The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

On Tuesday, I spoke on a panel about the 1965 Voting Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. During the reception after the event, someone asked me what I thought of President Trump’s recent actions at home and abroad. What did I make of his self-destructive decision to launch an unprovoked war in Iran? How did I understand the constant chaos and dysfunction coming out of the White House? In short, was there a method to the apparent madness?

My short answer to my interlocutor was “no,” although I of course said a bit more than that. And my slightly longer answer to you, reader, is “No — there isn’t.” I got at this somewhat in my column this week, but there is no available evidence to support the idea that Trump is capable of thinking beyond the short term. We see this with the war in Iran, where it is clear that Trump expected more or less instant success — a short conflict followed by regime change and another victory under his belt. The idea that there might be unintended consequences — and the fundamental reality that the Iranian government has both agency and the capacity to act — does not seem to have either troubled the president’s mind or figured much in the calculations of his closest advisers.

To this point, one of the fundamental realities of this administration is that the president has organized his White House in such a way as to prevent anything from ever troubling his precious mind. Having surrounded himself with sycophants — with men and women so eager to please that they’ll submit to practically any humiliation thrown their way — he has filtered out information that might challenge his preconceptions, his assumptions, or even simply his ego.

The presidency runs on information and that information, you might imagine, needs to be accurate. There is no way for a president to prioritize, decide and follow through if he does not have access to the facts and unvarnished intelligence needed to make cleareyed decisions. Naturally, Trump, who does not care to govern, has no interest in this kind of information, if he could even retain it in the first place. He prefers to act from his gut, which is to say, his most venal impulses.

What he wants from his aides and allies, by contrast, is the kind of praise, attention and constant affirmation that you might give to a child with low self-esteem. Consider the way he expects his cabinet members to shower him with praise during their public meetings, or a recent event with congressional Republicans where he received a standing ovation for his mere presence — and where no one clapping seemed to want to stop, for fear of being the first to sit down. (A dynamic common to cults of personality.)

It suffices to say that this is a problem for trying to manage and prosecute a war, especially one of your own choosing. Even in the absence of a sound and capable executive, it might be possible for the military bureaucracy to handle this conflict if it could count on competent leadership within its own sphere. But here again, the president is an obstacle. He is more concerned with promoting friendly faces than finding anyone equipped to handle the job in question. And so the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth — a former Fox News host who lobbied Trump, in his first term, to pardon an accused war criminal — is also ill-equipped, professionally and psychologically, to deal with the dangers, dilemmas and exigencies of conflict.

In “Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership,” the political scientist Richard Neustadt — whom I refer to in this week’s column as well — observed, bluntly, that “the presidency is no place for amateurs.” He added, that “The power-seeker whose self-confidence requires quick returns and sure success might make a mess of everything including his own power.”

Trump is an immensely self-confident man with a deep thirst for power. But he has none of the psychological qualities needed to harness and wield the power of the presidency effectively. It is not even clear, in the second year (and sixth total) of his time in office, that he even understands the nature of the job itself.

So, again, there is no method to this particular madness. There is no method at all. What there is, instead, is a man with a fourth-rate intellect and a fifth-rate temperament who treats reality as a television show for which he is the cloistered, pampered star. But the world actually exists. Real lives are at stake. And his actions have weight that cannot be easily moved.

There is no channel to change, and you can’t rewind the action. Trump made his foolhardy decision and now we must live with the consequences.

Trump is losing his reckless, foolish, and illegal war on Iran. In fact, I think he just lost it. And he’s now so desperate that he just admitted it. In the most Trumpian way possible, which is to say surreal, pathetic, and head-spinning. He begged the world for help. He even just begged China. Yes, really. Go ahead and laugh in horrified glee LOL with me.

After a week that brutalized markets around the globe, Trump fell under pressure to…fix the mess that he’d created. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, then we face an energy crisis of unknown magnitude and duration. Kiss the global economy goodbye. And so this morning, he did something fairly incredible and pathetic, even for Trump. He “asked for help” to keep the Strait open. As if everyone else should swoop in and clean up the mess this abusive and idiotic man has made, wife style.

There’s a lot to decode here, so let’s go through it quickly.

Now. Who did he ask for help? The UK, France, and so on. But note: China, of all people. Go ahead and chuckle with me. Trump is begging China for help. To join his side. In…Iran.

This must have caused eruptions of laughter in Beijing registering like earthquakes. Incredulous ones. China is already winning this war, emerging as a far more sober party in global affairs. But this? To ask China for help, after America bombed its ally? After Trump just spent the last year trying to cripple it economically? Incredible, but more than that, tone-deaf, but more than that—an admission of just how astoundingly incompetent, foolish, arrogant, and ignorant Trump’s team really are.

Here we are dealing with people who genuinely have zero understanding of how the world actually works, until it’s too late, and then, in a surreal turn of events, they beg for help from the very people they paint as nemeses and enemies. The likelihood that China, of all people, joins Trump’s war on Iran, on America’s side, is so colossally stupid that the mind can barely contain it without bursting out into pained laughter.

So this is also a sign of just how desperate Trump really is. He’s begging China for help, to join the war, on his side.

What is he willing to give up, Beijing will ask, because if nothing else, they are extremely canny negotiators. They won't do it, of course, but they will read it for what it is: an almost unbelievable sign of almost unbelievable stupidity, because…

That brings me to the second thing this is. Trump just admitted that the USA. can’t solve this problem by itself, the problem it created. That is to say, the entire might of its armed forces, its Navy, the Pentagon, all of it…can’t keep the Strait of Hormuz open.

Think about that for a second. We all know asymmetries in war, but here we have people so foolish, Trump’s team, they didn’t consider them for a moment. You can mine the Strait of Hormuz, apparently, from a jetski. Good luck fighting that in some remote, distanced way.

So. Trump just admitted that the USA can’t keep the Strait open by itself, which is to say, he more or less admitted that he lost the war.

Think about that, too, for a moment. It took a matter of days for Trump to humiliate himself before the world, and here he is, begging for help from his own self-described enemies, like China, precisely because he has created a mess so tangled that all of America’s military might cannot put it right.

Unreal. And yet somehow unsurprising, too.

Now. Where does this leave us?

Nobody is going to join Trump. The odds of China sending ships to defend Donald Trump are about the same odds as Trump growing a brain and a soul tomorrow. Will Europe send warships into the Strait? It’d be very, very foolish too, because of course, then it becomes a wholesale party to this war, and is seen as under Trump’s thumb. Let me amend what I said. Nobody should join Trump, but there are a handful of nations foolish enough that might just do it anyways, because they’re still desperate to appease him. The UK and Germany spring to mind.

And yet none of this is going to fix anything. Trump just admitted he lost the war. He can’t keep the Strait open. Yet the spice must flow, to keep the global economy alive. Iran now has effective control over the global economy, it appears. It must be, along with China, laughing in disbelief. Yes, it’s paid a price, but it was prepared to pay it. What it’s gained, on the other hand, is something surreal: victory over Trump, in a matter of days, and the high ground over the global economy itself.

This takes us into unknown territory.

Remember, Trump has admitted that he cannot keep the Strait open. That means that he cannot guarantee the flow of oil the world crucially depends on, including, by the way, America. And that means that all of this has been for less than nothing. In turn, this creates for us a situation of extreme uncertainty.

How high is too high? Will the price of oil hit $150 a barrel? $200? These are places it could go if the Strait remains closed, of course, plunging the global economy into a deep depression, causing a lost decade, and crashing markets around the world.

Trump is losing control of the very world he wants to be dictator of. And here is where truly terrible things begin to happen. Because when the world refuses Trump’s pathetic begging for help, where will he be left? Then he has two choices, to declare victory and walk away, a humiliated laughingstock, or to double down, again and again. He cannot dictate to the very nations he is now begging for help from, like China and France, LOL.

Now we’re faced with a situation where Trump has lost the war, in the stupidest possible way, which was predictable and yet is somehow still breathtaking. The entire world will now hang by a thread, over the basics, which all come from oil, whose fate is now so uncertain that Trump himself has been reduced to desperately revealing himself to be what he has always been trying to hide: a violent fool, a pathetic moron, a liar, a vicious thief, and a penniless beggar.

These are the kinds of men who start wars. They are never the ones who end them.

White House prayer video sparks a meme parody trend in China.
America is the punchline, of course...

A video of faith leaders praying over President Donald Trump inside the White House recently went viral and was largely mocked.
The clip took on an entirely different life once it reached social media users in China, who turned it into a parody.

Donald Trump must envy George W. Bush for the cultural compliance he got while dragging America to war in Iraq.

If you didn’t live through it, it’s hard to convey the atmosphere of stifling conformity that choked the country in the run-up to that disaster. Much of the Democratic Party fell in line; authorization for military force against Iraq passed the Senate 77 to 23. Phil Donahue was fired by MSNBC for giving voice to the antiwar movement. Artists were canceled for expressing their opposition.

When, on the eve of the invasion in March 2003, Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, denounced Bush from a London stage, the fallout nearly buried the band. Radio stations boycotted their music and two Colorado D.J.s who played their songs were suspended. Once one of the most popular country acts in America, the band fell out of the Billboard Top 40.

The same month, when the documentarian Michael Moore gave an antiwar speech at the Oscars, he was met by loud boos in addition to applause. “One pundit after another was saying, ‘Well, that’s the end of Michael Moore,’” he told The New York Times.

Trump has received no such deference for his adventurism in Iran, so he’s trying to force it. On Sunday night, during a tirade on his Truth Social website, the president attacked The Wall Street Journal for reporting on an Iranian military strike against American planes in Saudi Arabia, and called on other news outlets to be charged with “TREASON.” Brendan Carr, Trump’s thuggish Federal Communications Commission chairman, threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their war coverage. Criticizing CNN’s reporting on the war last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made clear that he’s hoping its new owners quash its independence: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Rarely in modern history has an American administration made such blatantly authoritarian efforts to subdue its critics. Such naked coercion is a screaming sign of democratic breakdown. But we shouldn’t lose sight of how Trump is failing to bend the country to his will. Even as he’s wrecking American institutions, Trump is revealing the limits of his cultural influence.

American wars usually commence with public enthusiasm even if they end in shame. The whole concept of “wagging the dog” — from the 1997 satire starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro — assumes that a president can get his ratings up and deflect attention from a scandal by bombing another country. But it’s not working for Trump. The Iran war has been unpopular from the jump, garnering less support in polls than any other American conflict for which we have public opinion data. Trump’s approval remains about as low as it was when the war began.

Republicans, being largely in lock step with Trump, continue to broadly support the war. But conservative influencers, a crucial part of the right’s propaganda ecosystem, are bitterly divided. Joe Rogan, who backed Trump in the 2024 election and even attended the inauguration, said Trump supporters feel “betrayed.” On X, the right-wing streamer Megyn Kelly accused a pro-war pundit, Mark Levin, of having a “micropenis,” leading Trump to defend Levin.

Tucker Carlson, one of the most listened-to Republican podcasters, has called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil.” And this past weekend, in a bizarre turn, he claimed that the Justice Department is planning to charge him with acting as an unregistered foreign agent because of his contacts with Iran. It’s hard to know what to make of Carlson’s wild claim, but if nothing else, it illustrates the scale of his breach with the White House.

Typically, the go-to move for Republicans at war is to bludgeon their Democratic opponents as unpatriotic. That’s harder to do without an echo chamber backing them up, especially since leaks suggest that even the vice president thought the war was a bad idea. Interviewing Senator Chris Murphy on CNN last week, Jake Tapper asked whether his opposition to funding Trump’s war might be taken as voting against the troops. That’s the sort of argument that used to terrify Democrats, but Murphy was utterly unfazed. “Oh, come on,” he said. “The American people don’t want this war.”

One reason the old hawkish canards no longer work is that Trump has so degraded the aura that used to surround America’s commander in chief. A recent fund-raising email for Trump’s political action committee used a photograph of the president — wearing a white baseball hat — receiving the remains of American service members. With his war raging, he’s spent the last two weekends golfing. Trump refuses to treat his role with reverence, so others don’t feel much need to either.

There was far more criticism of Trump at the Oscars on Sunday than there was of Bush in 2003. The host, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel both mocked him. Accepting the award for best documentary, David Borenstein, director of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” alluded to both America and Russia when he described the “moral choice” citizens face when “a government murders people on the streets of our major cities” and “oligarchs take over the media.” Presenting the prize for best foreign film, Javier Bardem said: “No to war. And free Palestine.” “One Battle After Another” — a thriller about resistance to a Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant brand of American fascism — won best picture.

This time, stars speaking out against Trump faced no significant backlash. Taboos against deriding a wartime American leader have disintegrated, and this administration can’t reassemble them by force. You don’t have to be brave or rebellious anymore to be antiwar in America. Trump has helped make it a mainstream position.

Federal judge halts RFK Jr.'s changes to children's vaccine policies

A federal judge Monday dealt a major blow to the Trump administration's efforts to overhaul the nation's vaccine policies, including the controversial decision to slash the number of federally recommended vaccinations for children.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Boston put a hold on the decisions made by an influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory committee, ruling that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had improperly replaced the entire committee.

The decision was hailed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other leading health groups that brought the lawsuit, as well as infectious disease experts around the country.

Joe Kent, one of the United States’ top counterterrorism officials, announced his resignation on Tuesday, citing his opposition to the Iran war and what he said was Israel’s influence over the Trump administration’s policies.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Mr. Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in a social media post. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Mr. Kent is the highest-ranking Trump administration official to quit over the Iran war. His resignation bluntly exposes how the Iran war is expanding fissures in President Trump’s coalition. Mr. Kent is a close friend of Tucker Carlson, the Trump ally who has emerged as the sharpest critic of the war.

In a brief interview, Mr. Carlson praised Mr. Kent’s resignation.

“Joe is the bravest man I know, and he can’t be dismissed as a nut,” Mr. Carlson said. “He’s leaving a job that gave him access to highest-level relevant intelligence. The neocons will now try to destroy him for that. He understands that and did it anyway.”

Mr. Kent has long had a penchant for conspiracy theories, claiming without evidence that intelligence officials had a hand in the violence around the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. And some Republicans were quick to call out Mr. Kent’s remarks on Israel.

Representative Don Bacon, a former brigadier general in the Air Force who serves on the Armed Services Committee, reposted Mr. Kent’s letter with the comment “good riddance.”

“Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government,” Mr. Bacon wrote on social media.

Mr. Kent’s post included a resignation letter addressed to Mr. Trump, in which he argued that Israeli officials drew the United States into the conflict with Iran.

In the letter, Mr. Kent wrote about what he saw as a “misinformation campaign” by high-ranking Israeli officials and the news media, which he said had undermined Mr. Trump’s “America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”

A veteran of the Iraq war, Mr. Kent said that the arguments in support of attacking Iran, and promises of a swift victory, echoed the debate over going to war against Iraq in 2003.

Mr. Kent also referred to his late wife Shannon, a military cryptologist killed in Syria.

“As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives,” he wrote.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long criticized Mr. Kent, accusing him of politicizing intelligence. In a statement on Tuesday, he said Mr. Kent’s record was troubling and that he should never have been confirmed. But Mr. Warner added that he agreed with him, at least in part, on the Iran war.

“On this point, he is right: there was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice in the Middle East,” Mr. Warner said.

As the varying responses to Mr. Kent’s resignation inside Republican circles showed, Mr. Kent has raised questions about how deep the war on Iran will crack the president’s Make America Great Again coalition, which has been positioned against wars of choice.

Vice President JD Vance, who has long criticized American interventions, has expressed some skepticism about the war, and Mr. Trump has said Mr. Vance was “less enthusiastic” about the mission that others in the administration.

Questioned in the Oval Office about his views on the war, Mr. Vance said Monday he would not allow the media to drive a “wedge” between him and the president.

Still, while polling shows Americans are deeply divided about the war, most Republicans have lined up in support of Mr. Trump’s actions.

As for his Republican critics, Mr. Trump declared that they are no longer part of the MAGA movement.

“THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon to blow up the United States of America, the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the World,” he wrote this weekend on Truth Social. “MAGA is about stopping them cold, and that is exactly what we are doing.”

Still, there is no question that Mr. Kent, despite his penchant for conspiracy theories and his deep skepticism of Israel, will be seen as a credible dissenter.

“Kent’s former experience as a seasoned combat veteran and with U.S. special operations and intelligence elements gave him a unique perspective on the risks and dangers associated with conflicts overseas,” Javed Ali, a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who now teaches at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email.

Mr. Kent has been a key adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and has been advocating inside the administration for a more restrained foreign policy.

Ms. Gabbard is set to appear before the Senate on Wednesday and the House on Thursday for annual hearings on threats to the United States. And Mr. Kent’s resignation is likely to be a focus of various lawmakers questions.

Mr. Kent did not respond to a request for comment. He is a twice failed Congressional candidate in Washington State.

Mr. Kent is not the first official to publicly resign from the administration over the war. A lower-level Trump administration appointee, Sameerah Munshi, announced last week that she was resigning from the White House Religious Liberty Commission, citing the Iran War as a major factor.

She wrote on social media that most Americans opposed the U.S.-Israel campaign, and said that “our tax dollars are funding the very violence that we oppose, both against innocent Palestinians and now Iranians.” Ms. Munshi, a Muslim woman, added that she had seen firsthand the “injustice” carried out by members of the commission, some of whom she accused of mocking of her religion and treating her community “with hostility.”

Ms. Munshi said she was also resigning because the commission had revoked the membership last month of Carrie Prejean Boller, a Christian model accused by the chair of derailing a hearing on anti-Semitism.

When Trump leaves office:

The Department of War will go back to being the Defense Department.

The Trump Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center.

The Gulf of America will once again be the Gulf of Mexico.

The unfinished East Wing (it won't be finished by the end of Trump's term) will be rebuilt by the next president, and it will not be a ballroom.

Federal agencies packed with unqualified loyalists will fire those people and rehire the career experts Trump fired.

The Department of Justice will go back to enforcing the law instead of protecting the president.

Scientific agencies like NOAA, the EPA, and the CDC will go back to publishing research without political interference.

The U.S. will re-align with its allies and not with its enemies.

The presidential pardon power will stop being used as a rewards program for loyalists.

Inspectors General will go back to investigating corruption instead of getting fired for it.

The White House press room will go back to having briefings, with real journalists and not podcasters.

U.S. foreign policy will stop revolving around flattering dictators.

And the world will progress as though Donald Trump never existed.

Credit: X user Tom Santos

Although I'm in favour of anything that damages Trump's regime I have to agree with your assessment.

Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump continued to demand that other countries help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Hormuz for tanker traffic, but one by one, they declined. It is a dangerous business, and since Trump launched the war without consulting anyone, they don’t seem inclined to help him out of the mess he created. For his part, Trump has told reporters that “numerous countries” have told him “they’re on their way” to help enable ships to transit the strait, but he has also threatened to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) over allies’ unwillingness to help clear the strait.

Trump has never articulated a clear reason for the war, but Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli officials have opened another front in Lebanon, saying they intend to destroy the terror infrastructure there as they did in Gaza. So far, Israel’s recent operations in Lebanon have killed more than 850 people and displaced at least 800,000.

Thomas Grove, Milàn Czerny, and Benoit Faucon of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Russia has expanded its efforts to keep Iran in the fight against the U.S. and Israel, offering more intelligence sharing and military cooperation. Russia is providing drone components and satellite imagery that enables Iran to strike U.S. troops and radar systems. The reporters say that “Russia is trying to keep its closest Middle Eastern partner in the fight against U.S. and Israeli military might and prolong a war that is benefiting Russia militarily and economically.”

Meanwhile, Iran has been moving its own ships through the strait and appears to be willing to allow passage through for countries that are willing to negotiate with it. If that practice becomes widespread, prices on oil will ease, making it harder for Iran to keep up pressure on the U.S. and Israel.

Oil is now selling at more than $100 a barrel, up from about $70 a barrel before the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28, and gas prices have risen by at least $0.70 a gallon since then. As David Goldman of CNN reports, Iran’s ability to stop most traffic through the Strait of Hormuz threatens not just about 20% of the world’s oil supply as well as natural gas. About 20% of the world’s fertilizer also passes through the strait, which will affect crops for this year’s growing season. It will also limit helium—necessary for the cooling process when making silicon chips and cooling medical equipment—and aluminum.

Anna Kramer of NOTUS reported today that last fall the Trump administration cut all the State Department staffers from the Bureau of Energy Resources who were in charge of maintaining diplomatic contacts with foreign energy bureaus and Middle East gas and oil companies. Those laid off included the only expert in tracking sanctioned oil tankers, and the person in charge of coordinating with the international agency that manages releases of oil reserves around the world to address crises.

“There was never any handover or transition. There was no formal handover of contacts or anything like that. We were all just let go,” one former State Department energy official told Kramer. Those trying to work on energy issues with the U.S. government after their departure could not find any contacts.

Nine former members of the bureau told Kramer it seems clear the administration did not prepare for a global oil crisis. Trump’s claim that “nobody expected” Iran to hit other countries in the Middle East supports their statement because, as they told Kramer, previous administrations planned for exactly that scenario.

Judd Legum of Popular Information explained today that the administration decommissioned the last of its four minesweeper ships in September. Based in Bahrain, the vessels were equipped to find and destroy both moored and bottom mines. They were supposed to be replaced with new systems that use unmanned vehicles, but those have so far been unreliable, and the systems apparently have not been deployed. Legum points out that starting a military operation without anti-mining ships in the region to protect traffic through the Strait of Hormuz illustrates how poorly officials planned.

According to Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) observed that Trump “has more plans for the ballroom he’s trying to build at the East Wing than anything he’s gonna do next in the Middle East.”

The fact that Trump’s allies in the White House are backing away from the war, talking to journalists like Politico’s Megan Messerly for a piece published today, suggests they see this conflict as a political disaster. Sources told Messerly they hoped the strikes would be quick, removing Iran’s leader much as Trump’s Venezuela strikes did in January. They said they thought Trump’s vagueness on objectives would let him declare victory whenever he wanted to.

Now, though, the sources told Messerly, they think Trump “no longer controls how, or when, the war ends.” One told her: “We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now. They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Another warned that officials in the White House “need to worry about an unraveling.”

The sense that Trump has dragged the U.S. into a war in the Middle East is splitting MAGA leadership. Isolationists who supported Trump’s claims of being “America First” and ending long foreign wars are turning on those supporting Trump’s Iranian incursion, and their attacks on social media have become deeply personal. They seem to be trying to hive their supporters off from Trump to coalesce around an even more extreme white nationalism that highlights antisemitism.

Today Joe Kent, a staunch Trump ally, resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, saying that he supported “the values and the foreign policies” Trump had campaigned on but that he “cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Although Kent is correct that U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S., both the White House and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pushed back aggressively on Kent’s statements, trying to justify their Iran entanglement.

Johnson said, “We all understood that there was clearly an imminent threat that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability and they were building missiles at a pace no one in the region could keep up with.” Trump seemed to try to blame former president Barack Obama for the crisis, telling reporters today that “if I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrible deal that he made…, you would have had a nuclear war four years ago. You would have had…nuclear holocaust, and you would have had it again if we didn’t bomb the site.”

Trump told reporters he thought Kent was a “nice guy” but “very weak on security,” and that he didn’t know Kent well.

Yesterday Trump told reporters that a former president told him, “I wish I did what you did” in attacking Iran. He added, “I don’t want to get into ‘who,’ I don’t want to get him into trouble,” although he said it wasn’t former president George W. Bush and also implied it was a Democrat. Chris Cameron of the New York Times reported that those close to all former Democratic presidents—Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph R. Biden—deny that they said any such thing or that they have had any contact with Trump lately.

This morning, Trump posted on social media: “Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance—WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!”

Meanwhile, Trump appears to be attempting to remove the leadership of Cuba. Frances Robles, Edward Wong, and Annie Correal of the New York Times reported yesterday that U.S. officials want to force Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel from power but will leave the next steps up to the Cuban people. The reporters note such a move might enable Trump to declare a victory. The U.S. has cut off the oil that feeds Cuba’s energy grid, forcing it to collapse.

Yesterday, Trump told reporters: “I do believe I’ll be the honor of, having the honor of taking Cuba. That’d be good,” he said. “That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba, in some form, yeah, taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I could do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth. They’re a very, uh, weakened nation right now.”

Trump’s team has blamed the media for what he insists are unfair reports about the Iran conflict. He has also gone after the Supreme Court, complaining on Sunday about its ruling that his tariffs were unconstitutional, but also complaining that the justices permitted Biden to be inaugurated, continuing to insist—in the face of all evidence to the contrary—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. He insisted that “[t]his completely inept and embarrassing Court” is “hurting our Country, and will continue to do so. All I can do, as President, is call them out for their bad behavior!” Trump called the court “little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization.”

Trump’s pressure on the court over his claims of political weaponization and the 2020 presidential election seems designed to enlist their support for his claims that the 2026 election was rigged if voters choose Democratic majorities in the House and/or the Senate. Trump told House members in January that if the Republicans don’t retain control of the House, he will be impeached.

Trump and his loyalists insist that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act to prevent Democrats from stealing the 2026 election, with Trump posting on social media today: “The Save America Act is one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself. NO MORE RIGGED ELECTIONS! Voter I.D., Proof of Citizenship, No Rigged Mail-In Voting….”

The Republicans won the House, the Senate, and the presidency in 2024, making it hard to argue that Republicans cannot win without new voting rules, but as G. Elliot Morris of Strength in Numbers noted today, since then Trump has lost the working-class white voters and Latino voters who put him in office. Republicans could woo them back but instead are trying to push voters off the rolls by demanding proof of citizenship to vote.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections—such voting is vanishingly rare— and states, which run elections, already require ID. According to the Brennan Center for Justice and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, Trump’s demand that voters provide proof of citizenship—a passport or a birth certificate and matching REAL ID—when registering to vote and again at the polls would cut as many as 21 million voters off the rolls.

To push the measure through the Senate, Republicans will have to kill the filibuster that requires 60 votes to move a bill forward from debate. Trump is demanding Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) make that change to Senate rules, but Thune and less-MAGA Republicans don’t want to. Republicans say they want to debate the measure so that Democrats will be forced to defend their objection to it, but already the fight seems to be shaping up as between Republicans eager to pass a voter suppression bill to support Trump, and those willing to protect voters as well as their own voices in the Senate.

Tonight the Senate voted to take up the measure.