“Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” -Donald Trump

When are we going to indict a bully who constantly attempted to obstruct the Justice Department's criminal investigation into Russian interference in a presidential election; a bully who, according to the Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice Robert Mueller, made "public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation..."

When are we going to indict a bully who tried to have his former Attorney General Jeff Sessions remove Mueller from investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election and cover up his own obstruction of justice; a bully who "dictated a message for [former campaign manager] Corey Lewandowski to deliver to Sessions... that should publicly announce [Sessions'] recusal from the Russia investigation, that the investigation was 'very unfair' to the president, and that the president had done nothing wrong"; a bully who expressed anger at Jeff Sessions' recusal and told advisers that "he should have an Attorney General who would protect him"; a bully who "reacted to news that a Special Counsel [Mueller] had been appointed by telling advisers that it was 'the end of his presidency' and demanded that Sessions resign..."

When are we going to indict a bully who wanted us to believe the Russian investigation was an attack on the legitimacy of his election and just "a witch hunt," despite 34 indictments, seven guilty pleas, and five imprisonments because of Mueller's investigation; a bully who had pressured Australia to help his current Attorney General William Barr investigate the origins of the Mueller probe; a bully who would have been indicted if he weren't a sitting president?[...]. 

When are we going to indict a bully who called on Russia's interference with his election: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press"; a bully who believed Vladimir Putin instead of the 17 U.S. Intelligence Agencies; a bully who, on the world stage in Helsinki, stated fawningly: "I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today"; a bully who confiscated the interpreter's notes at his private meeting with Putin at the Group 20 Summit in Hamburg and would not share them with his senior administration officials; a bully who had met privately with Putin five times and has had 11 private telephone conversations, all of which were never made available for his senior administration officials to review; a bully who shortly after firing James Comey told two Russian officials visiting the White House that he wasn't concerned about election interference because "America does the same thing"; an ignorant bully who also disclosed highly-classified information to these Russian officials, thus, "creating political and security concerns in the U.S., its allies and especially in Israel"?  […]

 from “Why Donald J. Trump Is a Threat to Our Democracy and Unfit to be President of the United States of America” by Glen Brown

August 24, 2019

For the complete article:

glen brown: Why Donald J. Trump Is a Threat to Our Democracy and Unfit to be President of the United States of America by Glen Brown

"Let’s go back to contemporary sources and make sure we have a clear picture of what investigators found and what the Report said about Donald Trump"

There is an enormous amount of misinformation circulating about former Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. election and the effort to obstruct that investigation following his death. Tweets honoring Mueller’s life of service to his country are now knee-deep in trolls and MAGA comments that have no relationship to the well-documented facts. 

So, let’s go back to contemporary sources and make sure we have a clear picture of what investigators found and what the Report said about Donald Trump. We’ll also look at why Mueller, nonetheless, didn’t indict Trump or even weigh in on whether he should be indicted. That decision drew a lot of criticism.

Some of the key results of the Special Counsel investigation:

Thirty-seven indictments, including six former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, a California man, a London-based lawyer, and three Russian companies. Seven were convicted. And perhaps most significantly, Mueller developed compelling evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Repeatedly. Mueller said publicly that the investigation did not exonerate Trump.

Among the specifics: Trump associates repeatedly lied to investigators about their contacts with Russians, and President Trump refused to answer questions about his efforts to impede federal proceedings and influence the testimony of witnesses. 

A statement signed by over 1,000 former federal prosecutors, including me, concluded that any other person who engaged in the obstructive conduct attributed to Trump would have been indicted.

Barb McQuade and I wrote a summary of the part of the investigation that delved into obstruction. You can read it here. “Attorney General William Barr did the country a disservice,” we wrote, “when he withheld the Mueller report from public view for weeks, while claiming Mueller concluded there was ‘no collusion, no obstruction.’ That is not what the report says.” 

We noted, “We start by acknowledging Mueller’s decision that he was bound by DOJ policy that prohibits indictment of a sitting president. Whether that policy is correct or not, prosecutors must follow the rules. Mueller did.”

We also laid out some of Trump’s most significant obstructive conduct per the Report: Trump asked his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to arrange for Mueller to be fired in June, after he started work. Trump denied he’d done this when a reporter broke the story about the requested firing in 2018.

Trump tried to get McGahn to deny reporting about his conduct as it surfaced and once threatened to fire McGahn if he wouldn’t. McGahn refused. Trump summoned McGahn to the Oval Office and ordered him to create a false record that denied that Trump ordered him to fire Mueller, which would be a federal felony if proven.

After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused from overseeing the investigation, Trump repeatedly tried to compel him to “unrecuse” (no such thing exists) and tried to get Corey Lewandowski to threaten Sessions that he would be fired if he wouldn’t. Trump wanted Sessions to limit the Special Counsel to investigating future elections. That would have meant no investigation into Russian interference in 2016, an information gap that would have left the country vulnerable to future attacks.

The president engaged in witness tampering, with one of the worst examples being dangling the prospect of a pardon to keep Paul Manafort from cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation.

Of course, the fact that Mueller was able to investigate and uncover much of this means Trump didn’t succeed with his efforts to obstruct. Some people suggested that means what Trump did wasn’t all that bad. As Barb and I wrote at the time, “Nothing could be further from the truth. To protect the integrity of our criminal justice system, prosecutors are able to hold accountable people who attempt to interfere with an investigation, not just people who have the luck to be successful. 

Allowing an individual to avoid accountability because they weren’t successful or because investigators were unable to develop proof of underlying crimes would ensure that the most successful obstructors avoid justice.”

It’s especially important to remember, as Trump, today, launches attack after attack against the investigation into the 2016 election and the people who conducted it, that the Mueller investigation confirmed the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia was behind the attack on the DNC’s computers and developed important and specific information about the full nature of the attack Russia launched. 

Mueller’s charges included computer hacking, conspiracy, and financial crimes. Given that context, it’s shocking that in order to try to protect himself, Trump was willing to put national security at risk, attempting to derail the investigation into Russia in order to save himself.

If you want more, there is a detailed analysis of the Mueller investigation from Just Security, which I participated in along with some very skillful lawyers. It’s divided out by topic, so you can dig in deeper on anything of interest.

Barb McQuade, impeachment counsel Norm Eisen, me, and John Dean.

In June 2019, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee, alongside Barb and John Dean (yes, that John Dean), about the Report. In my opening statement, I explained why Mueller had adhered to DOJ policy when he declined to make a prosecutorial decision on whether to indict Trump.

I asked Barb tonight what has stuck with her all these years later, and this was her response: “Mueller indicted 38 individuals and entities, including Russian agents who hacked into computers and stole email messages and who posed as Americans on social media to influence voters. And far from exonerating the Trump campaign, Mueller found that its members met with Russians at Trump Tower, shared polling data with a Russian intelligence officer, and coordinated messaging with the WikiLeaks release of stolen emails. This case was always less about Donald Trump and more about Russia, but rather than report Russia’s overtures to the FBI, Trump welcomed the help.”

It was and still is “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Even though Mueller couldn’t get the Russians he indicted before a court in the U.S., he managed to educate the American people about how Russia tried to interfere in our elections. Trump pardoned five of the Americans Mueller convicted: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Alex van der Zwaan. Manafort and Stone were convicted by juries. Flynn, Papadopoulos, and van der Zwaan pled guilty in court, each acknowledging under oath—Flynn twice—that they were pleading guilty because they were guilty, and for no other reason.

That’s Bob Mueller’s legacy. He uncovered the truth when it was difficult to do so and held people accountable. That’s a sharp contrast to the president who has criticized him. Bob Mueller was fair and decent, and he played by the rules, including respecting the rule of law, which may seem quaint in the time of Trump. Ultimately, criticism of Mueller’s report and his work is an indictment of what Trump has done to our country. The Mueller investigation and its results speak for themselves.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

"Nice Work, MAGA Voters"

 

Well, here we are. Exactly where a lot of us said we’d end up. But no, no. You MAGA voters knew better. The economists were wrong. The generals were wrong. The historians were wrong. The diplomats were wrong. Basic pattern recognition was wrong. Only the guy in the orange makeup yelling in all caps had the real plan.

And thank God, you saved us from Kamala Harris. Because obviously the greater danger was a competent adult who can read a briefing folder without turning it into a hostage situation. Instead, you gave the nuclear codes back to a man with the emotional regulation of a toddler who just had his iPad taken away at an Applebee’s.

You were warned he’d alienate our allies. He did.
You were warned he’d turn America into an international joke. He did.
You were warned he’d govern by impulse, grievance, flattery, and whatever dumb thing last crawled across his television screen. He did.
You were warned that putting a narcissistic idiot in charge during a global crisis might end with America isolated, hated, and dragged into a catastrophe.

And now, unbelievably, the narcissistic idiot part is really coming through. Today he said negotiations with Iran to end hostilities were showing promise. The Iranians replied, "What negotiations?". Did he say it to manipulate the markets? We don't know. He joins the Iranians in having no credibility.

So now Trump has managed to pull off something genuinely impressive: nearly everyone at home outside the cult hates him, most of the world hates him, our allies don’t trust him, our enemies don’t fear him in the way MAGA fantasizes they do, and the global economy is getting worked over because one emotionally unstable man wanted to cosplay Churchill after spending years acting like a drunk uncle in a Facebook comments section.

Brilliant. Absolutely first-rate patriotism. And now all the options are bad. If the U.S. backs off and Iran’s regime stays in power, Trump looks like the reckless fool he is.

If the U.S. stays in and tries to “finish the job,” we own the chaos, probably alone, because after years of insulting allies and blowing up trust, it turns out other countries are less enthusiastic about joining his latest tantrum. 

They’re not staying out because they’re cowards. They’re staying out because Trump has spent his second term threatening NATO, curtailing aid to Ukraine, damaging allied economies with tariffs, and proving over and over that he has no strategy beyond whim, impulse, and whatever grievance is currently foaming at the top of his brain.

And if his followers think there’s some magic fourth option where Trump struts around, everyone trembles, oil prices behave, and democracy survives the experience—yes, that does sound like something a person would believe right before buying commemorative gold sneakers from a man under criminal indictment.

You cheered him on as he alienated allies.
You cheered him on as he sneered at diplomacy.
You cheered him on as he replaced serious people with cranks, hacks, and human chain emails.
You cheered him on because cruelty felt good, because ignorance felt authentic, and because hatred finally had a candidate who spoke your dialect.

That’s the part worth saying plainly. A lot of this wasn’t about policy. It was about permission: permission to hate, permission to sneer, permission to feel like the decent people were the suckers and the assholes were finally back in charge.

And now look at it. America more isolated. The world less stable. The economy wobbling. Bad choices everywhere. And your big orange patriot in the Oval Office, pacing around with Lindsey Graham, furious that after setting fire to the neighborhood, nobody is showing up with a casserole and moral support.

Because this is the part MAGA never understood: allies make sacrifices when they believe a country stands for something, when they believe their sacrifice will matter, and when they believe the people in charge will remember it five minutes later.

Under Trump, they don’t. He acts on impulse, denies responsibility when things go wrong, and then lies about what he said the week before. At some point other countries stop looking for hidden logic and start accepting the simpler explanation: the President of the United States is just an unstable idiot with no strategy.

But yes. Tell us again how Kamala would have been worse. That remains one of the funniest unintentional jokes in modern American politics. America used to have a brand. Imperfect, hypocritical, often violated in practice, yes — but still a brand. The idea that we at least aspired to something larger than appetite. That we could be counted on, however inconsistently, to defend allies, uphold norms, and stand for something other than “what’s in it for us?” No more.

Now we’re a country that stands for less and less beyond naked self-interest, tantrums, and the moods of one vain, impulsive old man. No one trusts us. No one considers us reliable. No one expects us to stand up for what’s right. They assume any contribution they make will count for nothing, because a few days or weeks later Trump will change his mind, forget it happened, or lie about it anyway. Trump has ruined his own reputation forever. He might have permanently ruined America’s too. Nice work, MAGA voters.

-Mike McCready

"The war is a human, geopolitical, and economic disaster, but it may also be a political calamity for Trump and his MAGA stooges"

As unpopular as Donald Trump’s ill-conceived, incompetently managed war was when it began, it is now more unpopular with a key segment of voters. “Trump’s net approval of -20 for handling the situation in Iran represents a drop from last week’s poll. Then, 39% of Americans approved of how Trump was handling Iran and 52% disapproved — a net approval of -13,” The Economist/YouGov reported last week. While Democrats and Republicans have not changed their minds about the war much, “opinion among Independents of how Trump’s handling Iran fell to 24% approve / 63% disapprove (-39 net) this week from 30% approve / 53% disapprove last week (-23 net).

The longer the war drags on, and the higher gas prices go, the worse those poll numbers will look for Trump and his pusillanimous enablers in Congress. In every war since WWII, as NPR’s Domenico Montanaro recently recounted, approval of the conflict has decreased dramatically over time. George W. Bush lost 71 points in his approval by 2007 (from his high in the aftermath of 9/11). LBJ’s debacle in Vietnam (which the open-ended Iran quagmire has begun to resemble) cost him 43 points and another run for re-election. In Trump’s case, further decline in support may be even more acute for a war that the public never favored.

Several factors increase the likelihood that Trump’s support will crater. First and foremost, a decomposing president, plainly out of his depth, is on display as the public increasingly grasps that this debacle was predictable and entirely avoidable. While Trump claims not to have known (“no one expected”!) Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz or attack Gulf allies, news reports and lawmakers briefed by high-ranking career military say this is simply untrue. (He was even briefed on this in his first term.)

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) explained the depth of Trump’s blunder in this exchange with me about Trump’s decision-making: "I will not guess what went through that man’s mind. But I’ll say this: senior military and intelligence planners have for decades predicted that whenever Iran felt they really had their back to the wall and it was existential that they closed the Strait of Hormuz, they would strike regional allies of the United States, and they would use some of their many tools — ballistic missiles, drones, cyber-attacks, and a global network of distributed terror cells. We’re seeing all of that come true now. And whether Trump ignored them, didn’t believe them, or just wasn’t focused, I think his national security advisor and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, certainly was well aware of these challenges. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs certainly was well aware of the challenges. … But it was willful blindness to historical analysis." Voters’ anger may well rise as they learn more about Trump’s stupidity and Republicans’ refusal to challenge him.

Second, even if Trump wants to, it will become obvious that he has lost control of the timeline and the ballooning cost of the war. Iran learned the lesson of Ukraine (and Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—not to mention decades of regional battles) about asymmetric warfare. Experts suspect Iran has an almost limitless reserve of cheap drones (not to mention stored up missiles) that can continue to strike our military facilities, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Gulf states’ oil facilities. The Economist explained, “time is on Iran’s side,” because “America and Israel will gradually run out of useful targets to strike from the air, or run low on interceptor batteries to see off Iranian weapons” while Iran has plenty of drones and missiles (and continues to produce more).

One day, Trump declares he is considering “winding down” the war. The next, Trump is threatening to blow up all Iranian power plants if it does not open the Strait of Hormuz in 48 hours. With each breathless, erratic pronouncement, he advertises his own panic and confusion.

As if to underscore the magnitude of his blunder, Trump apparently will seek a stunning $200B in more funding, a stupefying amount suggesting the war could go on for months. Unsurprisingly, Republicans are petrified to take sole responsibility for the war. Few, if any, Democrats will vote for it (leaving the Senate well short of 60 votes); if Republicans use the reconciliation process, they may not even have a majority of Republicans. Moreover, they would have to find a way to “pay” for the massive expenditure within the 10-year budget window.

This funding dilemma of their own making (made inevitable when they voted down a War Powers Act resolution giving Trump a green light for open-ended war) reinforces voters’ perception that Trump and MAGA are focused on the wrong things. Republicans splurge on wars and tax cuts for the rich, while scrimping on items critical for average Americans, such as healthcare coverage. Voters, regardless of party, understand that MAGA control of government is ratcheting up their pain; meanwhile, the rich get richer while Trump’s grift machine rakes in billions.

Third, unlike the Iraq War (when George W. Bush urged Americans to go to the mall to shop) or Trump’s first attack on Iran, virtually every American already has felt — or will soon feel — the war’s impact. The price of oil won’t come down anytime soon. “Increasing attacks on energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf could significantly hurt the already strained global supply of oil and natural gas, pushing fuel prices much higher,” the New York Times reported last week. “The escalating attacks will make it much harder for energy producers in the Gulf to repair and restart their oil and gas operations when the war ultimately ends.”

Also, the war will continue to drag down economic growth. The World Trade Organization downgraded global trade growth to 1.9 percent in 2026, and it may dip further due to rising costs of energy, food, and service, “due to travel and transport disruptions.” With job creation essentially at zero, the prospect of stagflation looms large. As Paul Krugman remarked: “There’s definitely a whiff of stagflation in the air — a whiff that is entirely caused by Trump administration policies.”

Specifically in red America, the war’s significant impact on fertilizer supplies will hit the already weak farm economy. Coming on top of more frequent extreme weather events, soaring healthcare insurance costs, and rural hospital closures, rural America may face a disproportionate amount of pain.

In sum, the war is a human, geopolitical, and economic disaster, but it may also be a political calamity for Trump and his MAGA stooges. Thanks to Trump’s vivid blunders, the price and duration of a war he insists has been won, and the financial gut punch to Americans (already staggering in Trump’s economy), MAGA may be in for an historic shellacking at the polls. Trump can lie and blame others all he likes, but voters will have their say in November.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, enable our work, help with litigation, and keep this opposition movement engaged, please join the fight by becoming a paid subscriber.

 

Pitch Perfect: "The Robot Ump"

The foundations of baseball have largely remained the same since Babe Ruth swung a bat. Nine innings make a game. Three strikes and you’re out. And the ultimate authority on all pitches is the home plate umpire. We won’t be able to say that last one in a few days.

Players’ opinions have been a bit more mixed, though many say they’re open to giving it a shot. Catchers, in particular, have been interesting to hear from, because some have made a living by fooling umpires using a technique known as framing — where they shift their gloves and their bodies to make borderline pitches look more like strikes.

On Wednesday, when the San Francisco Giants’ starter tosses out the first pitch of the Major League Baseball season, players will — for the first time — have the chance to overrule the umpire’s call of a ball or a strike. The new higher power will be a network of specialized cameras set up in every ballpark to track the baseball’s exact location. It’s officially called the Automated Ball-Strike (A.B.S.) Challenge System. Many fans call it the robot ump.

It’s a major change for a sport steeped so deeply in tradition, and some players have expressed reservations. But baseball officials insist that the A.B.S. system will help rid the game of something that even traditionalists despise bad calls.

How it works

Teams will begin every game with two challenges — opportunities to summon the robot umpire and see whether the human behind home plate missed a ball or strike call. If a challenge is successful, the team can use it again. After two misses, though, it loses the power altogether.

Only the pitcher, catcher or batter can challenge a call, and they have to do so almost immediately, without help from teammates or coaches. The signal is a tap on the head, which effectively tells the ump: I think you’re wrong. A few seconds later, a graphic appears on the outfield screen showing whether the pitch was in fact a ball or a strike.

Fans might find the whole charade a bit strange on television. But when I witnessed the A.B.S. system in person, at a few spring training games this month in Florida, I was surprised by how much tension it introduced to the stadium.

People looked up from their phones, and the crowd collectively held its breath awaiting the results. Once, when the screen showed that the human behind the plate was correct — the pitch had indeed been a ball, by just a fraction of an inch — a fan couldn’t help but shout to the umpire how impressed he was. It may have been the first time that ump had heard a compliment from the bleachers.

How fans and players feel

M.L.B. officials say polls suggest that fans overwhelmingly support the challenge system, and my experience backed that up. Of the roughly two dozen I spoke to at spring training, nearly all said they liked the A.B.S. system, or at least were not against it. Only two, a father and son, disliked it. It wasn’t so much the challenge system they objected to, but rather the creeping intrusion of technology into the sport.

The Giants’ Patrick Bailey widely considered the best defensive catcher in the game, initially worried that A.B.S. would devalue his skills. But he now says he’s excited to see how he and other catchers can take advantage of the system. During spring training, catchers proved far better than batters at deciding when to call for the robot to step in. Bailey has been among the best, winning 10 of his first 12 challenges.

What’s next?

If robot umps are here to stay, does that mean that human umps are on the road to extinction? It’s a reasonable question, especially since tennis, which uses the same exact camera technology as A.B.S., has replaced line judges entirely at most major tournaments.

Baseball officials seem open to the idea. They have tested fully automated strike-calling in the minor leagues, and the M.L.B. commissioner, Rob Manfred, has described the challenge system as a “first step.” But a vast majority of the minor-leaguers who tried both systems told M.L.B. that they opposed full automation. And a survey by my colleagues at The Athletic found similar results with big leaguers.

Remember the father and son I spoke to during spring training? Many players agree with them: They want the game’s human touch to be preserved. “Can we just play baseball?” the star pitcher Max Scherzer once asked my colleague Jayson Stark. “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans?”

-Matthew Cullen, NY Times

"Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium was destroyed last year, and they’ve made no effort to resume the program"

 

Check out this paragraph from Tulsi Gabbard’s prepared text in her opening statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday: As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer [July 2025], Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There have been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.

There you have it. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence obliterated Trump’s case for going to war with Iran. Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium was destroyed last year, and they’ve made no effort to resume the program. Curiously, however, Gabbard elided this paragraph during her live testimony before the committee. She claimed, under questioning from Sen. Mark Warner, that she skipped that crucial paragraph because she realized that she was “running out of time.” Her time in office is likely running out, as it should.

Gabbard’s deputy, Joe Kent, resigned from office this week, claiming correctly that Iran posed no imminent threat to the US. Kent should know. As director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center, Kent saw all of the intel that Trump apparently refused to take the time to read.  Joe Kent’s no “think-tank pansy.”

He’s a hard-ass former Marine who courted the votes of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists during his failed run for Congress in western Washington. But according to Trump, who nominated him for office, he always knew Kent was “very, very weak on security.” Funny, he hired him and didn’t fire him. Kent walked out of the Executive Office building on his own volition.

So, we now have it from within the highest ranks of Trump’s own administration that the casus belli for the war on Iran were faked, in an even more blatant sham than the manufactured case for going to war on Iraq, a war Trump falsely claims he opposed from the beginning. But, like John Kerry, Trump was for the Iraq war before he was against it. 

It’s worth reiterating that even before the June 2025 bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites, there’s evidence that Iran was intent on building a nuclear weapon (and a lot of evidence that it wasn’t), even though perhaps they should have, given that possession of a stockpile of nuclear weapons seems to be the only deterrent against getting attacked by the US or Israel. 

Just this week, North Korea was gleefully launching 10 ballistic missiles into the Pacific during joint military exercises by the US and South Korea without even a squeak of protest from Kim’s former pen pal, Donald Trump.

Again, Tulsi Gabbard said as much not long before Trump’s Operation of Midnight Hammer, testifying before Congress that “the intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” When asked about Gabbard’s testimony, Trump snarled: “I don’t care what she says. She’s wrong. My intelligence community is wrong,” But he didn’t fire Gabbard for being wrong and publicly contradicting him.

Trump, Rubio, and Witkoff have repeatedly claimed that Iran was merely weeks away from having not only a stockpile of enriched uranium but a nuclear weapon: “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon. When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen.” (March 4) Trump has continued to push this lie in the last few days, as his war has gone south: “[W]e’re doing very, very well in Iran, knocking the hell out of them. And you have to do that. We can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. They were two weeks away — in my opinion, two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.” (March 17) Once again, it’s Trump’s position that his own top intelligence appointees are lying about his lies about going to war against Iran.

Still, not many Americans bought what Trump was trying to sell. Support for the Iran war remains at around 40 percent. And the fog of lies began to rapidly dissipate when Trump’s little excursion ran aground on the Strait of Hormuz, shattering the global economy and unleashing chaos across the region.

In an interview with Medhi Hassan, Senator Chris Van Hollen claimed Trump was duped by Netanyahu into going to war with Iran: They’ve had these constantly shifting rationales, and the reason they have to keep shifting them is because when they say that one thing was their goal – like getting rid of Iran’s nuclear capacity, they claimed – that turns out to be just not true….Netanyahu just a few weeks ago said he’d been waiting 40 years for an American president to join him in attacking Iran. And in Donald Trump, he finally found somebody stupid enough and reckless enough to actually do it.

Sorry, Senator, but this let's Trump off the hook. Iran has been on Trump’s targeting radar since Obama signed the nuclear deal. He assassinated Qasem Suleimani, head of the IRG’s Al Quds Force, in 2020 and bombed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June. 

As the Epstein scandal engulfed Trump, he began talking up another bombing campaign on Iran and the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores fed his delusion that he could pull off a similar pain-free operation in Iran, a delusion Netanyahu was eager to stoke, against all intelligence to the contrary.

Perhaps Trump will now replace Joe Kent with Newt Gingrich, who is very, very strong on security. So strong that Newt, the Edward Teller of our tormented times, advised Trump to drop 12 thermo-nuclear bombs on Iran to blast out a canal by-passing the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, someone with the guts to start a nuclear holocaust to prevent one…

-Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch

News from The Hartmann Report

 

— A Dangerous Deal Behind Closed Doors: Is Trump Letting Putin Reshape U.S. Foreign Policy? Putin offered to stop sharing intel with Iran if the US just cuts off Ukraine so he can kill as many people there as possible. This is going to be a tough one for Trump, since he’s been Putin’s guy for decades and pretty much always does exactly what Putin tells him to; he’s even hung Putin’s picture in the White House along with the pictures of past American presidents as a gesture of groveling homage. 

But there’s still strong support for Ukraine in Congress, even among a majority of Republicans, and, as Politico notes: “[T]he sheer existence of such a proposal has sparked concern among European diplomats, who worry Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. at a critical moment for transatlantic relations.” 

As if Putin hasn’t already succeeded — with his regular secret phone calls with Trump — in driving a wedge between the US and Europe. Trump is now constantly trash-talking the EU, NATO, and Zelenskyy using language that’s almost always nearly identical to Putin’s. Trump thought he was a great war tactician and strategist and could, with his fellow corrupt politician Bibi Netanyahu, try what no American president had before been stupid enough to do and attack Iran. 

It backfired (as, apparently, General Caine predicted) and now he’s frantic, so get ready for this to get a hell of lot messier as Trump’s now bringing a new warship and thousands of marines into the Gulf while Bibi gleefully escalates into a bloody killing spree against civilians in both Lebanon and Iran, much like he did in Gaza. Only this time, Trump and America will own this war…

— Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0: Will Trump Confront Putin, or Fold? As a favor to his friend/boss/owner Putin, Trump has suspended most worldwide sanctions on the sale of Russian oil, so now two massive tankers filled with Russian oil are steaming their way to Cuba, which Trump has had under siege (a war crime) long enough that power systems are collapsing, people are going hungry, hospitals are shutting down, and the island is in total crisis. 

(Previously, they’d been getting their oil from Venezuela, but Trump put an end to that when he took out Maduro.) So, to tighten the screws on Cuba, Trump’s Treasury poodle, billionaire Scott Bessent, just had the Treasury Department on Thursday publish a new list of countries that we’ll block from accepting Russian oil, and the only country on the list is Cuba. It appears that the tankers are still steaming toward the island nation, and when they get there it’ll be a whole new crisis for Trump. Does he stand up to Putin and block the tankers or even seize them? 

Or will he stand down and let Putin “save the day” for the Cubans? And if the former, could this spark a confrontation that rivals the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we were just hours away from nuclear war? And what about refugees? Rightwing Senator Tom Cotton asked the CENTCOM general in charge this past week, “Are we prepared for any kind of humanitarian crisis in Cuba—the possible flow of refugees, other civil disorder that may threaten our interests, especially if the decrepit, corrupt Castro regime finally falls or flees?” General Donovan told him they’re preparing Gitmo to deal with the refugees, which is pretty bizarre given the scale and scope of this crisis. The mind-boggling incompetence and bad faith of the Trump regime is both astonishing and dangerous. Keep an eye on this one.

— Will Colombia be the next country Trump invades or whose leadership he tries to decapitate? Trump has ordered his lickspittles Pam Bondi and Ka$h Patel to open criminal investigations into Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a move similar to what preceded his invasion of Venezuela where he abducted President Maduro and brought him to the US to face charges. 

The orange man-baby is apparently infuriated that Petro has called out his criminal activities in blowing up small boats in the Caribbean and his snatching Maduro, both clearly illegal under both US and international law. Step by step, country by country, it appears that Trump reading those “Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler” that sat beside his bed for years (per Ivana’s autobiography) have sunk in. He’s the first leader of a western nation to invade two countries and threaten a third within a year since the 1930s in Europe. What’s next? France? Greenland? Oh, yeah, that’s already “on the table…”

— America’s Healthcare Collapse Is Here, and It Was Written into Law. Just as Democrats predicted when the One Big Beautiful Bill passed with all-Republican votes, millions of Americans are now uninsured. In addition to giving billionaires around $5 trillion in tax cuts, the OBBB also did away with the most recent Obamacare subsidies, jacking people’s healthcare premiums into the stratosphere. The result has been that millions of families — about one in ten previously covered by the Affordable Care Act — are now lacking any sort of medical insurance whatsoever. 

Republicans are delighted, and Trump’s offering a new “cheap” ACA plan with $31,000 deductibles, a genuinely insane idea in a country where 60% of Americans can end up homeless if they’re hit with an unexpected $1000 expense. 

But, hey, the billionaires got their tax cut so now they’re paying virtually nothing in taxes, including billionaire Trump, his multimillionaire kids and wife, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the hundreds of billionaires who’ve ponied up hundreds of millions to fund his campaigns, ballroom, library, crypto, and every other scam he can dream up. Life’s good when you’re morbidly rich; the rest of us can “just eat cake” — when we can find stale packages of it in the dumpsters behind America’s grocery stores.

— Another death in ICE custody: How many more before anyone is held accountable? The 14th person to die in ICE custody so far this year is a 19-year-old young man named Royer Perez-Jimenez. He was mysteriously declared dead — although ICE refuses to release the medical examiner’s report and cause of death — this past Monday. 

The facility had been shut down by Biden because of “worms in food, malfunctioning toilets and overflowing sewage” and “a near-fatal carbon monoxide leaks last November; and regular exposure to highly dangerous levels of a toxic disinfectant chemical spray linked to severe medical harms” among other outrages. 

Miller and Trump ordered the concentration camp re-opened when they took over the government. ICE claimed they’d arrested Royer for having committed a crime but are now refused to produce an arrest warrant or any details of why he was snatched and detained. But some ICE agent, somewhere, made another $2500 on the “got another brown person” bounty, in addition to the $150,000 annual salary and $60,000 signing bonus. Why the hell can’t we pay teachers like this?

— Meet the new Kyrsten Sinema: John Fetterman. Sinema famously sold out her party and her country in exchange for campaign contributions and other gifts; now, it appears, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman is doing the same. 

He’s declared he’ll support former MMA fighter Markwayne Mullin (who’s totally unqualified; he doesn’t have a college degree, no experience in law enforcement, and no management experience whatsoever) to run the 200,000+ employee Department of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi Noem who’s leaving enshrouded in scandal. 

Even Republican committee Chairman Rand Paul is voting against Mullin. Fetterman’s also supporting Trump’s attacks on Iran, Bibi Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, and the GOP’s voter suppression SAVE Act. Democrats in Pennsylvania are furious, but Fetterman has another 3 years to go before they can vote him out of office. Every new Congress, Republicans identify one or two Democrats they can seduce, threaten, bribe, or otherwise sway to betray their own party. Last time around it was Sinema and Joe Manchin; this time it’s Fetterman. It’s sick.

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