Consider three of the biggest developments in our politics right now: We just learned that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, a capstone to a terrible year in terms of job creation. President Trump has fired widely despised Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a key architect of his mass deportations. And reports are indicating that the killing of scores of Iranian schoolchildren might have been the handiwork of the United States.
What links all these things? In addition to the massive human toll they’re inflicting, they suggest that Trump is about to pull off a unique trifecta. He is squandering the advantage he and Republicans have enjoyed in recent years on three major GOP-friendly issues: The economy, immigration, and national security.
This isn’t meant as a political gotcha; it has important ideological and policy implications. When Trump took office last year, it was reasonable to fear that the American public would rally behind mass deportations and tariffs—that is, embrace two of the main tenets of right-wing nationalism. Meanwhile, the launch of the largest military attack in the Mideast in decades might have plausibly produced a rally-around-the-war-president effect.
None of that is happening. And that’s significant in not-so-obvious ways.
Let’s start with Trump and national security. According to an extraordinary video analysis by The New York Times, the horrific bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran—which killed 175 people, many children—occurred while the United States was conducting missile strikes in the area aimed at a nearby Iranian naval base.
What’s more, Reuters reports that military investigators now believe U.S. forces likely bombed the school. We should suspend final judgement, of course. But it’s looking very much like this atrocity—one of the worst massacres of civilians in memory—is the result of Trump’s war. Whatever we learn about it, there will inevitably be more such horrors.
Now look at this in the context of remarks from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House adviser Stephen Miller. Hegseth recently declared that the United States is dispensing with “stupid rules of engagement” and will no longer fight “politically correct wars.” Miller recently enthused that Trump’s military doesn’t have “its hands tied behind its back,” mocked the very idea of human rights, and insisted that “strength” and “force” and “power” are fundamentally all that matter in the international arena.
But we’re now learning why we have the sort of constraints on military conduct these men ridicule. “Trump, Miller and Hegseth’s FAFO approach to the use of official government force and violence comes with considerable risk,” Democratic Congressman Adam Smith told me, employing the acronym for “**** Around and Find Out.” Atrocities like the school bombing, he added, show the perils that come when we “brazenly dismiss any sort of rules of engagement designed to protect the lives and rights of civilians.”
The swaggering certainty of Hegseth and Miller, those two giants of American statecraft, is what’s notable here. As Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, at times like this you can almost smell MAGA’s “bloodlust.” Clearly they have no doubt the public will rally behind this supposed display of Trump’s “strength.” Or maybe they don’t think it matters what the public thinks.
But it does matter. Data analyst G. Elliott Morris averaged high quality polling on Trump’s Iran invasion, and found that only 38 percent of respondents approve—the lowest initial support for an American war perhaps ever. Trump’s overall approval has also dropped a hair since the bombing began—it’s hovering at around 39-58—leading Morris to conclude that no rally-around-the-flag effect is materializing.
Also note that a CNN poll just showed that 59 percent don’t trust Trump to make the right decisions regarding the use of force in Iran, suggesting already-entrenched skepticism of Trump’s commander-in-chief abilities exactly when a “war president” boomlet might be expected to kick in. The school bombing will make this worse. In short, Trump has no built-in national security advantage. If anything he’s viewed as bad on it.
I’ve already tried to demonstrate at length that Trump is throwing away the GOP’s recent edge on the economy and immigration, too. The latest news reinforces this: The abysmal jobs report adds to a bigger picture in which job growth has been significantly lower under Trump than under his predecessor. His numbers on the economy are awful.
Meanwhile, Noem’s firing is partly a response to public anger over Trump’s invasion of Minneapolis. But it won’t solve his deeper problem. As long as the underlying agenda remains Miller’s dream of national ethnic reengineering—which requires going after non-criminals to get removal numbers up, necessitating more paramilitary violence in our communities—Trump will tank on the issue. As TNR’s Michael Tomasky notes, the durable public backlash is the big story here. Indeed, by one calculation, Trump’s net approval on immigration since last year has dropped by 20 points.
None of this guarantees a Democratic win this fall, and a rebound remains possible. Trump might end the war on a claim of victory, dial back paramilitary violence against Americans, and enjoy some kind of economic resurgence. Yet right now, George W. Bush’s fate is beckoning. While immigration was less relevant back then, the financial crisis and Iraq debacle wrecked Bush’s standing on the economy and foreign affairs alike. Iraq—and Hurricane Katrina—irreparably broke public impressions of Bush’s executive competence. From 2016 onward, Republicans largely recaptured these issues. But now Trump is drifting close to the Bush danger zone.
There’s another through-line here. I guarantee you that Miller and Hegseth believe a latent majority out there is quietly rallying behind zero-sum malignant nationalism (tariffs regardless of the consequences), the treatment of all undocumented immigrants as criminals (mass deportations), and a kill-first-think-later military posture (what Hegseth calls the “warrior ethic”).
This calculus assumes most voters will unthinkingly glimpse “strength” in nationalist belligerence, in unshackled state violence at home and abroad, in nakedly authoritarian abuses of power. The Miller-Hegseth calculation resembles the old Bill Clinton adage—that being “strong and wrong” is always politically better than “weak and right.” Trump can’t lose as long as he’s cracking the heads of the right “enemies,” whether they’re Euroweenie elites, “criminal illegal aliens,” or what Miller calls the “savages” in the Mideast.
That supreme hubris is now breaking up on the shoals of Trump’s malevolence and incompetence on tariffs, his undisguised white nationalist brutality on immigration, and his sociopathic warmongering amid an obvious lack of any real war rationale. In 2024, Trump coasted on (undeserved) GOP strength on the economy, immigration, and national security, but those pillars are now crumbling. Americans are seeing the real “America First” agenda up close—militarism, imperialism, malign nationalism, unabashed authoritarianism—and they’re recoiling. Though this is small consolation amid all the darkness enveloping us, it’s nonetheless a heartening development indeed.
As the Iranians get closer to naming their next supreme leader, President Donald Trump said Sunday the new leader "is not going to last long" if the Iranians don't get his approval first.
"He’s going to have to get approval from us," the president told ABC News. "If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it."
He added, "I don’t want people to have to go back in five years and have to do the same thing again or worse let them have a nuclear weapon."
When asked if he would be willing to approve someone with ties to the old regime, Trump replied, "I would, in order to choose a good leader I would, yeah, I would. There are numerous people that could qualify."
Seeming to offer yet another justification for this war, Trump said Iran was planning to take over the entire Middle East, and suggested he stopped them from doing so.
"They are a paper tiger. They weren’t a paper tiger a week ago, I’ll tell you. And they were going to attack," he said. "Their plan was to attack the entire Middle East, to take over the entire Middle East."
Donald Trump was at Dover Air Force Base Saturday for the dignified transfer of the six United States service members killed in Kuwait, and … well, there were some folks who felt like the President didn’t handle himself in a very dignified manner.
The issue?
Well, as others bowed their heads, Trump did not appear to do so. Also, he wore a white USA baseball cap that he did not take off during the ceremony.
“This fool has ABSOLUTELY no sense of dignity of appreciation for the moment,” former RNC chairman Michael Steele wrote on X while sharing a photo of Trump with his hat on. “It is called the Dignified Transfer for a reason. Take your (expletive) hat off.”
“Trump just wore a campaign hat to a dignified transfer for fallen U.S. soldiers that were killed during his Iranian blunder,’ Chris D. Jackson wrote on X. “These are the same people who spent week attacking Biden for briefly glancing at his watch. The hypocrisy is absolute. There is no bottom for these people.”
“Disgraceful that Trump is wearing a white baseball hat at the dignified transfer,” Blue Georgia wrote on X.
“The president of the United States has a baseball cap on during a dignified transfer of six American service members who were killed in war with Iran,” another wrote on X. “He couldn’t even be bothered to take his (expletive) hat off. Donald Trump is a deplorable, callous piece of (expletive).”
“Obama not wearing a tie into the Oval Office was a days long scandal,” Scary Lawyerguy wrote on X. “Trump wearing a (expletive) baseball hat while dead US soldiers were taken off a plane at Dover AFB and it’s crickets.”
There were plenty more comments like that. It will be interesting to see if the President is asked about the hat and the reaction to it.
The soldiers killed in action were Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, Capt. Cody Khork, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan, Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens and Sgt. Declan Coady.
We’re now living through times of immense tragedy. Greater, I think, than many understand or know. Our civilization is unravelling before our eyes. And for those of you, like me, who believe that the golden thread of civilization itself is humankind’s greatest accomplishment, binding all others together—perhaps you share my sense of loss and grief, too.
What Trump wants. By now, the answer is before our eyes. It’s an impossible one. A pornographic one. Before we say it out loud, even now, we must guard ourselves from it, because Trump, first and foremost, is a pornographer. A pornographer of the human spirit. A defiler of the human mind. He makes everything around him obscene, from women’s faces, to tacky gold accoutrements, to language itself, to nations themselves. He is a pornographer who creates obscenity: spectacles of desire, inadequacy, and rage, lurid fantasies of wish-fulfillment made flesh.
Trump, this pornographer of the human spirit, wants to be something so grotesque, that we must curse ourselves every time we say its name out loud. Because when we do, we invoke all the demons of history before us. And so too, we must exorcise them.
He wants to be dictator of the world.
Take it in for a moment, before we discuss its weight, import, and gravity. It head-spinning hubris, its bewildering idiocy, and, too, its foreshadowing of horror, Just sit with the most terrible thought of all for a second, which is now before us, and coming true.
Trump wants to be dictator of the world. The evidence around us is crystal clear. It’s in the shattered ruins of the jewels that used to be civilization. Can you see it yet?
When Trump says, I will hand-pick who leads this nation or that one, that’s the stuff of…a dictator of the world.
When he chokes off the energy of an entire world, which is all but sure to lead to lead to devastation, that’s the stuff of…a dictator of such a world.
When he says to this nation, you can have pennies, you can have resources, I exempt you from the very rules I have created, like “letting” India have Russian energy…that’s the stuff of a dictator of the world.
When he cavorts, gleefully, with losing millions of people their life savings, from America to Japan to Europe, that’s the stuff of…a dictator of the world.
Economically. Financially, Politically. Socially, culturally. Even morally—he decides who is “right.”
Trump wants to be dictator of the world.
And in this vision, the wars, attacks, enmity, hostility, rage—these are one by one the pornographic spectacles which build to the climax. You see, I phrased the above in the wrong tense. Trump is already becoming dictator of the world.
His tawdry vision of such a world is already there before us, and exactly what you’d imagined a “really great businessman” to come up with, LOL. The world is be run by a “board”, a “board of peace,” no less. And somehow, Trump has improved on Orwell. He’s an ever better dystopian. For Orwell, war was peace, but in the hands of government. Trump’s vision of the world is that it’s a giant corporation, and wouldn’t you know, guess who the “chairman of the board” is?
So…what does that make everyone else? Please, stay here with me. It is so vital that we discuss this, and that you understand this. If the world is a giant corporation, and Trump is its “chairman of the board,” then what are…you? The “shareholders” are to be those who pay Trump his extortion-mafia-racket fee. I suppose that you are just a worker in this corporation, and perhaps a consumer in it. What you don’t have in such a vision of the world is any existence whatsoever as a political, social, cultural, financial, or economic agent. You have no existence whatsoever in sociopolitical terms, in fact.
You are just a pawn, a nothing. You’re Beirut, fleeing the bombs. You’re an innocent family in Tehran, cowering under the fire. You’re the average American, watching their life savings turn literally to smoke. You’re nothing, nobody, and never will be. Do I go too far? Does the taste of my contempt make the room unbearable for you to be in? Stay here with me, because I am not the one who created this obscenity.
Obscene is the only word to describe all this. Trump is a pornographer, and his business, really, is obscenity. He’s obscenitymaxxing, day after day, if you need a clever portmanteau. Precisely because he is becoming dictator of the world.
But can we live in such a world? What does it mean for a world to have a dictator? Even a man who has failed at becoming one, in the end? Did you hear the 1930s whispering to you just now from the shadows?
Now I want you to think in civilizational terms. We live in a world where, for people like you and me, it appears that the processes of thinking, rationality, imagination, judgment, reflection, have broken down catastrophically. So when I ask you to think with me I know that I am asking for something very dangerous. Winston Smith’s second most revolutionary act was thinking, and his first was loving.
A dictator of the world.
Let us go back in time, to its distant recesses. Can you find an example of such a thing? Empires had emperors, true. But even then, there was no…dictator of the world. Perhaps some tried to be. Alexander. Caesar. The list of imperial conquerors is long, and their names are bestowed on babies to this day.
The world has never had an emperor before.
It has had many terrible institutions. And these are the demons of history. Slavery. War. Empire. Casteism. Hatred, bigotry, ignorance. History has a cave full of demons. And they still cackle there. Only a fool would say that to this day, we are free of these demons. We are not.
But perhaps now, here, we meet the devil himself.
An emperor of the world.
A figure who thinks that he is to make the political, economic, and financial decisions of a world, for it. To decide who is to pay what price, and when. How much more will gas cost you next week? And groceries next month? How much money did you lose in the stock market this week? And he is to decide who lives and who dies. A million people will have fled Beirut this weekend. How many have already fled the rest of the region? Who is to have the right to live, how, where, for how long, in what way?
A dictator of the world. An emperor of emperors. A king of kings, in the way that defiles the living truth of the prophet billions believe in, and his message of love and peace. A power only unto himself, over the world. I am the only sovereign left. This is what Trump said not so long ago. But did we understand his meaning?
Who has tried to be a dictator of the world before? Here, we meet history’s truest monsters. It’s only in modern times that we even had personas who attempted to be such a thing, precisely because only as we crossed into modernity did we have a global civilization at all. Do I need to remind you who we’re talking about? Am I allowed to use the Hitler comparison, or will the New York Times call me an “alarmist”? How many more bombs have to fall?
Only in modernity have we seen figures repellent enough to indulge the dream of being dictators of the world. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito. And perhaps it was true that in ancient history, there were those, too who, almost dreamed of such a thing—but they knew, then, too, that it was beyond their grasp. The limits of “civilization,” to the Romans, stretched only to the barbarians. Their grasp was only so long, then. But now?
Now we find ourselves confronted with the most barbarous idea that has ever been. A dictator of the world.
To my mind, all history’s other demons shrink by comparison. Slavery, war, empire. What are these, next to a dictator, ruler, emperor, of the world, a modern one, who has the grasp to devastate an entire world? There’s Trump, openly demanding that he “hand picks” who leads Venezuela, Iran, Cuba. Who’s next? Canada? Denmark? France? Of course we know it hardly ends here. There’s Trump, choking off a world’s energy, crashing its stock markets, cratering billions of people’s life savings, triggering a shockwave of ruin— gleefully.
As if all this were nothing at all. Here I am, toying with a world. It is my plaything. Look mom, look dad, see how you abused me once? See how powerful I am now. Do you love me now? Do you respect me yet? The world is mine, and I will crush it like an ant, if that is what pleases me.
To say that one wants to be a dictator of the world is the most obscene thought of all. I suppose there are some who will object to my “framing” of pornography as something negative. I am speaking metaphorically. There are many things far more pornographic than mere pornography in this world of ours now. Porn is something one click away. But pornography? The stuff of lurid desire, of flesh for fantasy, of omnipotence and omniscience? That is what I mean, and in that way, to even imagine one’s self to be dictator of the world is the most obscene thing of all.
It is not a thing civilized minds think. Children fantasize about it, but only in childish ways—their world is little. It is not the world. Here we have an infantile mind, with the arms of the world’s most powerful man, using them to become the world’s first global dictator. Those of us who think in a healthy, mature adult way? To do that is precisely to understand and accept human fallibility and frailty. And therefore to grant all others dignity, respect, and existence.
Trump wants to be dictator of the world. And it’s not enough to say that he will surely fail. Because that road, my friends, is oblivion for us all. And not the sweetest kind. But the stuff only of darkness with no redemption. It is the road of true ruin, from depression to atrocity to war to breakdown and collapse.
We are in a civilizational crisis now.
In this, we find ourselves at one of history’s bleakest moments. Because there has never been a dictator of the world before. Will there be now? Wrong question. All history’s demons kneel. They have have met the devil himself. And so, now, have we.
Brandon9000 wrote:It is reassuring that at least you can correctly interpret Trump's ever-changing rationale for the war on Iran.It really isn't complicated.
Officials seem unable to land on one coherent reason for the attacks.
But since Trump wrote thaat the US has won the war ("We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won! President DONALD J. TRUMP"), it doesn't really matter.
Although there may be other benefits, Trump invaded Iran to prevent the world's chief sponsor of terror who chant "Death to America" every day from acquiring atomic bombs.
“Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it… We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel.”
Trump’s answers to The Times of Israel pointed to the significant degree of influence Netanyahu would appear to have over Trump’s decision-making in the war, which the US and Israel launched jointly on February 28 with a strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
The US president then made a new assertion regarding Iran’s intentions, in an apparent attempt to justify the decision to launch the war against the Islamic Republic eight days earlier.
“Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it… and now look what we have — we have them being destroyed,” Trump said of Iran.
Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump was among the dignitaries who attended the dignified transfer returning the remains of the six U.S. soldiers killed in the military action against Iran to the United States for burial. At the transfer, Trump wore a white USA baseball cap for sale in his campaign store.
Recognizing that Americans would recoil from seeing Trump wear a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, the Fox News Channel declined to show how he had looked yesterday and aired old footage of Trump from his first term without the hat. Caught in their lie, the Fox News Channel admitted they had shown the wrong footage but claimed it was inadvertent. They did not, however, show the real footage from yesterday, showing Trump wearing his merch.
The producers at the Fox News Channel seemed to recognize that Trump’s USA hat at a dignified transfer looked like deliberate disrespect for those whose lives had been taken in the service of our country. They seemed to understand the gulf between the administration’s cartoonish approach to the war in Iran and the reality of war for those participating in it.
The official social media account of the White House has portrayed its military adventures in Iran as a movie, or a game, splicing images from what appear to be footage of U.S. military strikes with clips from adventure movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Undeterred by criticism, White House communications director Steven Cheung called for supporters to show their enthusiasm for one of the videos in comments below it.
Last Thursday, March 5, Trump talked to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl about the war. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” Karl answered that “nobody questions the success of the military operation, the concern is what happens next.”
“Forget about next,” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”
“We’re marching through the world,” Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told a laughing Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel this morning. “We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re gonna have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I have never seen anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan Plus. Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.”
The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism. Since the 1950s, right-wing ideologues in the United States have embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right. That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.
The idea of white men acting for freedom and justice on their own, unhampered by a government that served Black Americans, people of color, and women, became a guiding image for the rising right wing beginning with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. It found a home in the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan in 1980, as supporters took a stand against a federal government they insisted was redistributing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women.
That cowboy individualism spread into foreign affairs as well, until by 2003, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh could use it as shorthand to defend President George W. Bush’s military operation in Iraq. Just after the 2003 capture of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Limbaugh gushed about presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who had ignored the rules imposed by “liberals” and fixed what was wrong with the world. Limbaugh explained that Reagan was a cowboy: “He was brave, positive, and gave us hope. He wore a white hat…. Liberals hated Ronald Reagan.”
Limbaugh continued: “They also hate President Bush because he distinguishes between good and evil. He calls a spade a spade, and after 9-11 called evil ‘evil,’ without mincing any words, to the shock of the liberal establishment. That’s what cowboys do, you know…. In the old West, might did not make right. Right made might. Cowboys in white hats were always on the side of right, and that was their might. I am glad my President is a cowboy. He got his man! Cowboys do, you know.”
In Breaking the News today, James Fallows wrote that that way back in 2015, he concluded that “it had become far too easy for political leaders to strut and posture about ‘honoring the troops’—the Hegseth term ‘warfighters’ was not yet in common use—but then to commit them in half-thought-through “forever” wars, since so much of the public was so insulated from the consequences.”
But if Trump’s Iran adventure began with the strutting and posturing of a military performance, it is running hard into reality. It appears that Trump saw the strikes themselves as the culmination of his performance and did not have a plan for what would happen after them. He has said he was surprised that the conflict has included neighboring states.
Now the ships that carry about 20% of the world’s oil are not traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, and oil prices are surging. Rising oil prices are already hitting Americans at the gas pump—gasoline prices rose 14% last week—and will also hit the economy in general as jet fuel and diesel for trucks and tractors become more expensive. Trump tonight posted that high oil prices are “a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY.”
The public support for the financing of this war is different from that of past adventures. While President George W. Bush could borrow to pay the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, 2026 is a different story. The national debt has ballooned in the two decades since the Iraq war, and Republicans last summer justified their dramatic cuts to government programs, including healthcare and supplemental nutrition assistance, by insisting that it must be addressed. Now Trump is spending an estimated $1 billion a day on Operation Epic Fury, highlighting that while there was no money for programs that helped the American people, there appears to be plenty for a war of choice in the Middle East.
Since the 1980s, Republican presidents have been able to sell their military adventures with the argument that, like cowboys, they were cutting through bureaucracy and laws in order to do what was right. As Limbaugh described it, they were never looking for trouble, but when trouble came they faced it with courage. They were always on the side of right, defending good people against bad people. They had high morals and spoke the truth. They were “a beacon of integrity in the wild, wild West.”
The fantasy of those who embraced cowboy individualism was that if only they could have full sway, they would solve the world’s problems and keep Americans safe. But the conduct of the war is starting to illustrate that any claims of a moral code disappear when a leader exercises military might on a whim. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. will not be bound by any “stupid rules of engagement” and will rain down “[d]eath and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he said, “and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
On Wednesday, March 4, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters. The vessel was not participating in hostilities; it was off Sri Lanka returning from a naval exercise organized by India in the Bay of Bengal. In the past, the U.S. has participated in those exercises.
Andrew Roth, Cate Brown, and Hannah Ellis-Peterson of The Guardian noted that submarine attacks since World War II have been incredibly rare, as are attacks on vessels not taking part in hostilities. The ship was believed to have 180 people on board; Sri Lankan officials said they rescued 32 and recovered 87 bodies from the water. Hegseth boasted: “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.”
On Thursday, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali of Reuters reported that the U.S. appears to bear responsibility for the February 28 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, in the early waves of the Israeli-U.S. attack. The strike appears to have killed 168 people or more, many of them children. Since the Reuters report, others have noted that the U.S. was operating in the area and Israel was not. The strike remains under investigation.
After Saturday’s dignified transfer, Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” he said. “It’s a sad part of war.”
“It’s the bad part of war.”
Although there may be other benefits...
...Trump invaded Iran to prevent the world's chief sponsor of terror who chant "Death to America" every day from acquiring atomic bombs.
The JCPOA, which imposed restrictions on Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief, was signed on July 14, 2015. It was agreed to by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council -- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States -- as well as Germany and the European Union.
The JCPOA was designed to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program would be exclusively peaceful and provided for the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions in order to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. source
He tried to negotiate with them.
This made invasion absolutely necessary.
It's better than having Washington, DC or New York City vaporized.
The US-Israel relationship is finally facing a reckoning. It doesn’t need to slide into antisemitism
Joel Swanson
Israel’s role in drawing the US into a war on Iran is attracting healthy scrutiny. It’s also creating a permission structure for antisemitism
The joint US-Israel military strikes on Iran have forced a reckoning that American political culture has been approaching for years, but has perhaps never had to face as head-on as it does right now. It is a reckoning that contains two urgent, legitimate, and partially contradictory imperatives – and neither should be abandoned.
Let us start with one simple truth. Israel’s role in drawing the United States into military action against Iran warrants serious scrutiny. Whatever one believes about the strategic logic of the strikes, the process by which the United States came to participate in them raises profound questions about the relationship between the two countries. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has claimed that the US struck Iran partly because it knew Israel was going to act unilaterally and feared the blowback. In other words, Israeli strategic priorities shaped American military timing, and by extension, American casualties.
This does not mean, as some politicians have suggested, that Israel forced the US to do something it did not already want to do. The Israeli government does not have that power over the world’s most powerful military. Nonetheless, the degree to which intelligence-sharing, lobbying pressure, and the assumption of aligned interests drove US decision-making must be considered. They are exactly the kinds of questions that democratic oversight of military action demands. Only 21% of Americans supported strikes on Iran before they began. The public deserves a fuller accounting of how we got here.
Too many Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) have suggested that this is the time to get behind the war effort and not to ask questions. But to say that Americans should not ask questions about the relationship between Israel and the United States because it might raise antisemitic conspiracy theories means handing over the tools of democratic accountability. That is too high a price.
And yet. The questions are not being asked only by sober foreign policy analysts. They are being asked, in far cruder form, by people who have never needed a pretext to believe that Jewish power secretly governs American foreign policy. In the days since the strikes, social media has been awash in the language of “puppet masters”, “dual loyalties” and insinuations that Jewish money bought American blood. The phrase “Israel first” – often wielded as an insinuation that US politicians are controlled by Jews – has surged across platforms. Far-right influencers have recycled rat imagery in ways that consciously echo Nazi propaganda.
What is uncomfortable about this time period is how easily legitimate questions about Israel’s role in stoking this war can slide into conspiracy theories. The lines are not always as easy to maintain as we might like. And it is at times hard to distinguish between legitimate criticism and dangerous tropes.
This is the dual-edged reality of a political moment in which criticism of Israel has become newly acceptable across the American political spectrum. On the left, the shift has been building since the Gaza war of 2023–2024, which moved a generation of younger progressive voters toward a far more skeptical view of the US-Israel relationship than their predecessors held. On the right, a strand of nationalist isolationism – long present but previously subordinate – has found in influential figures such as Tucker Carlson and elements of the Maga coalition a large platform for questioning American commitments to Israel on “America first” grounds. Carlson has characterized the relationship as “deeply destructive and humiliating”, while also providing a platform to multiple Holocaust deniers. Candace Owens has called the Israeli government “not America’s ally”, while also advancing antisemitic conspiracies about the Talmud.
The critiques from across the political spectrum have converged on a shared conclusion: American policy toward Israel has been too uncritical for too long. Polling bears this out: American sympathy for Israel hit an all-time low in 2025, falling beneath 50% for the first time in nearly 25 years of Gallup tracking.
That convergence contains something genuinely healthy. A relationship between two countries that cannot be examined, questioned or criticized is not an alliance; it is a dependency.
And at a time when the state of Israel is committing what nearly every international and Israeli human rights group considers to be a genocide in Gaza, while implementing an apartheid regime in the West Bank, the US cannot afford to simply continue to provide unquestioned financial support to the Israeli government, even to the extent of violating American human rights law to do so.
But healthy critique does not exist in a vacuum. This is happening during a time of increased anti-Jewish violence – a year that included the arson of a Jewish governor’s home, a firebombing in Boulder, and a murder outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.
To be sure, the lines between violence committed against the state of Israel and its representatives in the US, and violence committed against Jews, can be very difficult to parse, but this difficulty is in fact part of the challenge. This challenge is made even harder by the fact that too many of the American organizations which collect statistics about antisemitism deliberately erase the distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, making accurate statistics about rising antisemitism difficult to come by. But what we do know is that we are living in a moment when there is more criticism of Israel in American political discourse than there has been in decades, and that this represents a healthy instinct for questioning Israeli policy, and it is also creating a permission structure for greater antisemitism. Unfortunately, the two travel together, and the increased acceptability of one can at times lend cover to the other.
At times, the reductive attempt to attribute all agency to Israel, and thereby minimize the agency of the United States in making its own decision to join the war against Iran, occludes a clearsighted geopolitical analysis. After the recent attack on Iran, former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Trump of “wanting to fight wars for Israel”, and Tucker Carlson referred to the war as “Israel’s war”.
The real challenge here is that figures like Carlson and Greene are using genuine concerns about US foreign policy towards Israel, and whether it really serves American interests, to attract followers who might not be aware of their bigotries. It is valuable and necessary to ask questions about Israel’s role in US foreign policy. It is not defensible to praise Holocaust revisionists or to blame the Jews for killing Jesus. And the fact that the same figures can go from one to the other is part of why this moment is so dangerous, and so fraught.
There is no clean solution. But anyone who tells you that the way to fight antisemitism is to stop criticizing Israeli policy, or that the way to enable honest critique of Israel is to simply tolerate the antisemitism that attaches itself to that critique, is offering you a false and ultimately cowardly choice.
The only intellectually honest path is to hold both commitments simultaneously, without letting either moderate the other. We must be willing to criticize Israel as though antisemitism does not exist: that is, without softening legitimate questions about Israeli policy or American complicity in it for fear of how those questions might be misused. And we must be willing to name and fight antisemitism as though the state of Israel does not exist: that is, without treating every accusation of hatred of Jews as a defense of Israeli government policy, and without exempting anti-Israel rhetoric from scrutiny simply because it comes wrapped in the language of anti-imperialism or national sovereignty.
These two commitments will sometimes feel as if they are pulling in opposite directions. They will require us to make fine distinctions in moments when fine distinctions are unpopular. They will require intellectual honesty from people who prefer the comfort of a single, unified enemy.
But the alternative – sacrificing either accountability or decency – is a price a genuinely democratic society cannot afford to pay.
Joel Swanson is professor of Jewish studies at Sarah Lawrence College
The other objection to this idea is that the bulk of the Iranian population is hostile to the Kurds. It's not as if they'd be welcomed outside of their current territory in the north of the country.
