Today, strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien gave a comprehensive review of the events and outcomes of Trump’s war on Iran. In his Phillips’s Newsletter, O’Brien noted that “the USA is now negotiating without much, if any, leverage. That really is extraordinary. The Trump administration has put itself in a position where it cannot go back to the use of military force, cannot put much if any real pressure on Iran, and therefore will have to concede most of the main points to the Iranians.”
“Personally,” he adds, “I have never seen the US in such a position of weakness.”
O’Brien notes that “because the U.S. has no significant leverage over Iran, the Trump administration…will simply have to dissemble about non-existent Iranian concessions to try and make it seem that they have not been completely routed.” They have been lying for months now, but as the magnitude of the loss becomes clearer, the lies will likely grow larger.
O’Brien adds that the Trump administration “seems utterly uninterested in achieving anything of substance and, instead, is desperately hunting around to win the narrative struggle in the USA itself.”
As if in illustration, Trump last night reacted to the Senate passage of a war powers resolution prohibiting him from further military action against Iran by posting: “So, I have Iran on the ‘ropes,’ ready to go down for the fall, willing to give us practically anything, and for the first time in decades, respecting the hell out of the United States and its President, ME, and the U.S. Senate decides to have a poorly timed and meaningless War Powers Act Vote, telling the Number One Sponser [sic] of Terror in the World that the United States doesn’t like what I am doing to them and I must stop, and by so doing has provided aid and comfort [to] the Enemy. Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats, and Iran asked my people, ‘what does that all mean?’ These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other, because I always get it done!”
Illustrating the degree to which Trump’s botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has come to represent his botched war on Iran, as well as the degree to which Americans have turned against both, social media users have taken to calling the algae-choked reflecting pool the “Strait of Warm Ooze.” (The strait the Iranians have taken control of is called the Strait of Hormuz.) Yesterday the administration put fencing up around it to keep people away.
Last night’s primary results in New York, in which voters ousted established Democrats in favor of progressive candidates, is creating concern among Republicans about the upcoming midterm elections. The growing groundswell of support for a major reset of our political system suggests that maybe even Republicans’ unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to favor Republicans may not cement control of Congress.
Trump is clearly panicked.
Just after midnight this morning, he posted that the “big Oil Companies” are not dropping gas prices as quickly as they should and accused them of price gouging. He said he had told the Justice Department to “start looking into this” and warned that “[g]asoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!”
At 2:38 AM he posted: “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
On Monday the Senate overwhelmingly passed a landmark bipartisan bill directed at making housing cheaper by boosting the national housing supply and homeownership and by stopping private equity from buying up single-family homes. By a similarly overwhelming vote, the House passed the measure yesterday. It was expected to cruise to Trump’s desk for a signature.
But this morning at 9:49, Trump suddenly announced he will not sign the bill into law until Congress passes the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE or SAVE America Act, that he keeps pushing. There are various versions of that measure, but by requiring proof of citizenship—a birth certificate or a passport—to vote, along with requiring states to hand their voting rolls over to the federal government, it is expected to stop many legal voters from casting ballots.
At 10:17, Trump posted: “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN. THANK YOU!!!”
Then, at 10:26, he posted: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
That language is important. Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has used official emergency declarations at an unprecedented rate in order to claim emergency powers under which he can ignore laws. Although the Republicans hold a majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning Trump could work with Congress to pass legislation, he and his advisors appear to be applying the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt.
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who himself almost certainly has not read Schmitt—asserted this view in August of last year when he said: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Alex Kaplan of Media Matters notes that since Trump took office in 2025, his loyalists have urged him simply to declare a national emergency in order to justify dictating new voting and election rules to the states.
The U.S. Constitution gives to the states the authority to conduct elections, but the Trump administration wants state voter lists, at least in part so it can run them through a tool designed to find noncitizens who might have applied for benefits for which they’re ineligible. That system, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements and, confusingly, also abbreviated as SAVE, is not designed for voter rolls, and as Liz Dye explained today in Public Notice, it explicitly did not cover U.S. citizens.
But, Dye explains, between last April and last August, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration linked the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to the master file from Social Security, called NUMIDENT. Then they reprogrammed SAVE to upload voter rolls for mass citizenship screening.
Certain Republican-dominated states, like Texas, handed over their voter rolls. An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.
In addition to the system’s inaccuracy, the uploading of the files, Dye notes, was “a gross violation of the Privacy Act of 1974,” which prohibits the government from repurposing an individual’s data for a new use without notice and without providing for 30 days of public comment.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration could not use the SAVE system to check state voting rolls, saying: “[T]he federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The Trump administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to get their voter rolls. Courts have struck down Trump’s attempts to get his hands on those rolls in all nine of the cases on which there has been a ruling, and today the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s suit against Michigan. Also today, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston permanently blocked much of Trump’s March 2025 executive order trying to gain power over elections.
Undeterred, Trump is trying other ways to rig the vote. Over bipartisan objections, he installed loyalist William Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, turning the agencies responsible for keeping Americans safe away from international threats and directing them instead at Trump’s domestic opponents. As Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Jack Cocchiarella on Sunday, Pulte can simply claim that there’s a threat against the country and use that argument to place troops or immigration agents at the polls or to shut down the election.
And today, testifying at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing today, Postmaster General David Steiner told senators that under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration, the United States Postal Service will not deliver election mail in states that refuse to turn over their voting lists to the federal government.
Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) clarified: “So the proposed rule basically coerces states to conform to these new requirements and hand over their absentee voter rolls or face the consequences of not being able to vote by mail.”
Trump’s obvious panic at the idea that voters might take away the Republicans’ congressional majority raises a question: Why is he so worried? Journalist David Rothkopf noted that “his desperation about losing in November is at such a high level that it is revealing. He is petrified of being held accountable by a Democrat-controlled Congress, of investigations, of his crimes being revealed. He’s obsessed with his fear of losing.”
Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), who frequently records short videos explaining what’s happening at the Capitol, posted from Statuary Hall about today’s “completely bizarre chapter.” She explained as people began to take their places on the stage set up for the signing of the landmark housing bill, “[t]he president tweeted he wasn’t coming because he’s having a temper tantrum that the Senate, and especially Senate Republicans, will not pass his voter ID law, which is basically designed to override state voting laws.”
“And so,” she observed, “in less than an hour we went from the signing of a historic housing bill to stop private equity from buying houses, and investing in housing infrastructure, and actually doing something good for the people of this country, and a ceremony that should have happened right here to…the president is not signing the bill.”
One senior Republican told NOTUS, “He’s having a f*cking tantrum.”
