...which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years...
Quote:...which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years...
Does he really believe this crap? I can't recall anyone, not one president, ever clamoring for a f-ing ballroom in the White House, in Washington, or anywhere in the USA. It's like something from the era of Louis the Fourteenth.
And don't get me started on the "Triumphal Arch"...
It is impossible to overlook the fact that Trump has crossed the line between strategic eccentricity and outright madness.
This morning, after a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect Thursday, Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial ships. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Iran’s leadership has said it would not recognize a ceasefire with the United States until Israel’s bombing of Lebanon stopped.
With Iran’s announcement the strait was open, Trump hit the media circle, announcing through interviews and social media posts that the war with Iran was over and peace talks were all but done, although Trump said the U.S. Navy will continue to blockade Iran’s ports. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted that Trump posted thirteen times in an hour claiming total victory.
He claimed that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” He said that the United States would work with Iran at “a leisurely pace” to retrieve and capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium and that Iran would receive no money for its cooperation despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Iran giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium.
Right on cue the stock market jumped and the price of oil futures dropped. Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”
But, as Ashley Ahn of the New York Times reported, Iranian officials’ interpretation of events was quite different from Trump’s characterization. Iran’s top negotiator, speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour, and all seven of them were false. Iran rejected Trump’s claim that it had agreed to hand over its uranium stockpile, and also said that the strait was open for commercial vessels—not military ships—but would close again if the U.S. blockade continued.
Tonight on Air Force One, after the stock market closed, when asked if Iran would turn over its nuclear material, Trump said: “We’re taking it. We’re taking it. Very simple. We’re taking it. With Iran. We’re going in with Iran. We’re taking it. We will have it. I don’t call it boots on the ground. We’ll take it after the agreement is signed. After there— there’s a very big difference. Before and after. BC. It’s before, and after. And after the agreement is signed, it’s a lot different than before. We would have taken it. If we didn’t have an agreement, we would take it. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”
When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
While being able to announce the end of the Iran war—at least for now—relieves Trump’s immediate crisis, there are many others in the wings. This evening, an article in The Atlantic by Sarah Fitzpatrick portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endangers our national security. Fitzpatrick notes that Patel has kept his job thanks to his willingness to use the FBI to target Trump’s perceived enemies, but his focus on things like whether FBI merchandise looks “fierce” has made officials think “we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”
Writ even larger than the behavior of the director of the FBI is the growing focus on corruption in the Trump administration. On Wednesday, House Democrats announced they have created a task force to reinforce ethics rules and highlight the Trump family’s self-dealing when in office. The task force is made up of members from across the country and from different caucuses in the Democratic Party. Representative Joe Morelle, a fellow New Yorker and close ally of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries who is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, will lead the task force along with Kevin Mullin of California, Delia C. Ramirez of Illinois, and Nikema Williams of Georgia.
Also on the task force are the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Robert Garcia of California, and the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, as well as Congressional Progressive Caucus members Greg Casar of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the head of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, Brad Schneider of Illinois.
They will be looking into self-dealing like Trump’s current negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service to settle the $10 billion lawsuit he filed against it after an IRS contractor during his first term leaked some of his tax information, along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers, to two news outlets during Trump’s first term. Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, said the leak caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
Peter Nicholas of NBC News noted in February that $10 billion is more than 80% of last year’s IRS budget.
Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press notes that several watchdog organizations have filed briefs challenging Trump’s lawsuit. Democracy Forward argued that the case is “extraordinary because the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics,” and that “the conflicts of interest make it uncertain whether the Department of Justice will zealously defend the public [treasury] in the same way that it has against other plaintiffs claiming damages for related events.”
On Wednesday, Democratic representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Dave Min of California, along with Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York, introduced the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act to ban presidents and vice presidents from stealing taxpayer money.
Pointing to the Department of Justice’s recent settlement of $1.2 million with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians before Trump took office, after he sued for $50 million on the grounds that the criminal case against him was malicious prosecution, Raskin warned of an “emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds and then settling the suit as a ‘defendant’ for big bucks.”
“Over the past 15 months, we have seen unprecedented corruption from this administration, but this new abuse of power of providing huge cash payments to ‘settle’ baseless lawsuits brought forward by Trump and his allies is a new low. The bill that Senator Warren, Leader Schumer, Ranking Member Raskin, and I are bringing forward would stop this backdoor bribery and bring some accountability back to the federal government,” said Representative Min.
In February, when the lawsuit came to public attention, Trump noted that it seemed odd for him to be negotiating with himself over the issue, but told reporters that he would give whatever monies he was awarded to charity. “We could make it a substantial amount,” he said. “Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”
On Friday, April 10, FBI Director Kash Patel was convinced that he had lost his job. Unable to log into an internal computer system, “he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House,” Atlantic staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick exclusively reports.
As news of the episode spread, the White House fielded calls from within the bureau and from members of Congress. If Patel had been ousted, who was in charge of the roughly 38,000 people employed by the FBI?
The answer, as it turned out, was still Patel. The access issue appears to have been a technical error. He had not been fired.
But he may have reason to worry, Fitzpatrick reports. She spoke with more than two dozen people about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Some expressed concerns about Patel’s behavior, including conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.
“On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly inebriated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials,” Fitzpatrick writes. “A request for ‘breaching equipment’—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.”
Patel’s behavior has, according to many of his FBI colleagues, raised concerns about public safety and national security.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that “Patel remains a critical player on the Administration’s law and order team.” The FBI responded with a statement, attributed to Patel: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.”
And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours. Citing the continuing U.S. blockade, Iranian officials announced they were closing the strait again. Reports say Iranian forces fired on two ships trying to cross the strait. Iranian media said: “Until the United States ends its interference with the full freedom of movement for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz will remain under intense control and in its previous state.”
Susannah George of the Washington Post noted that the fragile temporary ceasefire between Israel and the government of Lebanon also appears to be cracking. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Israel Defense Forces said Saturday that it believed Hezbollah had violated that ceasefire. It said: “IDF is authorized to take the necessary measures in self-defense against threats, while ensuring the security of Israeli civilians and the soldiers deployed in the area.”
This morning, Trump said Iran wanted “to close up the strait again, you know, as they’ve been doing for years, and they can’t blackmail us.” In fact, the strait was open until Trump began to bomb Iran on February 28. Trump’s choice of the word “blackmail” is interesting in this context, for there have been no public threats of exposing someone’s secrets or threatening harm to them in association with the crisis in Iran.
MeidasTouch reports that Iran says it has not agreed to further talks with the U.S. because of its pressure tactics and what it calls “unreasonable demands.”
The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Iranian political officials are not the ones controlling decision-making. Instead, it appears the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the primary force of the Iranian military, is in charge. Benoit Faucon of the Wall Street Journal writes that disagreements about what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz suggest divisions in Iran’s leadership.
Rebecca F. Elliott of the New York Times reminds readers that even if the strait does open fully, it will take weeks for oil from the region to flow back into world markets. High oil prices will persist for weeks, at least, as producers wait to make sure stability has really returned before they ramp production back up on the 20% of facilities in the region that have not been damaged. The damage from Trump’s attack on Iran “has inflicted the kind of damage that takes months, if not years, to repair,” Elliott wrote. Energy research and investment firm partner Arjun Murti told Elliott: “We don’t expect oil prices—and therefore pump prices—to go back to prewar levels.”
Once again, Trump’s announcement of the opening of the strait seemed timed to give the markets a bounce before the weekend. Those watching the markets observed massive trades yesterday just before Trump’s announcement. Regulators are currently examining similar trades from one of Trump’s similar announcements last month.
Meanwhile, Shelby Holliday, Michael R. Gordon, and Costas Paris of the Wall Street Journal report that the U.S. military is “preparing…to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters” in an attempt to force Iran to reopen the strait and back away from its nuclear program. President Barack Obama’s team, along with China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom had achieved both of those goals with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Trump tore up in 2018.
The journalists report that, as part of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, the U.S. Navy has already forced twenty-three ships trying to leave Iranian ports to turn back. Now it intends to take control of vessels around the world that are linked to Iran. The administration is calling this phase of the U.S. war against Iran “Economic Fury.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, said yesterday that the U.S. “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran. This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil. As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions or insurance requirements.”
On Wednesday the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, broke the record for the longest deployment of an aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War: 295 days. The vessel left its home port in June 2025 for the Mediterranean but was rerouted to the Caribbean as part of Trump’s buildup there. It took part in the capture of then–Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, then headed to the Middle East. A fire in one of its laundries left 600 sailors without berths, and it went to the Mediterranean for repairs.
Nahal Toosi of Politico wrote yesterday that, according to diplomatic cables she obtained from U.S. diplomats in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, the Iran war is hurting U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is losing the trust of the populations of those countries and possibly of their governments as well. Indonesia is the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world, with more than 287 million people, and under President Joe Biden the U.S. had been working to strengthen ties with it.
Trump’s erratic behavior has caught the attention of the New York Times, where on April 13 Peter Baker wrote that the president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” along with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV, “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.” Baker noted that retired generals, diplomats, foreign officials, and even Trump’s former allies on the right are all expressing concern.
Yesterday Steve Hendrix and Stefano Pitrelli of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s erratic behavior is alienating even those right-wing populists in Europe who hailed his reelection in the belief that it would strengthen their own hand. The authors say that Trump’s high tariffs, demands for Greenland, and surprise attack on Iran had already put right-wing leaders in an awkward position. For some of them, his portrayal of himself as Jesus on Orthodox Easter and his attacks on the pope are a bridge too far.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Catholic, said Trump’s attack on the Pope is “unacceptable.” In turn, Trump attacked Meloni, saying: “She doesn’t want to help us with NATO, she doesn’t want to help us get rid of nuclear weapons. She’s very different from what I thought. She’s no longer the same person, and Italy won’t be the same country.”
Supporting Trump appears to be a losing proposition in Europe, where last summer Europeans thought Trump was only slightly less dangerous to peace and security in Europe than Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In March a YouGov poll showed Trump with unfavorability ratings of 78% in France, 86% in Germany, and 80% in Italy.
On Wednesday, April 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would not renew the sanctions waivers that had permitted the sale of Russian oil. Yesterday the administration reversed that, renewing the waiver that allows countries to buy Russian oil and petroleum products loaded through May 16. The sale of oil provides a financial lifeline for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
Last night in Kansas, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is speaking across the country in support of Democratic candidates, explained to an audience why he is working so hard to restore American democracy. He said: “[W]hen you have one of those long nights, when you’re asking yourself, can I really do any more that I’ve already done? I want you to reach into whatever is your personal why.
“For me, the reason I make sure to hit the road and be with you on a night like this is actually, ironically, the very same thing that makes it a little bit harder than it used to be. When I woke up this morning before I headed to the airport, about 6:30 this morning, as usually happens, my first interaction was with a four-year-old boy. And I’m putting out the cereal for him and his sister. And he says, ‘Papa, can I come with you? On this trip?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think it’ll work out. I gotta go to Kansas. You gotta go to preschool, and…’ And then he walks up to me with, um, a Sonic the Hedgehog walkie-talkie. He tells me to put it in my briefcase. He says, ‘Take this with you. That way we can talk to each other.’
“I wasn’t sure whether I should explain how range works on walkie-talkies or not. Just gave him a big hug instead. But what I know is that it won’t be so long before he and his sister, who right now are asking me questions I can handle—like, the other day, I got: ‘Papa is a grapefruit bigger than a pineapple?’ I can handle that. But,what am I gonna do when they say, ‘Papa, back in the 2020s, did you do enough?’
“They’re gonna ask that, and I want to make sure we have a very good answer by the time they’re old enough to ask that question.”
Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.
The journalists describe an erratic president who entered the war after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him the Iranian people would support such strikes and after his successful extraction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores convinced him the military could pull off another quick victory. He seemed to believe that if his gamble worked, he would be saving the world.
But while the strikes did indeed kill Iran’s top leaders and badly damage its military, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump did not foresee this outcome, although he was warned of it. He told his team that the Iranian government would give up before it closed the strait and, if it did manage to close the strait, the U.S. military would handle it. The journalists report Trump has “marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed.”
Once the strait was closed, the president flipped back and forth between demanding other countries help reopen it and insisting the U.S. didn’t need any help, between wanting to fight and calling for negotiations. On April 5, Easter morning, after the recovery of the second airman, he turned to trying to scare Iranian leaders into reopening the strait and ending the conflict, warning: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”
He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” was “improvisational,” officials told Dawsey and Linskey.
Seemingly unable to figure out how to find a way out of the war, Trump has told aides he wants to focus on other topics, and shifted his attention to fundraising events for the midterms or details for his ballroom. Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post offered proof of Trump’s growing enthusiasm for his ballroom, noting that he has called public attention to it on about a third of the days this year, mentioning it less than tariffs or Iran but more than healthcare insurance or affordability. And his focus on it has increased as the year has progressed.
On Friday, April 17, after Israel and the government of Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial—but not military—vessels. Trump declared the strait was “completely open and ready for business” and that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including “never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” But Iran’s chief negotiator posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour and that all seven of them were false. Iranians said that if the U.S. continued its blockade of Iranian ports, as Trump said it would, they would close the strait again.
On Saturday, they did, firing on a tanker and two other vessels, all of which left the encounters safely. Yesterday Trump announced on social media that the USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, as it tried to pass the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. According to Trump, the U.S. Navy “stopped them right in the tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom” and then took control of the vessel. Trump posted: “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”
The two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, begun on April 7, expires on Wednesday, April 22. On Friday, Trump said: “Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain. But maybe I won’t extend it, so you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
Today Nick March of the BBC explained the fact pattern behind the general suspicion that someone is engaging in insider trading over Trump’s war announcements. After matching the president’s market-moving statements to the trade volume on a number of financial markets, March found “a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” Marsh notes a similar spike over Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs of last April.
A new NBC News Decision Desk Poll out yesterday showed that 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while only 37% approve. Fifty percent say they disapprove strongly, a sign that they will be highly motivated to vote in the midterms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, including 54% who strongly disapprove.
This morning, Trump’s social media account responded to the bad news of the weekend, including the Wall Street Journal story, by dismissing it. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” the account posted. “[T]he results of Oct[ober] 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn’t like talking about, the results in Iran will be amazing—And if Iran’s new leaders (Regime Change!) are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future! President DJT”
Over the weekend, David S. Cloud, Alexander Saeedy, and Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials if the U.S. will provide a financial backstop for the UAE if the Iran war continues to damage its economy.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) reminded an audience that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion,” a reference to the $2 billion a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has invested in Kushner’s private equity firm.
“And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East. Apparently, while at the very same time, asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. If you’re watching this online, don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.
“Can you imagine…a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting up Saudi Grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump. A royal. A princeling. The rules are for us, not for them.
“And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. A company owned in part by Eric and Don Jr. has been pitching Gulf kingdoms on its drone interceptors during this war. The Financial Times reported: ‘Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’
“I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”
This afternoon, Trump’s account posted: “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well.”
But things were not going very well. On Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick published an article in The Atlantic that portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endanger our national security.
After Patel’s behavior in the locker room of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, during which he was filmed shouting and chugging a beer, Ryan J. Reilly, Gordon Lubold, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News reported that Trump was unhappy with Patel over the incident. Shortly afterward, Patel directed the FBI to fire at least half a dozen FBI employees who had been connected to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization’s property in Florida, where Trump was storing classified documents he retained after his first term.
Over the weekend, Patel seemed to try again to curry favor with the president. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is about to make arrests related to the 2020 presidential election that Trump insists—falsely—was rigged. “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim,” Patel said.
This morning, Patel sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for $250 million for publishing “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece,” full of “obviously fabricated allegations.” The suit says “Director Patel does not drink to excess…, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government.”
The Atlantic says: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the discovery phase of this defamation lawsuit, during which parties testify under oath, “could be quite something.”
And yet at the end of the day, it was Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who abruptly resigned after accusations that she has abused her position, drinks on the job, and has had an affair with a subordinate. An investigation into her conduct was nearing its completion. She is the third person to leave Trump’s cabinet: all are women.
When asked about Patel’s fitness for office, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Kash Patel is deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and his behavior is deeply un-American. And he should no longer be the FBI director. That shouldn’t surprise anyone that I hold that view because he never should have been confirmed to begin with. And we have to stop putting all the blame on the people who nominated this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual. What about the people who confirmed him? And it’s extraordinary to me that Senate Republicans confirmed people like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel. All of them. Deeply unserious and deeply unqualified. And now the country is paying the price because of the individuals that Donald Trump chose to nominate as part of the Trump cartel that’s now doing great damage to the nation, and the fact that Senate Republicans, like helpless sheep, went along with it all.”
There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.
Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN reported last night that by the end of last week, negotiators for the U.S. and Iran appeared to be on the verge of hammering out an end to hostilities before the two-week ceasefire ends on Wednesday. Then Trump took to the media to crow that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”
Iranian negotiators said Trump’s claims were false and that if he didn’t remove the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, they would reclose the Strait of Hormuz they had just opened. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate [Trump] negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” a source told Treene and Liptak.
Over the weekend, Iranians closed the strait and the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel. On Sunday, even as two senior U.S. government officials were on television saying Vice President J.D. Vance would lead a new round of talks in Pakistan, Trump was on the phone telling reporters that he wouldn’t. On Monday, Trump told a reporter that Vance was in the air about to touch down in Pakistan just minutes before Vance’s motorcade arrived at the White House.
After Iranian officials said today they were not sure they would respond to U.S. positions or go to Pakistan for talks, Vance’s trip has been put on hold. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, complained of “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side,” on Iran’s state media.
For his part, Trump blamed the Democrats for the chaos in U.S. diplomacy. “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran,” his social media account posted yesterday. The post insisted “it will be done RIGHT, and we won’t let the Weak and Pathetic Democrats, TRAITORS ALL, who for years have been talking about the Dangers of Iran, and that something has to be done, but now, since I’m the one doing it, belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration. This is being perfectly executed, on the scale of Venezuela, just a bigger, more complex operation.”
As David S. Bernstein of Good Politics/Bad Politics noted, Trump’s account this morning reposted another account claiming that Iran was preparing to execute eight women, showing AI-generated images of them. Trump posted: “To the Iranian leaders who will soon be in negotiations with my representatives: I would greatly appreciate the release of these women. I am sure that they will respect the fact that you did so. Please do them no harm! Would be a great start to our negotiations!!!” As Bernstein put it: Trump urged Iran “to start peace negotiations by releasing non-existent, AI-generated women some rando posted about on X.”
Alan Rappeport of the New York Times reported today that Trump is considering using money from the U.S. Treasury to shore up the finances of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, which have been hurt by the Iran war. After the story appeared, Zach Everson of Public Citizen pointed out that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls the sovereign wealth of the United Arab Emirates, has directed hundreds of millions to Trump personally, buying 49% of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial and investing $2 billion of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin.
Tonight, Trump announced he is extending the ceasefire with Iran until Iran comes up with a proposal to end the fighting permanently. Iran has responded by saying Trump’s extension “means nothing” and suggested it was a “ploy to buy time for a surprise strike.”
According to a new poll out today from Strength in Numbers/ Verasight, conducted between April 10 and April 14, just 35% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance. Sixty-one percent disapprove, a new low. Seventy-two percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling rising prices. In a generic ballot for Congress, voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by 50% to 43%, a margin of seven points.
Administration officials’ approach to the midterm elections seems to be to continue to sow distrust of elections. Following Patel’s claim, on Sunday, that there would soon be arrests stemming from the 2020 presidential election, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a letter from April 14 demanding that a Wayne County, Michigan, elections official give it records from Wayne County and Detroit from 2024 and alleging that there was fraud in 2020. Although Trump won Michigan, he lost Wayne County by almost 250,000 votes.
Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and secretary of state Jocelyn Benson wrote in the Detroit Free Press that “this demand isn’t about election integrity—it’s about a weaponized DOJ trying to please a president who doesn’t want to be held accountable at the ballot box by voters tired of the chaos of his administration. It’s also about the upcoming elections in November and in 2028, which he is working to discredit by sowing doubt as to the security and fairness of the process. It’s not going to work with us, and it’s not going to hold up in court,” they wrote. “Michigan’s elections are safe and secure.”
Trump seems, though, to be courting the base that in 2021 attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to keep him in power. After offending his base first by posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ and then by insulting Pope Leo XIV, Trump is participating this week in an event called “America Reads the Bible.” Kaanita Iyer and Aleena Fayaz of CNN report that Trump is expected to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22 from the Oval Office. The same verse was read by Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and is associated with white evangelicals’ belief God sent Trump to heal America.
Trump’s vulnerability is showing on Capitol Hill. In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky examined House speaker Mike Johnson’s no good, very bad day last Thursday. With a Republican majority in the House of only three seats and a dramatically weakened president, Republican House members handed Johnson two embarrassing losses on Thursday.
First, Republicans joined with Democrats first to pass a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to protect the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and then they passed the measure itself.
Trump’s administration has left his claims to want to deport undocumented criminals far in the dust, working hard to get rid of legal immigrants as well. When she was homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem ignored the requirements for evaluating TPS and simply refused to agree to routine extensions of TPS for people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.
Haitian TPS holders sued, noting Noem’s apparent racial animus as a driving factor in her decision and that Haiti remains dangerous in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that destabilized the country. In February, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes paused the loss of Haitian immigrants’ TPS until the lawsuit works its way through the courts. Last month, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) brought a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to restore TPS to Haitian immigrants.
Johnson has tried to do Trump’s bidding even though it means ignoring what members of Congress actually want. It is possible for members to force a measure to the floor even after the speaker bottles it up through something called a “discharge petition,” by getting a majority of members of Congress to agree to override the speaker, but such an action is exceedingly rare because it requires members of the majority to side with the minority against their own speaker. Or it was exceedingly rare before this Congress. Herb Scribner of Axios noted last year that there were seven successful discharge petitions in the 30 years between 1985 and 2015; there were the same number from 2023 to 2025.
Four Republicans, all of them from purple districts, joined all the Democrats to sign Pressley’s discharge petition. Then when the measure came up for a vote, six more Republicans voted in favor of it. As Berlatsky notes, the bill probably won’t pass the Senate, but not only did it demonstrate Johnson’s weakness, it also, as Jamie Dupree of Regular Order noted, was a real rebuke to Trump on immigration. And it was bipartisan.
That was not the end of Johnson’s bad day. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 was scheduled to expire on April 20, and Trump and Republican loyalists wanted simply to renew it. But members of both parties have issues with Section 702 of that act, which allows the government to collect information about the communications of foreigners without getting a warrant from a judge. But there are increasing signs the government is also collecting data from Americans without a warrant, and members of both parties concerned about government overreach have refused to extend the law without reforms to 702.
Republican leaders tried to force through a five-year extension just after midnight on Friday, but while four Democrats voted in favor of the measure, twelve Republicans voted against it, sending the measure down to a loss by 20 votes. Then Johnson tried to push through an 18-month extension. Twenty Republicans voted against even considering it. Finally, the House agreed to extend the law for just ten days.
Today, Virginians passed a redistricting referendum that will boost the Democrats’ chances of winning four more seats in the U.S. House. Redistricting in the middle of a decade is rare, but after Trump pressed Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats, California retaliated with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas seats. Other states followed suit. As David A. Lieb of the Associated Press explained today, Republicans currently believe that their redistricting of Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that redistricting Virginia temporarily will make up the difference.
Zachary Roth of Democracy Docket noted that Trump ally Steve Bannon warned on his podcast Monday that “Democrats are demonic” and said that if allowed to have power, they will impeach Trump. “Not just, are they going to take power and use these four seats to impeach Trump?” he said, “But they’re going to use this as a template for the rest of the country. It’s coming.”
Virginia voters yesterday agreed to a constitutional amendment that would temporarily redistrict the state if any other state redistricted for partisan
reasons: that is, in retaliation for the partisan redistricting President Donald J. Trump launched in Texas in 2025 in an effort to retain control of the House of Representatives.
As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, Trump supporters immediately insisted the voting was rigged, probably through mail-in ballots. Trump himself took to social media to attack the election, repeating charges of rigging and then adding: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”
In fact, Trump himself began this mid-decade partisan gerrymander race with his pressure on Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats. That prompted California to retaliate with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas Republican-leaning seats. Other states followed suit. Republicans redistricted Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, in addition to Texas, and expect those mid-decade redistricts will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that the temporary redistricting of Virginia will give them four more seats.
State lawmakers in Florida will convene a special session next week to consider redistricting that state, as well, to benefit the Republicans.
Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that the Republicans have full control of the federal government and could pass a law to ban partisan gerrymandering any time they want to, as Democrats have called for, but they refuse. “Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists,” Cohen notes; “they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.”
The Republican National Committee, now controlled by Trump, immediately sued over the Virginia election, and a Virginia judge ruled that both the constitutional amendment and the referendum voters approved were invalid. He said that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective,” and prevented officials from certifying the results.
But, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket wrote, Virginia attorney general Jay Jones is challenging the decision, saying: “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”
Complaints about the Democratic push for a partisan gerrymander in Virginia have exposed a tendency to excuse Republican machinations to control politics while jumping on Democrats for similar behavior.
In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” “Even if Texas’s move triggers an arms race, the trend will not put American democracy on life support,” it said, dismissing the concerns of those fighting the Republicans’ attempt to game the 2026 elections.
But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” “They’re right that the [Republicans] started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward,” board members wrote.
Their argument appears to be that the Democrats stand a good chance of winning the midterms even if the Republicans have gamed the system, so the Democrats should not push back. “The news will embolden Republicans in Florida to forge ahead with their own gerrymandering…, continuing the race to the bottom,” they write, seeming to excuse the behavior of Republicans by blaming Democrats for it.
This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws.
In the 1850s, southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.
Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”
But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.
Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.
Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.
Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.
Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call, and to the new Republican Party he was helping to build, because he had shown it would stand up for their rights.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Burlingame today when a reporter asked what she thought of complaints about the Virginia vote. “Oh, wah, wah, wah,” she laughed. “Listen. Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set….
“What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight, and takes everything sitting down. And what they’re mad at right now is that we are here in a new day. And we have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they did, and now the Republican Party doesn’t like the fact that they are fighting against someone who actually will stand up for the American people.
“So if Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on…partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. And so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.” (emphasis mine)
Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Kristen Holmes, Natasha Bertrand, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN report that Phelan’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump has irked Hegseth, who saw Phelan’s direct communications with the president as an attempt to go around him. And Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a close ally of Hegseth’s, wanted to take over shipbuilding and Navy acquisitions, jobs that normally fall to the secretary of the Navy.
As the title of an article by Drew FitzGerald, Lara Seligman, and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, Feinberg is a billionaire thanks to his career in private equity and now is mounting “his biggest takeover yet: the Pentagon.” Feinberg is pushing Congress to pass the $1.5 trillion military budget Trump wants while at the same time overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.
Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday meeting with Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.
According to the CNN reporters, Trump told Hegseth to “take care of it,” prompting his phone call to ask for Phelan’s resignation. But Phelan didn’t believe Trump knew of the request, so he called officials at the White House to ask if they had heard he had been asked to resign and whether Trump knew. At about 5:30, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that “Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.”
Still unconvinced, Phelan finally went to the White House to meet with Trump, who did not see him but later confirmed in a phone call that Phelan was out.
On social media yesterday, Trump posted two different New York Times pieces about the 2004 ratings for the television reality show The Apprentice, in which he starred as a business executive whose famous line was “You’re fired!” Today, on social media, Trump’s account posted: “John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year. I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”
Lara Seligman, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal noted today that Trump sided with Hegseth over Phelan, who was his friend and neighbor and raised millions of dollars for him. Phelan’s firing shows that Trump still supports Hegseth despite his missteps and high-level firings as Hegseth seeks to remake the Pentagon.
Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post note that Hegseth has purged the military of its most senior ranks, including “the top generals and admirals of every branch of service except for the Marine Corps and Space Force, several military lawyers and even the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.”
Today the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. Today the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.
Smith has publicly criticized Hegseth’s crackdown on press freedom, and noted in a farewell column today that “[n]o one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence. For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.” She said she “knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news” and urged Americans not to let Stars and Stripes “be controlled by Pentagon brass.”
While Hegseth is shaping the military to his own specifications and Feinberg is working to tie the government and an expanded military more tightly together, Republicans in Congress are trying to strengthen the power of the president over the American people for the next three years.
As Charles Tiefer of Talking Points Memo reported today, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has proposed funding Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, through budget reconciliation, a process that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because Republicans control both the House and the Senate, this means things tucked into a budget reconciliation measure can pass without any Democratic votes.
Senate Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP for 2026 until Republicans agreed to reform the rules for the agents’ behavior, including requiring them to get a warrant from a judge before breaking into someone’s home—as courts have always required before this administration—and to take off their masks.
But Republicans have refused to agree to those reforms and are turning to funding through budget reconciliation so they don’t have to negotiate. And rather than funding ICE and CBP for the year, as the rest of the appropriations bills do, Thune is proposing to fund them for the next three years, taking away Congress’s power to reform ICE and CBP by withholding funds not just for 2026, but for 2027 and for 2028. Even if Democrats take control of the House or Senate after 2026, they could not reform ICE or CBP, which would remain a growing force under the president’s control.
Today Thune also teed up a vote on a bill to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for three years, until April 2029. Both Democrats and Republicans are concerned that the system for collecting information on foreigners who appear to pose a threat to the U.S. can also sweep in U.S. citizens, enabling the government to surveil citizens without a judicial warrant. They want to make sure there are stronger guardrails in place to keep the government within constitutional limits. The House has been trying to hammer out a measure with cosmetic reforms, but if it fails, Thune will try to pass a three-year extension of Section 702 with no reforms, taking away from Congress the ability to limit problematic government surveillance.
But the tide defending democratic values continues to rise.
On Tuesday, more than 100 former NASA astronauts announced they were launching Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan organization to protect American democracy. In an open letter introducing their organization, they noted that as astronauts, they “have sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States” and continued: “We are committed to science, evidence-based decision-making, public service, and the rule of law.” They vowed to speak out for American values and to work with lawmakers to protect those values: “the rule of law, constructive checks and balances, equal opportunity, and the peaceful transfer of power.” They reminded people that “[a] strong democracy makes all else possible: economic growth, national security, and our rights and freedoms.”
“I think we’ve all been getting concerned for quite a number of years about not being comfortable with the way some things are going,” Astronauts for America co-founder and former astronaut Linda Godwin told Adam Kovac of Scientific American. “It was powerful to find out that a lot of us felt the same way, and there’s a stronger voice together.”
Hegseth, the defense secretary who calls himself the secretary of war, said that “the one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military, because we are the guarantor of the safety and security of not just of our country, but of a lot of people in this world.” He said this right after he talked about how important it was to inflict “maximum violence” on adversaries.
The UK has reaffirmed its sovereignty over the Falkland Islands...
