily as president in “showing a bigger propensity to bet on his commander-in-chief discretion without caring about democratic buy-in.” Hence how his lame duck status is “a key factor in his calculations.”

This does not mean that Jenkins is entirely giving up on Trump’s Iran operation. He does, however, believe that it needs to be contextualized as part of Trump’s implicit understanding that his administration is on the wane.

“If Iran becomes Mr. Trump’s self-willed domestic Waterloo, well, American mistakes usually end up looking like very clumsy, needlessly expensive, often misguided ways of ultimately prevailing,” Jenkins opined. He concluded that even if Trump fails in Iran, “little has been damaged that really matters: Foremost is survival of a citizenry imbued with freedom, enterprise and a sense of personal possibility. The U.S. seems on track to remain the world’s premier engine of innovation and material progress despite a succession of presidents each of whom was regrettable in his own way.”

Earlier in March, Jenkins compared Trump’s 2026 war in Iran to President Richard Nixon’s Middle Eastern policies in 1973.

“Circumstances were different but the last time an ideologically motivated aspiring hegemon threatened the world’s oil supply was 1973, when the Soviet Union was observed making preparations to intervene in the Arab-Israeli war,” Jenkins wrote, adding Nixon even “resorted to an unvarnished nuclear threat,” the last president to do so. Subsequently that “nuclear bluster permanently vanished from the U.S. presidential vocabulary, experts in diplomacy tell us, for reasons that boil down to a loss of credibility once Moscow could match the U.S. in nuclear firepower. Oddly, though, this now-standard narrative hasn’t been updated for Donald Trump’s first term, much less his second.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2017, former Nixon adviser David Gergen had a less-than-glowing interpretation for Nixon’s use of the nuclear threat.

“If you go back to the Nixon era, right toward the end during the Watergate period, when Nixon was drinking heavily and had become erratic, the secretary of defense at that time was Jim Schlesinger, an extraordinarily bright man and very principled,” Gergen told Salon in 2017. “And he told the joint chiefs, if you get an order from the president to fire a nuclear missile, you do not do that. Don’t take an order from the commander in chief until you call me and I give you personal approval, or you get the personal approval of the secretary of state.”

President Donald Trump’s billionaire ally and military technology supplier, Palantir CEO Peter Thiel, says he is an expert on the Antichrist — but actual experts disagree.

“Thiel’s evangelism is another example of how the right has strategically co-opted Christian religious teachings to provide support for their autocratic tendencies, as well as their fears about technology being limited through ‘woke’ beliefs,” Anthea Butler, chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies, wrote in a Tuesday editorial for MSNOW.

Earlier in the piece, Butler broke down the components of Thiel’s religious philosophy, identifying them as a “mishmash of his political and personal beliefs about technology, civilization, race and democracy. And his views on the antichrist range from the disturbing to the nonsensical.”

Thiel, a businessman in the military-industrial complex, “believes the antichrist will push the world toward peace using the fear of war” and “use peace to slow down or even stop technological advances,” including the AI technology in which Thiel has invested billions.

“He’s said it’s possible that climate change activist Greta Thunberg and other critics could be ‘legionnaires of the Antichrist,’” a notable position given AI’s disproportionate impact on climate change.

“It’s a belief structure built on fear — and Thiel’s fear appears to be that western civilization will be crushed by a myriad of people and forces that don’t adhere to his interpretation of technocratic Christian beliefs,” Butler explained. Other top Catholic scholars agree with her, including Italian theologian Father Paolo Benanti, who denounced Thiel’s beliefs as “a sustained act of heresy,” and the Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro, who said Thiel misunderstands what the Antichrist actually is.

“The Antichrist, rather than a theological figure, is a concrete, identifiable historical possibility,” Spadaro said. “This is the point at which the Gospel is transformed into an instrument of geopolitical analysis.”

Butler also pointed out that Thiel’s potential belief that humanity should cease to exist are equally troubling and “should give us all pause.”

“The next time Thiel embarks on his lecture tour to tout his teachings about the Antichrist, remember that his lectures are the musings of a man who wants technology to overtake the emotional connections that humans have,” Butler wrote. “The New York Times’ Ross Douthat asked Thiel in a June 2025 interview, ‘I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?’ After a long hesitation, Thiel replied, ‘There’s so many questions implicit in this,’ before eventually offering a ‘Yes.’”

In addition to supplying the Pentagon, Thiel was also connected to Israel through the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who helped Palantir expand into the Middle East.

Ultimately Epstein’s theology seems to be motivated less by a consistent core belief system than a hodgepodge of ideas united mainly by their convenience to Thiel’s various business and political interests.

"Peter Thiel's Armageddon speaking tour has — like the world — not ended yet," Wired reporter Laura Bullard explained in September. "For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers…. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world — in politics, technology, and the fate of the species."

President Donald Trump’s supporters, comprising anywhere from the low 30s to the low 40s of the American electorate, will not waver because there is no “Trumpism” — only worship of a personality.

“I would argue it’s more of a pugnacious attitude with a handful of immovable north stars (immigration enforcement, tariffs, disregard for multilateralism) and every other policy decision negotiable — up to and including the federal government taking an ownership stake and some degree of control over private companies,” conservative columnist Jim Geraghty wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday.

Geraghty pointed to a recent NBC News survey which found a 100 percent approval rating for Trump among self-identified “MAGA Republicans.” A CBS News poll released over the weekend found his numbers at 92 percent of “MAGA Republicans.”

“Back in January, Trump boasted, ‘MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too,’” Geraghty wrote. “Other than a few exceptions such as the release of the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files, that has been the case.”

At the same time, he pointed out that it is misleading to interpret these statistics as indicating no fracturing of Trump’s base. After all, the term “MAGA Republican” implies support for Trump. Republicans who do not support Trump would most likely not use the “MAGA” label in front of “Republican” in polls.

“That’s why we shouldn’t expect to find many MAGA supporters expressing their opposition to Trump’s decisions on Iran or much else,” Geraghty explained. “When people in this demographic disagree strongly enough, eventually they just stop calling themselves MAGA.” And although many Americans are dissatisfied with Trump, most of his original supporters stick by him because “to the extent ‘Trumpism’ as a philosophy exists, a core tenet appears to be: ‘Always trust the guy in charge, because he knows what he is doing and is playing seven-level chess.’”

Geraghty also observed that “MAGA self-identification increased from 28 percent in November 2024 to 30 percent in the March NBC News poll. We should probably not read too much into that minute increase, because the NBC poll has a margin of error of 3.1 percent, and one year ago, the same pollster found 36 percent of registered voters identified as MAGA. Aligning with MAGA is probably closely correlated to how people feel about the state of the country and their approval of Trump — when they think he’s doing well, they identify as MAGA; when he isn’t, they don’t.”

Some high profile MAGA Republicans have parted ways with Trump over his war with Iran and handling of the release of files related to convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” podcaster Joe Rogan said earlier in March. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

Per the Epstein files, he said, “Who knows what f — — happens with all this Epstein files s — —,” Rogan said. “It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier and deeper and deeper.”

By contrast Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and one of Trump’s biggest supporters, said in response to the Iran invasion that the United States could avoid blowback because its weapons are so sophisticated they might as well be “alien technology.”

President Donald Trump is “going to set our house on fire,” warned a Republican congressman who once supported him, in the midst of a Substack post on Tuesday. His concern is that Trump is quite literally insane.

“When I do media in Europe, I feel like I'm speaking to the world, and I often say 'world, former congressman here, a proud American here,’” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said in his rant. “‘Hey, world, listen up,’ I said last night, ‘he's a madman. He's not only a bad, horrible guy — he's lost it. He should be removed from office. I don't think that will happen, world, but hang on.’”

Adding that “Trump is going to set our house on fire, he's making his way to setting the whole world on fire,” Walsh speculated that Trump is a “madman who is losing it more and more every day. And this is really scary and really dangerous, because he is the leader of still the most powerful country in the world.”

Walsh is not the first public figure to speculate about the president’s mental fitness. From his arbitrary wars against Venezuela and Iran and his unprovoked belligerence toward Canada and Denmark to a noticeable deterioration in the quality of his speech, it seems Trump is both on the decline and allowing that decline to impair his leadership.

“The other day, President Donald Trump claimed he’d had a conversation with a former president who endorsed Trump’s ill-considered war against Iran,” wrote journalism professor John Krull, the director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism, for The Statehouse File earlier in March. “According to Trump, the unnamed former president even said that he wished he had done what Trump had done.”

Krull pointed out these alleged conversations never actually happened and therefore Trump is either deliberately lying or, more troublingly, “that the president of the United States—the person controlling the most powerful arsenal on earth—finally and fully has come to believe his own con and no longer is in firm contact with reality.”

Speaking to this journalist for Salon Magazine shortly before the 2020 presidential election, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist who has taught at Yale and authored the new book “Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul,” profiled Trump psychologically and used that analysis to predict he would reject the result if he lost — which actually happened.

“Those with pathological narcissism are abusive and dangerous because of their catastrophic neediness,” Lee said. “Think of a drowning person gasping for air: a survival instinct just may push you down in order to save one’s own life. In the manner that the body needs oxygen, the soul needs love, and self-love is what a toxic narcissist is desperately lacking. This is why he must overcompensate, creating for himself a self-image where he is the best at everything, never wrong, better than all the experts, and a ‘stable genius.'”

Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch, warned on Tuesday that the mainstream media is imperiling democracy by refusing to call out Trump’s clear signs of mental decline, regardless of whether it is caused by a health issue or his personality. When they fail to do this, people are hurt.

“His about-faces on such issues as tariffs and Iran have created chaos in the financial markets,” Froomkin explained. “How about interjecting some skepticism when he says something absurd in the first place, so that people won’t overreact when he says it – and again when he takes it back?” He urged journalists to exhibit “self-respect. One of Trump’s most consistent messages to his supporters has been to mistrust the mainstream media and its ‘fake news.’ But the primary source of ‘fake news’ in the mainstream media is news reports based on Trump’s lies. So stop doing that.”

President Donald Trump and his administration are pushing AI, and according to a recent report by The Nation, this is part of a larger and insidious phenomenon — political action committees (PACs) devoted to inserting AI everywhere in our lives.

“The AI lobby has burst onto the scene in this cycle by spending millions of dollars in primaries,” Usamah Andrabi wrote on Tuesday. “And like AIPAC [the pro-Israel lobby], it is largely doing so by using opaquely named super PACs and flooding the airwaves with ads that don’t mention AI at all.”

Andrabi proceeded to list the super PACs doing this including “AI corporations like OpenAI (Leading the Future, Think Big, and American Mission PAC), Meta (Forge the Future Project, Making Our Tomorrow, American Technology Excellence Project, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California), and Anthropic (Jobs and Democracy PAC and Defending Our Values PAC).” Andrabi then explained how, like super PACs before them, these organizations are donating generously to viable candidates so that they will oppose broadly popular policies that might hurt their industries.

“No matter what votes they take or tweets they post, any candidate backed by AI super PACs is complicit in Trump’s warmongering and the facilitation of US imperialism abroad,” Andrabi pointed out. “Despite media narratives praising Anthropic for standing up to the Trump administration, Trump used Anthropic’s Claude model to plan and conduct 1,000 strikes on Iran—including the elementary school bombing that killed over 100 children. Before that, Claude was used to help the Trump administration kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and conduct a military coup in the country. In the midst of all that ‘fighting with the Pentagon,’ Anthropic even dropped its flagship safety policy that it said differentiated it from companies like OpenAI.”

Andrabi added, “At home, AI corporations are trying to evade responsibility for the harm their data centers cause to communities across the country. Research clearly shows that AI data centers raise utility rates for the areas they’re in through their massive consumption of electrical power. They also use inordinate amounts of water to cool their computers, threatening access to water and raising bills, while poisoning the air with toxic pollutants.”

Because municipalities and states have successfully organized to prevent proposed data centers and impose various regulations, AI companies aim to thwart the democratic process through lobbying.

“AI is not only not going away but is doubling down on strategies that AIPAC and Crypto have spearheaded in our election,” Andrabi concluded. “So be warned: The AI PACs are here, and they are a threat to us all. The hydra has grown another head. We must organize accordingly.”

Andrabi’s warnings were echoed earlier this month by Mackenzie Arnold, Director of U.S. Policy at Law AI, who posted a spirited defense of some of these regulations earlier in March.

“Let’s be real,” posted Arnold. “Most of these state laws do not threaten our national security or our path to innovation. And trying to beat back all laws that touch ‘AI development’ seems like the wrong category, one that confuses more than it helps, and one that doesn’t really overlap with the state laws of greatest concern.”

Even one of Trump’s senatorial allies shared his concern.

“We’ve got to figure out how to do this in a way that addresses the concerns that a lot of our members have about not trampling state’s rights in the process,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said in March. “We’re just trying to figure out how to thread that needle.”

President Donald Trump poses such a threat to American democracy and international security that the people who still support him need a “very bad burn” to snap out of their delusion, a prominent conservative columnist argued on Tuesday.

Observing that he was criticized for expressing glee at the prospect of the Iran war increasing energy prices, leading to job losses, hurting the stock market, exacerbating inflation and causing rising drug prices, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last explained he does not take joy in vulnerable people suffering.

The problem is that, like a child which must learn to avoid extreme heat by touching a hot stove, America must learn the dangers of far right politicians by being exposed to the harsh consequences of their policies.

“At root, there are only two possible explanations for the Trump era,” Last explained. “A controlling plurality of Americans affirmatively want Trump and the Republican party’s post-liberal, authoritarian vision. Or, Americans don’t want post-liberalism—not really. They don’t even know what post-liberalism means. They’ve just voted for Trump because his terrible governance hasn’t impacted their lives. If they felt the real-world consequences of Trumpism, then they’d reject its illiberalism.”

If it is indeed the latter scenario, which Last said he hopes is the case, “our fellow Americans are capable of changing their minds from getting burnt by the stove,” meaning “we are all going to have to absorb the pain.”

He added, “I say: Bring it on. Because what’s the alternative?” In fact, Last pointed out, it is quite possible that Trump has administered so many little shocks to the American body politics — a January 6th insurrection here, blatant conflicts of interest there, constant lying, a proven link with a convicted child sex trafficker (one of whose victims accused him of sexual assault) — that “what we need is a true shock to the system,” Last opined, “bad outcomes so far outside the normative window that voters rebel and wake up to the reality of what they’ve been excusing and accepting.”

He concluded, “In which case a very bad burn is exactly what we (as a society) need—even if it means pain being dealt to many people who don’t deserve it.” For those who fear Trump might use the military to stay in power illegitimately, Last offered one last hopeful note.

“One of my worries about 2026 and 2028 is that Trump might try to use the U.S. military to assist in overturning the results of an election—and that he would have a sympathetic core of senior officers at the Pentagon,” Last wrote. “The Iran war makes this less likely. I suspect professional soldiers are spooked by Trump’s utter incompetence. No minimally competent officer could look at the president’s conduct during this war and think, ‘Yes, I should violate my oath to the Constitution to help this guy stay in power.’”

Last is not alone among conservatives calling out Trump’s bad behavior and saying it will eventually disgust and/or harm his constituents.

“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” The Bulwark’s Mona Charen recently wrote. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”

Similarly bro-MAGA influencer Joe Rogan, one of the president’s biggest supporters during the 2024 presidential election, has harshly criticized the president for things like invading Iran despite running as an antiwar candidate.

“But it just seems so insane based on what he ran on,” Rogan said. “I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars, and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me – unless we’re acting on someone else’s interests, like particularly Israel’s interests,” Rogan added. “It just didn’t make any sense to me.”

He also was upset about Trump’s links to Epstein.

“Like, what is this? This is not good. None of this is good for this administration,” Rogan said. “It looks f—— terrible. It looks terrible.”

If you think people with opposite political ideologies are wired differently than you, a recent study in the scientific journal Politics and the Life Sciences reveals you may be correct.

In a study titled “Differential brain activations between Democrats and Republicans when considering food purchases,” authors Amanda S. Bruce, John M. Crespi, Dermot J Hayes, Angelos Lagoudakis, Jayson L. Lusk, Darren M. Schreiber and Qianrong Wu studied 65 politically engaged adults in the Kansas City area. The University of Kansas Medical Center and the University of Exeter professionals analyzed the 40 Democrats and 25 Republicans with an fMRI scanner as they had to spend $50 on groceries like varieties of milk and eggs differentiated by price, production method or both. As the patients pondered their choices, the fMRI measured concentrations of blood flow to different brain regions, thereby determining which ones were activated as people made their selections.

The finding was astonishing: When they broke down their food selection data using statistical models that predicted participants’ party affiliation, they found that their models succeeded between 76 percent and 94 percent of the time, far more than usual methods for prediction. Even though Democrats and Republicans did not differ widely in the actual groceries they chose to purchase, the underlying brain activity that went into the decision-making process diverged considerably between the two groups.

“While the food purchase decisions were not significantly different, we found that brain activation during decision-making differs according to the participant’s party affiliation,” the authors wrote. “Models of partisanship based on left insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal gyrus, or premotor/supplementary motor area activations achieve better than expected accuracy.”

Covering the story for PsyPost, journalist Karina Petrova explained that the data also managed to surprise the scientists.

“The researchers pointed out a few unexpected absences in the brain data,” Petrova wrote. “They did not see any differences in the amygdala, an emotion-processing center of the brain that has featured prominently in older studies of political ideology. The team suggested this is likely because choosing eggs or milk provides cognitive information but does not trigger the intense emotional reactions seen in experiments involving political faces or physical threats.”

This is not the first study to suggest deep psychological underpinning behind individuals’ political choices. In a 2021 paper in the scientific journal Political Psychology, researchers from Cal Poly Pomona and Eureka College conducted two studies to ascertain any links between a person’s political ideology and their openness to non-expert opinions on science. Their goal was to assess how people feel not just toward scientists but also “nonexpert” voices. To do this, surveyed individuals were shown a spectrum of opinions ranging from credible to non-credible and asked to either rate one higher than the other or deem “both sides” equally believable. They found that conservatives were more likely to either equate expert and non-expert opinions and to hold less favorable views of non-experts than experts.

“From my understanding traditional conservatism is all about individualism, so more weight is given to an individual’s experience with any given phenomenon,” Dr. Alexander Swan, assistant professor of psychology at Eureka College and a co-author of the paper, told this journalist when he interviewed him by email for Salon Magazine at the time. “This experience is fueled by our innate sense of intuition — what feels right to me? What makes sense?” While liberals also sometimes succumbed to this mindset, Swan argued that modern conservatism often requires adherents to reject ideologically inconvenient science; climate change denial is rampant, for example, because acknowledging that it is man-made “would impact the capitalistic pursuit.”

Dr. Randy Stein, assistant professor of marketing at Cal Poly Pomona and another co-author of the paper, had a similar observation to this author.

“Keep in mind, political ideology is something you can pick,” Stein told this journalist for Salon. “Trumpist/populist conservatism is pretty open as far as pushing ‘don’t believe what the media tells you’ and ‘don’t believe experts’ type thinking, so it’s going to be more attractive to those who think that way.”

By contrast, earlier this month liberal commentator Amanda Marcotte speculated to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his “Daily Blast” podcast that Trump supporters stick by him despite his numerous flaws and failures out of a “sunk cost fallacy” mindset.

"I think at the end of the day, the most important psychology that keeps these people on board is just that admitting that Trump is bad or wrong or a failure is admitting that all those people who, for a decade, have been telling you that you made a mistake were right,” Marcotte told Sargent. “And what's weird is the longer this drags on, the harder it is for them to let go without some kind of offramp. And I will say, if there ever was an offramp, I do kind of think the Iran war might be it — because again, they don't want another [George] Bush."

President Donald Trump’s “recent adventurism” in Iran is likely to fail, warned a retired four-star general on Monday — and it is because he does not understand the magnitude of what he has done in Iran.

Speaking with David French of The New York Times, retired General Stanley A. McChrystal linked Trump’s invasion of Iran with his unilateral tariffs, economic confrontation with China and threats toward Canada and Denmark.

“Now, there was no military action taken. But there was no cost to it,” McChrystal told French. “And then shooting at the drug boats in the Caribbean was a muscular way to do something. I don’t think it had any effect. But the Maduro raid, I think, crossed a point in which the president got seduced by one of the things I mentioned — the idea that you can do something on the cheap if you’re clever enough and you can pull it off.”

Yet even though Trump succeeded in Venezuela, that does not mean the same tactics will work elsewhere.

“The thing about Special Operations missions is they are high risk,” McChrystal told French. “We say, ‘Well, they’re high risk, but they always work.’ No, they don’t. That’s what makes them high risk.”

Despite this drawback, Trump “got emboldened” by his success in Venezuela, and that made him more susceptible to the arguments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for invading Iran.

“I think he got caught up in the current of it,” he concluded.

At another point in his conversation with French, McChrystal addressed the argument that the military today is more sophisticated than it was when McChrystal served, and that he therefore may be underestimating its ability to quickly win in Iran.

“I have to keep an open mind that it is possible that the dynamic has changed so much that we finally hit a tipping point where it will be decisive,” McChrystal acknowledged. “But I’m not seeing that, and I don’t feel that. The other part that I would bring out is we thought really early in Afghanistan that the people on the ground who we were targeting would be awed and intimidated by the bombing and that they would respect our capability. In many ways, what we found, particularly with the tribal members, is that they were disdainful of it.”

For his part, French argued earlier in March that Trump would need a “military miracle” to win in Iran quickly and permanently.

“Here is the present situation, in a nutshell: The United States and Israel have established absolute air dominance over the nation of Iran,” French opined. “In a few short days, our combined forces have destroyed Iran’s ability to protect its own airspace, have killed much of Iran’s senior military and civilian leadership, and have sunk much of Iran’s navy.”

Citing the Institute for the Study of War, French said America cannot afford to leave Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz, lest Iran view its shutdown as a tactical victory.

“That’s the logic that leads to a quagmire,” French explained. “If America declares victory now, when the Iranian regime is still in power and the strait is closed, then Iran perversely can claim that it won. It took a huge punch, absorbed the blow, and still forced America to climb down. It employed its ultimate weapon — closing the strait — and America had no effective answer.”

He added, “Commit to opening the strait (and keeping it open) by force, and the U.S. may well find itself in yet another open-ended, costly conflict with at least some American soldiers on Iranian soil. This would be war on our enemy’s terms and terrain, with the potential of slowly but surely inflicting casualties and costs on the American military until we grow tired of the conflict and leave.” Only a “military miracle” can stave off both, “a fast campaign with minimal casualties that can quickly reopen the strait, minimize harm to the international economy and leave Iran almost entirely toothless, unable to inflict military or economic damage on its foes.”

Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant under both President Barack Obama and Trump himself, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Monday that his various war gaming for the US-Iran war did not account for America killing most of Iran’s previous leadership.

“Kasie, I've war-gamed the Iran war plan a number of times across multiple administrations,” McGurk explained. “And I think what the administration said earlier — a 4-to-6-week military campaign — was about right. If you're going to degrade Iran's defense industrial base, the missiles, the drones, everything, it takes 4 to 6 weeks.”

Yet “the one thing that usually did not happen in those war games was that on Day One of the campaign, you took out the entire Iranian leadership,” McGurk added. “That brought this to a whole new level. And therefore the fact that Iran is turning everything on — I think that's not particularly surprising. But we're only about halfway through from where it was originally planned.”

President Donald Trump is a habitual liar who may also suffer from serious mental illness, a seasoned journalist argued on Monday — but the mainstream media is too cowardly to call it out.

“For a while now, I’ve been imploring the leaders of our top news organizations to call out Donald Trump’s derangement,” wrote Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch and former journalist at The Huffington Post and The Intercept. “My argument is simple: It is the central, underlying explanation for everything else they’re covering.”

Yet, as Froomkin pointed out, “They won’t do it. Their arguments: It would appear partisan; We don’t want to take sides; And (more reasonably) we prohibit the use of language associated with mental illness unless a person has been diagnosed as mentally ill. (I wrestle with a variation of this last one myself: How do you call him insane without stigmatizing insane people?)”

Even though Froomkin can understand journalists being reluctant to discuss mental illness, Froomkin argued that Trump’s chronic untrustworthiness “cannot be seriously in doubt.” In addition to telling literally thousands of documented lies since becoming president, Froomkin observed that Trump’s dishonesty also shapes his policies.

“His about-faces on such issues as tariffs and Iran have created chaos in the financial markets,” Froomkin wrote. “How about interjecting some skepticism when he says something absurd in the first place, so that people won’t overreact when he says it – and again when he takes it back?” It is both an issue of public responsibility and one of having “self-respect. One of Trump’s most consistent messages to his supporters has been to mistrust the mainstream media and its ‘fake news.’ But the primary source of ‘fake news’ in the mainstream media is news reports based on Trump’s lies. So stop doing that.”

After elaborating on how Trump’s dishonesty has harmed America’s ability to successfully prosecute the war he started in Iran, Froomkin predicted that Trump will ultimately be politically done in by his inability to contain the fallout of that conflict.

“Despite the strong incentives to say whatever is necessary to legitimate military operations, the lies will be exposed over time,” Froomkin wrote. “Presidents cannot ignore the long-term costs that result from dismissing the truth in pursuit of national security.”

This does not absolve the media of its responsibility to be truthful, though, although they have not done this.

“The elite media still more often than not treats his words as if they were coming from a normal president: Dutifully and stenographically,” Froomkin said. “I don’t know how many times I have fruitlessly called for an end to media’s normalization of this very damaged and disturbed man.” That can only happen, he concluded, when they “tell the truth” about Trump’s untruthfulness, despite being accused of partisanship or taking sides.

While Froomkin refrained from questioning Trump’s mental health, others have been less reticent to do so.

“A lot of people are increasingly concerned about Trump’s mental acuity right now,” says Dr. David Andersen, associate professor in US Politics at Durham University, told iPaper earlier in March. “His public appearances are clearly growing less focused, more rambling, and less clear about what he is trying to communicate.” Also speaking with iPaper earlier in March, Dr. John Gartner, American psychologist, psychiatrist and former assistant professor at John Hopkins Medical School,

“On the red carpet at Davos you may have noticed him weaving,” Gartner explained. “That relates to one of the signs of what I think he has: frontotemporal dementia. That walk is called a wide base gait where he swings his right leg in kind of a semicircle and that drives him to the left,” Gartner continued. “That seems to have gotten dramatically worse recently. It may be related to the stroke I think he’s had on the left side of his body.”

In 2023, this journalist wrote an article for Salon Magazine about the Goldwater Rule, a concept promulgated by the American Psychiatric Association which frowns upon practitioners speculating about the mental health of public figures they have not personally analyzed. Of the five mental health experts who discussed the subject at the time, only one offered an unqualified endorsement of the rule.

“The Goldwater Rule is relevant today for the same reasons it was relevant when it was adopted,” psychiatrist Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum from Columbia University told Salon at the time. “Psychiatrists (the only mental health professionals technically covered by the Rule) are not capable of rendering accurate diagnoses in the absence of a personal examination; doing so risks dissemination of inaccurate information that can harm the person supposedly being diagnosed; and this kind of ‘shoot-from-the-hip’ approach to diagnosis can legitimately call into question the objectivity and responsibility of the psychiatric profession, thus deterring patients from seeking care.”

By contrast Dr. Jerome Kroll, a professor of psychiatry emeritus at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, viewed the Goldwater Rule as a violation of psychiatrists’ free speech rights.

“What psychiatrists owe their patients (confidentiality, respect, thoughtfulness, technical knowledge) has nothing to do with offering public comments about a public figure about whom there is a controversy,” Kroll told Salon at the time. “I see this as an issue of free speech, which often leads to ill-advised, divisive, even stupid statements, but not to an ethical breach of my professional responsibilities. A court of law can determine my liability if the person commented on takes offense.”

He also pointed out that the rule holds psychiatrists to an unusual methodological standard.

“Doctors in emergency rooms frequently have to make rapid diagnoses and important decisions of persons they have never seen before, have little reliable information, no previous records, and no reliable way to evaluate the accuracy of the person they are assessing,” Kroll said. “Yet they have to assign a working diagnosis and a treatment plan, such as involuntary admission to a psychiatric ward, on just a few salient features of the interviewed person. This is accepted and ethical practice for doing all this; there is no luxury of delay in the ER, other than perhaps an overnight stay for observation. The APA leadership just ignores these realities of daily work of psychiatrists.”

Psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula told Salon at the time that the Goldwater Rule similarly ignores the practical realities of mental health professionals.

“If a person is in the public eye and we are able to observe their behavior, their use of language, their appearance, and also have other historical data on them (past behavior, shifts from past behavior) — while I acknowledge that it is only the publicly facing behavior we are seeing — is it any different than a client coming in and telling us only what they tell us and leaving out what they want to leave out?” Durvasula pointed out.

Dr. David Reiss, a psychiatrist who co-authored the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” emailed Salon at the time that the Goldwater Rule “is at least out of date – and in my opinion, was never well conceived.” His co-author, psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee, told Salon at the time that in her opinion the rule “violates the Geneva Declaration and most other core tenets of medical ethics. So I believe it should either be radically modified or be eliminated,” as it denies the public important information about political figures.

“Of interest to the public are fitness and dangerousness, and these are different mental health assessments than diagnosis,” Lee said. “Given the dangers of unfitness in an influential office, it should be one of the most vital societal responsibilities for health professionals to point this out, in order to protect the public’s health and safety.”

Despite being scolded by her colleagues for breaking the Goldwater Rule, Lee warned this journalist for Salon Magazine less than a week before the 2020 presidential election that Trump’s mental health would mean he’d have a “frightening” response to losing.

“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Lee explained. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”

Lee added, “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”

President Donald Trump wants to ban mail-in balloting, and MS NOW analyst Jordan Rubin is concerned that the Supreme Court is prepared to help him do it, even if that means “injecting needless chaos” into American elections.

“The Supreme Court may be on the verge of injecting needless chaos and uncertainty into the midterm elections and beyond,” Rubin wrote for MS NOW. “That possibility was on display Monday, when the court heard a GOP-backed challenge to counting mail ballots that come in after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked by Election Day.”

Describing the efforts of Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to fight Trump’s mail-in ballots policy, Rubin wrote that some of the judges instead seem to “endorse” Trump’s position “to disqualify later-arriving ballots.”

“There’d be no reason for those parties to advance that position if they thought it would hurt Republicans’ electoral prospects,” Rubin wrote. “President Donald Trump has railed against mail ballots. He has also made unproven voter fraud claims a centerpiece of his elections stance. That dynamic was at play at Monday’s hearing, during which Stewart noted that the federal government has ‘sounded the antifraud theme’ but still could not show ‘a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.’”

Rubin noted that the more pro-Trump judges clamored for mail-in voting bans.

“Justice Samuel Alito, who sounded likely to side with the Republicans, seemed receptive to the ‘fraud’ narrative, as he cited arguments that ‘confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome’ of an election ‘is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash’ of ballots,” Rubin wrote. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked about fraud, too, wondering, ‘Is that a real concern? Is that something we should be thinking about? Confidence in the election process?’

Ultimately Rubin predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be the “pivotal votes in the relative center of the dispute.” Rubin’s nervous take was shared by Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern, who argued that there have been “some very disturbing questions from the Republican-appointed justices in today's Supreme Court arguments — definitely several votes to strike down laws in 30 states which count mail ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, as long as they're cast by Election Day. Not what I was hoping to hear."

He added, "Alito strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud. [Neil] Gorsuch and [Clarence] Thomas leaned in that direction as well. [Amy Coney] Barrett and [Chief Justice John] Roberts are harder to read.” By contrast, Politico’s Josh Gerstein predicted that the Supreme Court seems “likely to deliver a defeat to Trump and rule states can count ballots received after Election Day, with Roberts, Barrett and maybe Kavanaugh joining the liberals.”

Trump has a long history of refusing to accept defeat when he loses at something. He accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged when he was not recognized for his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” During the 2016 presidential election he falsely claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stole the Iowa caucuses from him, and then declared he would only accept the result of the general election if he won. Despite winning in the Electoral College, Trump received fewer popular votes than Clinton, and so falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots. He created a voter fraud commission to find evidence of tampering but never produced any proof.

During the 2020 election, Trump preemptively attacked mail-in voting, declared victory despite losing and inaccurately claimed votes were being "dumped" on him. Biden won that election in both the popular and electoral vote, and in response Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. Despite continuing to claim that the election was stolen, Republican columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post that Trump has had many days in court, and they all prove him to be stating untruths.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

President Donald Trump’s surprise war against Iran did not factor in the implications of an important consideration, and a foreign policy expert who “war gamed” this conflict is calling it out.

“Kasie, I've war-gamed the Iran war plan a number of times across multiple administrations,” Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant under both President Barack Obama and Trump himself, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Monday. “And I think what the administration said earlier — a 4-to-6-week military campaign — was about right. If you're going to degrade Iran's defense industrial base, the missiles, the drones, everything, it takes 4 to 6 weeks.”

Yet there is one variable that did not happen in those war games, and it makes a big difference.

“The one thing that usually did not happen in those war games was that on Day One of the campaign, you took out the entire Iranian leadership,” McGurk told Hunt. “That brought this to a whole new level. And therefore the fact that Iran is turning everything on — I think that's not particularly surprising. But we're only about halfway through from where it was originally planned.”

Earlier in his interview with Hunt, McGurk criticized Trump’s press conferences about the Iran war for their “stream of consciousness” quality and added that Trump is probably trying to buy time to resolve the ongoing crisis over Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

“I think here, this is the president buying some time — calming the economic situation in markets and energy prices — because that buys you time,” McGurk told Hunt. “And that is the one tool the Iranians are playing. It's also buying some time to get forces into place. We still have forces moving as we try, over this five-day period, to see if diplomacy has a chance. I hope it does. I hope an Iranian can come forward and say, ‘I'm speaking now for what's left of our system, and we're prepared to sit down and do a deal.’”

Yet he added, “I'm just — I don't see that happening. So I suspect that by the end of this week, the military campaign is continuing. We're not hitting energy sites, but we're hitting everything else that was on the target list. That will continue through the week, and by the weekend, we might be kind of back to where we started — with Marine Expeditionary Units moving in and other things that give the president a number of options. So I don't see this ending anytime soon, Kasie. I'm just trying to analyze it as best I can in a neutral way.”

Hunt then asked Marc Short, who served as Trump's legislative affairs director from 2017 to 2018, about the president's mindset in approaching this war. He agreed with McGurk's analysis, adding that "he's giving himself five days to see if any negotiations happen."

Trump’s problems do not end with the chaos caused by assassinating Iran’s leadership. Phil Klay, a novelist and Marine Corps veteran from President George W. Bush’s Iraq war, explained in The New York Times earlier this month that the war’s prosecution has been inherently demoralizing.

“I have plenty of complaints about the war I served in two decades ago: the Iraq war was ill-conceived, hubristic and marred by poor leadership at the highest level,” Klay wrote. “But I did know why I was there. What exactly do our service members think we’re trying to do in Iran?”

Denouncing the Trump administration’s “stunningly incoherent” explanations for the war, Klay concluded that “in President Trump’s America, there may be only two genders, but our military adventures can identify however they please.” Noting that they seem to exult in “mixing images of death and destruction with footage from video games or sports highlights,” Klay described the president’s actions as “macho posturing.”

Similar to McGurk and Klay, former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman and Levant director for the Pentagon Mara Karlin wrote in The New York Times earlier in March that Trump’s “cavalier approach” in Iran is putting Americans and others in danger. In addition to leaving U.S. diplomats and their families on their own to evacuate the Middle East, they also pointed out that America is not accounting for the scale of the Iranian response, which has shut down travel across the region and increases the risk of retaliatory acts of terrorism.

President Donald Trump promised that if he was elected, he would impose high tariffs and thereby help America’s beloved and lucrative automobile industry. Instead, expert economists revealed on Monday that the tariffs have actually done “the opposite of what Trump promised.”

Describing a “tariff shock” caused by Trump’s policies, the car magazine WardsAuto reported that “the financial toll has been swift and steep. General Motors projects a tariff hit of $3.5 to $4.5 billion in 2025. Ford absorbed an $800 million second-quarter blow. Volkswagen is bracing for a €5 billion impact. Cox Automotive estimates the industry has collectively accumulated more than $25 billion in tariff obligations through just the first seven months of the year — roughly $5,200 per imported vehicle. For vehicles built in Mexico, a critical manufacturing hub, the added cost runs to approximately $4,800 per unit, effectively turning the build-in-Mexico business model upside down.”

To analyze the problems which have arisen from Trump’s tariffs and come up with proactive solutions, the US software company ServiceNow and the UK multinational professional services network KPMG issued a joint white paper called "When Tariffs Hit an Industry in Transition.” KPMG managing director Len Prokopets, an expert on supply chains, explained to WardsAuto that the tariffs “have created a three-dimensional crisis: direct cost increases on materials and parts, deteriorating supplier financial health, and a massive internal administrative burden as OEMs must analyze, validate, and renegotiate thousands of individual supplier claims.”

Karl Widerquist, an economist and philosopher at Georgetown University-Qatar, told AlterNet that he shares the concerns expressed in the WardsAuto article. He described the tariffs as being “very much the opposite of what Trump promised,” having had “a highly negative effect on many U.S. manufacturers. Today, most big market products are built with international supply chains, meaning that parts come from factories all over the world.” For more than half a century, the car industry built supply chains all over the world based on the fact that America had been a free trade country since the 1930s.

“Suddenly Trump reversed course with tariffs sometimes upwards of 100%,” Widerquist explained. “That kind of reversal will disrupt any industry that relies on foreign resources or parts--and that is most industries.”

Writing for MS NOW, lawyer Ray Brescia cited the Court of International Trade Judge Richard Eaton — who is presiding over the case to determine how the Trump administration reimburses the tariffs he illegally collected — to illustrate the magnitude of the tariffs’ impact on ordinary Americans.

“The $165 billion in collected duties is currently accruing approximately $650 million in interest every single month,” Brescia wrote citing Eaton. “If the entries are not liquidated by the end of the year, he explained, American taxpayers will be on the hook for an estimated $10 billion in interest alone.”

Widerquest further broke down the “legal morass” that has resulted from Trump levying illegal tariffs.

“The question of who gets compensated for a tariff is a legal morass that relies on unknowable questions,” Widerquist told AlterNet. “The question of how to pay a tariff usually involves at least three parties: foreign manufacturers, U.S. retailers, and U.S. customers. With the complex contemporary supply chains, it can be many more. To decide who gets the refund, one has to imagine what the price would have been without it.”

As an example, Widerquist posited a consumer paying $200 for a “widget,” with $100 going to the domestic retailer and the other half going to the foreign manufacturer.

“To say who should get the refund, we have to imagine what the price would have been had there been no tariff,” Widerquist pointed out. “If the retail price would have been $100, then the consumer should get a $100 refund. If the price would have been $200, while the import price was $100, the local retailer should get the entire refund. If both the retail and the import prices would have been $200, the foreign manufacturer should get the entire refund. But the two relevant prices could have been anything in between, justifying a three-way split of the refund in any conceivable set of portions. We have no way to know which is the ‘right’ one.”

He concluded, “Our legal system will probably give the refund to the part that spends the most on lawyers instead of the one with the best evidence.”

Americans appear to be aware that the tariffs have hurt their pocketbooks. Conservative commentator Mona Charen wrote for The Bulwark in February that the tariffs could even cost Trump in the 2026 midterm elections.

“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” Charen wrote. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”

President Donald Trump is solely to blame for America declaring war on Iran, but a distinguished military historian believes many of his supporters are instead blaming a “handy fall guy” — one that has been viciously persecuted throughout history.

“When a nation starts a war for dubious reasons and then suffers the consequences, there is inevitably a search for scapegoats,” military historian Max Boot wrote for The Washington Post on Monday. “Conspiracy theories abound. It happened after World War I, when the favorite villains were ‘merchants of death’ and international bankers. It happened again after the Iraq War, which some blamed on ‘neoconservatives’ and Halliburton, the oil-services giant led by Dick Cheney before he became vice president.”

All of these scapegoats — the so-called “merchants of death, “international bankers,” “neoconservatives” and so on — are code words for “Jews,” Boot observed. Now the longtime editorialist opined that this is happening again because of Israel’s alliance with America in Trump’s “foolhardy war against Iran.”

“As so often happens, the Jews — or, if you prefer a polite euphemism, ‘Zionists’ or ‘the Israel lobby’ — make a handy fall guy,” Boot wrote. “What the right-wing fringe once whispered — that this was ‘a war for Israel’ — suddenly burst onto the front pages last week thanks to Joe Kent’s resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a blistering public letter, Kent wrote that ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation’ and that ‘we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."

Jonathan Sarna, emeritus professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of “Lincoln and the Jews: A History” and “When General Grant Expelled the Jews,” told AlterNet that he shares Boot’s concerns. To provide historical context, Sarna explained that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which claim Jews control the world can be linked to an infamous 1903 hoax, one that involved forged documents published in Imperial Russia and called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

“If you go back to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — the great antisemitic forgery of the turn of the last century — that really began this sense that Jews are all-powerful, that they operate behind the scenes, and that whatever happens is ultimately their fault,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Before then, for centuries, the prevailing view was that Jews were persecuted and lowly because they had killed Christ, and that was what they deserved — they were powerless. That was their punishment. But ‘The Protocols’ flipped that.”

Sarna added that “especially as Jews in modernity have begun to succeed economically, it doesn't much matter what the issue is — whether it is 9/11, which some blame on the Jews, or the crash of 2008, or now the war with Iran. You can predict before it happens that people will blame Jews, because as The Protocols taught people, it's always the Jews. It's the great conspiracy theory. And even many people who have never read The Protocols believe many of the things in it — just as many people have never read Darwin, but they know the word ‘evolution.’ This is simply the latest iteration.”

As Boot pointed out in his editorial, Kent was correct to say Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Yet not only is Kent a tainted source (he has white supremacist ties and spread conspiracy theories intended to minimize Trump's attempted coup and the January 6th insurrection), but he ignored that Trump is surrounded by many pro-Arab and pro-oil advisers that emphatically did not want war with Iran. Boot quoted a Foreign Affairs essay by Nate Swanson.

“Trump seems interested, in no particular order, in demonstrating the prowess of the U.S. military, strengthening his negotiating position, showing he was serious when he vowed in a January Truth Social post to protect Iranian protesters, and differentiating his approach from President Barack Obama’s,” Swanson wrote per Boot. Indeed, Trump threatened war against Denmark to conquer Greenland and actually waged an unprovoked war against Venezuela before his attacks against Iran, and neither of those campaigns had anything to do with Israel.

Boot then lamented that “Trump and his aides inadvertently helped foster conspiracy theories about Israel” when Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out on March 2 that Israel was going to attack Iran anyway so the U.S. thought it should go along with it.

“The administration then tried to walk this back — and rightly so,” Boot wrote. “It’s absurd to imagine that Netanyahu would have bombed Iran if Trump had told him not to and threatened to withhold military aid if he did.”

Despite the absurdity of blaming the Iran war on “the Jews,” however, Boot predicted this will happen more frequently as the Iran war turns into a quagmire.

“The more the Iran war is blamed on Israel, the more it will do to turn public opinion against the Jewish state,” Boot wrote. “A recent Gallup poll already found that more Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis. According to a YouGov poll, younger Republicans are turning against the Jewish state — a trend that’s doubtless been driven by Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Now imagine what will happen if American motorists blame Israel — however unfairly — for the high cost of gasoline.”

Sarna argued that many people with latent anti-Semitic tendencies struggle to apply the same logic to Israelis and the Israeli government that they regularly apply to Americans and the American government.

“I think that for a lot of people, their knowledge of Israel is so limited that it's very difficult for them to engage with it the way we would with any democracy,” Sarna told AlterNet. “But I always remind audiences: I can be critical of President Trump without being un-American. Most people who criticize President Trump or the Republicans would assure you how much they love America and hold a fundamentally positive view of it. It seems to me that it's deeply important for us to do the same with Israel — that is, to make clear that there is a huge difference between disliking the policies of the Prime Minister of Israel and hating Israel itself. If you wouldn't equate criticism of the President with hating America, there is no reason — and indeed it is wrong and wicked — to do so with regard to Israel.”

Boot and Sarna are not the only intellectuals to raise the alarm about rising anti-Semitism. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg made a similar argument earlier in March.

“For those who suspect that Israel manipulated America into war, the resignation of Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, surely seems like confirmation,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote on Wednesday. She added that Kent’s claims “taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control” and is easier to believe for many Americans as Trump bungles the Iran war.

“This conflict, whose timing and purpose Trump barely bothered to explain to the American people, was probably always going to increase anti-Jewish animosity among Americans, especially when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gloats that he’s ‘yearned’ for such a war for 40 years,” Goldberg explained. “But the more it drags on, the more I worry about a full-blown American ‘dolchstoßlegende,’ a modern version of the stab-in-the-back myth that German nationalists used to blame Jews for their humiliation in World War I.”

Ironically, despite the argument that Trump waged war against Iran for “the Jews,” Jews have been an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc since the late 1920s. For the past century, Jews have consistently voted between 60 and 80 percent Democratic, with the number reaching as high as 90 percent for presidents unusually beloved by Jews (Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson) and only falling below 50 percent once (during Jimmy Carter’s losing 1980 campaign). The Democratic candidates running against Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 garnered between 66 and 71 percent of the Jewish vote, while Trump only garnered between 24 and 32 percent in those elections. Trump himself denounced Jewish Democratic tendencies in controversial 2019 remarks.

“I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” Trump said at the time, arguing that Republicans are more pro-Israel than Democrats. The president added that “five years ago, the concept of even talking about this . . . of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people — I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people over the State of Israel?”

President Donald Trump’s reaction to the death last week of former special counsel Robert Mueller was more than just cruel; it foreshadows how republics fail.

That’s the take of Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist who advised President George W. Bush. In a Monday Substack post, Schmidt responded to Trump’s social media post celebrating Mueller’s passing.

“Robert Mueller just died,” Trump wrote. “Good, I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Describing Mueller as “a man who embodied a life of service, discipline, and duty to country,” Schmidt denounced Trump for his cruelty and Trump supporters like Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent for insisting on empathy for the president rather than Mueller’s loved ones.

“We are told that the appropriate response to a president celebrating his death is not condemnation, not shame, not even silence, but empathy for the family of the man doing the celebrating,” Schmidt wrote. “Let that sink in.” From the ex-top aide’s point of view, this coarsening of America’s character speaks ominously about the health of American democracy.

“This is how republics fail,” Schdmit argued. “It doesn’t happen in a single moment of catastrophe, but in a thousand small surrenders. In each instance where truth is bent. In each defense of the indefensible. In each shrug where there should be outrage.”

This is not the first time that Schmidt, who was a lifelong Republican until the party’s far right turn, has scathingly critiqued Trump and his administration. Earlier in March, he cited Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in the 2020 election and subsequent coup attempt as further examples of the “devolution” of American democracy.

“A mob, inflamed by a sitting president, attacked the seat of American democracy to overturn a free and fair election. And what did the party do? In large measure, it rationalized, minimized, or outright defended it,” Schmidt wrote. “That is the devolution.” Instead of standing for the expansion of freedom, Republicanism under Trump is defined by the “language of victimhood” and supporters’ “willingness to believe anything — so long as it serves the cause.”

Schmidt has also written with alarm about Trump’s warmongering, locating his attacks on Venezuela and Iran in the president’s personal character flaws rather than any coherent ideology.

“He wanted the Peace Prize, and when he couldn’t get it, Trump lost his mind,” Schmidt wrote. Quoting a letter Trump wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre which hinted that he was no longer interested in peace because he was denied the prize, Schmidt concluded that “no man of violence and venom can resist the siren song of modern warfare, which, after all, is just a game” to people like Trump who do not understand the grave seriousness of war.

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) used to support President Donald Trump, but in recent years has become one of his most outspoken critics. Now he is accusing Trump of appointing as the next Homeland Security Secretary someone so unqualified, it is literally “disgraceful.”

“Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Donald Trump’s new DHS pick, sat for a confirmation hearing this week, and even some Republicans think he has ‘anger issues,’” Walsh wrote on Sunday. “Mullin previously went on record calling Alex Pretti, the VA nurse killed by ICE agents in Minnesota, a ‘deranged individual.’ But the only deranged individual I see here is Mullin.”

Walsh went on to describe how in 2025 Mullin posted on X that journalists should write “less false stories” if they do not wish to encounter violence.

“If you think that’s bad, Mullin, briefly an MMA fighter, previously attempted to fight Teamsters Union president Sean O'Brien right in the Senate chamber during a hearing,” Walsh wrote. “Okay, Mr. Tough Guy. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, of all people, had to step in to diffuse the tensions, but later butted heads with Mullin when discussing Obamacare, which Mullin blamed for the country’s ‘broken’ healthcare system. Talk about an utterly disgraceful first impression.”

Despite these ample drawbacks, Walsh pointed out that Mullin’s nomination will proceed to a full confirmation vote on the floor. For this, Walsh placed the blame at the feet of the president himself.

“The biggest jerk of the week, month, year, and decade is always Donald Trump, but there’s only so much space here to write about all the horrible things he does in a single day, much less a week,” Walsh wrote. “F— — Trump.”

Walsh is not the only conservative commentator to denounce Mullin. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller observed that Mullin lacks any qualifications for the role he has achieved.

“At the same time, [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth is a meathead, and the shoe designer at the top of the FBI [Kas Patel] is preoccupied with visiting all the places on his bucket list,” Miller wrote, adding that Mullin is “a masculine Kristi Noem” and not much brighter than her.

“I'm not sure exactly the differences between the two of them,” Miller concluded. His guest David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, expressed alarm at Mullin’s lack of relevant experience.

“The leading state-sponsored terrorism uses a lot of terrorism, and Iran has a long history of activating terror networks all over the world, including in the United States,” Frum said. “So you would think it would be, for the administration leading the war, a matter of vital concern to have a non-bozo as head of the Department of Homeland Security and maybe also a non-bozo at the FBI.”

Mullin was also heavily criticized earlier this month for seemingly padding his resume in order to get confirmed. He claimed he had

"You stated your special assignments occurred intermittently between 2006 and 2011," Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said at the time. "My letter did not exclude official travel and it also give you explicit instructions for providing classified information, how we could do that, and do it in a way that protects the classified information. You did not provide any of that. Today is the first time I'm hearing about your classified activities from 2015 to 2016. Quite frankly, as we have these conversations, you have not been forthcoming with me and the committee."

He continued, "The story always seems to kind of change. As you know, candor, honesty, transparency are absolutely critical to try to build trust as the secretary of Homeland Security. We have to clear this up. We feel pretty strongly we have to understand exactly what this is."

Despite asking Mullin to clarify what he had done overseas, the Oklahoma senator declined.

"Sir, I think this committee made it clear with the paperwork they give me that I do not have to disclose my official travel. That was part of the documents," Mullin told Peters. "It went over two or three times. I complied exactly with what the committee said. There is no area for mission work and mentorship that was a volunteer basis [that] I did on my own time. It was specific, over and over again, that you do not have to claim official travel."