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The Other Trump War

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 9, 2026

Red hats are the new black hats

Donald Trump launched two wars on February 28. One with Iran and another among his base of true believers. Media Matters last week sketched out the rift inside MAGA that’s grown since:

Many prominent right-wing figures spoke out in praise of the war. Ben Shapiro praised Trump as “the most courageous commander in chief.” Marc Thiessen called Trump “one of the most consequential commanders in chief in American history.” Mark Levin gushed over the “humane” war. And one Fox guest even suggested that the war “could qualify him once again for a Nobel Peace Prize.”

However, a wide variety of streamers and podcasters have broken with the administration, with Tucker Carlson calling the decision “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Streamer Adin Ross called it “really fucking stupid.”

Red hats are the new black hats, and MAGA knows it. Many don’t like the look. Not one bit.

Melissa Ryan posts a few of the MM links on MAGA infighting at Ctrl Alt Right Delete:

“It’s objectively good when MAGA fights amongst themselves. It weakens their movement and their hold on the base. It’s energy they’re spending on one another rather than harming the rest of us,” Ryan writes:

MAGA is a coalition with differing ideologies brought together under Trump’s umbrella. The Epstein files already weakened them, and Iran has the potential to do so even further. Especially as Donald Trump is a lame duck president, and given what Americans can see of his declining physical health, it seems unlikely that Trump would be able to hang on for a third term even if that’s what he very much wants to do.” But will the faithful come back?

The MAGA faithful see their very worst qualities “redeemed” in Trump. Jesus tells them to love their neighbors. Trump tells them the opposite. He models that it’s okay to lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead in this world. Guess which gospel they’d rather follow? They chose Trumpism with a Jesusy glow.

Trump has lived a privileged life under the blanket of elite impunity for nearly 80 years. He’s evaded meaningful punishment for his misdeeds both in private and public life. MAGA believers thought they’d be covered by the same unholy dispensation. But with his Iran war, Trump finally has ripped down the myth of Americans as the good guys that they learned from infancy. They considered it a birthright. Now the world is asking cult members to account for themselves. They don’t like that either. Not one bit.

We on the left have long held a more nuanced view of America’s mixed legacy. But on balance, we believed that “long arc of the moral universe bent toward justice” stuff, that American ideals and principles of equal justice still meant something. We don’t like wearing black hats either.

Canadian-born Leigh McGowan is pissed.

The question now is will the prodigals return to Trump’s fold?

“I’m just going to be brutally frank,” adviser Steve Bannon said over the weekend. “That was not pitched in the 2024 campaign. It just wasn’t. We’re going to bleed support.”

But Trump is betting that they repent. Ryan observes:

His Regime is the path for MAGA’s more extreme influencers to have actual power, and those like Kelly who screwed up their chance for a more mainstream audience and now rely on MAGA to make a living. A fractured MAGA coalition shrinks MAGA’s political capital and the available profit from the grift instantly. These folks might all be upset at Trump over Epstein and/or Iran and hate one another, but you can argue that they still need him and one another to have influence.

Thus, rumors of MAGA’s demise may be greatly exaggerated.

The War And Jokes Are On You

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 9, 2026

Tonight’s “The Daily Show” gag reel preview

On Monday [3/2], gas at the Sunoco on 98 Murtland Ave. in Washington [PA] was $3.25 per gallon. By Wednesday, it had jumped to $3.59 per gallon.

You won’t have to watch “The Daily Show” tonight. Social media is filled with what you’ll see this evening.

He is peace:

Vote for the Black-Asian lady, warned Trump and J.D. Vance in 2024, and she’ll send your sons and daughters to war. Maybe WWIII.

Yup, world war.

Why are we bombing Iran again?

Judd Legum at Popular Information itemizes 17 reasons the Trump administration has floated for why we attacked Iran and why now. (Trump throws lunch at the wall. His team throws spaghetti.)

John Oliver wasn’t done being stunned.

“You go through this and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who was no better,” says the peace president. Wait. What?

Top clerics selected Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, despite President Trump’s warning that he was “unacceptable.” Oil prices surged to their highest levels since the pandemic, reflecting growing alarm over a prolonged war.

But no worries, say White House allies. The pain won’t last. They all got the memo.

Back in the day, I joked that if you wanted to know what Sean Hannity thought before he did, beat him to his fax machine in the morning. Now the memos are digital.

I keep returning to this ancient clip from The Anderson Tapes (1971). “It just hurts right now.” Behold, your overlords:

“A Call to Conscience”

Published by digby on March 8, 2026

The following are official social media posts by the White House:

Statement of Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago:

As more than 1,000 Iranian men, women and children lay dead after days of bombardment from U.S. and Israeli missiles, the official White House X account on Thursday evening posted a video of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran. The clip was captioned: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.”

A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening. Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day. Six U.S. soldiers have been killed. They are also dishonored by that social media post. Hundreds of thousands displaced, and many millions more are terrified across the Middle East.

This horrifying portrayal demonstrates that we now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced. The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game. Indeed, the prediction market Kalshi recently paid a $2.2 million settlement related to users who were unhappy with how the company paid out the $55 million wagered on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ouster after his was killed.

Journalists now use the term “gamifying” the war to describe this dynamic. What a profound moral failure, for gamifying strips away the humanity of real people. Let’s not forget, a “hit” isn’t putting points on the board; it’s a grieving family whose suffering we ignore when we prioritize entertainment, and profit, over empathy.

Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the “spectacle” of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war. But the longer we remain blind to the terrible consequences of war, the more we are risking the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity.

I know that the American people are better than this. We have the good sense to know that what is happening is not entertainment but war, and that Iran is a nation of people, not a video game others play to entertain us.

He may know it but I have to say that I’m afraid that only some of the American people are better than this. Maybe most. But there are tens of millions, maybe a hundred million who are not.

Miller’s Phase II

Published by digby on March 8, 2026
poster

The Wall St Journal is doing some incredible work these days. Even their editorial page isn’t a obnoxious as it used to be, But the straight journalism is first rate. This multi-media investigation today is a great example. (gift link)It’s about the U.S. government going after U.S. citizen protesters and making their lives hell.

Protesters, observers and passersby taken into custody by federal agents were declared terrorists and attackers in hundreds of social-media posts by U.S. officials and departments since the start of the immigration sweeps in cities. This includes Minneapolis, where two citizens were excoriated by officials after they were killed by federal agents in January.

The Wall Street Journal found that the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against citizens.

Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.

Yet names, mug shots and other identifying details posted by the government put a bull’s-eye on them. They had to explain the accusations to family, friends and employers. In a few cases, their home and workplace addresses were leaked online, drawing death threats.

Federal prosecutors in cities with high-profile immigration operations said they have been pressured by Justice Department leaders to aggressively pursue assault charges, even in cases undermined by contradictory evidence or ones that fail to appear worthy of prosecution. Some have quit in response. Others say the time spent on flimsy cases takes them away from prosecuting drug cases, public corruption and gun-related crimes.

This is a Stephen Miller program. He’s in charge of DHS.

He wrote the speech that Donald Trump delivered on Veterans Day 2023 in which he said this:

‘”We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

He’s also the guy who said this about the American left inn the wake of Kirk’s murder:

“It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

He was talking about Indivisible and Act Blue.

Never think that Miller’s agenda ends with the ethnic cleansing of foreigners. He has a phase two.

Rooting For Terror

Published by digby on March 8, 2026
wiki

When Trump was quoted in his recent TIME magazine interview saying “I guess” when asked if Americans should fear terrorist retribution for this war, I thought to myself, “Oh boy. There’s no way that even his miscreant incompetents haven’t discussed that possibility. He’s hoping for it.”

Timothy Snyder writes this in his latest piece:

A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or “federalize” the coming Congressional elections.

Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses.

Trump has already telegraphed the move. We know that he is obsessed with the fall elections, which his party will almost certainly lose by spectacular margins, and that he fears the accordant loss of power. This is clear from his own statements and actions. In a social post right after starting the war, he claimed (wrongly) that Iran had tried to hurt his cause in past elections.

We lack any other explanation for the war, at least from the American side. Trump is incoherent, and his administration is inconsistent. Much of what has been said about Iran is not true. The propaganda is contradictory. It is as though the war itself is not the main goal, but that it was simply important to somehow get the thing started.

War, famously, is the extension of politics by other means. But what are the politics? The president and especially the Secretary of Defense present the United States as a kind of war crimes central, a place where the rules do not apply. War crimes to do not win wars. Instead they provoke further war crimes and other retribution.

The Tehran regime is, so to speak, a convenient partner in the mutual provocation of terror. Iran is ruled by ruthless people with a record and a capacity for carrying out terrorist attacks beyond its borders. A terrorist attack on the territory of the United States might be a response by Iran or one of its proxies. Trump seems to have anticipated this, without seeming to care about loss of life: “Like I said, some people will die.” And if they do, he has his pretext.

I could easily see this happening. Yes, it would go to court and they would take their own sweet time and perhaps we would end up having the elections anyway, just postponed. Then they would just pull all the shenanigans they plan to pull anyway and who knows how that will all come out. But even in the best case scenario, tens of millions of people will see the election as illegitimate if Trump doesn’t win — and tens of millions of people will know the election is illegitimate if he does.

This piece in the Atlantic (gift link) discusses the potential for Iranian terrorist attacks and it is very high. They have done them for many years and even are known to have sleeper cells in the U.S.

Despite the successful record of U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in disrupting Iranian-backed plots on American soil, and even with a more feeble Iranian proxy network, there is good reason to be concerned today. Over the past several years, the U.S. government has shifted resources and personnel away from counterterrorism and toward other priorities, including China, Russia, and immigration. Because of this, the U.S. homeland is arguably more vulnerable than it has been in a long time.

And then there’s the question of Iran’s desire for retribution. Terrorists need both capabilities and intent to succeed. Even as the Iranians’ capabilities are being attenuated, their intent to attack, if anything, is growing stronger.

There is very good reason to be concerned.

All The Very Worst Qualities

Published by digby on March 8, 2026

I came across this on social media and it spoke to me. I think it’s right:

I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.

I don’t wonder anymore.

I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.

If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy.

If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy. If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy.

If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy.

If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.

If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it. It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission.

He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.

Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” And that’s the part that should chill us.

Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?

Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress. Now the mask is off. Now we know. And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.

– Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

QOTD: Trump

Published by digby on March 8, 2026

For the latest Time cover story titled “Trump’s War,” which was published on Thursday, March 5, correspondent Eric Cortellessa questioned Trump about the details of the unfolding war with Iran. In a pointed moment, he was asked whether it’s reasonable for Americans to have concerns about being attacked at home.

“I guess,” Trump, 79, responded. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things.”

“Like I said, some people will die,” the president added. “When you go to war, some people will die.”

A Look Inside The Machine

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 8, 2026

A book, a series

Many of us sense that something is not quite right with the world. Like a tickling on the back of the neck. A kind of spider sense. That nagging itch. As Morpheus puts it in The Matrix, “You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

This is ground where conspiracy theories sprout, I’ve argued:

When life feels as if you have awakened locked in the trunk of a car careening down a rutted mountain road, you want to believe – you need to believe – that someone, anyone, is sitting behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is better than no one at all.

“Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity” by Paul Kingsnorth attempts to get at the root of it. (I’m partway through the audiobook.) Kingsnorth suggests that behind Man’s increasing alienation from nature and himself is a system, a technological-cultural matrix. Cultured in capitalism over centuries and fueled by money, always money, it is colonizing our own culture, reducing humans to inputs, and leaving people spiritually barren.

From a review last fall, “The Machine, he writes, is the sum of the forces ‘controlled by and for technology’ that have, since the inception of modernity, been ‘uprooting us from nature, culture and God.’ ” We have raised innovation to a secular faith, “a religious vision for an irreligious society.”

Kingsnorth resists categorization. “Some of Kingsnorth’s explanations align with Trumpism and the American Christian right,” reviewer Alexander Nazaryan notes. And yet he argues that left and right are both being subsumed by the Machine. A Machine in the latter stages of cultural collapse.

“I’m hopeful about the fact that the Machine can’t last,” he said. “I don’t think it is spiritually or ecologically or culturally sustainable.”

Over at Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink (subscription required), they’ve begun a series with an overlapping subject, only focused on contemporary issues of power. Downstream of the Epstein class, “millions simply sense that something is amiss, wonder how decisions are made, and grow alienated from the system. Life feels hard, but it’s even harder to see upstream through the fog and understand why.” The Epstein files provide clues to what’s happening, Giridharadas writes in the introduction. “But access does not equal understanding” the underlying operating system. And the network.

Giridharadas wrote on Monday, “When you live and die by the network, you never know whom you’re going to need, when, or how. Every friend is a potential steppingstone. Every phone number is a key. Every door must remain ajar, no matter what you might glimpse through its crack.”

Does it look suspiciously like child sex trafficking? Look the other way.

Another curiosity about now the network operates is women’s place in it. Or not in it. “What are seeing in the Epstein circle is a strange hybrid of patriarchies,” Giridharadas writes this morning (crediting contributor Kate Manne), “a new-world commodification and fungibility and trading of women and girls, on one hand; and, on the other, a persistent old-world sense of where women belong and don’t belong.”

“To understand the present, we must understand the machinery that produced it,” Giridharadas writes. And yet.

We, the disempowered, are still looking to “out” the men behind we perceive sit behind the wheel. Pursuing them gives us a false sense of agency. If we could just expose them and their schemes, we think, our lives would improve. In that pursuit, we don’t have to look at ourselves.

The MAGAs Wore Red

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 8, 2026

I remember every detail

Not one week after launching a war with Iran unsanctioned by Congress, Donald Trump next hopes to annex the Sudetenland (Politico):

President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military into Ecuador this week to strike drug cartels, and now he’s poised to do the same in more than a dozen other Latin American countries under a new proclamation he signed Saturday.

In remarks before the signing ceremony, flanked by the leaders of many of those countries, Trump described the proclamation as “a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks.” He touted the U.S. military’s “amazing weaponry” — and said all the other Latin American countries need to do is identify the location of cartel operatives.

Private Vasquez: “I only need to know one thing: where they are.”

You don’t have to be Dennis Hartley to spot the foreshadowing:

“We need your help,” Trump said at the Shield of the Americas Summit. “You have to just tell us where they are.”

Our power-mad, hairsprayed protector keeps a red button on his desk for ordering a Diet Coke. He thinks ordering the killing of thousands of people and winning wars of choice is just as simple. Trump has so neutered the U.S. Congress that it might simply spend days like he does: playing golf.

Last week, Trump again threatened Cuba’s government, suggesting it will fall next after Iran (CNBC):

“We think that we want to fix — finish this one first, but that will be just a question of time before you and a lot of unbelievable people are going to be going back to Cuba, hopefully not to stay,” Trump said to the Miami-heavy audience that included people of Cuban heritage.

He’ll “fix” Cuba without congressional approval too. If all of this has an ominous (if greasy) feel to it, that’s because Trump’s biggest distraction yet from the Epstein scandals is not making the world safer. Or the U.S.

A report from the Daily Mail (unconfirmed for now by other sources) claims that the White House is blocking release of a joint intelligence statement from the FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center on the heightened threat of foreign terrorism against Americans, including inside the United States:

The bulletin, which was reviewed by the Daily Mail, details ‘elevated threats by the government of Iran to US military and government personnel and facilities, Jewish and Israeli institutions and their perceived supporters, and Iranian dissidents and other anti-regime activists in the United States.’

Asked whether Americans should be worried about foreign terrorism on our soil, Trump said, “I guess.” He added, “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

The war that’s not a war will get some people killed, maybe even here at home. Just not the better half. It is of no consequence to Donald Trump so long as the war dead don’t make him look bad. So don’t advertise the risk is the White House approach.

Are the attacks on Iran (in coordination with Israel’s Banjamin Netanyahu) prompted by Trump’s need for another Epstein distraction? Or by the declining geriatric’s increased susceptibility to suggestion and his own megalomania? Yes.

Administration claims that Iran posed some nonspecific imminent threat appear predictably specious unsupported by evidence the Trump administration won’t present. Will Saletan of The Bulwark deconstructs the mercurial meanings of “imminent threat” offered by administration flacks. “Imminent” can mean anything from someday to “nuclear ambitions” to threats Trump divined through intuition.

Chaos is Trump’s calling card. Chaos is what he’s delivered. But it wasn’t chaos voters were looking for in November 2024. Vote for the black-Asian woman and you’d see World War III, Trump warned supporters in 2024.

“With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness and chaos will be over,” Trump promised. “I don’t have wars.”

See? Whatever is happening in the Middle East? Not a war.

 

 
View on Threads

 

Trump’s imperialist designs and his thirst for blood elicit what Rick Blaine said recalling the day the Nazis marched into Paris: “I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”

The MAGAs wear red.

Over the last year, everyday Americans rose up to oppose Trump’s mass deportation project. The cruelty. The violence. The violation of human and constitutional rights and basic human decency. But it took time for people to organize and get traction. Meanwhile, those in Congress who didn’t kowtow dithered.

The question now is whether Americans have it within themselves to rise up and stop an American megalomaniac. Military adventurism from the self-declared peace president threatens to spawn the World War III he promised his base his election would prevent. Even if Americans do, will it be in time? Is it already too late?

Our enemies have red buttons too.