He's been told to shut up...
Early this morning, the U.S. and Israel launched a major military assault on Iran. Early reports suggested that Israel targeted senior officials in Iran’s government while the U.S. attacked military targets. The U.S. government named the assault “Operation Epic Fury.” Iran state media reported the strikes killed at least 200 people, including 118 students from a girls’ school, and wounded more than 700.
Iran retaliated with strikes against Israel, where one person was killed and 121 others injured, and with strikes on U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. U.S. Central Command said there are no U.S. casualties and there has been little damage to U.S. facilities.
Shortly after the strikes, President Donald J. Trump, who was in Florida at Mar-a-Lago, posted an 8-minute video on social media announcing “major combat operations in Iran.” He warned: “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission.”
Trump referred to that mission vaguely, rehearsing a litany of complaints over the tensions and sometimes combat between the U.S. and Iran since 1979, but indicated the U.S. and Israel were attacking to prevent the country’s murderous regime from becoming “a nuclear-armed Iran.”
In June 2025, the Trump administration struck Iran’s nuclear laboratories at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, after which Trump insisted the U.S. had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. In his message, Trump said the U.S. in negotiations afterward warned Iran “never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil. But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.”
Trump did not mention the landmark 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, that limited Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Trump withdrew the U.S. from that accord in 2018, and within a year, Iran was ignoring the limits the JCPOA imposed.
But, hours after his team posted his video, Trump told Natalie Allison and Tara Copp of the Washington Post that his real goal is regime change for Iran. “All I want is freedom for the people,” he told the reporters in a phone call shortly after 4 A.M. Eastern Time. In his video address, Trump told Iran’s armed forces and police they “must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death.” He told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison, and Souad Mekhennet reported this evening in the Washington Post that U.S. intelligence officers assessed that a threat from Iran was not “imminent,” saying it was unlikely that Iran would pose a threat to the U.S. mainland for at least ten years. The International Atomic Energy Agency says there is no evidence Iran has an active plan for creating nuclear weapons, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that if Iran tries to build an intercontinental ballistic missile, it will take them at least a decade.
This afternoon, Trump posted on social media that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a cleric who has ruled Iran as supreme leader since 1989, was killed in the strikes, a fact later confirmed by Iran. After celebrating Khamenei’s death, Trump posted: “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.” He claimed without offering evidence that many of Iran’s soldiers and police “no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us,” and expressed hope that those forces “will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
Notably, he did not suggest how one would get “immunity,” or from whom, or what the process of taking back the country would look like just months after the regime killed tens of thousands of protesters. He also appears unconcerned that the coordinated response to the attack from Iran’s leadership even after the death of Khamenei suggests regime change will not be a question of knocking out the leader.
In his triumphant post, Trump concluded with an Orwellian “war is peace” statement, writing that the process of rebuilding should start soon because in just a day the bombing had “very much destroyed and, even, obliterated” so much of the country. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
Trump’s objectives for going to war sound vague because they are. The event that triggered his attack is also vague—so far, there is no evidence of an imminent threat that required the attack. His prescription for what his war is trying to accomplish is also vague.
It’s a given that this sort of vaguely justified attack on another country usually reflects that the leaders in the attacking country are worried about losing power and are launching a war to try to get disaffected people to rally around the flag.
Indeed, social media users are already referring to the attack as “Operation Epstein Fury,” suggesting it is an attempt to distract from the frequent appearance of the president’s name in the Epstein files as well as the recent story that the Department of Justice illegally withheld an allegation that Trump raped a thirteen-year-old.
Before his State of the Union address, Trump’s approval rating had fallen to an abysmal 37%, while 59% of Americans disapproved. His speech did little to convince Americans that he is trying to address their concerns about the economy: G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that after the speech, only 30% of Americans think Trump is focused on the things that matter to them, while 57% think he is focused on other things.
The January inflation report, out yesterday, showed prices rising faster than expected, inspiring Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to suggest Americans should buy cheaper food. “Most of the cheap cuts of meat are very inexpensive,” he said. “You can buy liver or the cheaper cuts of steak.”
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder noted in Thinking About… that Trump’s personal corruption is another interpretive framework for thinking about his decision to go to war. Trump’s sudden foray into regime change after years of attacking other presidents who tried it raises the question of whether he is acting for other countries in the Middle East he considers his allies.
“Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration,” Snyder wrote, “one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.” Snyder noted that Gulf Arab states eager to curb Iran’s power “have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family.”
Last week, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, both of whom have deep financial ties to the Middle East, would guide the decision of whether to strike Iran. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for U.S. strikes on Iran for a long time, and hours after Snyder wrote, Washington Post journalists Birnbaum, Hudson, DeYoung, Allison, and Mekhennet reported that Trump decided to attack Iran after Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman made “multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack” while at the same time publicly calling for a diplomatic solution.
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall pointed out that as his power diminishes, Trump “is leaning heavily into the presidential prerogative powers where his power is most untrammeled, where the loss of political power doesn’t really matter. Almost no presidential power is more clearly in that character [than] the president’s control over the military.”
And that is the crux of the matter. For all the vagueness of Trump’s justifications and goals in attacking Iran, he has launched a war—his word—on his own, assuming the powers of a dictator.
The Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to declare war. After fighting for their independence against a king they considered a tyrant, the men of the constitutional convention were not about to hand the power of raising an army to a single man. One delegate commented that he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.”
Trump’s attack on Iran also violates the charter of the United Nations, under which members promise not to attack other states. This particular attack raises the specter of a larger war. In an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council today, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “[e]verything must be done to prevent a further escalation” in the Middle East.
Trump launched his attack while lawmakers were not scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., for a week, but Democrats are demanding Congress return immediately to vote on whether to continue military action against Iran. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) said in an interview: “This is one of the most dangerous efforts that Trump is undertaking in the second term: trying to normalize war without Congress, trying to normalize the idea that a president can just do whatever they want when it comes to foreign policy.” Huge though this is, there is a larger issue behind it: Since taking office again, Trump has gone out of his way to define tariffs, deportations, and so on as part of national security policy.
The president is supposed to get Congress’s buy-in to go to war in part because that requirement forces an executive to convince the American people that a contemplated military action is worth their tax dollars and their lives. But Trump made little effort to explain his Iran attack to the American people, and they oppose it. Morris notes that support for attacking Iran has held fairly steady for months and remained so after the strikes, with 34% in favor of them and 44% opposed. This is “incredibly low” support for a foreign war, Morris writes, and support for military action tends to be highest at the start of a war.
Trump’s attack on Iran scorns the will of the people and their constitutional right to decide whether they want to pay for a war with their money and their lives. That disdain for democratic government reveals that Trump’s military adventure against Iran is also fundamentally an attack on the United States of America.
U.S. Central Command said there are no U.S. casualties and there has been little damage to U.S. facilities.
This morning, U.S. Central Command posted on social media that three service members have been killed in action in Operation Epic Fury and five more are seriously wounded. It continued: “Several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions—and are in the process of being returned to duty. Major combat operations continue and our response effort is ongoing.”
Democratic leaders reacted to the news with comments like this one by Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA): “My thoughts are with the families of these servicemembers, and their loved ones. And I continue to pray for the safety of every servicemember and the recovery of those wounded in these operations. May God protect our troops.” Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz—the same man who invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal chat about striking Yemen—suggested the soldiers’ sacrifice for the country was worthwhile, writing: “Freedom is never free.”
In a phone call with Peter Nicholas and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News, Trump said: “We expect casualties with something like this.” He added: “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”
Later today, Trump told the American people: “As one nation we grieve for the true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. Even as we continue the righteous mission for which they gave their lives, we pray for the full recovery of the wounded and send our immense love and eternal gratitude to the families of the fallen. And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more. But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case. But America will avenge their deaths and deliver the most punishing blow to the terrorists who have waged war against, basically, civilization. They have waged war against civilization itself.”
Trump was hosting a fund raiser at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, as the U.S. offensive began. The New York Times reported last November that tickets for the dinner dance were $1 million apiece. The optics of Trump partying with his rich cronies while American soldiers died is at least partly what is behind the fact that today, “#SendBarron” trended on social media.
Strikes continued today in the Middle East as Israel and the U.S. hit Iran and Iran retaliated against Israel and U.S. bases in the region. Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon joined the fight by sending missiles into Israel. Israel responded with an attack on the suburbs of Beirut. Oil prices jumped sharply as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz at the outlet of the Persian Gulf, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, dropped almost to a halt.
After yesterday’s euphoria coming from the administration following the first strikes against Iran, today revealed that the administration had not given much thought to whether the strikes were legitimate or what would happen after them. Administration officials did not appear on the Sunday talk shows, relying instead on congressional surrogates. Brian Stelter and Kit Maher reported that journalists have been working around the White House press office, calling Trump directly, and he has been willing to talk.
Trump told NBC News reporters Nicholas and Marquez that he launched the strikes because “They weren’t willing to stop their nuclear research. They weren’t willing to say they will not have a nuclear weapon.” When asked if he would stop the strikes and negotiate, he said: “I don’t know,” but said he would consider it “if they can satisfy us,” adding that “they haven’t been able to.”
Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Jennifer Hansler of CNN reported this evening that briefers from the Pentagon today told congressional staff that Iran had not been planning to attack U.S. forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked first. Trump administration officials said on Saturday that Iran was planning to strike the U.S. preemptively and thus posed an imminent threat. The briefers said there was no intelligence to support that claim.
Trump seems unclear about the end game of the conflict he has started.
When NBC News reporters Nicholas and Marquez asked him what he hoped to accomplish through the military operation, he said: “There are many outcomes that are good. Number one is decapitating them, getting rid of their whole group of killers and thugs. And there are many, many outcomes. We could do the short version or the longer version.”
He told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic that Iran’s new leadership wants to talk with him and that he will do so, suggesting that he was not, in fact, interested in regime change. “They should have done it sooner, Michael. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute,” Trump said. But then Trump told Scherer he had confidence that the Iranian people would launch an uprising against the Iranian government.
Kristen Welker of Meet the Press this morning quoted Trump’s statement of yesterday saying “Hopefully, [Iranian troops] and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
Then Welker asked her guest, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), “Is ‘hope’ the plan for the future of Iran?” Graham said: “No, the future of Iran is going to be determined by the Iranian people. The new Iran, whatever it is…our goal is to make sure it cannot become again the largest state sponsor of terrorism.” Welker responded: “But is there a plan to make sure that happens…does the president have a plan to guarantee that that happens?” Graham responded with some heat: “No. It’s not his job or my job to do this.”
Apparently, U.S. officials simply hoped the Iranian people would seize the government if their leaders were killed in airstrikes. But there was a line of succession, and the country’s police state remains in place. Erin Banco of Reuters reported yesterday that before the attacks, analysts for the Central Intelligence Agency assessed that if Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were killed, younger hard-line men could replace him.
Trump told Zolan Kanno-Youngs, David E. Sanger, and Tyler Pager of the New York Times that he intends to keep bombing Iran for “four to five weeks” if necessary. He spoke repeatedly of an outcome like that of Venezuela, in which the U.S. removed the top leader but left the rest of the government intact. Trump told the reporters he hoped Iran’s military forces would turn over their weapons to the Iranian people. “They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he said.
The New York Times reporters note that the security forces he says should surrender to the people were the ones that killed thousands of protesters in January. Trump refused to say that the administration would defend the Iranian people if they did rise up.
ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl spoke to Trump tonight and posted: “Pres Trump told me tonight the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack. ‘The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,’ Trump told me. ‘It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.’”
In the midst of today’s military operation and all his calls with reporters, Trump took to social media to repost more than 40 social media posts with over-the-top praise for his State of the Union address. The posts appeared to be curated, suggesting that someone is feeding him praise.
National security scholar Tom Nichols posted on social media: “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.”
Trump presented medals of honour to veterans who fought in Vietnam and Afghanistan in the East Room of the White House. After first talking about the attacks on Iran and the ‘beautiful ballroom’.
"See that nice drape? When that comes down, right now, you see a very, very deep hole," the president said at the beginning of the event. "But in about a year and a half from now, you're going to see a very, very beautiful building."
"And there's your entrance to it right there," Trump added. "In fact, it looks so nice, I don't think I'll even — I think I'll save money on the doors, because it can't get more beautiful than that.
"I picked those drapes in my first term," reminisced Trump. "I always liked gold, but I think we can save a lot of money. I just saved — I just saved curtains. But — and it will be. It'll be spectacular."
According to the president, "It'll be the most beautiful ballroom — I believe it's — because I've built many a ballroom." He added, "I believe it's going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world."
[All quotes via media transcript.]
The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom noted that Trump appears to be workshopping the causes for his attacks on Iran and his goals for the war by talking to journalists.
As Meidas Touch summarized Carlstrom’s argument, he said: “[Trump] doesn’t sound convinced by any of it. He’s throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he ‘solved’ a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there’s no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”
Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted today that Trump, who watches the Fox News Channel consistently, appears to have shaped his attack on Iran in response to encouragement from FNC hosts. Gertz recalled that for decades, the FNC hosts Trump trusts the most have called for military strikes on Iran.
Last June, FNC personalities Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade urged Trump to bomb Iran and then lavished praise on him when he did. Hannity said the bombing would “go down in history as one of the great military victories.”
In the past weeks, Gertz wrote, the same figures have been urging Trump to attack. But their goal appeared to be the bombing itself. They expected an easy victory, without defining what that might look like. According to Kilmeade, the U.S. would “lose credibility forever” if it didn’t hit Iran. On Friday morning, Kilmeade said: “I hope the president chooses to go at it. We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this president likes to make history.”
On Friday night, Levin told Hannity: “This president knows right from wrong. He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there’s only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this. We don’t need to put up with their crap. It’s time to put it to an end.”
On Saturday, after Trump had started the bombing, Levin said: “Donald Trump did what nobody else could do for half a century. How do you like that? And you know why he did it? Because he loves his country.”
Trump’s strikes on Iran could have had something to do with the increasing heat over the Epstein files or his fury that the Supreme Court struck down his tariff walls, which were central not only to his economic program but also to his pressure on foreign governments and companies to do his bidding. Possibly he was responding to pressure from Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, or both.
Whatever their immediate trigger, the strikes fall in line with the ideology of cowboy individualism that began to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s and which, under Trump, has turned into brutal displays of dominance. The old idea of a cowboy from rural America who cuts through the government bureaucracy that threatens his livelihood by coddling racial minorities and women has curdled into the notion that a leader can do whatever it takes, including violence, to force opponents to submit to his will.
In foreign affairs, that means smashing the international alliances built after World War II. One of the crowning achievements of that international order is the United Nations, constructed to maintain international peace and security by creating organizations that could provide a forum for diplomacy and stop countries from attacking each other. The U.S. currently owes the U.N. nearly $4 billion in unpaid dues as Trump seeks to replace the organization with his own “Board of Peace” that he alone controls. This month, the U.S. holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, enabling it to set the agenda. Today, Trump sent First Lady Melania Trump to chair the meeting, the first time a presidential spouse has done so.
Another of the crowning achievements of the post–World War II international order is the Geneva Conventions, which define the legal treatment of noncombatants in war. In his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King (I-ME), who pressed him on the issue, that he would uphold the Geneva Conventions.
In the ideology that honors violent domination, Trump’s bombing Iran without regard for the Constitution or international law, when no president before him had done so, proves his strength. Hegseth illustrated that idea this morning when he said: “For forty-seven long years, the expansionist and Islamist regime in Tehran has waged a savage, one-sided war against America.” Hegseth, who was a Fox News Channel weekend host before becoming secretary of defense, tried to turn the administration’s military operation into a heroic stand in a silent war that had lasted for two generations.
Claiming the U.S. attacks on Iran that started this conflagration were defensive, rather than offensive, Hegseth claimed: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we are finishing it…. It took the 47th president, a fighter who always puts America first, to finally draw the line after 47 years of Iranian belligerence. He reminded the world, as he has time and time again…if you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down, without apology and without hesitation, and we will kill you.”
Hegseth celebrated Israel and its strikes alongside the U.S., while he condemned “so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force. America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history…. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”
In this ideology, the dominance itself is the point: there is no other endgame.
But this ideology was always based on a myth that played well on television. Three days into the attack on Iran, there is increasing scrutiny of the assertions from government officials. According to Dustin Volz, Alexander Ward, and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal, lawmakers and experts say those assertions are “incomplete, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.”
And as the conflagration spreads, taking the lives of now six of our military personnel, the administration is now discovering that the American people would like to know why we are engaged in what appears to be a war of choice, and why this approach to the world is better than the one that kept us safe for 80 years.
Today the State Department told U.S. citizens to leave Gulf states immediately because of “serious safety risks,” “using available commercial transportation.” But many of the airports in the region are closed, some because they have been hit in the fighting. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) posted on social media: “Dear [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]: You told Americans to depart now via commercial means when you know many airports/airspace are closed. YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY SCHEDULE U.S. GOVERNMENT EVACUATION FLIGHTS FOR THE STRANDED AMERICANS IN DANGER. Maybe you should have thought of a frickin’ plan first.”
Retired Major General Randy Manner, who is currently stranded in the United Arab Emirates, told CNN: “It seems to me that the purpose and mission have been shifting over the past few days and the past few weeks. Initially, it was to ensure that they could not continue to develop nuclear weapons. Now it’s about regime change, and then there’s so many things that are being piled onto the mission list, it almost seems like someone googled it before the brief, to throw everything…in the kitchen sink into it. So it’s a little bit disconcerting.
“And, in fact, one of the small things that does matter to tens of thousands of people here, as well as to their families: It’s a little bit disheartening and a little bit envious to hear that the BBC has announced that the U.K. government is actually arranging transport for the British citizens to be able to extract them, whereas here, for us as Americans, we feel abandoned. The State Departments have talked to two embassy personnel, two different embassies. They are in survival mode, quite frankly, because as we know, the administration reduced their budgets by almost one half over the past year. So this is a difficult situation for people who are not used to being in a combat situation. And that, of course, is, quite frankly, probably 99% of the travelers that are here.”
Former paratrooper and Army Ranger Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) also had something to say about the reality of war. “I learned, years ago, that when elites like Donald Trump bang the war drums and pound their chests in Washington, D.C., and talk about sending troops into the ground or into combat, he’s not talking about his kids. He’s not talking about all of his minions’ kids. He is talking about kids like me and the people that I grew up [with] in working-class areas, rural places around the country that have to pick up rifles, jump in the tanks or helicopters, and…do the tough work. Well, America is over it. America is over the three trillion dollars we’ve spent. The quagmires of failed nation building. The sending of our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters to enrich oil executives. America is over endless adventurism using our military. Because they want their infrastructure rebuilt. They want quality affordable healthcare. They want to be able to afford groceries. They want to be able to afford a home. They want to be able to send their kids to school.”
