He doesn’t believe this is true having persuaded himself that his popularity among self-described MAGA cultists is all that matters. They are his army.
This is not really unusual among despots. If they have control of state violence and the backing of a brainwashed extremist faction they believe they can control their entire society. And they can, at least for a time. That’s where we are today.
Trump has the brain and temperament of a 12 year old bully who is too clever by half when he does things like sending ICE into the airports to force the Democrats to say uncle when the American people start getting their heads bashed in. I guess that could work. But really, it’s just a troll:
Does he think that only Democrats use the airports? Or is it that he believes the MAGA faithful, which he believes is the “silent majority” will stand up for ICE and be grateful when they start knocking heads? Who knows?
By the way, here’s an example of how it’s going to go from last night:
Greetings from SFO airport where ICE is working diligently to speed the line up. pic.twitter.com/r3Fft5Lv9V
— Certified Hoodie Thief 🏁 Ms 1/11 🎂 (@KryssyLaReina) March 23, 2026
I’m unclear if that was part of this new deployment or something else. But it’s a good illustration of what we might see going forward if he keeps this up.
Trump on airports: "I want to thank ICE because they stepped in so strongly. They'll do great. And if that's not enough, we'll bring in the the National Guard." pic.twitter.com/p32xKTXjIt
The Times of Israel reports that Israel is learning the pitfalls of following the MAGA edict to “trust the plan” when it comes to Trump. There is none:
Trump and his advisers — especially top envoy Steve Witkoff — might occasionally have said things that confused Israel and even undermined its interests, but they trusted that he was a president who could distinguish good from evil, and was not about to be pushed around by Iran and friends.
Trump’s decision to unleash an all-out bombing campaign against Iran alongside Israel seemed to confirm the wisdom of putting trust in the US leader. Sure, Trump might have engaged in direct talks with Iran, but, they reasoned, he saw right through their attempts to prevaricate and delay and embarked on a war that could damage him politically because he knew it was right.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly acts like he fully trusts Trump. In a press conference last week, he lauded “the wisdom and the courage of President Trump’s decision, and his leadership, and the fact that we’re working together.”
[…]
After delivering a seemingly unequivocal deadline to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, Trump seems to have equivocated. In a bombshell announcement Monday, Trump revealed that his administration has been engaged in “productive” talks with Iran regarding a “complete and total resolution” of hostilities, leading him to postpone his pledge to bomb Iran’s energy sites. He followed that up by claiming that the US had effectively achieved “regime change” in Iran because so many of its leaders are dead. Israelis who had trusted the plan now fear there is no plan and wonder if Trump can still be trusted.
It seems that Jerusalem was caught off guard by the announcement from the mercurial president. As of 4:30 p.m. Israel time, hours after Trump dropped his bombshell, Netanyahu and his office had yet to formulate a public reaction. Just the day before, the IDF said Israel expects to fight for “several more weeks” to achieve its goals in Iran, indicating that even if it knew the US was talking to Iran, it did not think the negotiations would go anywhere. “This was always a possibility,” said Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren.
There are precedents over the past year for Trump accepting a hasty deal that solves nothing in order to extricate himself from a situation, even if it leaves others in the lurch.In May, Trump came to a surprise deal with the Houthis in Yemen that simply returned the situation in the Red Sea to the status quo before the seven-week-long bombing campaign. The agreement ended attacks on US vessels, but allowed the Houthis to keep shooting at Israel and others using the waterway.
Israeli officials told Hebrew media outlets at the time that Washington did not give Jerusalem advance notice of the announcement, and that Israel was surprised by it. That deal, not surprisingly, was negotiated by Witkoff and brokered by Oman.
At the end of the 12-day June war, Israel promised to “forcefully strike the heart of Tehran” in reaction to an attack that broke the fresh ceasefire. Trump’s response was to berate Israel and publicly force it to turn its planes around.
Lie down with dogs…
I suspect that Bibi has already gotten much of what he wanted. And the war will continue until Israel wants it to end and the U.S. will be part of it. The dynamic is set.
Trump can TACO about this and declare victory but it’s not going to be the end of it. Maybe the markets will continue to reward him which seems to be the only thing that matters but in the end we’re all just passengers on the crazy train and we have to hope it doesn’t crash before we can get rid of him.
Iran denies talks. At this point I think we’re better off trusting their word. Check this out:
Trump: "Look at the way Iran attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding them. That was not supposed to– nobody was even thinking about it." pic.twitter.com/5wZsxU0CLn
Only every war planner for the past 50 years. He’s just openly admitting that the U.S. was completely unprepared.
Q: Iran's foreign ministry says you're not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations to end the war
TRUMP: Well, they're gonna have to get themselves better public relations people. We've had very strong talks. Mr Witkoff and Kushner had them. They went… pic.twitter.com/zzwlv4aBL5
I’m sure he’s talking about the deal that was on the table before he decided to blow everything up. There is no way this is true today. In fact there have almost certainly been no talks at all with anyone with actual power.
COLLINS: Who's gonna be in control of the Strait of Hormuz? Who's gonna be in control of that?
TRUMP: Uhhhh it'll be jointly controlled
COLLINS: By who?
TRUMP: Maybe me. Maybe me. Me and the next ayatollah, whoever that is. There will also be a serious form of regime change.… pic.twitter.com/Q8GcuVixfx
“… like Venezuela.” Except there was no regime change in Venezuela.
Trump is dancing as fast as he can to TACO on Iran. And since he’s such a destructive lunatic we have to let him do it because otherwise he’ll blow up the world. Unfortunately Iran is in an entirely different situation with the U.S. and Israel prepared to dominate them militarily for the foreseeable future and they may not be willing to let this crazy old freak pretend he’s “won” as some kind of binky soother.
How long can we accept this kind of reality bending gibberish from the most powerful man in the world? He obviously can’t meet the fate of his role model Caligula but there has to be some kind of breaking point. He’s taken us to war for no reason now. How much worse does it have to get?
Over the course of the Trump era it has become harder year after year to sympathize with neighbors and family who gave themselves over to Trump and his MAGA movement. After biting his tender-hearted rescuer, the snake in Trump’s favorite poem says, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” Trump, a master of projection, is the talking snake in that scenario, but critics of the MAGA cult might say the same to its members. You knew what you were signing onto.
Peter Wehner writes at The Atlantic that in 2016 he was a lifelong Republican. He’d served in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. But he saw Trump for what he is, a “virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness.” Trump’s nomination as GOP candidate for president would reshape and redfine not just the GOP but conservatism itself.
“The impulses now on display within MAGA existed long before [Trump] entered politics. But those impulses were, for the most part, confined to the fringes,” Wehner explains. “Republican presidents and other political leaders did what they could to keep it that way.”
That’s not quite true. The Southern Strategy Lee Attwater confessed to promoting was built on feeding racist impulses he knew lay barely below the surface of southern conservatives and others. The GOP dog-whistled racist messages to keep conservative base voters on simmer, but not boil, for decades. Trump, not one for restraining his own impulses, turned up the gas.
But from the moment Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, he sought to cultivate and encourage the ugliest passions within the GOP, dousing the embers of hate with kerosene. Among Trump’s most consequential legacies has been his deformation of the temperament and disposition of virtually the entire Republican Party. It has been a remarkable shift to observe: The very qualities that early on made Republicans, including evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, uneasy about Trump are those they have since come to accept and embrace. He rewired their moral circuitry.
I feel sorry for Wehner. He laments the loss of manners among those who once were proud conservatives. Yes, those manners often concealed the same impulses the Southern Strategy sought to inflame among the plebs. But they were a leash of sorts that Trump removed and burned.
MAGA is not just antithetical to conservatism; it is at war with it.
It’s important to acknowledge that many rank-and-file MAGA voters haven’t knowingly rejected the conservatism I’m describing; they voted for Trump and attached themselves to the MAGA movement for a variety of reasons, including economic dislocation and feelings of cultural displacement. But it long ago became clear what they signed up for. At the core of the MAGA project and Trumpism is disruption and destruction, the delegitimization and razing of institutions, and the brutalization of opponents. Its leader, the president, abuses power, hurts the innocent, and mocks the dead before their families have even begun to grieve.
Those watching the news over the weekend know where Wehner is going next. Trump has deformed genteel conservatism into something uglier than Wehner could have imagined:
The MAGA ethic celebrates dehumanization. It is lawless, crude, and combative. Its entire ecosystem—social media, podcasts, and talk radio—is committed to spreading lies and conspiracy theories, to stoking rage and resentment. The disciples of the MAGA movement define themselves by what they hate much more than by what they love. They pursue culture wars with revolutionary zeal even as they vandalize our civic culture.
For all that, over the weekend, my friend Anderson Clayton, the 28-year-old who chairs the North Carolina Democratic Party, spoke on the Bulwark Focus Group about not writing off such people.
“We need to have more people in politics who like genuinely want to understand other people,” Clayton said, “because I think a lot of the time empathy is something that we lack so much.”
“I hear it now in our party. Even for folks that have voted for Donald Trump three times over again, folks that are like, I would never talk to those voters in my life. And I’m, I’d pull up a chair and have a conversation with them any day in my life.” She wants them to know that someone they think probably hates them “never will.”
There are more Wehners out there than we suspect. They know they’ve been sold out.
Over two decades ago in North Carolina, Democrats were 48 percent of registered voters, Republicans were 34 percent and independents were an afterhought at 18 percent. Today, the mix is 39 percent independents, with Ds and Rs tied at 30 percent. Forty-five percent of Americans consider themselves independents. I have yet to see evidence that the national Democratic Party is coming to terms with that slide and asking what it’s doing wrong and what it might do better. They’d rather raise more money to do more of the same. I’d rather have more young Claytons.
That was not exactly the twice-impeached, convicted felon’s sales pitch to voters in 2024. But it’s what the increasingly addled, 79-year-old Donald Trump has delivered. Buyer’s remorse will soon be as much an epidemic as measles and spiking gas prices.
But if you filled your tanks over the weekend ahead of Trump’s threatened attacks on Iranian power plants (potential war crimes under the Law of Armed Conflict), your timing may have been off. Trump now says they may be postponed (The Wall Street Journal):
Oil prices dropped Monday and stock futures soared after President Trump said the U.S. will postpone further strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure for five days, citing productive talks between the two countries.
Brent crude futures were down 7% to around $104 a barrel after initially dipping below $100 for the first time in days after the announcement.
Etc., etc.
In other chaos news, Trump is still eyeing overturning the Cuban government before he’s finished with Iran. (It was like that with Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush II, wasn’t it?) He’s eyeing erecting hotels on foreign versions of Boardwalk and Park Place (The Atlantic):
The Trump administration is squeezing Cuba to a breaking point—and is seemingly willing to engage in a high-seas stand-off that has pronounced Cold War echoes. Donald Trump’s goal appears to be to install more amenable leadership in Havana. Last week, he told reporters at the White House that he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking Cuba,” adding: “Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want with it.”
Trump is already talking to wealthy Republican donors with Cuban heritage about stepping in to monetize Cuba for him:
“Regime change is lined up,” one administration official told us. But Trump-style regime change is unlikely to be the democratic uprising that many Cuban exiles have longed for. Venezuela again is expected to be the model. The administration found that its short-term goals of ousting a repressive dictator and opening opportunities for U.S. companies was best met by empowering Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, who proved more willing to engage with Washington. Much of the Caracas regime remains in place.
One person familiar with the planning (they plan?) tells The Atlantic, “We want these hostile regimes out of our hemisphere, and we’re going to set up the business community, because we don’t believe in diplomacy.”
So another hostile takeover at gunpoint it is. The only things Trump’s desperados are missing are horses and MAGA cowboy hats in black.
But why stop there? More chaos: The Trump administration is planning to send ICE to “assist” TSA agents at American airports this morning.
“I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!” Trump said on Saturday.
President Donald Trump’s decision to order federal immigration agents to U.S. airports to help with security during a budget impasse is drawing concerns that their presence may escalate tensions among air travelers frustrated over hourslong waits and screeners angry about missed paychecks.
Trump made clear on Sunday that he was going ahead with the plan to have immigration enforcement officers assist the Transportation Security Administration by guarding exit lanes or checking passenger IDs unless Democrats agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats are demanding major changes to federal immigration operations and showing no sign of backing down.
As Digby observed last week, “Let Americans from all over the country see what it’s like to live in Trump’s Golden Age. They’re gonna love it.”
Finally from The American Prospect, as if it’s not enough that diesel prices exceeding $5 per gallon will drive up (no pun intended) the price of goods across the country:
“… the Trump administration banned roughly 200,000 truck-driving-certified immigrants from any further truck driving. The new rule from the Department of Transportation forbids refugees, asylum seekers, or recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses, and forbids those who currently hold such licenses from renewing them.”
Harold Meyerson writes:
You may think that taking certified truck drivers, who’ve all been granted federal work permits, off the roads—in an industry that has 94 percent yearly turnover—may not serve the common good particularly well. You may also think that it is a gratuitous crime to harm the fortunes of those drivers and their families, not to mention an act of malignant folly to jack up the prices of the goods that will come late or go undelivered without immigrant drivers to take them to their destinations. If so, you’d be right.
If that’s too much chaos for one Monday morning, climb back into bed and pull the sheets over your head if you have that flexibility.
Americans used to think of ourselves as the good guys in the white hats. We (at least in theory) valued decency and respected the rule of law. But like sacrificing your life for a higher purpose than profit, under the Trump regime that’s for suckers and losers.
The Trump administration plans to convene the so-called God Squad, a high-level federal panel that has the power to override protections under the Endangered Species Act, for a meeting related to oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico.
The meeting, scheduled for March 31, will be the first time in three decades that the group, officially called the Endangered Species Committee, will gather.
Notice of the meeting was released on Friday and officially published in the Federal Register on Monday. The Gulf, which the administration calls the Gulf of America, is home to the critically endangered Rice’s whale, a species that exists nowhere else. According to the latest available federal estimates, around 50 of the animals remain on Earth.
Information in the notice announcing the meeting, called by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, is sparse.
“The Committee is meeting regarding an exemption under the Endangered Species Act with respect to oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities in the Gulf of America associated with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Program,” the notice states.
When emailed for additional information on what had prompted the move, the Interior Department declined to directly answer questions and repeated the published information. But President Trump has wanted the God Squad to convene since he returned to office last year.
Here’s the story of the God Squad from Wikipedia. It long predates Trump which just goes to show you that this level of cruelty and stupidity has been with us a long time:
The 1978 amendment to the ESA “attempts to retain the basic integrity of the ESA, while introducing some flexibility which will permit exemptions from the Act’s stringent requirements.” The amendment clarified the ESA of 1973 in many ways, including clearly defining the term critical habitat, clearly defining penalties for non-compliance and determining the future appropriation of funds. The most important change that was brought about by the 1978 amendment was the creation of the Endangered Species Committee, known as the “God Squad” because of the substantial impact of its decisions on the natural world.
there must be no reasonable alternative to the agency’s action
the benefits of the action must outweigh the benefits of an alternative action where the species is conserved
the action is of regional or national importance
neither the federal agency or the exemption applicant made irreversible commitment to the resources.
Just imagine what the freak show of a cabinet we have now will do with this.
By the way, this is the horror you’re greeted with at all the government web sites:
It is NOT the Gulf of America and it never will be. I don’t know how we have just let these atrocities add up one after the other but it’s going to take a full-blown demolition team to get rid of it all. And God help them if they fail to do it.
Will they be wearing masks and carrying Ar-15s? Will they be dressed like they’re invading Fallujah?
I think this is going to go over very really well with a public that is impatient dealing with airport security on a good day and right now is having to get to the airport three hours early. They’ll love being rousted by these thugs for failing to follow orders. Should be great.
GENERAL MOTORS JUST ROLLED OUT A CAR that’s perfect for the moment. It’s the 2027 Chevrolet Bolt—a relatively cheap, all-electric subcompact that will let you drive right past gas stations, and dodge those high prices from the war in Iran.
But if you want a Bolt, you’d better act fast, because they won’t be on dealer lots for long. GM has already confirmed that production will end next year. The plan is to convert the Bolt’s factory in Kansas City back to manufacturing vehicles with internal combustion engines.
GM says it made its decision to limit the Bolt a while ago, and remains committed to producing other EVs. That’s almost certainly true. But it’s also true that GM has dialed back its overall EV ambitions—by, for example, shelving plans to convert more factories to EV production—and that other companies are doing the same. Just this past week, Honda announced it was scrapping plans for three EVs it had been preparing to manufacture at factories in the United States.
There’s no single, simple explanation for the retrenchment. But a big part of the story is Donald Trump. Since taking office, he has launched an all-out assault on EVs—by working with Republicans in Congress to eliminate tax breaks for vehicle production and purchases, and by using his regulatory powers to gut federal and state emissions standards that favored fuel efficiency.
“It wasn’t just the subsidies that Trump removed,” Corey Cantor, research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. “It was the fuel economy standards. It was the California regulations. So it was almost a triple whammy of policy pullback.”
Trump has insisted that these old policies—the bulk of which were put in place by former President Joe Biden and the Democrats—were forcing the auto industry to make unprofitable vehicles, while sapping America of its petroleum-powered swagger. But high gas prices are turning that swagger into a stagger: Edmunds, the website for car buyers, says it has in recent weeks seen a rise in customer inquiries about EVs. You can safely assume that’s going to continue as long as gas prices stay high, which means that more American consumers are going to be looking for vehicles that U.S. manufacturers are becoming less able to provide.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who is a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election and is investigating whether they were fraudulently counted.
“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco said at a news conference Friday.
The unusual probe drew a sharp rebuke from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said in a statement Friday that it is “unprecedented in both scope and scale” and appears “not to be based on facts or evidence.”
“There is no indication, anywhere in the United States, of widespread voter fraud,” Bonta said. “Counts, recounts, hand counts, audits, and court cases all support this.”
According to Bonta’s office, Bianco’s department on Feb. 26 seized about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials in Riverside County related to the November election for Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas.
The sheriff said his investigators are looking into allegations by a local citizens group that “did their own audit” and found that the county’s tally was falsely inflated by more than 45,000 votes — a claim that local election officials have refuted.
You’d think that the fact he’s the leading GOP candidate for Governor should give any judge pause but I guess we’ll have to see how this plays out. But they’re just doing this and I would guess it’s going to happen all over the country after the midterms if Democrats win.
I honestly think the most likely election shenanigans will be to turn the post-election into 2020 style post-election chaos with the hope they can paralyze the Congress in whatever way they can. The lower courts are not likely to support their ridiculous claims but they could find some allies as it goes up the line.
The whole point of the endless drumbeat of “voter fraud” is to persuade at least 40% of the country that any election they lose is illegitimate. And since these are generally dumb, self serving people they are more than willing to buy into this fatuous notion.
One might be tempted to think that the most shameless shape-shifter in the Trump administration is JD Vance. After all, the vice president once called Donald Trump America’s Hitler, and ten years later, he is one of the president’s most ardent supporters. But Vance is a piker compared to the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. No one in American politics is more brazenly hypocritical — and considering the contenders in the Republican Congress, that’s saying something.
Gabbard appeared last week before the House Select Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee and, along with FBI Director Kash Patel and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, delivered the worldwide threats assessment. But most of the questions were about the war in Iran.
Gabbard’s testimony was of particular interest because, prior to joining the Trump administration, she was known for her strident and uncompromising anti-war philosophy. In fact, when she ran for president in 2020 while serving as a congresswoman for Hawaii’s second district, her platform was explicitly built around an anti-Iran war message, which she specifically aimed at Trump. She even sold T-shirts that said, “No War With Iran.”
Although Gabbard had been a Bernie Sanders supporter in previous races, after she dropped out of the primary campaign that year she endorsed Joe Biden, even though Sanders was still in the race. That move came as a surprise, but in retrospect it was just the beginning of her move away from the left, and it wasn’t long before she began to play footsie with MAGA. With Trump running on his “America First” platform, and as the man who didn’t start any new wars, his camp was a natural place for her to land. By 2024 she had fully transitioned to being a Trump supporter, and her support provided important validation for Trump’s phony peacenik image, particularly among independent voters.
Still, it came as a shock when the president named Gabbard as the director of national intelligence since she had little expertise or experience. But she wound up being just one of many with such a pedigree in his Cabinet, and she’s kept a low profile ever since. Along with Vance and a few others who emerged from the right-wing fever swamps to buy into Trump’s isolationist pretenses, Gabbard was assumed by many political observers to be a quiet force within the administration against the so-called deep state. But it soon became clear that Trump didn’t have much use for her, or her analyses.
According to POLITICO, as Trump was preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, he was reminded by a reporter that Gabbard had reiterated the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran wasn’t close to getting a bomb. “I don’t care what she says,” Trump responded. When quizzed about it again a couple of days later, he snapped, “She’s wrong.” As we know, he went ahead and hit the facility, using the United States’ most lethal bomb short of a nuclear weapon and immediately declared that Iran’s nuclear capacity had been “obliterated.”
Despite the president’s obvious disdain for her, Gabbard kept her head down and continued going to work. Completely marginalized during the administration’s Venezuela incursion, she was reportedly not even being invited to the White House Situation Room to observe the operation. Soon after she was spotted lurking around the FBI raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, election office, apparently on some secret mission from the White House to oversee their election suppression efforts.
All this has led to speculation that Gabbard will soon be reassigned to an ambassadorship in a country far, far away. Still she’s hanging in there, apparently willing to debase herself before the world in an attempt to cling to a job that the Tulsi Gabbard of 2020 would have spat upon if the person in it had turned in the performance she gave before Congress last week.
Gabbard was playing for an audience of one: Trump. She attempted to distance herself from the intelligence community’s finding that there was no imminent nuclear threat from Iran. In her written testimony she had used the president’s own words, saying that the nuclear program had been “obliterated.” But she omitted those words when she delivered the statement to the Senate committee, a change that was noted by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
She was quick to try to clean up her faux pas, claiming she had skipped over the section because her statement was running long, but no one believed it. The omission clearly came because Trump and other administration officials, including Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, have said that Iran was “a week away” from possessing nuclear weapon-making capability, and Gabbard didn’t want to contradict them, particularly on live television.
Her tap dance was, and is, awkward. Recall that Gabbard had always agitated against waging preemptive war. As a congresswoman in 2018, she introduced the weirdly specific No More Presidential Wars Act, which stated that the president must “seek congressional authorization prior to any engagement of the U.S. Armed Forces against Syria, Iran, or Russia.” Eight years later, here she was defending Trump for launching the war without congressional authorization, despite her personal knowledge that Iran posed no imminent threat.
The biggest moment of the hearing came when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., asked Gabbard if the intelligence community had determined if the Islamic Republic presented an imminent threat to the safety of the United States. This is, of course, the only acceptable reason a president can unilaterally launch an attack against another sovereign nation unless America has been attacked. (The definition of the word “imminent” is currently up for debate, with GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas saying that “Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years.”)
Gabbard disingenuously replied that “only the president can determine if there is an imminent threat.” No doubt Trump was thrilled to hear that, seeing as he has been telling everyone who will listen that the only thing that can constrain him is his “own mind and morality.” In the case of Iran, the White House has explicitly said that he started the war because “he had a good feeling.” Likewise, the president said he will end the war when “I feel it in my bones.”
Based on this, what Gabbard said is technically true: Trump decides based on his feelings if there’s an imminent threat that requires him to start a war. The actual facts, though, do not matter.
Gabbard’s performance led MAGA influencer, conspiracy theorist and Trump whisperer Laura Loomer to predict that she would soon follow counterterrorism chief Joe Kent’s lead and resign. Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said he expected Gabbard to be fired. But it also called into question the role of the U.S. intelligence community in the decision-making about Iran; it would once have been tasked with making determinations about imminent threats. And it also shined a spotlight on Gabbard’s effectiveness in her position, since she basically serves the function of a potted plant.
One can’t help but wonder what is motivating her at this point. If she sincerely thought in 2024 that Trump had become an anti-war president, why is she going along with his war of choice today? Or has she actually changed her mind and joined Trump’s crusade to conquer the world? Or is it something else entirely?
Gabbard has an odd habit of defending American adversaries. In fact, her support for Iran over the years can easily be seen in that light, although she’s been all over the map.
Gabbard has an odd habit of defending American adversaries. In fact, her support for Iran over the years can easily be seen in that light, although she’s been all over the map. During the debate over the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, she inexplicably voted to increase sanctions on the regime, which puzzled those on the left who expected her to back diplomacy as they did. At the time, that position was understood to be a GOP tactic designed to sink the deal, so one might assume her actions were to help the Iranian hardliners. Who knows? She’s nothing if not enigmatic.
Then there’s her very odd behavior toward Syria. While she was still a congresswoman in 2017, she took an unauthorized trip to the country and met with its despotic war criminal leader Bashar al-Assad. This violated the prohibition against individuals speaking to governments in dispute with the U.S. and came at a time when the Syrian government was slaughtering thousands of civilians. Gabbard’s trip shocked both Democrats and Republicans, and she has never adequately explained why she made it, nor did she disclose what she and Assad talked about. But upon her return she filed a bill titled “Stop Arming Terrorists” that demanded a halt of American support for Syrian rebel groups. She urged the U.S. to “end our war to overthrow the Syrian government and focus our attention on defeating al-Qaeda” and ISIS.
Syria, like Iran, was a strong ally of Russia, and if she has one consistent position through all of this, it is her support for Russia. As the New York Times pointed out in 2024, she is a favorite of Russian state media for that very reason — and for her apparent willingness to parrot Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. While it may be hard to understand why she’s now going along with Trump’s war against a Putin ally, perhaps she calculated that the president would attack Iran no matter what and saw an upside — the temporary lifting of Russian oil sanctions. This will do wonders for Russia’s war effort against Ukraine, which she has appeared to support. Gabbard may just feel that supporting this war in Iran is for the greater good. The question is: for whom?
