Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” brilliantly parodied the lunacy of the nuclear threat during the Cold War. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” says Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Air Force Col. Buck Turgidson, one of the film’s most memorable characters, while agitating the president in the war room for a first strike against the Soviet Union. “But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.”

Unbelievable as it sounds, Turgidson was based on a real-life war hawk. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay advocated immediate airstrikes and a full-scale invasion to destroy the Soviet nuclear missiles. Even after President John F. Kennedy’s naval blockade proved successful, possibly preventing a nuclear war between the superpowers, LeMay called it “the worst defeat in our history.”

He was also known for another quote: “We should bomb them to the stone age,” a sentiment expressed thousands of times during the era by drunk right-wingers propped up at the end of the bar. Turns out, LeMay borrowed the phrase; the words were originally coined by satirical columnist Art Buchwald, but they lived on as the ultimate hawkish critique of the American strategy during the Vietnam War. Right-wingers believed that the U.S. needed to go all-out and prove their enemy’s cause was hopeless. The belief was that by bombing all of North Vietnam’s infrastructure to rubble, not to mention killing a massive amount of people, the Viet Cong would be forced to surrender.:

This idea has held the imagination of the right-wing in America for more than 60 years: if only we had taken the gloves off — if only we had obliterated Hanoi, or gone into Baghdad in 1991, or attacked Iran years earlier — all the wars we have lost or brought to a draw would have been won. America’s presidents, cowed by public opinion, just didn’t have the stomach for what it takes to really demonstrate our superiority and put our enemies in their place. Trump’s Trugidson

Lindsey Graham is the contemporary embodiment of this philosophy. As the quintessential Trump suck-up who sees the president as an opportunity to advance his own personal agenda, he knows all too well — like so many other establishment Republicans — that Trump is barely hanging on to sanity at this point, and that he should never be allowed to wield such massive power. But Graham is the Senate’s version of LeMay — a hawk who wants to see the United States use its mighty military to settle scores and punish any and all who have been a thorn in its side. And he has learned how to persuade Trump to be his instrument in that cause. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, Graham has been the most relentless and the most successful of all the hawks pushing for Trump to attack Iran. He finds ways to get next to the president on the golf course and at his resorts to lobby for major military incursions, and he’s also been traveling overseas to tutor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on how best to speak to Trump to get him to agree. Obviously, Trump listened. 

Despite his claim of being the president for peace, Trump has always believed in the idea that the U.S. military should be unleashed to do its worst so as to teach the country’s adversaries a lesson they won’t soon forget. In this he was largely contained during his first term by good-faith officials and staff, and by his own insincere promise to keep America out of wars. He also, one suspects, has been haunted by a personal fear of making a mistake in an arena in which he has no experience. 

Trump knows that a failed war would be the ultimate black mark on his legacy, and until now he was reluctant to go all out. But Graham was there, the little devil on his shoulder, whispering sweet nothings into the presidential ears about how Trump will be remembered as one of history’s greatest leaders if only he will do what no president in his lifetime has been willing to do: launch wars of choice to demonstrate American military might.

Until now, even the most hawkish Republican presidents knew this notion was absurd. They had learned from the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican. Over three years, from 1965 to 1968, the U.S. conducted Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign with the objective of putting the Viet Cong in their place — and it was remarkably unsuccessful. Nixon tried it again with Operation Linebacker in 1972, and it was equally a failure. The North Vietnamese were not cowed. They just kept on fighting until the U.S. finally pulled up stakes three years later and withdrew.

Of course the hawks all said that the military just didn’t go hard enough, destroy enough, kill enough or it would have worked — an argument that persisted throughout the rest of the Cold War and the years of Iraq and Afghanistan. America was restrained by what our current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently called the “stupid rules of engagement” and “outdated” international norms like the Geneva Convention. Hegseth believes that the United States must be “ruthless” and “uncompromising,” willing to use “overwhelmingly lethal” force geared to “winning our wars according to our own rules.” 

Over the weekend, Graham took to the airwaves and agreed, making Buck Turgidson look like Mahatma Gandhi by comparison. He told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo about Iran, “You just wait to see what comes in the next two weeks. We’re going to blow the hell out of these people.”

Then the senator turned his attention back to the Western hemisphere. “If we get in a fight,” he said, “I want to win it quick. I’m in Miami. You see this hat? ‘Free Cuba.’ Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. We’re marching through the world. We’re clearing out the bad guys. Cuba is next.”

Subtle, Graham is not. It’s clear that this bombing campaign in Iran has him high on his own supply. He sees that Trump is loaded with over confidence from the administration’s successful action in Venezuela, which saw the seizure of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro, and he is now champing at the bit to get going on Cuba, which the president has been talking about incessantly. At a White House event last week with soccer players, Trump blurted out to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “Your next one is gonna be Cuba. [Rubio’s] waiting but he says, ‘Let’s get this one finished first.’ We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen.” That’s what passes for prudence in this administration. 

When Graham says that they’re “marching through the world,” he means it. According to the Journal, he is also pushing Trump to bomb Lebanon back into the stone age, although it appears Israel is well on its way to doing that already. Graham called up Trump and pitched the idea of “‘Operation Semper Fi’ in honor of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American personnel.” He told the president he could go even farther than Ronald Reagan, which, in this context, is an interesting statement, since Reagan rattled some sabers initially but actually made the judicious decision to withdraw.

With his inane bleating on television about taking over the world, Graham sounded unhinged. But like so many members of the GOP establishment who signed on to the MAGA movement as a way to either line their pockets or fulfill their ideological holy grails, he knows what he is doing. Graham is finally getting what he always wanted. 

I suspect the late John McCain would be dismayed to see his protegé thinking that Donald Trump could be trusted with such decisions. The late Arizona senator may have been a war hawk, but he knew the president was a disaster. But then, so did Graham — until he realized Trump could be manipulated for his own ends. 

Salon

Or is it?

Donald Trump is feeling the economic blowback from his [your spin on what this is here] in Iran. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,”Trump said in a phone interview on Monday. Afterwards, markets shot up and the soaring price of oil fell.

The New York Times this morning:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed that Tuesday would be the “most intense day” of American strikes against Iran since the start of the war after President Trump sent mixed signals about a possible end to the conflict.

So is the war that isn’t a war over or isn’t it?

“We have won in many ways, but not enough,” he told a gathering of Republican lawmakers in Florida. Asked later if the war would be over this week, Mr. Trump said, “No.” He said only, “Soon, very soon.”

Q: You said the war is 'very complete.' But your defense secretary says 'this is just the beginning.' So which is it?

TRUMP: You could say both pic.twitter.com/4orXm5ZM4b

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 9, 2026

Where’s that legendary, Trump “truthful hyperbole” now?

Oh, about Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO), Bill Kristol notes at The Bulwark:

Yesterday we saw the mother of all TACO trades. Oil prices were soaring and the market was falling. Then at 3:30 p.m., President Trump told Weijia Jiang of CBS that the war could be over soon: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil prices promptly plunged and stocks shot up. You could have made a lot of money in that last half hour of trading. For all we know, some Trump insiders did.

But chickening out isn’t a matter of one phone call. It takes time and can be a bit complicated to pull off. And of course Trump won’t acknowledge he’s doing it.

It’s TACO Tuesday at The Financial Times as well:

Sometime soon Donald Trump will ring the closing bell on his Iran war. That moment will have less to do with whether his mission is accomplished (whatever that is) than how much pain he can endure. We can safely assume that Iran’s pain threshold is higher than his. Trump will nevertheless present his exit as a victory. Iran will have every incentive to ensure nobody believes him. That is the crux of his self-inflicted dilemma.

Anticipating this would have served Trump well. One step would have been to build up America’s strategic petroleum reserves, which dropped sharply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and were never replenished. Oil and natural gas prices may have soared but an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure. A second would have been to win the Gulf monarchies round to his war plan in advance. That he had no fixed goal made that difficult. Now he is faced with an increasingly irascible Gulf. A third would have been to prepare the US public for a longer conflict. Ditto.

The question is whether Trump has become aware of the drawbacks of not thinking ahead. Were he on a learning curve, he would know that even a severely degraded Iran can continue to frighten oil tankers from the Gulf and shutter much of the region’s energy production. Short of occupying Iran, Trump cannot guarantee safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz. Drone production is decentralised and hard to eradicate from the air.

Speaking of drones, or at least cruise missiles:

Trump on Tehran School Bombing: "Whatever the Report Shows, I’m Willing to Live With It"

REPORTER: You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war… Why are you the only person saying this? pic.twitter.com/W8hbcz9cEi

— RCP Video (@rcpvideo) March 9, 2026

Forbes corrects the record (without meaning to):

What Is The Tomahawk Missile And Who Operates It?

The Tomahawk is an advanced subsonic cruise missile that is primarily launched from submarines and ships and used to conduct precision strikes. The U.S. Navy and the U.K.’s Royal Navy are the main operators of the Tomahawk and in recent years the Japanese and Australian Navies have also agreed to acquire the weapon. Neither Iran or Israel is known to operate the Tomahawk.

The new age of gullicism

Adam Serwer on Monday took on our “bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism” in The Atlantic. “Gullicism” is his shorthand for this explosion of a variety of epistemic closure. Or is that “epistemic explosure”?

Serwer writes (gift link):

Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.

A carnival of mountebanks (if that’s the right collective noun) exploits the suckers born every minute, as our sitting president surely has tens of millions. Vaccine conspiracists are behind the measles outbreaks across the country, Serwer notes, a disease thought eradicated 26 years ago.

It’s unnerving to watch friends and relations disappear down the conspiracy rabbit hole and become gullicists. The schoolteacher who “did her own research” in online threads and recommends stockpiling supplements for warding off Covid. The once liberal nurse whose Facebook posts suddenly fill with vaccine conspiracy “truths” from right-wing websites. All enhanced by the confidence in knowing that the rugged, fiercely independent You know more than the duplicitous Them. Gullicism knows no partisanship.

(I’m still waiting for someone on the left to produce a perpwith the means, motive, and opportunity to steal Ohio for Bush in 2004, or for Rudy Giuliani to produce the volumes of proof he repeatedly claimed to have that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump.)

Serwer is on my page when he writes:

Part of what’s going on here is that people want a simple explanation for their troubles in a complicated world. Autism? It’s vaccines. Disease? Some foods are “poison.” Trouble with your kid? Must be brainwashed by … novels? Video games? Rap music? (This one depends on the decade.) The One True Reason trains a mind not only to reject complexity but to accept bigotry—which is why it’s so ideal for reactionary politics. No housing? Immigrants. No job? Immigrants. Inflation? Immigrants. Immigrants? It’s the Jews.

Lately, however, even some conservatives have begun to lament this monster they’ve helped create. The right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who peddled garbage about African immigrants eating pets, recently complained that “the right’s brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy and algorithm chasing.” But conservatives built that vat. Using legal and political pressure, they pressed the platforms to eschew any consistent or responsible content moderation in the hopes they would serve as frictionless distributors of conservative propaganda. They got their wish.

My decade-old analogy involves waking up helpless in the trunk of an out-of-control car.

But it’s Serwer’s reference to frictionlessness that’s also familiar. At The Ink, Anand Giridharadas writes about the culture of elite impunity and, especially, immunity from respecting any limits at all. “These are men who do not like resistance. Friction. Pushback. Any obstacle to the sprawl of their ideas and needs.” he writes. Including women who might have ideas and power of their own. That’s what makes young girls so attractive to the Epstein class:

It is a different experience of life never to have to wait for your turn on the ski lift. Never to have to contend for space in the overhead locker with another person. Never to have to be charming to get into a restaurant. After a time, one imagines, all the not-having-to-dos will change you. You will become less capable of exerting yourself in ways you once did without a care. And one can even dig deep and muster the empathy to appreciate that, the smoother and easier and more frictionless many parts of your life become, the more intolerable is whatever continues to resist you. 

Like having to pursue and woo a grown woman.

There is a politeness culture, Giridharadas writes in another installment, “where disagreement is treated like ugly tribalism rather than intellectual engagement.” But the need for frictionlessness is a culture among grifters and gullicists in general, and not isolated to the rich.

I observed it while studying the New Age Movement of the 1990s. One vendor at a New Age trade show might offer a (non-FDA approved or tested) device that would reduce wrinkles with electrical stimulation. The vendor in the next booth might sell magic amulets (made from recycled circuit boards) that they claimed removed the harmful effects of electrical fields. Neither questioned the other’s placebo. It would be bad form. Like questioning the young girls hanging around Epstein giving massages on demand.

The Iranian council chose their new leader, a nepo baby son of the former Ayatollah. Trump said before the announcement:

“Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy  in Venezuela.

That demand is one of the most delusional he’s made since this whole thing has started, second only to the fact that he keeps comparing Venezuela to Iran which is completely daft.

In case you haven’t seen the dossier on the new leader, Axios provided a nice concise one:

Mojtaba, Ali’s second-eldest son, was born in 1969. His childhood was shaped by both the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the previous dynasty and by his father’s rise to power, first as president in 1981, then as supreme leader in 1989.

• A cleric, Mojtaba studied under the late Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who called for killing Iranian youths who promoted “Western immorality.”

Mojtaba joined the Revolutionary Guard at 17, serving during the Iran-Iraq War in the Habib Battalion.

• The battalion is a “notoriously ideological unit” led by one of the founders of Hezbollah, according to the Atlantic Council. Many of its alumni later became high-ranking members of the regime’s security and intelligence bodies.

Between the lines: Mojtaba is expected to be more hardline than his father, and his ascent means the Iranian regime may get more repressive.

• He has close ties to some of the most “ideologically extremist clerics” who have been at the forefront of the regime’s most violent crackdowns, per the Council.
• Mojtaba also allegedly engineered the 2005 election that installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. In the 2009 election, protesters flooded the streets to insist Ahmadinejad didn’t win again, and Mojtaba reportedly personally supervised how the IRGC crushed these demonstrations.
• Mojtaba reportedly oversees a massive business empire of luxury properties and investments worldwide, according to Bloomberg.
• He does not list the investments under his name but has amassed wealth despite 2019 U.S. sanctions for his role in his father’s inner circle.
• At the time, the Treasury said Mojtaba worked to “advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives.”

He may be a lightweight, I don’t know. He does, in fact, seem a bit like Don Jr., what with all the corrupt investments. And he’s a hard line extremist too. So maybe he’s just a clown like the Trump boys are. But it appears to be done and Trump isn’t going to have a say in it.

The Bulwark’s Andrew Eggar makes a good point.

What did the White House think it was getting into in Iran? A strike against Iran’s oppressive and fanatical regime, sure. A display of America’s awesome military might, definitely. But it’s become increasingly, painfully clear: They didn’t think there was going to be a war.

The Trump administration developed no real theory of the objectives of the Iran war, because they didn’t think there was going to be a war. ..

The Trump administration made no effort to get the American people on board with war, because they didn’t think there was going to be a war…

They didn’t think there was going to be a war, and so the White House seemingly gave no thought to what the economic ramifications of war would be…

They didn’t think there was going to be a war, and so the president assumed he’d be in charge of picking Iran’s next political leadership…”

They didn’t think there was going to be a war. But now they’ve got one, and they don’t have the faintest idea how to end it.

Looks like he’s getting bored and just wants to declare victory:

NEW—In a phone interview, President Trump told me the war could be over soon: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force.” He added that the U.S. is “very far” ahead of his initial 4-5 week estimated time frame.

— Weijia Jiang (@weijia) March 9, 2026

As for the Straight of Hormuz, Trump noted that ships are moving through now, but he is “thinking about taking it over.”

Trump warned Iran, “They’ve shot everything they have to shoot, and they better not try anything cute or it’s going to be the end of that country.”

— Weijia Jiang (@weijia) March 9, 2026

Well ok then. I’m sure everything’s going to turn out just fine.

They obviously still do not have a plan and Trump is trying to dance on the head of a pin, hoping against hope that everything will turn out ok like it has his whole life.