I missed this polling question from a couple of weeks ago. It seems important:
Six in ten Americans, including a significant portion of the Republican Party’s support base, now believe President Donald Trump is becoming more unstable as he grows older.
As reported by Reuters.com (25/02), citing the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, 61% of respondents overall agreed with the description of Trump as “becoming unstable with age”.
This figure comprised 89% of Democrats, 64% of independent voters, and 30% of Republicans.
He’s always spoken at what experts say is about a 4th grade level. The next lowest was Truman with a 6th grade speaking level:
That chart was made during the first term and he’s slipped since then. He has the nerve to say that Biden (who was rated between 6th and 8th grade speaking level) and call out Gavin Newsom for admitting that he has dyslexia, saying that makes him dumb.
Trump has always been discursive and often untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.
According to a @nytimes computer analysis, Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13% more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did 8 years ago.
He uses 32% more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21% in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swear words 69% more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition.
As president in 2.0 we can see that it’s not just his words. He’s going to war every other day now. He’s falling asleep in meetings. He makes less sense every time he talks. It’s obvious that he’s lost more than a step. For a man who started out with serious intellectual deficits and massive character flaws, he didn’t have much mental capacity to lose but he’s losing what little he had. I’m glad to see that so many Americans can see it, including 30% of Republicans.
Trump: "It used to be very successful. Now it's a country run by fear. It's a country where they tell protesters, 'Don't go outside, because if you do, we're gonna kill you.'" pic.twitter.com/Usmfkzvs4f
Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation on Tuesday, citing his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran and saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media, making claims President Donald Trump has denied.
It’s hard to argue with that. He claims that the Israelis misled Trump and that Israel drew the U.S. into the Iraq war which is just Tucker Carlson slop. I’ve no doubt that Netanyahu worked Trump hard but the decision is all Trump for his own reasons.
And the issue of Israel drawing us into Iraq goes back to the history of neoconservatism which was largely influenced by concerns over Israel going back to the 1970s. I’m not sure that’s what Kent is referring to because he’s hardly a political history scholar. But in that way, at least, he’s not wrong. (I suspect it’s more about the fact that Kent is a white nationalist which has a strong streak of fascist anti-semitism.) He represents the Tucker Carlson wing of the party, also known as the Tulsi Gabbard wing. (You’d think she would have been the first to go but because she’s is nothing more than a crass opportunist she’s hanging in there working to steal elections for Trump. )
The polls show that the people who identify as MAGA are sticking with Trump which figures. It’s a cult. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t significant that a substantial portion of the influencer crowd is breaking away. Megyn Kelly, Carlson, Rogan, Marjorie Taylor Green and others are adamantly against the war. This split does mean something. If only 10% of the MAGA coalition breaks over this it weakens the GOP going into this election.
Trump is characteristically gracious:
Trump on Joe Kent: "I always thought he was weak on security. Very weak on security. It's a good thing that he's out." pic.twitter.com/225kN39r2f
Presidents historically have at least paid lip service to the idea that they are supposed to consult Congress before launching a military action. While it’s usually obvious they will proceed anyway, they have nonetheless made the effort, if only to obtain the political cover they might need should things not go as planned. In the case of Donald Trump’s current misadventure in Iran, it’s becoming clear there was no plan — and since the president feels he is owed support for anything he does, he didn’t even bother with the niceties.
Since Vietnam at least, this dynamic has tended to put Democrats in a bind more often than Republicans. The reason for that is simple: The GOP has traditionally been unified in its zeal to go to war, while Democrats have been more divided. For a couple of decades, this caused Democratic presidential aspirants to twist themselves into pretzels trying to find a sweet spot between the party’s anti-war base and its more hawkish minority.
Now, as Trump’s Iran war is intensifying and expanding, Republicans are being forced to confront their own intra-party divisions and rivalries. This has become clear not as a result of some dramatic debate about the war and its aims — because there hasn’t been one. Instead this is best seen in the escalating rivalry between Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both of whom appear to already be vying for the Republican nomination in 2028.
Both Vance and Rubio would do well to remember how the Iraq wars played out for Democrats.
The run-up to the first Iraq war exposed the party’s divisions. In August 1990, Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait. After a flurry of diplomatic initiatives went nowhere, the United Nations issued an ultimatum that Saddam Hussein withdraw his troops, and a coalition of 39 countries, led by the U.S., mobilized nearly a million troops to the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border by January 1991 to enforce it. President George H.W. Bush asked for authorization to go to war as soon as Congress convened, which began an extended and torturous debate. The Senate voted 52-47 to authorize the use of military force, with ten Democrats joining with virtually unanimous Republicans in support. The House approved it 250-183.
That swiftly-executed war was considered a rousing military victory, and many Democrats who had planned a presidential bid and had voted against the war were tarred as unpatriotic in its wake. The eventual winner of the nomination, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, was fortunate enough not to have had to make that decision.
As it turned out, the fates of those who had voted against that war played a big role in how Democrats would eventually vote in 2003, when the same decision was forced upon them by President George W. Bush and his crusade to “finish the job” Iraq. Many of the party’s presidential hopefuls voted in favor of the war, an equally poor decision since this time it turned out to be a disaster. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry won the Democratic nomination in 2004, but he paid a price for his vote. Four years later, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton did as well.
Public opinion in both wars was initially divided, and then the public rallied around the flag once they started. In 1991, public approval for the war stayed relatively high throughout the operation. A decade later, as the second war dragged on, support shrank dramatically.
The lesson here is an easy one: When it comes to war and peace, political leaders should use reason, vote their conscience and let the politics play out as they will. Not only is it the moral thing to do, there’s just no way to predict the outcome of a war in any case.
Trump’s Iran war has been unpopular with the American public from the beginning. Those concerns didn’t stop Rubio, who has always been something of a hawk, from agitating for war. There was some tension in the early days of Trump’s second term, when Rubio was still hostile to Russian President Vladimir Putin while Trump was bending over backward to deliver Ukraine to him on a silver platter. That’s changed now that Trump has somehow found a way to think of himself as the world’s greatest peacemaker as he blows boats out of the water, seizes leaders of sovereign nations and starts wars halfway across the world — just because he can.
Rubio is Trump’s closest administration ally in all these decisions, and as the bulk of the party rallies around Trump, the secretary is being seen in elite circles as his heir apparent. At a recent gathering of big donors at Mar-a-Lago, Trump reportedly asked who they would prefer he support in 2028. The group unanimously picked Rubio.
The secretary is already making his moves. Last week the New York Times published a story portraying Rubio as the visionary behind Trump’s foreign policy. Eschewing the gooey idealism of the neoconservatives, who pretended to care about freedom and democracy, Rubio’s innovation is what the Times characterizes as “destroy and deal,” but what it really is is a very old concept called conquest.
“It is about sustaining American military primacy, making other states fear and respect us,” Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington, explained in the article. Rubio underscored this in his recent speech at the Munich Security Conference, when he bemoaned the fact that the “great Western empires” had passed.
The vice president, on the other hand, has been seen as the frontrunner in most public polling for months. But he has been a cipher when it comes to the administration’s military “excursions,” as Trump calls them, and has reportedly even been exiled from the makeshift Mar-a-Lago situation room. Vance is known to be the voice in the room — at least when he’s there — who pushes against military action. He’s not coming out against these wars; Vance is not politically suicidal. But he’s playing it very close to the vest, seemingly waiting to see how it all shakes out.
This is tricky for Vance, who is often seen as the “one true MAGA” carrying on the philosophy of America First and “no new wars” philosophy, which is no longer operative with anyone except the elite MAGA influencers. But he can’t afford to overtly separate himself from Trump.
The machinations of both camps are coming into focus. By lashing himself to Trump’s foreign policy mast, Rubio has to hope that these wars go well if he is going to win the nomination. Trump is said to be favoring him, but the danger is that if things in Iran go south, the secretary will be the one Trump blames for the failure. Vance is trying to have it both ways. If things go well with the war, Rubio will reap the political benefits. So Vance is quietly rooting for the war to fail while keeping his fingerprints off any of it.
After watching Democrats’ experience with the Iraq debacle, Vance, Rubio and their fellow Republicans should have learned that staking one’s political fortunes on the outcome of war is a fool’s game. But with Trump in charge, they really have little choice. Good luck to whomever wins the prize. It’s likely not to be one worth having.
Dan Pfeiffer this morning recalls an Obama campaign team meeting from 2012. Everything was upbeat and going swimmingly until White House Senior Advisor David Plouffe spoke:
“Gas prices are an existential threat to the entire enterprise. If they keep going up, we will lose reelection.”
The direness of Plouffe’s warning caught everyone’s attention. Plouffe was known for keeping calm under the most intense pressure and never panicking.
But prices went down. Obama won reelection. Donald Trump may not be so lucky in the 2026 midterms. With his attack on Iran, he’s shot himself in the foot in the middle of Fifth Avenue. He’s losing voters.
Since the U.S. launched a war against Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, the national average price of a gallon of gasoline has climbed from $2.93 to $3.72, according to AAA. That is the highest price in over a year, and a 27% increase compared to the same time last year. Americans are witnessing the largest month-to-month spike in gas prices we’ve seen in 30 years.
Consumer sentiment is “cratering” as worry about inflation spikes. Even sucking helium, Trump cannot keep the jobs market from deflating:
And gas is just the latest blow. The February jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed payrolls declined by 92,000 — the third time in five months that the economy has shed jobs. This month, unemployment ticked up to 4.44% (dangerously close to rounding to 5%). Year-over-year CPI is running hotter, and that’s before you account for (a) the fact that the BLS changed data sources for legal services last month, leading to an artificially lower inflation reading or (b) the full impacts the war with Iran will have on everything from food to building materials.
“On day one, we’re bringing prices down,” Donald Trump promised crowds throughout 2024. But every major piece of data we have on prices is going in the opposite direction.
Working-class whites and Latinos who helped put Trump back into the White House one year ago have noticed. Low-income white voters have swung 26 points against Trump since 2024. He’s lost more with low-income Hispanics with a 34-point net approval gap.
Simply put, “the data is that workers voted for Trump because he promised to make their lives cheaper — but he has done the opposite at every turn, and is now suffering the consequences.” Their support in 2024 was transactional, and Trump has not delivered, either on an improving economy or on his promise to keep the U.S. out of endless foreign wars.
Trump did not just avoid a foreign war. The dangerous, delinquent idiot started one on a whim. “The casual nature of the declaration of war matched the unmoored nature of Trump’s imperial cosplay,” observes Fintan O’Toole in The New York Review. The reflexive liar has not even bothered to construct a sensible story as to why. Past U.S. conflicts purported to be about “making the world safe for democracy (World War I), defeating fascism (World War II), saving civilization from communism (Korea and Vietnam), upholding international law and the sovereignty of nations (Kuwait), responding to the atrocities of September 11 through the “war on terror” (Afghanistan and Iraq).” Trump’s attack on Iran contradicts his own National Security Strategy published in November.
One area in which Trump has gone the extra mile is in routinely insulting U.S. allies. Now that he’s started a widening war in the Persian Gulf, U.S. allies are letting him stew in it.
It is obvious that making war is a useful distraction—for himself as well as for the world—from the Epstein scandal. But it is also now the purest form of self-pleasuring. Usually a president going to war is taking on burdens. Trump is shrugging them off, entering a state of weightlessness where all thought of consequences and all concern for mundane irritants like inflation and affordability are left behind.
MAGA has noticed. In the seven months that Sign Guy has been on street corners and overpasses five times per week, last week’s message drew far more middle fingers than in any week since August. It read: IRAN’S LEADER IS DOWN. YOUR PRICES ARE UP.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is done with MAGA, even as he’s pursuing a full pardon from Trump. So he blames Israel for the war, not Trump, but he’s done. As Monday guest host on Alex Jones’ show, Rhodes declared “the obvious role of the influence of Zionism in our government,” etc., etc.:
“So that’s why I no longer call myself MAGA. I am an America-only patriot. I’m a Christian nationalist, an American Christian nationalist. I have to open my eyes to the reality in front of my face, and it’s caused a division inside of MAGA, and it’s caused a division on the political right. But so be it,” Rhodes said.
Trump is burning through supporters faster than U.S. advanced weaponry. For those of a certain age, in there somewhere is a Carnac the Magnificent joke involving diseased camels.
UPDATE:
After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this… pic.twitter.com/prtu86DpEr
Hassett: "If the war were to be extended, it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about what we'd have to do about that, but that's really the last of our concerns right now."
“I predicted the JFK assassination. Nobody gives me credit for that.” <satire>
I don’t know who this guy is (below), but he’s plainspoken. Just the way MAGA likes it.
England’s prime minister “should do as little as possible. Trump is a dangerous, delinquent idiot who started a war in one of the world’s most historically volatile tinderboxes’ — with no legal rationale, no plan, and no end objective.”
🇬🇧 @mrjamesob on Trump’s war: “@Keir_Starmer should do as little as possible. Trump is a dangerous, delinquent idiot who started a war in one of the world’s most historically volatile tinderboxes’ — with no legal rationale, no plan, and no end objective.” pic.twitter.com/2Mu0Ui17iX
Clean up your own mess, Herr Trump, or we’ll build more wind turbines offshore of your Aberdeenshire golf course.
Has the world finally had enough of this moron’?
Trump: "I knew the Strait would be a weapon. I predicted it a long time ago. I predicted all of this stuff. I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I wrote it in a book." pic.twitter.com/tdllc55VQ4
Speaking of straits, I’ll pay for his straitjacket if Republicans in Congress can ever find their long-lost testicles and haul him away in one.
I am well aware that Trump supporters inhabit a parallel reality where facts don't matter, but nonetheless, here is a montage by CNN showing Trump contradicting himself several times over the span of a single hour: pic.twitter.com/nix64xT7iY
Q.E.D.: Cuba is “not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change.”
Trump: "I do believe I'll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That's a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form. I think I can do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth." pic.twitter.com/vOy9OoMgZB
I was on the radio last week with Michaelangelo Signorelli and Joe Sudbay last week and Joe said something that really resonated with me. Speaking of the Iran war, he said that it felt to him like the early days of COVID when we knew that something bad was happening but had no idea what was going to happen. It’s a feeling of free-floating anxiety mainly caused by the fact that we know Donald Trump is a clown and his administration is filled with incompetent toadies.
That’s exactly how I feel right now. We simply have no way of knowing how this thing is going to go. We just have to hope that Trump stays lucky. Right now it doesn’t look promising.
President Donald Trump began his second term with a promise to cut “billions and billions of dollars” in government spendingempowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate programs and fire workers it deemed wasteful.
One year later, cuts to programs and personnel at federal agencies that had been declared unneeded mere months agohave hampered the US government’s abilities to prepare for domestic emergencies; monitor terror threats; guard against cyber-attacks; broadcast US information into Iran; and quickly help US citizens stranded abroad, current and former government officials told CNN.
Democrats and a handful of Republicans have long criticized the way that DOGE and the Trump administration slashed government programs, warning it harmed the US domestically and abroad. Now the cuts, which continued evenafter Musk left government last spring, are again being scrutinized as US strikes on Iran have sparked a war that’s spilled out across the Middle East.
I’m reminded of the nurses and doctors wearing garbage bags for PPE. And Trump saying “slow the testing down, please…”
Trump on Starmer: "He says, 'Well, I'd like to ask my team.' I said, 'You don't have to worry about a team. You're the prime minister. You can make a decision. You don't have to speak to anybody.' So it's very disappointing." pic.twitter.com/WmhrPzM7vq
England has had a king or queen for over a thousand years. But they are also a democracy and their elected leaders are not granted unlimited power to do anything they want — unlike the world’s longest continuing democracy which is now under the sway of a megalomaniacal would-be monarch who is rapidly losing his faculties. He could lose his seat overnight. If only we had the same ability to discipline a lunatic leader.
I really hope the allies have learned their lesson with this freak. After his disastrous performance just last month when he went to Europe, threatened to take over a sovereign country by force and insulted everyone in sight they seemed to have finally learned the lesson that appeasing him is a completely useless exercise because he will stab them in the back anyway. There’s just no point in it.
He has to live with the consequences of his actions. We all do or it’s only going to get worse and worse.
Startling moment even by Trump’s standards, egging Speaker Mike Johnson on to talk about GOP Rep. Neal Dunn’s health diagnosis. Johnson hedges a bit and Trump interjects that Dunn was told he’d be dead by June.
Johnson: Ok, that wasn’t public.
Of course it was really just a way to toot his own horn:
President Donald Trump on Monday left House Speaker Mike Johnson and others visibly shocked by revealing private medical information about a House Republican while television cameras broadcast the scene.
Trump was speaking during an impromptu press conference — where he was expected to field a few questions about the ongoing Iran War — before a scheduled lunch with Kennedy Center board members, when he began praising the way House Speaker Mike Johnson has managed to keep his majority together despite having only a two-vote margin since earlier this year.
Seated between Johnson and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, whom Trump had earlier revealed is battling early-stage breast cancer, he asked the Speaker about one GOP member who was “very ill.” Johnson replied that Florida Representative Neal Dunn had been suffering from “real health challenges” and a “pretty grim diagnosis” while still showing up to work and voting, calling him “a real champion and a patriot.”
Trump then interjected to ask about Dunn’s diagnosis before revealing, unprompted, that it had been “a terminal diagnosis.”
“He would be dead by June,” said Trump, prompting Johnson to jump back in, more than a bit surprised.
”Ok, that wasn’t public,” Johnson said.
Johnson added that Trump had connected with Dunn to offer condolences and later arranged for him to receive medical treatment from White House Medical Unit doctors and other military physicians at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
“The man has a new lease on life. He acts like he’s 30 years younger, and he walked into the conference meeting, and we thought we’d seen a ghost, and I spoke with him over the weekend, and he’s encouraged and thankful, and he thanks the President for his leadership and intervention,” Johnson said.
Trump re-entered the conversation by recounting how Johnson had told him that Dunn had been “terminal” with a “really bad heart” and remarked how there was “nothing they could do” for the longtime Florida representative.
“I realized I have doctors in the White House … the White House, doctors are incredible and they’ve helped me with other people. They’re helping me with people right now, people that are very sick… like they’re miracle workers. And I said, I have to call them. And I called the two doctors, they’re both great. And they immediately went over to see the congressman, and he was on the operating table, like two hours later,” Trump said.
Earlier this year, Dunn said he would not seek re-election in Florida’s 2nd district. Last month, amid rumors that Dunn might resign early, his office told Politico that he would serve out the duration of his term.
I don’t think anyone knows exactly what went on with Dunn’s diagnosis but it’s clear that he did not want the details to be public. But Trump needed to fluff himself on camera so he just blurted it out.
Great American power and responsibility are not unprecedented, and have been used with restraint and great benefit in the past. We have not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom, and we have consistently reached out to the international community to ensure that our own power and influence are tempered by the best common judgment.
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.
The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes – and we must.
He was awarded the prize during the run up to the Iraq war. Read the whole thing. Carter was long out of office at the time but he used his moment, as an elder statesmen, to make a moral statement at a time when it was difficult to do so.
The astonishing thing is that we’re back where we were then except the people in charge are much worse and the only rationale is the most fatuous of all: the president took the country to war because he “had a feeling” they were going to attack.
