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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Bringing In The Boots

Published by digby on March 13, 2026

Apparently, Trump told the G7 leaders that Iran is about to surrender:

President Trump told G7 leaders in a virtual meeting Wednesday that Iran is “about to surrender,” according to three officials from G7 countries briefed on the contents of the call.

Why it matters: Trump is as confident about the war’s outcome in private as he is in public. But his assessment is colliding with a more complex reality on the ground.

Huzzah. But why would we be doing this if that’s the case? The Wall St. Journal reports:

The Pentagon is moving additional Marines and warships to the Middle East as Iran steps up its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, according to three U.S. officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East, for an element of an amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit, typically consisting of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors, the officials said.

The Japan-based USS Tripoli and its attached Marines are now headed for the Middle East, two of the officials said. Marines are already in the Middle East supporting the Iran operation, the officials said.

The move comes as Iran’s attacks on the strait have paralyzed traffic through the strategic waterway, disrupting the global economy, driving up gas prices and posing a major military and political challenge for President Trump. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.

He’s just saying whatever comes into his head believing that he can bend reality to his will as he has so many times before. I don’t think it’s going to work in this case but you never know.

The question is why he’d be sending this particular contingent to the Gulf. Guess:

An amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit typically consist of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors. An earlier version of this post incorrectly said it typically consists of 5,000 Marines

Yeah. It’s not looking good.

Oh, and if they are deployed they will almost certainly be ordered to commit war crimes:

One of Pete Hegseth’s first actions after taking charge at the Pentagon was to fire top lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force—senior officers who the defense secretary said functioned as “roadblocks” to the president’s orders. The former National Guardsman has a history of hostility toward military lawyers and the legal restraints they impose on the use of military might. They are known as judge advocates general. Hegseth calls them “jagoffs.”

This week, Hegseth proposed a “ruthless” overhaul of how the military’s thousands of lawyers in uniform, and their civilian counterparts, are organized, part of his campaign to move from, as he has called it, “tepid legality” to “maximum lethality.” JAGs serve a vital oversight function on issues such as whether drone strikes are aimed at legally justified targets and whether to prosecute adultery. “In some circumstances, the delivery of legal services across the Military Departments has become marked by duplication of effort, ambiguous lines of responsibility, uncertain reporting relationships, and inefficient allocation of legal resources that do not match the command’s priorities,” Hegseth said in a memo, which we reviewed, that announced the plans. He gave the military services 45 days to submit proposed changes to the way that they allocate legal responsibilities to their JAGs and civilian lawyers.

Hegseth couched the review in terms of efficiency and reducing waste and overlap. He said in a video released on the Department of Defense’s X account that JAGs in the future will be responsible for operational and military issues, including the laws of war and matters of criminal justice, and that civilian lawyers will handle more administrative work such as environmental and labor reviews and routine procurement.

But his plans have alarmed many current and former military lawyers, who see the bureaucratic justifications as cover for what they suspect Hegseth really wants to do: reduce the ranks of lawyers, purge internal dissent, and eliminate guardrails designed to restrict the military from carrying out legally dubious orders.

He’s doing this in the middle of a war. I don’t think we need to wonder why.

Lower Than Low

Published by digby on March 13, 2026

Remember this?

This was what he was referring to after he saw it on Sean Hannity:

During his book tour in February, Newsom sat down with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and got very honest about his academic past, saying, “I’m not trying to impress you, I’m just trying to impress upon you I’m like you, I’m not better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy and you know, I’m not trying to offend anyone — you know — trying to act all there if you got 940 — but literally, a 960 SAT guy.”…”You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech. Maybe the wrong business to be.”

Newsom’s tart reply to Trump:

But Trump’s running with his disgusting talking point:

Here’s Newsom’s response to that one:

People can hear Newsom speak and it’s clear that he is not mentally impaired. If anything it’s very impressive since he memorizes speeches or speaks off the cuff much more fluently than most, especially Trump.

But this has been a common these ever since Trump entered the political arena. He went after Obama’s law school transcripts suggesting throughout the 2012 and 2016 campaigns that he was a poor student. And remember this?

During former President Barack Obama‘s 2012 presidential campaign, Trump begged Obama to share his college records and prove he wasn’t a “terrible student.” Just days later, then-NYMA superintendent Jeffrey Coverdale was “accosted by prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Mr. Trump’s friends,” then-headmaster Evan Jones ttells The Washington Post. Ironically, those alumni wanted Trump’s high school grades kept under wraps.

Coverdale confirmed the account to the Post on Monday, saying NYMA trustees wanted to take Trump’s records. Coverdale refused, but said he did move the records “elsewhere on campus where they could not be released.” That account lines up with the story Cohen told Congress last week: that he threatened Trump’s high school and colleges “to never release his grades or SAT scores.” Fordham University, where Trump went to college for two years, also confirmed to the Post it got one of Cohen’s letters.

He didn’t insult Hillary Clinton’s intelligence and instead repeatedly said she didn’t have the “strength and stamina” to be president (“strength and stamina” being a euphemism for penis.) And then there was Joe Biden and he’s still going on about how he was stupid and had dementia. Now Newsom.

It’s always projection. He has a talent for hype and a feral instinct for survival but on some subliminal level he clearly understands that he’s uneducated and pychologically unfit. That’s what triggers the narcissism and now the megalomania.

Here’s the thing. Millions of people have had dyslexia, including George Washington. Other presidents with learning disabilities include Jefferson, Kennedy, Wilson and Eisenhower. And in you want to include mental health, Abraham Lincoln was known to have major depression. But I will say that we’ve probably never had one with the constellation of psychological, mental, intellectual and character flaws that exist in the person of Donald J. Trump.

Angling for ’28

Published by digby on March 13, 2026

It looks like the Vance people are making a bet on Iran failure and he’s making his move for the MAGA America Firsters and others who believed the bs about Trump being the “peace president.” And maybe he figures he’ll get credit for it among other Iran skeptics too.:

Vice President JD Vance was skeptical of the U.S. striking Iran in the leadup to President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war, two senior Trump officials told POLITICO.

Vance, who has long questioned U.S. intervention abroad, has publicly defended Trump’s Iran operation. But White House officials revealed that the vice president made his opposition known in the leadup, pulling the curtain open after months of speculation about Vance being far more tepid about military action than Trump.

Vance is “skeptical,” is “worried about success” and “just opposes” the war on Iran, a senior Trump official said via text message. The official was granted anonymity to speak about the vice president’s views.

A second senior Trump official said “his role is to provide the president and the administration, you know, all points of views of what could happen from many different angles and, you know, he does that. But once the decision has been made, he’s fully on board.”

He’s going to have to get a personality transplant to make this work for him. And the long knives are going to come out soon if this keeps. up.

Let the games begin.

Who Woudda Have Thunk It?

Published by digby on March 13, 2026

Apparently, the U.S. government decided to ignore every analysis of what I ran would do in the face of attack for the past 50 years and they’ve been taken by surprise:

Nearly two weeks after the United States and Israel attacked Iran with an extraordinary display of firepower, Iran has found a way to inflict pain back on its enemies by strangling one of the world’s most vital waterways. By threatening shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, attacking tankers in an Iraqi port and beginning to lay mines in the strait, Iran has sent oil prices surging and slowed global trade. It has also made clear that it is intent on using what advantages it has to sap the will of the United States to sustain the war.

The Iranian tactics have forced the United States to prepare to provide naval escorts for shipping traffic through the strait and to plan for anti-mine operations even as American forces target what is left of the Iranian navy, including Iranian mine-laying vessels.

On Thursday, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of Iran, sent the regime’s clearest signal yet that it would continue to endanger commercial shipping in the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil was passing before the war began.

“Certainly, the lever of closing the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used,” Mr. Khamenei said in his first statement since being chosen to succeed his father, who was killed in an airstrike at the start of the war.

Iran, analysts say, is demonstrating that even in a weakened state, it can inflict significant economic and military damage on the United States. That further complicates President Trump’s calculations about how and when to end the war and how to deal with a post-conflict Iran.

They had no calculations. Trump was convinced that his new hand-picked leaders in Iran would “make a deal” in order to stay in power and would give up their military and cut him in on the oil and everything would be great. Bibi and LIndsey told him he’d be remembered as Alexander the Great. Nobody could tell him otherwise.

This is one of the dumbest mistakes any president has ever made. EVERYONE who knew anything about the middle east understood the risk for the world economy if the Strait was closed for any length of time. They ignored that or or were too stupid to know it and were completely unprepared.

“It’s An Honor” To Kill Them

Published by digby on March 13, 2026

It appears that he’s finally giving up his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize for real. He’s really letting his homicidal freak flag fly now. I’m afraid that as this goes on, it’s only going to get worse.

“I Miss My Uncle Joe”

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2026

MAGAs experience buyer’s remorse

A MAGA’s buyer’s remorse. “Between him and her, I thought he was the better choice. But, honestly, I miss my Uncle Joe.”

Donald Trump’s MAGA base seems to be experiencing some buyer’s remorse.

Buzzfeed cautions that these are collected online comments “and not necessarily fact.” Nevertheless:

On r/AskConservatives, one person asked, “How many of you are upset that Trump lied about ‘no new wars’?” People did not hold back their thoughts. Here’s what some self-described conservatives had to say:

1. “I am. I don’t think people realize how much of a shit show the Middle East is right now and how infuriating it is for our government to start a war for a foreign country.”

—Vindictives9688, Right Libertarian (Conservative)

2. “Absolutely infuriating indeed. ‘No new wars’ is the most blatant lie a president has said in a long time.”

—dudeabiding420, Right Libertarian (Conservative)

3. “At this point, I think Trump has completely betrayed half of his campaign promises.”

—thoughtsnquestions, Conservative

4. “I really think the Republicans have lost so many people that supported them in 2024 and are about to get absolutely obliterated in the midterms. The skyrocketing gas prices alone are going to doom them. Not to mention the mishandling of the Epstein files.”

—dudeabiding420, Right Libertarian (Conservative)

This one evokes dystopian films:

11. “My wife said, ‘I’m done with him.’ She mentioned the Epstein files, in that he ran on releasing those, and then suddenly didn’t want to release them. After that, he said he wasn’t going to start wars, especially with Iran, and instead became a puppet of Israel and started this war. She acknowledged how terrible Iran’s government is, but ‘Why is it our responsibility to take care of that? Did we learn nothing from Iraq?’ Honorable mention, the handling of Anthropic. ‘Do we want Terminators running around freely??? Wtf??!!’ The midterms are going to be a nightmare for the GOP.”

—Gumby80, Center-right Conservative

Things are a nightmare now.

Republicans Sacrifice Their Own

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2026

Plus, two out of three ain’t rigged

Casanova Frankenstein: It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules (throws switch & electrocutes the Frat Boys). You see, I kill my own men. And lucky me…I get the girl. (Mystery Men, 1999.)

Just so I don’t bury the lede: Republicans will sacrifice their own voters if that’s what it takes to retain power. Their voters are expendable. I’ll get to why in a bit.

A 40-ish guy walked up on the street on Tuesday. He was curious to ask what I was doing. He said he’d been in D.C. on Jan. 6th, 2021. I didn’t press for details, but told him I was on the sidewalk as part of an effort to turn out more voters in November. But does voting do anything, he asked. Sometimes you vote and don’t get what you want. Um, that’s democracy, I replied.

What I didn’t point out was that Donald Trump claimed throughout the 2016 campaign that the election would be rigged against him. He won. Trump claimed throughout his 2020 reelection campaign that the election would be rigged against him. He lost. Trump claimed he’d been robbed. You know what happened on Jan. 6th. During his 2024 campaign, by then a convicted felon and twice impeached, Trump claimed again that the election would be rigged against him. He won. If U.S. elections are rigged, that’s working for Trump, isn’t it? Two out of three ain’t bad.

Yet again, however, it’s the Republicans trying to rig the elections. Their latest ploy is demanding immediate passage of the SAVE Act. The GOP is hyping it as a photo ID bill with help from the media.

See? See how popular requiring a photo ID to vote is, they argue? So why do Democrats oppose SAVE? It’s about preventing voter fraud, they argue (after scaremongering all-but-nonexistent voter fraud for 60 years).

How many times must the press (and anchors like Kaitlan Collins) fall for that diversion?

What are Democrats afraid of? Disenfranchising large swaths of legitimate voters in the name of supposed “election integrity.” To register to vote under SAVE, one must provide documentary proof of citizenship, something this country has not required in 250 years. The marketing of SAVE as a photo ID bill is a diversion. It’s another Republican voter suppression bill.

Here’s what the Bipartisan Policy Center says about the vote-suppressing impacts of SAVE’s requirement that voter registrants produce a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a Certificate of Citizenship, or a Naturalization Certificate:

Although at least one of these documents are in theory available to most citizens, not all voters have them readily available. According to recent studies:

Given how well voter ID polls, marketing SAVE as a voter ID bill makes it a Trojan horse for the proof of citizenship and other features. Republicans mean to dare Democrats to vote against photo ID ahead of the November election. So long as the press falls for the diversion, it’s helping Republicans with their vote suppression effort.

Republicans sacrifice their own

Furthermore, consider what happened when Kansas added this documentation hurdle to ballot access:

Kansas offers a case study of how a documentary proof requirement would likely play out in practice. Before the law took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After adoption, the documentary proof of citizenship requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering to vote than noncitizens.

That, of course, is the Republican plan. And that’s red-state Kansas! Key elections these days are often won on thin margins. GOP lawmakers know how to slice them.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick observed in 2013 that voter ID bills designed to suppress the votes of Democrats might also disproportionately suppress the votes of Republican women. I wrote about this phenomenon at Crooks & Liars earlier that year:

In a report issued in April, the NC State Board of Elections estimated that 176,091 registered Democrats are without the state-issued photo identity card most will have to pay $20-$32 for before they can vote under VIVA. Plus 73,787 unaffiliated and 1,126 Libertarian voters. Among registered Republican voters, 67,639 have no photo identity cards. Over 2/3 are women.

Let Republican relatives and acquaintances know how little their party thinks of them

Why would Republicans make it harder for Republicans to vote? To give their subterfuge that stylish, party-neutral look. And because they believe their bills will harm more Democrats than Republicans. They’re playing percentages. They see sacrificing their voters as acceptable losses in their quest for power. Requiring proof of citizenship to vote is no different. The GOP is just upping the ante with SAVE.

Per the Democratic Committee on House Administration, SAVE would also “gut voter registration by mail and online,” and “disallow states from accepting the NVRA’s mail voter registration application unless the applicant presents DPOC [documentary proof of citizenship] in person at the office of an appropriate election official.” In person. Recall that when GOP-led states require citizens to obtain IDs for voting at the DMV, they have a habit of closing offices in Democratic areas. What might happen with elections offices after passing SAVE? Trump also wants to add a ban on men in women’s sports and on transgender surgeries for minors. Apparently, vote suppression wasn’t enough red meat for his shrinking base.

SAVE is another of the GOP’s Orwellian bills like the Bush-era “Clear Skies” initiative that repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, and the “Healthy Forests” initiative that promoted logging of old growth forests. Promoting SAVE as a voter ID bill is misdirection.

Trump, of course, is scared to death of losing control of Congress, and he’s desperate to plop his stubby thumbs on the scales “strongly” with SAVE. He could face investigations and a third impeachment. Trump believes if SAVE passes, Democrats “probably won’t win an election for 50 years and maybe longer.”

For now, it appears that Senate Majority Leader John Thune does not have the votes to clear a filibuster and bring SAVE to a vote. Which is why Trump wants the filibuster gone. Anything to keep him from facing a House and Senate controlled by Democrats for his last two years.

“Senate Republicans are planning for days of marathon sessions as they try to put Democrats on defense over their controversial elections bill backed by President Donald Trump,” reports Politico. So DO NOT assume that Trump won’t pull a rabbit out of his hat. If you have Republicans representing you in the Senate (or John Fetterman), let them hear from you over the weekend.

Get Ready For The Baby Nazis

Published by digby on March 12, 2026

There are a lot of scary things happening in this world but I think this op-ed by Michelle Goldberg (gift link) ranks right up there. It’s about a candidate for Florida Governor who is bringing in enthusiastic crowds of young GenZ men. He happens to be a hustler who’s settled on a platform of Nick Fuentes plus populism. It’s not good.

Slight and bespectacled, Fishback has a geeky charisma and the verbal dexterity of a former competitive high school debater. His policies are a mishmash of extreme conservatism and economic progressivism; nationalism tinged with socialism, if you will. He believes that Florida’s gun laws are too strict, its abortion laws too lax and its public teacher pay too low. He’s called for a 50 percent sin tax on OnlyFans creators and $10,000 grants to high-performing high school graduates to buy homes or start businesses. Though he’s the son of an immigrant — his mother is Colombian — he wants a total immigration moratorium.

Most of all, Fishback has made contempt for Israel and its American lobby a centerpiece of his campaign, constantly reminding audiences how much America spends on Israel while its own needs are ignored. He often calls Byron Donalds, a Black Republican congressman who is the front-runner in the governor’s race, “AIPAC Shakur,” a play on Tupac Shakur. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show in January, Fishback described the “sexual, sadistic” pleasure that pro-Israel donors get in forcing America to “bend over” for a foreign country. Carlson endorsed him and wrote, “Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.”

[…]

Fuentes’s ideology is a sneering, adolescent sort of Nazism. As he said on his podcast last year: “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the [expletive] up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” In Fishback, Fuentes’s followers — often known as groypers — have a candidate who is serious about representing them.

He’s not going to win the governors race or even come close. But this is a growing movement:

[A]nyone concerned with the escalating extremism of the young right should be paying attention to his campaign and the enthusiastic crowds it’s drawing. More than any political candidate yet, Fishback has managed to bring the paranoid, transgressive, meme-drunk spirit of the right-wing internet into the real world. Chris Rufo, a conservative operative who played a major role in Ron DeSantis’s war on wokeness, is no fan of Fishback, but said that “he’s demonstrated a pretty sophisticated method for turning a campaign with no budget, a skeleton staff, into the most talked about campaign in Florida politics.”

Fishback is tapping into an increasingly radicalized generation of Republicans. In December, the conservative Manhattan Institute found that 31 percent of Republicans under 50 identify their own views as racist, and 25 percent say their views are antisemitic. For those over 50, it’s only 4 percent for each. The same survey showed that a majority of Republican men under 50 think that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated.

Maybe it’s a passing fad, I don’t know. But for about a decade now, a lot of young men in the is country have been stewing in right wing radicalism that’s slowly but surely infiltrating the mainstream. Its not that far right extremism hasn’t always existed. It has. But these folks are being welcomed into the mainstream in ways we haven’t seen before. And its particularly worrying because they’re young and don’t have any other experience. Political identity tends to stick.

Keep your eyes on this. It’s a bad sign.

Nobel Retreat

Published by digby on March 12, 2026

I can’t even believe he’s saying this but…

President Donald Trump, more than a week into his seismic military campaign in Iran, no longer wants to talk about winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The president often claims that his peacemaking bona fides and “peace through strength” foreign policy agenda make him a shoo-in for the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s top honor.

But in a brief phone call with the Washington Examiner on Thursday morning, Trump claimed to have “no idea” if Operation Epic Fury will “get him over the finish line” with committee members.

“I don’t know,” he told the Washington Examiner flatly. “I’m not interested in it.”

“No, I don’t talk about the Nobel Prize,” the president added when asked if the subject had been broached during any of the conversations he has had with foreign leaders since last Saturday.

He doesn’t talk about the Nobel Prize??? I guess the Alzheimer’s must really be kicking in.

I mean:

Letter from Donald Trump to Norway

President DJT

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States.

The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

Thank you!

He’s going for the Board Of Peace Alexander The Great Prize. It’s much bigger. And it’s sold gold.

They Live Among Us

Published by digby on March 12, 2026

And there are a lot of them

I’m not talking about immigrants. The administration has put out the word to tone down the mass deportation talk in the run-up to the election. Apparently, it isn’t going down well with the racists:

Top allies of President Donald Trump are furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants — and they’re launching a lobbying effort to reverse that reversal.

A group of longtime Trump allies, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants. The group has commissioned new polling from one of Trump’s top pollsters to back its thesis that doing so will ensure GOP wins this November, and plans to share that data with White House officials, agency heads and every member of Congress.

The new poll was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, a pollster that Trump has used in all of his presidential elections, and shared exclusively with POLITICO. It found that 66 percent of likely 2026 voters support deporting any migrants who enter the country illegally. When asked if they support deporting all deportable migrants, not just violent criminals, a majority (58 percent) say they do.

Eighty-seven percent of Trump 2024 voters surveyed, including 79 percent of Hispanic Trump voters, want the president to exceed the previous largest deportation effort in history, led in the 1950s by former President Dwight D.

I have nothing further to add except that if you see people like this coming you should probably cross the street. After watching the brutality and cruelty we’ve seen over the past year, the violence in the streets and the lawless behavior of the government, it’s clear there’s something very twisted and sick inside them if they still support this.