Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I highly recommend that you watch this discussion between Paul Krugman and Kim Lane Scheppele. The story of Magyar’s rise is much more complicated — and fascinating — than previously known. Scheppele is an incredible source. Here’s just one little excerpt:

Krugman: Given all that, it’s still kind of astonishingly brave that people were willing to stand up in this campaign.

Scheppele: Absolutely. And Peter Magyar developed into this role, right? Because he came out of Fidesz circles. I don’t think he imagined himself as the opposition. He spent 20 years in the shadows. This is not what most leaders do. So he kind of grew into the role as people projected onto him a role he should play. And so one of the things he started saying at his rallies is “We shall not live in fear ever again.” And so it was the fear thing. And he would travel. I mean, Peter Magyar never had security. I’m sure he had death threats. I’m sure that they had a target on his back. He was clearly bugged and wiretapped. They would occasionally release conversations between him and close associates. Like I said, they sent him a girlfriend from the security services. I mean, they had him on their radar but he never traveled with security. He’d dive into crowds to shake hands and so forth, and he would say, “This is our country. We cannot live in fear.” And then crowds were chanting like, “We shouldn’t live with fear!”

And today, actually, I was just in tears this morning reading this. One of my close friends wrote to me and was trying to make sense of everything. He’s also a sociologist, I might add. And he said, “What just happened can be expressed in the most beautiful way by the word “awakening.” I felt the country is waking up to self-consciousness as we wake up every morning. Hungarian society woke up from an unbearable world into a normal and livable world. It took time, but I feel like in the last two years, people’s attitude toward each other and toward politics has changed step by step. I just had to follow the events of the Tisza Party. [Magyar’s Party] Because whoever saw these events could testify that not only more and more people came out to the streets to listen to Peter Magyar, but people were smiling more and more and became more intimate, more joyful, more confident. And they were increasingly connected to the community with a sense of belonging. On the day after the election, Peter Magyar put it simply: ‘What happened was this is the end, and what lies ahead is change and creation.’”

I mean, that’s what those rallies were. More than what he actually said, you showed up and saw how many other people felt the same thing you did. And then the fear went away as the crowd expanded.

It gives you hope.

CNN: “It’s a blowout… not even close… Pope Leo absolutely crushing Trump when it comes to how popular they are.” pic.twitter.com/Ww3E4U4pGl

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 18, 2026

This piece in the WSJ (gift link)lays out the history of the church and the US government and as we know it was often hostile mostly due to anti Catholic bigotry. But it changed :

Post-Cold War presidents mostly walked in lockstep with Catholic leaders at home and in Rome, with a major exception being the Iraq war. John Paul II advised George W. Bush not to take pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein. Bush stayed the course but reaffirmed his respect for the holy father. The next year Bush presented the pope with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, vowing to work with the pope “for human liberty and human dignity, in order to spread peace and compassion.”

Trump has chosen a different path.

In each election since 2016, Trump won a majority of the White Catholic vote, increasing his percentage in 2024 to about 60%. Yet beneath these positive election results, the mood can be tense. Many of the president’s actions suggest values that are out of step with the presidents that came before him; and as recent popes have demonstrated, they are also out of line with the values of the Catholic church. 

During Trump’s first presidential campaign and first term, Pope Francis noted that the gospel called on Christians to build bridges, not (border) walls. Trump issued a statement that Francis was going to wish Trump was president if ISIS attacked the Vatican.

But the real escalation of the conflict has come in recent months. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, has proven to be very politically savvy. He seems to have ensured that when he speaks, the American bishops generally fall in line behind him. He has called on the bishops to defend the rights and dignity of immigrants and refugees, and they have answered by submitting legal briefs to the Supreme Court on their behalf. 

Their larger clash, however, came over the war in Iran. When Trump vowed to destroy Iranian civilization, to blast it back to the stone ages, Leo called his rhetoric “unacceptable.” He preached against the “delusion of omnipotence,” and called for an end to “idolatry of self and money” and “enough of war.”

Catholics have criteria that they invoke to evaluate righteousness of wars, which date to the fifth century teachings of St. Augustine. They determine whether a cause is just, if all other options have been exhausted, if war will lead to peace, and if the evil being targeted by war is greater than the evil of the violence the war will inflict. This allows them to determine what is a “just war” and what is not. 

The American president and his advisers have made limited effort to justify their aggressive military actions, which also meet none of the traditional Catholic just war criteria. 

The pope’s skepticism about the administration’s rationale for war prompted Trump, unlike any president in the last 100 years, to recast the Vatican as an adversary rather than an ally. Never before, even at the height of U.S. anti-Catholicism, has a sitting president attacked the pope like this

He attacks anyone who dares to disagree with him or is more popular. I honestly don’t think it’s any more complicated than that. He’s a Know-Nothing in the original sense of the world taking the country back to the 1800s in more ways than one.

Is it a blowout or a knockout?

Donald Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV are even more misguided than Trump’s other assaults on decency. CNN’s Harry Enten explains Trump’s tanking polls in a manner reminiscent of Howard Cosell’s famous “Down goes Frazier!”

“Down he goes …. into the Dead Sea!”

CNN: “It’s a blowout… not even close… Pope Leo absolutely crushing Trump when it comes to how popular they are.” pic.twitter.com/Ww3E4U4pGl

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 18, 2026

All this while Donald Trump eats McDonald’s and sailors under his command eat Unhappy Meals. The Office of the Chief of Naval Operations denied reports of food shortages and poor food quality, declaring that the “US Navy possesses an unmatched logistics capability.” And the shortages, mystery meat and food trays two-thirds empty? Simply “routine menu adjustments.”

Bandits are making out like bandits

The fabulist residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “made 13 posts in an hour” Friday celebrating his greatness. (That’s His Greatness.) Ron Filipkowski compiled the lot:

• “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!
• “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD! DJT”
• “Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over, I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help. I TOLD THEM TO STAY AWAY, UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL. They were useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!
• “Again! This deal is not tied, in any way, to Lebanon, but we will, MAKE LEBANON GREAT AGAIN!”
• “Iran, with the help of the U.S.A., has removed, or is removing, all sea mines! Thank you!”
• “Thank you to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar for your great bravery and help!”
• “The U.S.A. will get all Nuclear “Dust,” created by our great B2 Bombers – No money will exchange hands in any way, shape, or form. This deal is in no way subject to Lebanon, either, but the USA will, separately, work with Lebanon, and deal with the Hezboolah situation in an appropriate manner. Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!”
• “The Failing New York Times, FAKE NEWS CNN, and others, just don’t know what to do. They are desperately looking for a reason to criticize President Donald J. Trump on the Iran situation, but just can’t find it. Why don’t they just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT, and start to gain back their credibility???”

Speaking of credibility, the Strait of Hormuz is an open and shut case that His Greatness has none.

From The Washington Post this morning, Breaking: Iran says it’s closing Strait of Hormuz again, citing U.S. blockade:

Iran’s military announced it has closed the Strait of Hormuz just a day after the country declared the waterway open, claiming the U.S. had breached Tehran’s trust by maintaining its blockade in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz had “returned to its previous state” and “is under the strict management and control of the Armed Forces,” Iran’s military command said Saturday, according to a statement published by Iranian state-backed media.

“Trump keeps claiming victory in Iran,” a headline at Politico reads. “Our new poll shows voters aren’t buying it.”

Neither are the Iranians:

Iranian officials did not confirm most of Mr. Trump’s claims and disputed several of them. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator and the speaker of its Parliament, said on social media Friday evening that Mr. Trump made several false claims.

“The president of the United States made seven claims in one hour, all of which are false,” said Gen. Ghalibaf, a military and political influential figure in Iran leading negotiations. “They did not win the war with these lies, they will certainly not get any where in negotiations either.”

Who is buying Trump’s total victory BS? The stock market. The Washington Post reports that investors most distant from the oil production and processing business seem less concerned about the realities of what’s been damaged and how long “it will take for things to return to normal — if they ever do,” said Gerry Morton, oil and gas co-chair at the law firm Baker Botts. Underlying problems signal “a reckoning in the not too distant future,” the Post reports.

Until then, “US stocks rally and return to where they were before the US-Iran war.” For illustration, here’s what the one-year tracker on my retirement nest egg looks like since Trump launched his unsanctioned war on Feb. 28:

Thirty years ago, then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, described that kind of investor behavior as “irrational exuberance.” Under a Trump administration, one might call it market manipulation. Somewhere close to Trump’s inner circle (and to the buffet line at Mar-a-Lago), bandits are making out like bandits.

Update: Container ship reportedly hit by ‘unknown projectile’ in second incident in Strait of Hormuz

Baby Meerkat time!

Baby meerkats..🐾😊 pic.twitter.com/EPKh9cwxxm

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) April 13, 2026

I’m still traumatized by the “Shakespeare” heartbreak on Meerkat Manor, so I’ve been reluctant to follow the meerkat world. But this pulls me back in. They are incredibly cute.

“This is what Trump does. He lights our national house on fire. He lets it burn for 15 minutes before he shows up with a fire hose. And then he demands a prize for putting out the blaze while the rest of us stand here in the smoldering ruins.”

Yep.

He’s now saying that he “solved” the Iran war. Which he started,

Trump is destroying America’s relationships across the globe

Politico reports:

The Iran war is risking America’s global security ties and damaging its reputation, especially among the world’s Muslims, according to a set of State Department cables obtained by POLITICO.

The cables, dated Wednesday, described the fallout of the war for America’s standing in three countries in different parts of the world: Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Indonesia.

[…]

U.S. diplomats at embassies in the countries’ capitals painted damning portraits of an America under siege in multiple media spheres by pro-Iranian actors that are exceptionally agile in the digital space.

In Azerbaijan, what had been a significantly improving relationship has hit a plateau at best, and appears to be faltering. Bahrain’s government is facing questions about whether the U.S. abandoned it to fend for itself against Iranian drones and missiles. And Indonesia’s leader could face growing calls to reduce security ties with the U.S.

Some of the cables describe anti-U.S. sentiment that is having an immediate impact, while others raise concerns that relationships could be in danger if the war continues much longer. Taken together, the cables paint a picture of countries where the U.S. is losing the population’s trust, and potentially that of their governments.

I’m quite sure they aren’t the only ones. For instance:

The abrupt change in direction of US policy is a massive shock for both Korea and Japan. While much of his attention has been focused on Europe and the Americas, Trump’s recent comments on Japan and Korea have not been encouraging. Early this month he said he “loves” Japan, but complained that Japan had made a “fortune” out of the US. While the alliance ensured the US protected Japan, Japan had no obligation to protect the US.  Korea in turn was “unfair to the US – militarily and in other ways”.  

Officials in both countries are reacting with anxiety and alarm.  

The US and South Korea have a long shared military history. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Both support the continuation of the rules-based order, even as they worry it may barely exist any more. For the moment the approach of both countries can be summed up as hide, plan and wait:  avoid being an immediate target of US action; nevertheless plan that they will be; and wait to determine when to execute their response plan.

Trump’s shock treatment seems to be working already – to the extent of forcing Japan and Korea to upgrade their own self-reliance. Ishiba has committed to “dramatically bolster our defense capabilities…with the fundamental goal of deterring an invasion of Japan by possessing the capabilities needed to prevent or repel an invasion of Japan on our own.”  Achieving this would amount to a major reversal of Japan’s post-war dependence on US deterrence. 

The whole world is recoiling in horror at what this idiot is doing. First there were the inane tariffs, now he’s blowing up boats in the high seas and starting wars. How could they possibly trust this country?

The implications of this are profound, as we know. I don’t think we can accurately predict where it’s going but the dissolution of the world order as we’ve known it for the past 80 years is happening very rapidly. If we weren’t in the nuclear age I think we might be able to just sit back and watch it unfold without panicking. The U.S. will still be very powerful, regardless, and very wealthy. As individuals we would likely be more or less ok.

But the reason we had the post WWII order in the first place was to keep a lid on the nuclear threat which, despite many problematic aspects, did work. That’s gone now and we don’t know what, if anything, can replace it. That’s something to keep you up at night.

Well, well, well:

In recent weeks, as criticism of President Donald Trump from his own supporters has reached a fever pitch, a new conspiracy theory has taken hold: Some of the president’s biggest supporters are now claiming, without evidence, that Trump staged the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and is covering it up.

Many of the true believers think that his survival meant he was the chosen one. But this was probably inevitable:

“I think that maybe it was staged,” Tim Dillon said on his show last weekend about the assassination attempt. Dillon, who was previously a staunch Trump supporter, went on to share that Trump should now come out and say, “Some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”

Some of these claims began months ago. In November, former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson promoted the idea that the FBI was somehow involved in covering up the shooting, writing on X that the “FBI lied” about the shooter’s online footprint.

A day later, conservative pundit Emerald Robinson went further, posting on X that the FBI “did it.” (In the same post, Robinson claimed that the agency was responsible for everything from the January 6 attack on the Capitol to “Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail tapes” and the “Gov. Whitmer fake kidnap plot.”)

But the claims that Trump had staged the entire thing really picked up steam when former US National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent appeared on Carlson’s podcast last month, one day after he resigned from his position over the Iran war. During the interview, Carlson and Kent discussed the failure of the Trump administration to provide more details about the Pennsylvania shooter. Kent claimed, without providing any evidence, that investigations into the shooting had been shut down before they finished.

I guess that explains why Trump went crazy on Kent the other day. The problem is that until this month he was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Trump administration, a top post with unfettered access to classified information. He’s always been a kooky conspiracy theorist but Trump put him in a job that handed him the credibility he needs to push this counter-narrative with the weirdo base.

A lot of people are skeptical of that event. I’m not one of them. Trump is the luckiest SOB in the history of the world so it doesn’t surprise me that he survived that attempt that killed one of his ardent followers instead. That’s the story of his life. But I have to say that I am enjoying the fact that his own conspiracy mongers are turning on him. That assassination attempt is one of the fundamental tenets of his cult, proving that he is divinely ordained and he’s massively invested in that, as we can see by his displays of the “iconic” picture above, even putting it on the commemorative coin. He’s not going to like this, not one bit.

There’s nothing he won’t do for his Dear Leader:

Fox News host Sean Hannity dedicated a portion of his Thursday show to deliver a message to Pope Leo XIV, suggesting he and others at the Vatican had “totally lost sight of the true meaning of the bible and its teachings.”

… Hannity first discussed his own background with Catholicism, explaining the factors that led to his break with the church, before later turning on the pope himself.

“While I am a Christian, I left the Catholic Church in large part because of institutionalized corruption, and it was at the parish level, to the bishop level, cardinals, all the way to Rome,” he said.

He continued:

The very top scandals, terrible behavior, frankly, went not only unchecked, but they never fully corrected it or dealt with it, and others at the Vatican have totally lost sight of the true meaning of the bible and its teachings. I don’t know why. For the first 1200 years of the church, the priests were allowed to marry. They changed that law. But right on cue, Pope Leo XIV is seemingly more interested in spreading left wing politics than the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. As the AP put it, quote, “Pope Leo amplified his condemnation of America’s conflict with Iran, saying that God does not bless any conflict and certainly doesn’t side with those who drop bombs.”

Well, first, that is simply not biblically accurate. The bible contains over 400 references to war, for equally depicting God as authorizing, commanding, intervening in battles like one that we all know, the battle between David and Goliath. Why is the pope twisting religion to specifically attack only President Trump and the U.S.? Why did he recently meet with top [Barack] Obama advisor David Axelrod and far left governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker? It’s because he’s a run of the mill Trump hating Democrat that lacks radical clarity about radical Islam?

Hannity then pivoted to Trump’s words

“I want him to preach the gospel, I’m all about the gospel,” he said. “But I also know you cannot let a certain country, which is a very mean-spirited country, have a nuclear weapon. If they did, they would use it, and I think they’d use it quickly, and they would kill many millions of people. So, the pope can disagree, but certainly we are allowed to have that.”

Hannity responded to the president’s words with a blunt assessment. “The president is correct, the pope is wrong on so many levels,” he said. “Perhaps his judgment is clouded.”

He’s clearly just a Trump cultist at this point worshiping at the feet of his Dear Leader and doing his job as an apologist for anything he says. But it seems to me that as a conservative talk show host he’s taking a big risk of offending quite a few of his own audience members, most of whom love Trump but aren’t used to seeing the Pope and the church disparaged in this way.

I think these guys are playing with fire. This could have been papered over but they’re obviously spoiling for a fight with the Pope and when you combine it with the creepy crusader talk from the likes of Hegseth you have to wonder if we aren’t seeing a real religious schism in the right wing.

If Trump really was doing a good job, I’d think this would blow over. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there are quite a few people who know that he’s a failure but don’t want to admit it. Some of them are probably looking for another reason to back away from the cult. This is a way out.

The rumor is that Trump has agreed to release $20 billion in frozen funds to Iran in exchange for agreement that they will “suspend” their nuclear program indefinitely. (He’s denying it but nothing he says can be taken at face value, obviously.)Too bad nobody ever thought of that before.

Oh wait, they did:

Trump spent years in a jealous rage, relentlessly slamming Barack Obama for unfreezing $1.7 billion of Iran’s own money to Iran, calling it pathetic ransom money and proof of a disastrous, weak-kneed surrender.

Driven by petty obsession, Trump spitefully ripped up the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, shredding every restraint on Tehran, and smugly promised the world a “better deal.” Instead, his childish vendetta supercharged Iran’s nuclear program, pushing it dangerously close to the bomb. Now, in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy and failure, Trump is negotiating to hand Iran access to $20 billion in frozen funds — more than ten times what he once condemned — in exchange for the regime surrendering its near-weapons-grade uranium stockpile.

This is Trump at his most embarrassingly stupid: destroying a deal that had capped Iran’s enrichment and kept it under watch, only to crawl back offering vastly more cash after his own incompetence made the threat far worse. The man who mocked Obama for “giving” Iran money is now dangling a fortune in frozen assets while pretending it’s a brilliant victory.

It’s not leadership — it’s ego-driven incompetence and rank hypocrisy, a petty grudge that backfired spectacularly and left America facing a more expensive, more dangerous mess. Trump’s jealous tantrum didn’t make America safer; it just made the cleanup bill ten times bigger.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

It’s good news if the war is coming to an end, at least for now. (There’s no guarantee, of course.) But Trump and Netanyahu precipitated it in the first place and now Iran knows that it can close the Strait at will, they have a new younger,more hardline Ayatollah who will no doubt crack down even harder on the population and spend the money they will get from the U.S. to rebuild the regime even stronger.

But yeah, it’s a real victory. Trump is already saying that he’s ended another war. He’s discovered that he can start wars and then end them, claiming he’s the second coming in the process. It probably won’t be the last.