Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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— Frank Peeters ☄️ (@peetersfrank2) March 11, 2026

Very Serious People:

The Defense Department has barred press photographers from briefings on the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military conflict with Iran after they published photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that his staff deemed “unflattering,” according to two people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

The March 2 briefing came days after a joint military strike on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28. It was also the first time the defense secretary had appeared from the briefing room podium since June 26

Several outlets including the Associated Press, Reuters and Getty Images sent photographers to the briefing from Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But after they published photos — which have broad reach because they are licensed by publications globally — members of Hegseth’s staff told colleaguesthat they did not like the way that the secretary looked. Hegseth’s aidesdecided to shut out photographers from the two subsequent briefings at the Pentagon, on March 4 and March 10, according to the two people familiar with the decision.

Right. It was the staffers who complained.

No, it was him. Recall this:

Meanwihle, we’re at war, the government is violating everyone’s civil rights and the economy is in the dumper but:

NEWS — Trump coercing staff to wear the same black pair of shoes that he wears.

“Everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” a staffer said, as some reportedly ditch their own footwear to comply with Trump’s wishes.

We’re officially in the dumbest timeline. pic.twitter.com/qwxUOtMlyv

— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) March 10, 2026

Yep, yep:

I saw an article yesterday in The Telegraph about Trump coercing his staff to wear the same shoes as him. At first, I thought it had to be a joke. This is such a classic dictator trope — forcing subordinates to copy your style — that it couldn’t possibly be real. For instance, look at Mao Zedong and the “Mao Suit,” Saddam Hussein and “The Mustache”, or Joseph Stalin and the “Generalissimo Uniform.” I dropped photos below. The phenomenon is so well documented that I assumed this was a parody.

But apparently… it is not. Donald Trump reportedly has a footwear fetish. He’s testing the loyalty of his lieutenants by whether they’ll lace up in the same black shoes he wears. And yes, it’s creepy.

Just take a look at the names of the folks who are now dutifully wearing Donald Trump’s preferred footwear. JD Vance. Marco Rubio. Pete Hegseth. Sean Duffy. Howard Lutnick. Sean Hannity. Lindsey Graham. These people are now allegedly sporting $145 Florsheim oxfords at Trump’s behest. One unnamed cabinet secretary shelved his Louis Vuittons, according to The Telegraph, lest he offend Trump by donning shoes the president didn’t want him to wear.

“All the boys have them,” one female White House official told the Wall Street Journal, and another added that “everybody’s afraid not to wear them

📸 Marco Rubio wearing oversized shoes that Trump ordered for him by just guessing his size.

Trump has been buying $145 Florsheim dress shoes for allies, using the gifts as a lighthearted way to encourage loyalty and unity within his circle.

Source: The Times pic.twitter.com/1EuyKSRYqy

— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 11, 2026

I need a drink.

A real estate guy and Ivanka’s beloved Jared

The dynamic duo of Kushner and Witkoff have an excellent record of failure. But Trump still thinks they’re great:

The unprecedented dynamic of two men leading negotiations with Iran, Israel and Hamas and Ukraine and Russia — sometimes all in one afternoon — underscores how the Trump administration believes peace deals should be forged. It views diplomacy like a real-estate venture, requiring a business mindset and a small team tasked with securing a big development deal, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to explain how the president’s closest advisers think about their mission.

And if negotiations with one party fail as they did with Tehran, use the failure as leverage for another deal. Trump, on Friday, did just that, suggesting that the war with Iran may prove a boon for Kushner’s notable first-term achievement — the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Sure. It’s all part of the plan…

Trump’s optimism comes as critics accuse the president of placing overwhelming trust in underwhelming men. While Kushner and Witkoff, a New York and Miami real estate developer, are widely lauded for shepherding the deal that brought home Israeli hostages, their brokered ceasefire remains fragile and Hamas is still a force in Gaza. Negotiations to end the Ukraine war have not produced a ceasefire. And attempts to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program were unsuccessful.

The breakneck pace leads to a “risk of overextension,” said former State Department negotiator Aaron David Miller, who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. The volume of detail required to handle three negotiations at once is too much to place on two businessmen, and there is a risk that the administration’s top negotiators lack a sufficient understanding of history and psychology, “which is critically important to how the combatants in these conflicts actually see matters,” Miller said.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran deal the Obama administration negotiated and Trump has widely panned, was 159 pages long and took two years to hammer out. But Trump’s confidence is unwavering. “They don’t have too much,” he said. “They actually have — they have capacity for more, to be honest with you.”

Trump and his two accomplices are tearing the world apart and they simply don’t see it. It’s not as if they have any strategy. It’s just, “try to get a deal, any deal, and then move on to the next thing before anyone notices that the deal is bullshit and has actually made everything worse.”

They’re a couple of hustlers just dancing as fast as they can to get through the day before everything blows up. Just like Trump. It’s hubris but also elite impunity. They’re very rich and they don’t believe there are any real consequences to what they do. And even if they somehow got caught committing a crime you will probably end up being the ambassador of France, as Jared’s father did.

They are just crashing through the world randomly wrecking things, secure in the knowledge that everything will always turn out all right. For them.

Or just plain stupidity?

The NY Times on the administration’s hubris:

On Feb. 18, as President Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.

Even during the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran last June, Mr. Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Mr. Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that — the second time around — Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.

The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.

The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.

Idiots:

On Feb. 18, as President Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.

Even during the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran last June, Mr. Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Mr. Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that — the second time around — Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.

The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.

The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.

I’m sure Bibi and Lindsey told Trump he had nothing to worry about and that in the end he would be remembered as America’s greatest leader. It doesn’t take much to fluff him these days.

Hegseth even admitted yesterday that they were taken by surprise and Trump s reportedly very upset about the oil situation. I guess she just thought they’d hand it over like Delcy did as long as he offered them a taste of the proceeds and maybe some real estate deals. Now he’s telling people that it doesn’t matter because he has control of Venezuela’s and can offset any disruption. (No idea if that’s possible.)

The upshot of the article is that they were totally unprepared and are now looking for a fast off ramp because Trump is getting the yips. He’s out there making contradictory comments all day long but Hegseth and Rubio have apparently come up with some talking points that indicate that their objectives are being met by degrading their military and ability to produce more weapons. Whether Iran is prepared to cooperate with that is unknown. And in the end, it all depends on Trump anyway. Great.

How Trump’s power extends to his underlings:

Embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s top aide and alleged lover Corey Lewandowski bragged that he could do “whatever” he wanted as a powerful federal official because he believed President Trump would pardon him, The Post has learned.

The political pit bull made the remark on multiple occasions tied to his work as a special government employee, sources revealed in the wake of the DHS duo’s downfall.

“I’m not worried. I do whatever the f–k I want. DJT will pardon me,” Lewandowski told one of The Post’s sources last year — making the flippant aside during a discussion about official actions.

He’s right.

That’s the second time just this week that we’ve heard the same thing:

The engineer told colleagues that once he had removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it into the company’s systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.

Trump got immunity from the Supreme Court and he has pardoned thousands of loyalists already and made no secret of his willingness to do it.

This is how a criminal president gets his accomplices to do his bidding. It’s quite a racket.

Trump says it’s safe to sail

Donald Trump on Monday insisted that tanker captains in the Persian Gulf man-up and sail right through the Strait of Hormuz.

From CNN this morning:

• Attacks near strait: Three vessels were reported to have been hit by unknown projectiles near the Strait of Hormuz today, the UK’s maritime agency said. Earlier, the US military said it destroyed Iranian mine-deploying ships near the strait. Sources told CNN Tehran had begun laying mines in the key waterway.

The God Emperor of Ruin was not amused. Trump posted to Truth Social on Tuesday afternoon, “If Iran has put out any mines in the Hormuz Strait, and we have no reports of them doing so, we want them removed, IMMEDIATELY!”

Or he’ll huff, and he’ll puff, and Iran will face consequences “at a level never before seen.”

CNN added, “US Central Command said in a social media post later Tuesday that the military destroyed multiple Iranian naval ships — including 16 minelayers — near the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iranians have claimed responsibility for one of the attacks on cargo vessels mentioned above:

Alireza Tangsiri, the naval commander in Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, named one of the ships that was struck, the Mayuree Naree, in a post on social media, saying they had “ignored the warnings” from Iran, and “ended up getting caught.”

He added: “Any vessel that intends to pass must obtain permission from #Iran.”

But Trump already gave them permission. Tangsiri apparently did not get Truth Social the memo.

As SNAP benefits dry up and teachers compete for supplies funding

On Mehdi Hasan’s now-cancelled MSNBC show, he commented on the humiliating spectacle of South Dakota teachers particpating in a “Dash for Cash” event at a local hockey game in December 2021. (This was during Kristi Noem’s tenure as governor, BTW.) Teachers scrambled to stuff into their jerseys as much as they could from a pile of 5,000 $1 bills “to help fund classroom projects.” Critics called the event “dehumanizing” and even “dystopian,”

Hasan asked at the time, “But I wonder, is there anything more depressing, more disgusting, more dystopian, than watching public servants have to perform in public, humiliate themselves, to get a tiny bit of extra cash for the most basic of supposedly government-funded public services?”

Why, yes. Yes, there is.

It happens in the halls of the Pentagon at the end of each and every fiscal year. “Use-it-or-lose-it” rules mean program managers scramble to spend whatever is left of their annual appropriation on something, anything, lest their funding get cut in the next budget. (I can’t find the decades-old article just now, but it described men wandering the halls asking colleagues what they could spend millions on in the final hours of the budget year.)

It is still going on, says watchdog site Open Books. The site has been tracking this phenomenon for over a decade but has seen nothing like what happened last September when the Pentagon issued $93.4 billion in grants and contracts:

In the last five working days of September alone, the DoD spent $50.1 billion on grants and contracts. That’s more than the annual defense budget of countries like Israel and Italy. In fact, there are only nine foreign countries that spend that much on their military in an entire year!

As The Independent framed it, “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon apparently isn’t feeling the same affordability struggles as many average Americans, as he approved spending more than $93 billion in September, including on luxury food items and iPads.”

The New Republic lists those and a few more items:

Some of the frivolous September purchases made under Secretary Pete Hegseth’s stewardship include a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.)

In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.

Weeks later, millions of Americans would lose their SNAP benefits amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. More still stand to lose eligibility to the food assistance program thanks to a Republican crusade that added stricter work requirements to the program, piling on paperwork and documentation mandates.

“The DoD spent $225.6 million on furniture, the most since 2014,” reports Open Books. Simply itemizing the expense as “office furniture” concealed what lay beneath:

The purchases included $60,719 worth of chairs from the premium furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, including at least one order of their luxurious Aeron Chair for $1,844. Another $12,540 paid for three-tiered fruit basket stands.

Furniture spending today is far lower than in President Obama’s administration, when the military routinely spent $300 to $400 million every September. However, it has increased compared to Joe Biden’s administration. Since 2008, there have only been four Septembers when the DoD spent less than $178 million on furniture: the four Septembers that Biden was president.

So it’s not exactly fair to lay this annual tradition at Hegseth’s feet. But have at it.

I recall from college that meals in the dining hall noticeably improved during parents’ weekends and at exam time. In “Surf And Turf Before The Storm,” Military dot com recounts a similar phenomenon in the services:

Across branches and generations, service members have circulated a widely recognized belief: when steak and lobster appear in the dining facility, something significant may be coming. Often described as a “surf and turf” meal, the combination has become embedded in military culture as a symbolic precursor to deployments, combat operations, or extended missions.

While experiences vary by unit and theatre, anecdotal accounts from servicemembers consistently reinforce the association between morale-boosting meals and periods of heightened operational tempo. The belief has become part of military folklore, shared in barracks conversations, deployment stories, and online veteran communities.

Military dot com published that piece on February 23rd, one day before Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech and five days before Trump began bombing Iran. Talk about telegraphing your punches!

TPM has a good state of play here:

President Trump has been flooding Truth Social in recent days with a series of indecipherable posts that appear to outline his interest in stuffing two anti-trans provisions into the SAVE America Act, a disastrous voter suppression bill that passed the House earlier this year and is currently languishing in the Senate due to filibuster rules.

The bill, in its House-passed form, appears to have almost no support from Senate Democrats (though Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has increasingly proven himself to be a wildcard).

They will have to nuke the filibuster to pass this even with Fetterman’s betrayal.

But Trump has been pressuring Republican leadership to change filibuster rules, with one popular idea being to force Democrats to engage in a talking filibuster if they want to block the legislation. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has not been interested in taking such action, fearing it would prevent the Senate from accomplishing anything at all, but everything got even more weird and complicated this week. I’ve unpacked this in Where Things Stand a few times but here is the short version:

• Trump wants to endorse someone in the Texas Republican Senate primary for Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) seat. Thune would like Trump to endorse the reliable incumbent, Cornyn. Trump is considering doing that but wants a guarantee that the other candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is very popular among MAGA fans, will drop out of the coming runoff election if he does.
• Paxton does not want to do that.
• In a tweet earlier this month, Paxton made it clear that he would only drop out of the race for Trump/Cornyn/Thune if the Senate is able to pass the SAVE America Act, reminding Trump that he is annoyed with Thune for not nuking filibuster rules to pass it.
• Thune still does not want to change filibuster rules to pass the legislation.
• Trump is now upping the pressure and also demanding that confusing provisions be added to the legislation.

In a series of seemingly aimless Truth Social posts over the course of the last week, and in private meetings with House Republicans, Trump has urged Republican lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act with additional provisions that target trans Americans. Specifically, he wants the SAVE America Act to now include non-voting-related bans on trans athletes and gender affirming surgeries for minors. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt ticked off the provisions Trump wants added to the legislation from the White House podium on Tuesday, as well.

“These are called ‘best of Trump.’ We should also add on to this bill. And so what I’ve asked Mike to do is to draw a new one with these few things added and let’s go for the gold. Let’s not just get one, like voter ID,” Trump reportedly told House Republicans in Florida this week. “This is the No. 1 priority.”

Thune knows this won’t work and furthermore, he is terrified that the Democrats might win in November and they really will nuke the filibuster He know that it’s a much more valuable tool in the hands of the Republicans in the minority than it is the Democrats who actually believe in legislation and want to accomplish big things. With Trump in office, this SAVE act is a rare occasion in which he wants the Congress to act. But then he’s promised to do it all by executive order anyway so what’s the difference?

There is also the point that Trump is making everything worse with his silly anti-trans additions to the bill. (Trump thinks trans hate is the most powerful issue in America.)

It is still not clear why or how exactly Trump wants these things accomplished. Most House Republican efforts this Congress to pass anti-trans legislation have not gone anywhere. And anti-trans legislation is even more unpopular in the Senate. Per the 19th:

Caius Willingham, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality who frequently works on the Hill, said that there is just not enough support in the Senate to adopt these anti-trans measures. That makes Trump’s fixation on this bill all the more perplexing, he said. 

“It seems as if he believes that attaching these anti-trans riders to the SAVE America Act would improve its chances in the Senate,” he said. “Putting those riders into the SAVE America Act would actually turn off more senators than it would inspire them.” 

It seems especially ludicrous considering that we are at war right now and building concentration camps for our ethnic cleansing program here at home. I don’t think people are particularly interested in his culture war obsession right now.

The Bulwark’s Matt Johnson makes a very smart observation. Putin may not be as ignorant as Trump but he suffers from many of the same personality defects. And they have both made the same bad decisions because of it:

The CIA doesn’t know exactly when Vladimir Putin decided to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but it was likely sometime in the first half of 2020. According to a recent Guardian report on how U.S. and British intelligence exposed Putin’s war plans, “During those months, Putin passed constitutional amendments to ensure he could stay in power beyond 2024. Then, locked away in isolation for months during Covid, he devoured books on Russian history and pondered his own place in it.” In the summer of 2021, Putin published a long essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which made the case that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia.

This partially explains why Putin thought the war in Ukraine would be easy—he believed many Ukrainians would accept Russian control of their country.1 U.S. and British intelligence were correct about Putin’s plans, but they assumed Russia would steamroll Ukraine in a matter of weeks. This is because intercepted internal communications drastically overstated the Russian military’s capabilities. One reason European governments were skeptical of the U.S. and British intelligence was how detached from reality Russia’s ambitions were. “We didn’t believe it would happen,” one European intelligence official said, “because we thought the idea that they would be able to walk into Kyiv and just install a puppet government was completely insane.” As one U.S. intelligence official put it: “The system encourages them to make things sound better than they are.”

We all know what happened. Ukraine fought back ferociously. Oops.

While Trump’s Iran debacle has gone better so far, it’s because it’s being waged as an air campaign. However:

[W]hile the U.S. military can plan an air campaign, it’s up to the civilian leadership to set strategy and determine which ends America’s mighty means are working toward. This is precisely what the administration has failed to do, and it’s where the similarities between Trump and Putin become alarming.

Hubris is their watchword and it’s leading Trump to become even more megalomaniacal than he already was. The military has dealt a painful blow to the Iran regime and nobody knows where that goes from here. But it’s clear that Trump and his sycophants have no idea either and it’s not clear that Israel has any plan either. Yes, it’s good that they took out the Ayatollah but let’s face facts. The man was 86 years old. He wasn’t going to be around much longer in any case. And now they’ve replaced him with a 56 year old and strengthened the hand, at least temporarily, of the hard-liners.

But none of this changes the reality that Iran is now in an extremely combustible situation. Nor does it change the complete lack of strategic focus from the Trump administration. By launching an open-ended war on a major state, Trump is taking a far greater risk than he did in Iran last summer or in Venezuela in January. By cutting off the head of the Iranian leadership, the United States and Israel have unleashed forces that could drag the country into a bloody civil war or a regional conflagration. Trump and other top officials like Vance have long insisted that the United States’ regime-change adventures in the Middle East were a costly distraction from much more important threats like China. If Iran descends into chaos, will Trump continue to tie up a massive concentration of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf? He may get lucky and not have to answer this question. Then again, he may not.

[…]

Just as Putin’s arrogance blinded him to the risks of war in Ukraine, Trump’s construction of an echo chamber in the executive branch has warped his judgment. He has convinced himself that the military is an instrument of personal prestige rather than a last resort to be deployed with great care in defense of the national interest. Perhaps this is why he is so enamored with Putin.

It’s certainly one of the reasons. L’etat c’est lui. He’s made that clear from the very beginning. It’s just that now he’s in his YOLO years and he’s just going for it. And, like Putin, he’s surrounded himself with lackeys and enablers and nobody can stop him.

Putin and Trump didn’t think the Ukraine war would last more than a few weeks. So… yeah. Buckle up.

Paul Krugman explains why Hegseths fatuous little “joke” is stupid:

You’ll note that ridiculous pieces of propaganda was circulated by Tom Cotton and the Senate Republicans. They’re all doing it now. As if we’re supposed to be impressed that Trump’s cultists still back their cult leader … and that cult support is all that’s necessary to take us into war.

In case you were wondering how many of these deluded weirdos there are:

Creepy.

The good news is that the coalition that brought him and the GOP victory in ’24 is crumbling. G. Elliott Morris has this:

To measure how Trump’s 2024 coalition is holding up, I pooled nine months of Strength In Numbers/Verasight national surveys from May 2025 through Feb. 2026 and isolated respondents who said they voted for Trump in 2024.

Among these self-described Trump voters, 83.5% currently approve of his job performance while 15.3% disapprove.

Fifteen percent might seem low, but consider that if Trump lost 15% of his voters in 2024, he would have won just 42% of the vote. So it’s a meaningful slice of the electorate.

The chart below breaks down Trump’s job approval today among different demographic groups. People who say they voted for Trump in 2024 and are at least 65 years old are the most likely to approve of his job as president (92%), whereas Black 2024 Trump voters are the least likely (65%).

Still too many, but it’s getting better slowly but surely.