At 4:11 this morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, to to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT”
While this morning, Trump appeared to wash his hands of his Iran war, there was an undertone of panic in his post, especially coming as it did just before an exclusive story by Alexander Ward and Meridith McGraw in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump has “told aides he is willing to end the military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed.”
Economist Paul Krugman noted this evening that this is essentially an admission of defeat, and Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution think tank and an expert on Iran, called Trump’s suggestion that he is willing to leave the strait closed “unbelievably irresponsible.” Having started a war, she said, the U.S. and Israel cannot walk away from the outcome. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues,” she told the Wall Street Journal reporters.
Nonetheless, the idea the Iran War would end soon was a signal investors wanted to see. On the strength of the hope for a short war, the stock market posted its biggest one-day gain in ten months.
Meanwhile, another aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, left its home port, Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, today to head in the direction of the Middle East, although it is not clear if it will support Operation Epic Fury. According to Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes, the carrier will pick up other elements of the carrier group, including the destroyers USS Ross, USS Donald Cook, and USS Mason, as it crosses the Atlantic. The George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group also includes several aircraft squadrons and detachments that make up the 70 or more aircraft in Carrier Air Wing 7, along with more than 5,000 sailors and military personnel.
Nearly 3,500 sailors and Marines from the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in the region on Saturday.
Yesterday, host Laura Ingraham of the Fox News Channel wondered, “[W]as the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning? And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this? How complex it could actually get, and further possibilities of casualties or other damage—the difficulty of dealing with these people? Or was he told this would be relatively quick, in and out?”
Nick Hilden of AlterNet reported that MAGA leader Alex Jones speculated today that ill-health is contributing to Trump’s poor decisions on Iran. “Trump’s run off the edge of a cliff, and I don’t think he’s coming back from it,” Jones said. He urged MAGA to move on without Trump. “We cut bait on Trump and we mobilize against the Democrats,” he said. “Trump is just a minor figure.”
Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo picked up the story of another MAGA figure distancing himself from Trump. When he ran for governor in 2024, former North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson flat out denied stories about his participation in pornography forums and social media chats where he attacked Jewish, Black, gay, and transgender people as well as flirting with Holocaust denial and calling himself a “black NAZI!” He even sued CNN for $50 million for defamation, calling their story about him “a high-tech lynching” before dropping the suit after losing the election.
Walker noted that Robinson recently admitted on a podcast that he was lying all along. He “had to ignore the truth at that moment,” he said, because he was shielding Trump. “I certainly don’t want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election,” he said. “Didn’t want to cost anyone else their election.” Asked if he would do it again, he answered: “I’d make the exact same decision. I’d fight in the exact same way.”
After Saturday’s No Kings rallies around the country and the world, and after new polls showing his job approval ratings have dropped to new lows, Trump this afternoon signed an executive order attacking mail-in voting. Although both Democratic and Republican election officials insist mail-in voting is secure and reliable, Trump claims it permits Democrats to cheat.
Ironically, earlier this month the story broke of a right-wing activist in Wisconsin who ordered ballots in other people’s names to prove that mail-in voting enabled voter fraud. Last week Harry Wait was convicted of one felony count of identity theft and two misdemeanor counts of election fraud, suggesting mail-in voting is not as insecure as he thought.
Nonetheless, Trump is ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters on the list, and to mark each ballot with its own unique barcode. It threatens any states refusing to cooperate with the order with a loss of federal funding and directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate anyone wrongfully distributing mail-in ballots. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “there is no such thing as a federal list of citizens. It does not exist.”
“This is unconstitutional on its face,” election law expert David Becker told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections.” The Senate Rules Committee oversees federal involvement in elections, and its top Democrat, Alex Padilla (D-CA), called the order a “blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” adding that Trump has “no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting.” Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said that the order is “illegal, dangerous and subversive” and that “Donald Trump fears the American people and is willing to violate the Constitution to stop them from voting.”
“See you in court,” posted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “You will lose.”
Another of Trump’s executive orders was in court today, when Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that much of Trump’s order stripping NPR and PBS of funds was unconstitutional. As Brian Stelter of CNN reported, Moss quoted a Supreme Court ruling when he wrote: “The First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.” Republicans in Congress have since voted to cut federal funding from NPR and PBS, but the decision is a victory for the First Amendment.
Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also stymied Trump today when he ruled that Trump cannot proceed with his plans for a giant ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House without approval from Congress. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and a number of federal agencies to stop construction of the ballroom, noting that Trump skipped reviews and approvals that were required by law.
The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”
The Department of Justice has already appealed.
Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets [sic] sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”
Tonight Summer Said, David S. Cloud, and Michael Amon of the Wall Street Journal reported that the United Arab Emirates is trying to get a United Nations Security Council resolution to call for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE says it will help the U.S. and other allies open the strait by force.
BREAKING: Trump STORMS OUT of Supreme Court after his own Justices
tear apart his birthright citizenship case.
Donald Trump showed up to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to intimidate nine justices into stripping citizenship from 200,000 American-born babies a year. He left humiliated, with his motorcade speeding away down Independence Avenue before the other side had even finished arguing.
Trump made the unprecedented decision to personally attend oral arguments in his birthright citizenship case — the first sitting president in American history to do so. He was escorted in ten minutes early and seated in the front row, presumably to send a message. The message the justices sent back wasn’t exactly what the adamantly anti-immigrant crusader had in mind.
Within 90 minutes, multiple members of the court's own conservative supermajority — justices Trump either appointed or championed — were openly dismantling his administration's arguments.
Chief Justice John Roberts called a key part of the government's position "quirky." Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett both signaled serious skepticism. And when Trump's solicitor general, D. John Sauer, tried to argue that modern realities like "birth tourism" justified rewriting 157 years of constitutional interpretation, Roberts delivered the most perfectly devastating response of the entire term: "Well, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution."
Trump didn't wait around to hear more. His motorcade was spotted zipping away from the Supreme Court at 11:25 a.m., while the challengers' lawyer was still being questioned. The man who came to project dominance fled before the other team even got to speak.
Here's what was actually at stake in that courtroom. Trump's executive order — signed on day one of his return to power — would eliminate automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants or temporary visa holders.
It has never gone into effect, blocked by courts from the moment it was signed. If ultimately upheld, it would strip citizenship from approximately 200,000 babies born every year. By 2050, according to a new study, it would create 6.4 million U.S.-born children with no legal status — stateless in the only country they have ever known. It would disproportionately affect Hispanic and Asian families. It would even potentially leave abandoned infants with no citizenship anywhere on earth.
All of this to undo the 14th Amendment — ratified in 1868 specifically to guarantee that America would never again create a permanent underclass of people born on its soil with no claim to its protections.
The Constitution has answered this question for 157 years. On Wednesday, even Trump's own justices seemed to know it. While we’ll have to wait for an official ruling to see what the Justices ultimately decide in this particular challenge, Trump’s hasty retreat from the Court proceedings presages what the expected decision will be — and it’s not what the Racist-in-Chief was intimidating the Justices for.
Trump came to the Supreme Court to make history. He made it — just not the kind he was hoping for.
Today, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president attended oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court. President Donald J. Trump broke precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court’s public seating area, alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to observe arguments in the case of Trump v. Barbara, a case under which Trump hopes to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case argued before the court today grew out of Trump’s executive order of January 20, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.
With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect.
Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.
The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”
But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.
In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when eleven southern states were not represented in Congress.
When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.
But the question of whether the amendment recognized birthright citizenship for all immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where white settlers were not terribly concerned about Black Americans—there were only 4,272 Black Americans in California in 1870, while there were almost half a million white Americans—but wanted no part of allowing Chinese men to be part of American society.
Western state legislatures continued to discriminate against Asian immigrants by falling back on the country’s early naturalization laws, finalized in 1802, to exclude first Chinese immigrants and then others from citizenship. Those laws were carefully designed to clarify that Afro-Caribbeans and Africans—imported to be enslaved—would not have the same rights as Euro-Americans. Those laws permitted only “free white persons” to become citizens.
In the late nineteenth century, state and territorial legal systems kept people of color at the margins, using treaties, military actions, and territorial and state laws that limited land ownership, suffrage, and intermarriage.
As late as 1922, in the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.” The court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States,” it said.
The next year, the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind upheld the argument that only “free white persons” could become citizens. In that case, the court said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only “free white persons” could become citizens. After the Thind decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about fifty South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens.
Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.
But despite the longstanding use of laws designed to perpetuate human enslavement to prevent certain immigrants from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of their children. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens.
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.
The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”
In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on an historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.”
But one judge after another has sided against him on this issue, and he apparently showed up at the Supreme Court today to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him into supporting his own radical reworking of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half, before Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak.
Later, Wang described what it was like to argue in court today. She explained, it’s “a nerve-wracking experience to argue any case in the Supreme Court, and especially one as weighty as this one, where the president of the United States is taking aim at a cherished American tradition and individual right of citizenship based on your birth in this country. I myself am a Fourteenth Amendment citizen because my parents had not yet naturalized when I was born. So I walked in today with the spirit of my parents and so many people’s ancestors in that first generation of Americans—whether they naturalized or not, I consider them all Americans. They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans, and that’s us.”
Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.
Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics (including me) have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.
A speech that should have been a clear explanation of why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began instead in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. He then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.
Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. But he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.
But back to the war: What is America fighting for? Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. Instead, he simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.
Trump, however, then undercut his own point by assuring the country that Iran’s “nuclear dust” was buried under mountains of rubble, inaccessible since the great success of last June’s joint Israeli-American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranians would never be allowed to excavate any of it, he said.
So, then, perhaps the war was about regime change, which would be the surest way to stop every evil plan gestating in Tehran, including nuclear weapons and terrorist plots. Well, no, it turns out, the war is not about that either. Trump explicitly denied that the goal was to bring down the Iranian theocracy—a staggering claim given his exhortations to the Iranian people on the first night of the war that their hour of liberation was at hand. After denying that the U.S. goal was regime change, he then claimed that regime change had now already happened because so many Iranian leaders have been killed.
In addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump laid out three other goals that he said were now within reach: neutralizing Iran’s ability to project power anywhere through terrorism, destroying the Iranian navy, and eliminating Iran’s missile stocks and production capabilities. As with so many other Trump promises, the president said that he will accomplish these goals in two to three weeks. How he will do all this was left unclear, other than that he will hit Iran “extremely hard.”
Meanwhile, Tehran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said only that other nations should go in, clear the strait, and take Iran’s oil. He chided Americans for their impatience; the two world wars, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq took longer than the current war, he said. He also waved away any economic concerns. Everything will get better, he promised, telling viewers that only a year ago America was a “dead and crippled country” that he personally rescued. Oddly, Trump claimed that the United States has never been more economically prepared for a conflict—the “little journey,” as he called it—like the one he has led against Iran.
The president also said things that might come back to haunt him. He vowed not to let Israel or America’s friends in the Persian Gulf “get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,” as if Iran were not already inflicting damage on them. And he assured Americans that gas prices would come down. (They might, but not anytime soon.) He threatened, yet again, to bomb all of Iran’s electrical plants, a likely war crime if carried out with the completeness that Trump promised, should Iran refuse to … well, do whatever it is he thinks they should do. “We are unstoppable,” he said, noting that U.S. forces were in combat against “one of the most powerful countries.” (This, too, is nonsense: It takes nothing away from U.S.-military valor to admit that Iran was at best a second-tier power even before the war.) America might be unstoppable, but the American president seems to be at loose ends now that the Iranians have a chokehold on a major part of the world’s energy supply.
The only bright spots in the speech were in the things the president did not say. He did not, as many observers expected, prepare Americans for the introduction of ground forces into Iran. (If he now goes ahead with such an operation, he will have betrayed the public by misleading them about the course of the war.) And he did not eviscerate NATO and threaten to pull out of the alliance, as some expected him to do because of his ongoing anger at major European powers’ unwillingness to join a war they did not start.
If the president meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)
The president seems lost. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.
As with so many other Trump promises, the president said that he will accomplish these goals in two to three weeks.
This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media a video of the theme song of the Davy Crockett TV series from 1954–1955 starring Fess Parker. Over the clip, he wrote: “Davy Crockett, obviously a distant relative of Jasmine Crockett, and a very High IQ Frontiersman, would be proud of the legacy that he began long ago, and especially Jasmine’s Great Success as a Politician from the Great State of Texas! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The Walt Disney Studio designed the Davy Crockett western series for children when Trump was about nine, an age that put him in the right demographic to have been part of the Davy Crockett craze that put “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” at the top of the Hit Parade and spurred the sale of $300 million of Davy Crockett merchandise as little boys begged their parents for raccoon caps that would make them look like a western hero.
Jasmine Crockett is a current Democratic U.S. representative from Texas. There is no evidence she is related to David Crockett, who served as a U.S. representative from Tennessee from 1827 to 1835 and who died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Trump mused about their possible relationship before, in 2025.
It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does. Davy Crockett was only one of the many westerns on television in the 1950s and 1960s as those eager to dismantle the New Deal government championed the idea of the western hero as the true American. Trump is trying to bring to life a right-wing political fantasy of the 1950s, and Americans in the present are making clear they reject it.
After World War II, Republican businessmen, southern racists, and religious traditionalists hated the government that both Democrats and Republicans had embraced since 1933, one that leveled the American social and economic playing field by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. They insisted that such a system of government action was socialism or even communism, and contrasted it with their fantasy of an independent white man on the frontier who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone.
In 1960 a ghost-written book released under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who wore a cowboy hat and boasted of his family’s ties to the Old West although he himself grew up with a live-in maid and a chauffeur, articulated this right-wing vision.
The Conscience of a Conservative maintained that even if Americans liked the new government that had stabilized the country since the Great Depression and World War II, the Constitution’s framers had deliberately written a document that would prevent “the tyranny of the masses.”
In place of a strong federal government, the book said, power should go back to the states to restore true freedom to Black Americans, farmers, and workers. Federal action had given those groups too much power, and they were using it to destroy liberty and lower the American standard of living. In their hands, the book said, the U.S. was on its way to becoming a totalitarian state. At the same time, the government must protect the country with an increasingly strong military.
At an Easter lunch reception yesterday, Trump echoed this argument precisely. “I said to [Office of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare,’” he said. “That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have fifty states, we have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up, but we, it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”
Trump is expected to release his 2027 budget plan tomorrow, in time to use it to shape Republicans’ argument for the midterm elections in November. Like Trump’s budget requests for 2026, it calls for an enormous boost to the nation’s military spending, $1.5 trillion, to be paid for with cuts to domestic programs. But members of Congress recognized that domestic spending is popular, and their 2026 appropriations bills kept domestic spending relatively flat.
The popular pressure to fund domestic programs showed today when House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) backpedaled on the Senate’s plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) without funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the parent agency for Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection. Far-right House Republicans opposed the Senate’s bill, and bowing to them, Johnson called the Senate’s bill “a joke” and sent House members home until April 13 without voting on it. Today Johnson said he would bring the bill forward to pass it with Democratic support and that Republicans would then try to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through a budget reconciliation measure that does not need Democratic votes.
Racism was central to the rhetoric of cowboy individualism, and the institutionalization of that racism in the mass deportations and incarcerations of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump has created a backlash. A poll last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration while 61% disapprove.
An analysis of DHS records by Ali Winston and Maddy Varner of Wired revealed today that DHS has used agents from special units accustomed to dealing with high-risk warrants, armed drug cartels, and manhunts for civilian immigration sweeps. Agents from Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and its sister unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR), are part of what the journalists call “a secretive, tightly knit world” in which their identities “are typically excluded from official documents and shielded from public records requests.”
The journalists’ analysis shows that these agents are “as a group, the most violent of the hundreds of federal agents deployed to Chicago.” Following the use-of-force guidelines rewritten by former leader Gregory Bovino—himself a member of BORTAC—their use of force there “included punching and kicking protesters, throwing tear gas, macing civilians, firing pepperballs and 40-mm foam rounds into crowds, shocking people with tasers, unleashing dogs on deportation targets, and shooting unarmed civilians, killing at least one of them [Silverio Villegas González, shot at “close range” as he fled from officers after a traffic stop].
The county medical examiner yesterday declared the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a visually impaired Rohingya refugee from Myanmar whom Border Patrol agents dropped off in the parking lot of a coffee shop on a frigid February night in Buffalo, New York, a homicide. Rather than releasing him to his family or lawyer, CBP officers offered Shah Alam what they called a “courtesy ride.” He was found dead five days after agents left him at the closed shop.
A DHS spokesperson told Sydney Carruth of MS NOW that the homicide ruling was “another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol.”
Those who oppose government social welfare programs, regulation of business, and so on, have worked to concentrate power in the president, knowing that Congress will hesitate to slash programs their voters like. Yesterday Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, of the Office of Legal Counsel, published an opinion for the White House that claims the Presidential Records Act, which requires that presidents keep records of their official business and turn them over at the end of their term, is unconstitutional. Gaiser clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
“The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress’s Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose,” the memo reads. “For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”
The fallout from that concentration of power is showing now in Trump’s disastrous adventure in Iran, undertaking to attack the country without consultation either with Congress or with allies.
Yesterday evening, Trump commandeered time from television networks to deliver what officials billed as a major announcement on the Iran war. But rather than announce anything new in his first address to the nation about a war that has gone on now for more than a month, Trump rambled for 19 minutes, reiterating what he has put in social media posts. He said the war was almost over but also that military operations were going to intensify, said its purpose was to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities—despite his claim in June 2025 to have obliterated those capabilities—and said the rise in oil and gas prices would be only a “short-term increase.”
Sounding tired and speaking in a monotone, Trump reiterated his claim that the U.S. doesn’t need the oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz and demanded that other nations who need the oil more force Iran to reopen it. In reality, the U.S. is tied into international oil markets, and prices not only of oil, but also of products that use oil to get to market, are already rising.
One Republican strategist from a battleground state texted Lisa Kashinsky and Alec Hernandez of Politico: “What the hell did he just say?” The strategist called the speech “nonsense.”
As Trump spoke, U.S. stock futures plummeted, erasing about $550 billion in 25 minutes.
Today forty nations, led by Britain and France, discussed ways in which they could work to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited to participate.
In the midst of this crisis, the tension between the Army’s leadership and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew up today when Hegeseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George. The Army chief of staff is the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, the top military advisor for the Secretary of the Army, overseeing planning, training, and policy. George was appointed to his position in 2023 and worked closely with former defense secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the four-star general who preceded Hegseth. Recently, George refused to remove four officers—two women and two Black men—from a promotion list at Hegseth’s insistence.
A source who spoke to Jennifer Jacobs, Eleanor Watson, and James LaPorta of CBS News said that Hegseth “wants someone in the role who will implement President Trump and Hegseth’s vision for the Army.” Two other Army leaders were also removed: General David Hodne, leader of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Major General William Green, head of the Army’s Chaplain Corps. Hegseth has reworked the Chaplain Corps recently to limit the range of religious instruction available to military personnel.
And finally, Trump today fired Attorney General Pam Bondi by posting her dismissal on social media. He was apparently angry that she has not adequately punished his enemies and that her botched handling of the Epstein files has stoked rather than calmed the story. For the present, her replacement will be Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before joining the Department of Justice.
It was Blanche who met privately with Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, last July, as the outcry over the Department of Justice’s apparent cover-up of the Epstein files grew. After their meeting, Maxwell was moved from the prison where she was being held in Florida, to a less restrictive, minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas.
Quote:As with so many other Trump promises, the president said that he will accomplish these goals in two to three weeks.
Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.
“For the Russians, having Orbán as the fifth column in the EU – as someone who can derail or block or slow down European decision-making or as a conduit for intelligence operations – is quite useful. He has rendered many services to the Russians over the years”
For the US, however, the “infatuation” with Orbán appeared to be rooted in ideology, said Rohac. “For Russia, I think there is a real strategic imperative in trying to keep Orbán in power,” he said. “For the US, I think it’s a sort of artefact of how the Republican party has transformed under Trump.”
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the U.S. Army chief of staff, General Randy George, in a struggle to exert his will over the career officers in the service. On Friday at 8:15 p.m., the official social media account of the Joint Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Vice Chairman appeared to express their opinion of the firing when they posted: “On behalf of the Joint Force and the Joint Chiefs, we extend our deepest gratitude to Chief of Staff of the Army, General Randy George, for his decades of steadfast service to our nation. Since 1988, General George and his family have consistently answered the nation’s call with honor and dedication. We are profoundly thankful to General George and his wife, Patty, for their many years of sacrifice and devotion to those who serve. As they graduate from this distinguished chapter of service and look toward the future, we wish them both continued happiness and success in all that lies ahead.”
On Friday, Iranians shot down a U.S. F-15E fighter jet over Iran. U.S. forces quickly rescued the pilot of the jet, but the second crew member, a weapons system officer, was not rescued until late today, with the news breaking just minutes before midnight.
Iranians also hit a U.S. A-10 Warthog aircraft, a ground-attack plane designed for close support of ground troops, as it was engaging in the search. Its pilot ejected and was rescued. A helicopter also engaged in search and rescue was hit by small-arms fire that injured crew members, but it landed safely outside Iran.
The strikes came two days after Trump told the American people that the U.S. military had “beaten and completely decimated Iran,” that “[t]hey have no anti-aircraft equipment,” and that “[t]heir radar is 100% annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force.” Meanwhile, Iranian TV showed people heading into the mountains to find the airman.
Dan De Luce, Courtney Kube, and Gordon Lubold of NBC News identified the last time an American plane was shot down by enemy fire as 2003, with a crash near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. The pilot ejected safely and was rescued.
The social media accounts of the defense secretary and of U.S. Central Command went silent after Thursday night. Trump did not speak to the public about the missing airman. When the White House wants to tell the press there will be no more public information released that day, it “calls a lid” so journalists will stop waiting for news. The White House called a lid yesterday at 4:12 p.m., and the president did not go to Mar-a-Lago, as he has been in the habit of doing on the weekends. Trump did not appear at all today, and the White House called a lid at 11:08 a.m.
But Trump did post on social media. Yesterday, while the search for the airman was underway, his account posted: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD??? President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
At 10:05 this morning, Trump posted: “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out—48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Economist Paul Krugman noted today that this post didn’t sound like Trump. His speech on Wednesday was low energy and delivered in a monotone. It suggested Trump was abandoning the idea of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and handing off the problem to other countries. Now he is threatening to “reign”—he meant “rain”—down “all Hell” on Iran to get it to restore the conditions that existed before he attacked. And then, as Krugman noted, he added “Glory be to GOD!” which sounds a lot more like Hegseth’s Christian holy war language than Trump’s.
Krugman says, “It sounds like he’s…going to try and do something truly awful in an attempt to somehow redeem himself and the situation” in Iran.
Michael R. Gordon and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump’s aides have been telling him Iran’s civilian infrastructure is a legitimate wartime target, despite the understanding among experts that such attacks are illegal. The journalists say Hegseth has embraced the aides’ argument that attacking infrastructure would make it more difficult for Iran to transfer the materials they need to develop nuclear weapons. A White House official added that destroying electric plants could foment civil unrest, which would in turn make it more difficult to produce a nuclear weapon.
Ryan Goodman of Just Security commented: “That would be an F on a bar exam.” He observed, “This isn’t legal analysis. It’s idiocy.”
Reuters reported today that Israel is prepared to attack Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for the U.S. to agree.
Tonight the White House released the president’s schedule for tomorrow, Easter Sunday. It has a scheduled 8:00 a.m. “Executive Time” and a 7:00 p.m. family Easter dinner. He has no scheduled public appearances.
President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened once more to strike Iran’s civilian infrastructure if it does not move to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, raising the specter that the U.S. could commit what are considered to be war crimes in the country.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote on Truth Social. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!”
He added, “Praise be to Allah.”
