The Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize. It could begin very soon. A U.S. military operation in Iran would likely be a massive, weeks-long campaign that would look more like full-fledged war than last month’s pinpoint operation in Venezuela, sources say.
The sources noted it would likely be a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign that’s much broader in scope — and more existential for the regime — than the Israeli-led 12-day war last June, which the U.S. eventually joined to take out Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. Such a war would have a dramatic influence on the entire region and major implications for the remaining three years of the Trump presidency.
With the attention of Congress and the public otherwise occupied, there is little public debate about what could be the most consequential U.S. military intervention in the Middle East in at least a decade.
Trump was ready to go last month but ended up sending in Kush and Witkoff to strong arm the Iranian government into bowing down. Shockingly, that crack team has not had any success:
While both sides said the talks “made progress,” the gaps are wide and U.S. officials aren’t optimistic about closing them. Vice President Vance told Fox News the talks “went well” in some ways, but “in other ways it was very clear that the president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through.”
He ordered another armada to to region over the last few weeks and just in the last 24 hours, he’s sent another 50 fighter jets.
Axios reports:
The standoff with Iran has gone on so long that many Americans are likely numb to it. War could come sooner, and be much bigger, than most recognize, sources say.Trump’s military and rhetorical build-ups make it hard for him to back down without major concessions from Iran on its nuclear program. It’s not in Trump’s nature, and his advisers don’t view the deployment of all that hardware as a bluff.
With Trump, anything can happen. But all signs point to him pulling the trigger if talks fail.
Aaaand,there’s the fact that Israel is agitating for a full-fledged, Iraq style regime change operation. and is planning for it to begin in just days.
And then there’s this creepy observation:
U.S. officials said after Tuesday’s talks that Iran needs to come back with a detailed proposal in two weeks. Last June 19, the White House set a two-week window for Trump to decide between further talks or strikes. Three days later, he launched Operation Midnight Hammer.
It really looks like we’re going in. And I don’t think the American people have a clue.
Do they have to go along with this stupid “Donroe Doctrine” nonsense? I don’t think so.
Apparently, Trump is out of the loop and posting erratically again. The BBC reports that Trump’s post, “comes despite Washington on Tuesday giving its official backing to London’s plan to cede sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius.”
I don’t know the details of the U.K. deal or whether it’s good or bad. But I do know that Trump issuing orders on Truth Social to sovereign countries is not the way things should be done.And signaling that he’s seriously looking at more military action in Iran in this manner is just plain stupid.
But that’s how America rolls now. Buckle up, world.
The Trump boys were interviewed on CNBC. The rotten apples don’t fall far from the poison tree:
EISEN: I want to ask you about the WSJ report that a 49% stake in World Liberty was sold to an Emirati royal family member after your father was elected president so they could get access to AI chips
EISEN: I want to ask you about the WSJ report that a 49% stake in World Liberty was sold to an Emirati royal family member after your father was elected president so they could get access to AI chips
DON JR: We’ve been dealing with the conflict of interest stuff for years. Frankly, it’s gotten old. They put us in this position. We just fought back.
EISEN: The critics say everyone is here to curry favor
ERIC TRUMP: The great irony is they didn't give us much of a choice
Eric Trump next to a graphic showing bitcoin tanking over the last 6 months: "I've never been more bullish on bitcoin in my life" pic.twitter.com/DUNdgIfbRR
Don Jr on why he got involved in prediction markets: "We'd see polling — 'Kamala Harris is going to win Iowa by 12 points!' I'm like, 'Man, I was in Iowa last week, I didn't see a single sign.'" pic.twitter.com/nPwyPw63KV
Eisen brought up the “49 percent stake that was sold to an Emirati royal family member after your father was elected president” and said it has raised questions “about whether they were doing that so they could get access to AI chips.” …
Eric Trump answered by going off on a wild tangent about his family’s removal from major social media platforms, his father’s pivot to Truth Social, and the benefits of cryptocurrency. “It’s crazy. The law of unintended consequences,” he said, boasting that after his father and other family members were booted from the platforms, “we went out and we formed Truth Social.”
He added that banks “started canceling us left and right,” prompting the family to move into decentralized finance. “We went out and we got into defi because we realized there was a future of finance,” he said, calling crypto adoption worldwide “the future.”
Donald Trump Jr. also rejected suggestions of wrongdoing, insisting, “A, my father has nothing to do with it. B, it has nothing to do with AI chips.” “I mean, they tried all this nonsense the first time around,” Trump Jr. said. “Frankly, it’s gotten old. They were the ones that put us into this position by creating legislation to try to put us out of business. We just fought back.”
“We weren’t willing to sit in a corner, curl up in a ball, and die like they would love us to do. That’s not how we function. That’s not how we operate,” he added.
They aren’t trying to hide it. Trump himself told the NY Times that he realized after the first term that “nobody cares” about any of this and it’s pretty clear that he realizes he has immunity and unlimited pardon power (along with total control of the GOP, making an impeachment conviction impossible) so he and the family can rob the country blind and get away with it.
I don’t know if reforms will ever be enough to fix the problem that Trump and his spawn have shown a bright light on. Ultimately , if we are to survive as a democracy, something will have to be done about the fact that so many people are deluded enough to vote for a flagrant criminal — twice. I haven’t the vaguest idea how that might be done.
According to a new PRRI survey, 32% of Americans are either adherents of Christian nationalism or sympathetic to it. But this breakdown of who they are by religion and race is interesting:
Most (83%) of those who reject Christian nationalism — the idea that America was founded by and belongs to Christians — say they want to live in a pluralistic country. Not surprisingly, those who embrace Christian nationalism, according to PRRI’s measuring index, prefer a nation made up of Christians (73%).
The report reveals deep divides about the role that religion should play in the country, said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI.“It’s a question of American identity,” said Deckman.
Since 2023, PRRI has tried to measure support for Christian nationalism in the U.S., using a series of five questions. Those questions ask:
• If the government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation. • If being Christian is important to being an American. • If U.S. law should be based on Christian values. • If Christians are called to have domination over American society. • If the U.S. will fall apart without its Christian foundations.
About 1 in 10 Americans (11%) are what PRRI calls Christian nationalist adherents, meaning they agree or completely agree with all questions, according to the new report, based on data from September 2025. More than 1 in 4 Americans (27%) are “rejectors,” meaning they completely disagree with all five statements. Another 21% of Americans are Christian nationalist sympathizers, according to PRRI, meaning they agree with most of the statements, but don’t completely agree with them. And 37% are skeptics and disagree — but not completely — with most of the five statements.
The skeptics outnumber adherents by more than 2-to-1.
Thank God.
Overall, about a third of Americans — including 56% of Republicans, 67% of white evangelicals and 54% of Hispanic Protestants — fall in the adherent or sympathizer categories.
In case you were wondering, many in the GOP establishment and Trumps administration are self-identified Christian nationalists including Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth and Speaker Mike Johnson..
There are places in America where this idea is much stronger than others:
The new report also takes a state-by-state look at the responses and found that Americans in the Bible Belt and the Midwest are more likely to fall in the adherent or sympathizer categories, while those who are skeptics or rejectors are more likely found on the coasts. Residents of Arkansas (54%), Mississippi (52%), West Virginia (51%), Oklahoma (49%), and Wyoming (46%) were most likely to fall in the adherent and sympathizer categories.
No surprises there. This really gets me:
PRRI found that support for President Donald Trump and his policies was much higher among those in the adherent and sympathizer categories. For example, about two-thirds (67%) of adherents and just over half (53%) of sympathizers agreed with the assertion that immigrants are invading the U.S. and “replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Overall, a third of Americans agree. About 61% of adherents and 54% of sympathizers agreed with the U.S. “deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process,” something a third of Americans overall agree with.
These supposed Christians pretty much worship an adjudicated rapist with 5 children from three different wives who was the best friend of one of the most notorious pedophiles in American history. And they are all about being cruel and heartless toward strangers. But sure, they say they are followers of Jesus and expect the rest of us to follow them.
I’m afraid they missed all the Jesus stuff in the Bible.
The mere fact that they have shown themselves to be such epic hypocrites by supporting that monster means we never have to give them even the slightest respect as moral arbiters ever again. Just say “Trump” whenever they even try to wave around the Bible and spout morality. The days of having to kow-tow to that are over.
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said the authors of a New York Fed study that found that Americans pay for tariffs should be disciplined, in an interview with CNBC Wednesday morning.
The findings of the paper run counter to what President Trump has claimed about his tariffs, and the attention the research has received has created a political problem for the White House. Trump wrote in the WSJ that the burden of tariffs “has fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S.”
That is not what the NY Fed study, out last week, concluded. Using government data, the authors found that U.S. importers of foreign goods paid 90% of the higher tariffs last year.They did this by looking at whether exporters lowered the prices of their goods, eating the costs of the tariffs, or if importers were paying more.
The boot-licking lackey Hassett has the nerve to say this:
“I mean, the paper is an embarrassment,” Hassett said on CNBC. “It’s, I think, the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system.”
Hassett argued that prices have gone down, wages are up, and “consumers were made better off by the tariffs.”
It’s clear that the word has gone forth in the Trump administration that their best hope for winning the midterms is to tell people that they don’t know their own minds. I’m sure it will work with the cult but that population seems to be shrinking not growing.
Traditional conservatives certainly aren’t buying it:
“I think the findings of the paper are consistent with what standard economic analysis would suggest,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, tells Axios. “The findings of the paper are also consistent with the empirical estimates of related papers,” he says. The problem is its conclusions run counter to the White House narrative.
Yes, that’s certainly true. But Trump has good reason to believe that if he just says something over and over again he can convince tens of millions of people to believe it regardless of the facts. It worked for him regarding the 2020 election and he even reversed many people’s beliefs about what they saw with their own eyes on January 6th. But this will be a real test of his limits. When it comes to their own wallets, people tend to go their own way no matter what the talking heads and politicians tell them. But who knows? Maybe Trump and his henchmen can pull this one off too.
McLaughlin was a key contributor to a particular Trump II aesthetic: young, photogenic, often blonde women going feral in front of cameras on behalf of President Trump and his most odious nativist policies, in a performative spectacle that rejected the very premise of transparency and public accountability.
The peak example of McLaughlin’s angry-white-woman theatrics came in May, when the Trump administration rushed out a planeload of immigrants to South Sudan, in violation of an order from U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy of Boston. McLaughlin raced in front of the cameras to attack Murphy as he was convening an emergency hearing in the matter:
The deportees sat on a tarmac in Djibouti for days while the case made its way to the Supreme Court, where the six-justice conservative majority stayed Murphy’s order over a vigorous dissent from the three liberal justices, allowing the deportations to South Sudan to be completed.
The poison that came out of this woman’s mouth actually made Karoline Leavitt’s spew look angelic by comparison. I can only imagine what she’s got in mind next. I’m sure they’re actively looking for camp guards.
ICYMI, Donald Trump has been “totally exonerated on Epstein.”
Trump: I have nothing to hide. I have been exonerated. I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I have been totally exonerated on Epstein. pic.twitter.com/fh2dwDKiAx
The reality, then, was somewhat different: “The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed,” Mueller told Congress back in 2019 as he presented his report. Mueller hadn’t found the evidence most wanted — direct connections with Russian interference operations. He’d found compelling reasons not to dismiss the idea that Trump had obstructed justice — he’d simply left the decision to act up to the Department of Justice. A serious error (as journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis have told us), but the report was far from a “complete and total” exoneration.
And Trump’s claim of “exoneration” now is just as curious, even if it is simply a reflex. So far, this hasn’t, at the core, even been about him. There has been no public process of inquiry, no special counsel has been appointed to look into the questions surrounding Trump’s involvement with Epstein raised by the newly released documents, and nobody has had their day in court to speak to any issues that might be raised by those documents.
That’s not quite exoneration — and certainly not total.
Expect to hear more of it from Trump and his pet parrots.
Actually that Trump line is familiar, only from someone a few years older, maturity-wise: “I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove anything!”
The karmic imbalance with this guy is massive. At some point the universe has to come into balance. Please?
There is a lot of timorous discussion among Democrats regarding how to deal with the what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has become under Donald Trump, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Customs and Border Protection (CBP, the people who shot Alex Pretti to death in the street and shot 30-year-old Marimar Martinez five times in Chicago), and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE, an agent shot and killed Renee Good) are out of control thugs acting with willful disregard for the U.S. Constitution. Their terrorizing our communities has the full support of the Trump administration.
Brian Allen summarizes the Oregon incident described in the video below. It can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time:
UNREAL: An American citizen was followed by an unmarked car, boxed in, dragged from her vehicle, injured, and left in a parking lot after agents found her passport.
She was on her way to pay rent and buy a birthday cake for her grandson.
Torn rotator cuff. Concussion. Bruised ribs. No help. No explanation.
This is happening to ordinary people.
This is not “enforcement.” This is lawless violence.
The 911 call from the daughter:
Democrats cannot decide whether defunding the agencies, reforming them, or abolishing them is the more politically palatable to American voters.
Here’s an interim solution. Maybe the next Congress just passes a law to make them wear more appropriate uniforms?
on September 1, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich decreed that all Jews in the Reich six years of age or older were to wear a badge which consisted of a yellow Star of David on a black field to be worn on the chest, with the word “Jew” inscribed inside the star in German or in the local language. This applied to all German Jews and Jews in Germany’s annexed territories: Alsace, Bohemia-Moravia and the Warthegau (the German-annexed territory of western Poland).
In German-occupied western Europe, attempts to introduce the badge were met by varying degrees of opposition by the local population, officials, and even the German military.
German occupiers imposed the badge in Belgium and the Netherlands in the spring of 1942. The German military commander in France ordered all Jews over six years of age to wear, on the left side of the chest, a yellow star the size of a person’s palm, with the inscription “Juif” inside. This ordinance was issued on June 7, 1942, although bureaucratic resistance on the part of French officials meant that a similar measure was never applied in Vichy France, even when German forces occupied those regions of France in November 1942.
In Denmark, the “Jewish badge” was never introduced. There is no truth to the much-repeated story that Danish King Christian X wore a yellow star in solidarity with the Jews. This myth may owe its origins to a remark the king is said to have made to his finance minister, Vilhelm Buhl, that if the Germans introduced the star in Denmark, “perhaps we should all wear it.”
In Norway, the badge was never introduced, although after January 10, 1942 all Jews had to carry identification cards stamped with the letter “J.”
There were more variations but I think we all know that the yellow star is a very specific Nazi icon. Granted, he’s suggesting that all American citizens must carry an ID featuring the yellow star to prove they can vote but the fact that its a yellow star of all things, just makes it mind-boggling.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like coming down the pike for the massive camps they’re building all over the country:
Jews incarcerated in camps were marked with two yellow triangles forming a Star of David. Made of fabric, these were sewn onto camp clothing. Other categories of prisoners were identified by the red triangle (political prisoners), green (criminals), black (asocials), brown (Sinti-Roma, originally black), pink (“homosexual” [“homosexuell”] offenders), among others.
These categories could be further refined by combining them. Thus, a Jew incarcerated for political reasons would have a red triangle superimposed on a yellow triangle. For non-German nationals, a letter denoting the country of origin was placed inside the badge, such as a P for Polish prisoners.
This is exactly how Stephen Miller and his accomplices are identifying their enemies.
The three versions of the SAVE Act would go into effect either immediately after enactment, or within the next year or two, depending on the specific provision. Such a rushed implementation of massive policy changes would wreak havoc on election administration, unleashing confusion that will itself undoubtedly prevent some American citizens from voting.
Though all versions of the SAVE Act would block millions of American citizens from voting, the new bills each contain unique additional obstacles. The anti-voter provisions in the House’s new version, formally titled the Make Elections Great Again Act, are so numerous that they require a bullet-pointed list:
The bill not only requires proof of citizenship, but also proof of residence in order to register. This could block even more Americans from voting. Roughly 9 percent of the population has moved within a state in the past year, but many will not update their driver’s licenses until they expire.
The bill would require photo ID to vote, providing a narrow list of acceptable IDs more restrictive than the voter ID laws in every state but Ohio. For example, the bill prohibits the use of student IDs (even those issued by state universities), and accepts tribal IDs only with an expiration date, even though many tribal IDs do not contain them.
The legislation would mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, placing enormous burdens on election officials and ending the 90-day quiet period that protects voters from being mistakenly thrown off the rolls right before Election Day.
The bill would prohibit universal mail voting, requiring all mail voters to submit an application in order to receive a mail ballot. This would end the longstanding principal method of voting in eight states and Washington, DC.
The House bill appears to create an exception from the “show your papers” requirement for states that require full Social Security numbers to register, but only three states are allowed to require such data because of privacy protections in federal law.
The other new SAVE Act bill, the SAVE America Act, also comes with its own add-ons. The Senate’s version of the SAVE America Act not only requires voters to show documents such as a passport or birth certificate to register — it requires them to do so again when they cast a ballot, unless their state has been regularly handing over its voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security since June of 2025 for comparison with the agency’s citizenship verification tool (confusingly named the SAVE program). Meanwhile, the latest House version of the SAVE America Act takes a different approach by simply directing states to run their voter rolls through the DHS SAVE program.
By the way:
All available evidence, including from the Trump administration itself, indicates that only American citizens vote and the exceptions are vanishingly rare. States that have combed through their voter rolls looking for illegally cast votes — like Louisiana and Utah did recently — have repeatedly confirmed that fact.
And studies over many years have also proved that there is no systemic voter fraud. However, the right has been pushing this canard for decades for the same reason they instituted poll taxes and literacy tests during Jim Crow. They know they can only win repeatedly if they can keep their opponents’ supporters from voting.
I wonder, however, if they’ve thought this through. The coalitions have shifted in recent years and the more educated voters are now voting for Democrats which means that they now have to rely on the less educated who tend not to vote if it’s difficult. Good luck with that.
Whether any of this come to fruition will depend on the Senate and then the Supreme Court which will be the ultimate arbiter of whether the federal government actually has the power to do all these things. I would bet they’ll think they do. One would hope that they consider the fact that Democrats might just be able to eke out wins in spite of all these roadblocks and then use this power to disenfranchise Republicans which would make them think twice but I doubt they will. They know that Democrats are far less likely to do it in the first place but if they do the Court can always find reasons why their usurpation of states’ rights is completely different.
I don’t think they can truly keep Democrats from voting but I do think that the combination of this SAFE Act, stacking the election boards in the states, using the ICE gangs to intimidate people and using the courts to contest every loss could make a difference at least on the margins. In a wave election they can’t get it done. In a close election it could easily tip the balance.
By the way, this isn’t a Trump thing, oh no. Republicans have been pushing this stuff for a very long time and it’s no surprise that they’re finally getting it done. Don’t think that Trump’s pushing of the voter fraud myth isn’t something they don’t support and are just going along with out of fear of MAGA. This is right up there with tax cuts for fundamental GOP priorities.
Brian Beutler takes up an important issue that I wish more Democrats would focus on. He cites the otherwise excellent Jon Ossof speech for an error too many of them make:
“This is the most corrupt administration of all time. And everybody knows it. Everybody knows it.”
I say the error is surprising not because I’m surprised it slipped past the people on Team Ossoff, but because it will strike most readers of this newsletter as counterintuitive.
In our world, in the world of high-information voters, the statement is true. Indeed, it is a statement of the obvious. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. Democrats know that Republicans know it, and Republicans know that Democrats know that their apologetics for Trump’s corruption are delivered in bad faith. If you watch a cable-news panel featuring a Republican plant like Scott Jennings trying to muddy corruption questions, or lash out angrily at supposed corruption on the left, that person knows they’re lying, and any co-panelists who engage as if it’s a good-faith debate are also playing a kind of make believe.Because in this echelon, this is the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it.
But if you pick a person at random in the country and ask him or her, which of the two major parties is most corrupt—a question that’s easily answerable if you already know that “this is the most corrupt administration of all time”—he or she will likely as not say “Democrats.” Or at least say both parties are similarly corrupt.
That is a (to me) infuriating but consistent finding in the data: Trump has at least fought the corruption issue to a draw—and may actually be winning it.
Grrrr!
Yes, all of politics is corrupt to some degree. Wealthy people have an outsized influence, politicians spend too much time listening to lobbyists and there’s always been self-dealing. There are an awful lot of rich people in office. But as Beutler writes:
Let’s allow that this phenomenon at least contributes to the problem. But does it explain the whole thing?
I don’t believe it can. Or if it does, it reflects a significant failure of imagination on the part of Democrats and liberals. The extraordinariness of Trump’s corruption is a fact. Quantifiable. Empirical. A simple truth, and a simple binary. There’s Trump, who is the most corrupt, and there’s every president who came before him, who was less so. In a world of perfect information, pollsters would ask which party is more corrupt, and Republicans would “win” 100-0. The median voter may have this other view, that corruption is simply endemic in all politics, but then that person is misinformed. And the misinformation persists for a reason.
If politicians never pointed fingers at their opponents’ corruption, you might imagine this misperception persisting as a kind of folk wisdom. Another way for regular people to signal independent thinking. Like “throw the bums out.”
But we live today in an unusually bleak epistemic moment. In a world of spin and lies, of casting blame and claiming credit, and all the things that make politics icky, magnified tremendously by artificial intelligence and algorithmic social media.
This information environment is teeming with accusations of corruption, but the simple truth is not getting through. Republicans have evidently done at least as good of a job blurring what’s obvious as Democrats have driving it home.
As he says, Democrats convinced themselves that Trump’s corruption didn’t matter in the first term so they haven’t really bothered with it in the 2nd. But, as Trump himself would say, there’s never been anything like it. The corruption in this term in epic and should be a massive scandal every single day. Between the Trump family, the cronies, the crypto, the selling of the presidency to the highest bidder (as often a foreigner as an American) we are watching presidential graft on an unprecedented scale. And yet the right continues to vomit up the name of poor, fucked-up “Hunter Biden” as if he was the one literally stealing billions. It’s intensely frustrating. Think “Crooked Hillary” and you can see how much more Trump and his henchmen have succeeded in tarring Democrats as the corrupt party than vice versa.
Brian points out:
Democrats not only fail to match this energy, they treat the whole sphere of public integrity as politically inert. As if there’s nothing to be gained from an opponent’s immorality or hypocrisy or shadiness, and there’s no cost to being accused of wrongdoing. As if every politician in the world wouldn’t much rather run against a corrupt opponent than an ethical one. As if corruption scandals didn’t end political careers all the time.
If you came to this question blind, with no prior knowledge of our two parties, and formed your opinion based only on the sum total of claims and counterclaims made by political actors, you’d have to conclude Democrats were more corrupt, because they are subject to the most high profile accusations of corruption.
Read the whole thing. He’s right on.
I would just add a couple of points. First, there are many lefty types who also insist that Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans, often even more so. It’s a reflexive hatred of the party establishment that literally makes no sense in this environment. Yes, the whole system is corrupt but here is only one party filled with people literally lining their personal pockets with billions of dollars right out in the open.
The other thing is Epstein. We are in the midst of a massive scandal that implicates powerful, wealthy (mostly) white men in a secretive, elite cabal of immoral and corrupt behavior. Donald Trump is actively trying to cover it up and everyone does know it. (The polls are lethal on this point.) We are at a moment of high interest in corruption and Democrats can place Trump right in the middle of it. Using the term “the Epstein class” is a good start.
