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Kennedy Center Board to Vote Monday on Trump’s Proposed Closure The planned vote to close the center for renovations was listed on an agenda circulated to the center’s board of trustees on Sunday, less than a day before the meeting.

Kennedy Center Board to Vote Monday on Trump’s Proposed Closure

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War with Iran costs an estimated at $1 billion a day. We could instead restore Medicaid & ACA tax credits.

Demand Congressional investigations and release of all remaining Epstein files.

In Illinois, Clashes Over AIPAC Erupt As House Campaign Closes In a Democratic primary, accusations are flying that allies of a hard-line pro-Israel group are trying to divide progressives, exploiting a broader rift in the party.

In Illinois, Clashes Over AIPAC Erupt As House Campaign Closes

MAGA churches are flouting the law with impunity: report President Donald Trump and his supporters are engaging in “more overt” defiance of laws prohibiting nonprofits like churches from explicit partisan activity — and this is because, one journalist alleges, MAGA is run by Christian nationalists. “People not attuned to the evangelical world may have missed the growing prominence of hyper-politicized churches such as Mercy Culture, which have become a key wing of the MAGA coalition,” wrote The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe. “Compared with the religious right of previous generations, this cohort of pastors, influencers, and self-described prophets offers up a version of worship that’s at once more mystical, with an emphasis on supernatural powers, and more militaristic, with heightened political rhetoric.” Monroe added, “Many adopt a Christian-nationalist framework, arguing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed as such.” They do this in spite of the Johnson Amendment, which outlaws precisely this type of overtly political activity from churches and other religious institutions that wish to claim nonprofit status. “Houses of worship aligned with both political parties have long flirted with defying the rule, but, after Trump was first elected, that defiance became more overt,” Monroe wrote, highlighting the Texas nondenominational evangelical megachurch Mercy Culture as one example. “Mercy Culture’s pastors hung a candidate’s banner behind the pulpit, endorsed politicians during Sunday services, said that people who vote for Democrats weren’t truly Christian, and described Kamala Harris as a demonic Jezebel taking the form of a snake encircling the White House.” Monroe is not alone among journalists to notice the literally militant tone of the Christians in the White House under Trump. The Hill's Jos Joseph, a Marine Corps veteran who now writes about the military, reported that some of the brass in the military are explaining the war in Iran in bluntly religious terms. "There is messaging that this war with Iran is somehow a religious war tied to the Book of Revelations, the second coming of Jesus, and the end of the world," Joseph wrote. "One of the stories was of a military commander who told his non-commissioned officers that Trump was 'anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.' It would be easy to write this off as a single military commander off his rocker, who shouldn't be in command of a U.S. military unit. But the Military Religious Freedom Foundation said they received more than 200 complaints in a couple of days from service members being told in separate instances that their military mission was key to fulfilling Christian prophecy." He added, "Add the fact that Israel is also at war with Iran, along with several high-ranking Trump officials being ardent Christian nationalists or devout evangelicals, and you have to ask yourself: What is the reason for this war?.... This is a cause of concern, because as the war evolves, there is a good chance that the objectives will change in a way suited to Christian nationalists' beliefs."

MAGA churches are flouting the law with impunity: report

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🚨 Republicans are trying to NATIONALIZE voter suppression. Their new bills would require passports/birth certificates to register - documents MILLIONS of Americans don't have. This isn't about security - it's about silencing voters.

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Trump’s cruel legislation strips 17 million Americans of health insurance through the largest cuts to Medicaid in history, while making it easier for the wealthy to buy private jets through expanded tax breaks.

Their actions show us who they are. Shame!

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DC insider breaks down Trump's 'unpardonable' Iran blunder President Donald Trump’s actions in engaging America into a war with Iran are “unpardonable,” according to a Republican strategist who worked for President George W. Bush during his similarly-controversial war against Iraq. Steve Schmidt, co-founder of The Lincoln Project and the Save America Movement, cautioned that a “tidal wave” of epic proportions is coming for the president’s party on The Daily Beast Podcast. “We’re not winning this war,” consultant Steve Schmidt told The Daily Beast Podcast’s Joanna Coles. “And that is unpardonable in the United States.” Noting that Trump has been repeatedly told the Iranian regime shows no signs of being toppled despite the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28th, Schmidt expressed disgust at Trump for publicly declaring victory regardless. At the time of this publication, Trump’s war has led to at least 13 American servicemembers dying and another 140 being injured. “Before the war started, the midterms were already a political disaster of immense dimensions, immense dimensions for MAGA, for Trump,” Schmidt told Coles. “They’re going to lose the House majority. They’re likely to lose the Senate majority. They’re going to lose governors’ races. They’re going to lose up and down the ballot all over the country.” Even before the Iran war, Democrats were already gaining momentum by flipping 28 traditionally safe Republican state legislative seats since November 2024, while Republicans have flipped zero. The Iran war is only heightening that trend. “There are a lot of [Democratic] candidates and a lot of places who are going to win, and that’s before the war,” Schmidt said. “You can tell through the collapse of his polling numbers and their further deterioration and the split within the MAGA party on this issue that this is terrible for Trump.” Despite originally being a staunch Republican, Schmidt is now one of Trump’s fiercest conservative detractors. Earlier in March he called out Trump for demanding a Nobel Peace Prize before waging unprovoked wars against Venezuela and Iran. “He wanted the Peace Prize, and when he couldn’t get it, Trump lost his mind,” Schmidt wrote for his Substack on Friday. He then quoted a February letter Trump wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre saying he would wage wars because of his disappointment at not getting the prize. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump told Støre. On another occasion in March, Schmidt characterized the Iran war as being waged with “no debate, no plan, and no thought given by Donald, his stooges and politicized generals about the second-and third-order effects of their decisions. This is escalating.” In a separate Substack editorial, Schmidt described how Trump has eroded faith in public institutions. “Trust is a rare commodity in our wretched times,” Schmidt argued. “These are the days of corruption, self-dealing, incompetence and faithlessness to the Constitution.”

DC insider breaks down Trump's 'unpardonable' Iran blunder

How MAGA could 'wipe out' Democrats An expert on law, politics and foreign policy explained in a Sunday editorial that the same logic used by President Trump and his supporters to invade Iran is also being used to justify getting rid of the Senate filibuster. “Sen. John Cornyn’s reversal on the Senate filibuster may or may not be sincere, but it is logical,” The Washington Post’s Jason Willick wrote in a Sunday editorial about Trump’s demand that the Senate abandon the 60-out-of-100 vote threshold necessary to call off a filibuster. Trump wishes to nuke the filibuster because Democrats are using that to thwart his attempt to pass the SAVE Act, a mass disenfranchisement law he insists is necessary to help Republicans keep control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. “That supermajority threshold for most legislation has historically made it harder for the majority party to steamroll the minority,” Willick wrote. “Cornyn (who has been in the Senate for nearly a quarter-century) argues that this arrangement used to make sense, but today’s Democratic Party can no longer be trusted to respect it.” Because Democrats came two votes away from getting rid of the Senate filibuster in 2022, Willick concluded that Cornyn “has a point” insofar as the filibuster is concerned, then speculated that this same logic is being applied by Trump to justify invading Iran. “Iran has been inveterately hostile to the United States for decades,” Willick wrote. “But the U.S. has long managed to deter the regime from taking the two steps that would be most threatening to American interests: closing the Strait of Hormuz and building a nuclear weapon.” Now that America and Israel have invaded Iran, “there’s a good chance the surviving elements of the Iranian regime will see the U.S.” as having escalated matters past the point of no return. “When deterrence erodes, incapacitation becomes more important,” Willick said. “If the U.S. and Israel want to prevent Iran from closing the strait or lunging for a nuclear weapon, they’ll need to make sure it never rebuilds the capacity to do so after this war. That will be an arduous process, likely requiring further attacks. And there’s no guarantee that a future U.S. president will be up for them.” The bottom line, as Willick put it, is that “the chances of Iran building a bomb are thankfully much lower” than the likelihood of the Senate eventually abolishing the filibuster, “but, I fear, higher than they were before Trump started this war.” Trump’s desire to eliminate the filibuster and thereby pass the SAVE Act is so intense, the president has refused to endorse either Cornyn or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the ongoing Senate Republican primary as a means of pressuring the Senate to get rid of the filibuster. Yet as Semafor journalist Burgess Everett reported earlier in March, “the Republican Congress is consumed by a daunting, nearly impossible task: Satisfying President Donald Trump’s desire for new federal voter ID legislation.” Many of them share his belief that the law is necessary to avoid losing in the midterms, but also fear that getting rid of the filibuster to pass it will leave them vulnerable to future major policy shifts by the Democrats. "The one thing I’ve said all along and I’ve told [Trump] and others — that I can’t guarantee an outcome,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters earlier this month about Trump’s anti-filibuster crusade. “I can’t guarantee a result if the result is only achieved by nuking the legislative filibuster. We don’t have the votes to do that, and so that’s just not a realistic option, and I’ve made that clear to anybody who’s asked."

How MAGA could 'wipe out' Democrats

Entering War’s Third Week, Trump Faces Stark Choices As the conflict with Iran expands and intensifies, President Trump’s options — to fight on, or to move toward declaring victory and pulling back — both carry deeply problematic consequences.

Entering War’s Third Week, Trump Faces Stark Choices

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Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s Homeland Security Pick, Got Wealthier Stock Trading in Congress Markwayne Mullin’s financial dealings take on new importance as the Senate considers his nomination to lead an agency whose budget has vastly expanded.

Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s Homeland Security Pick, Got Wealthier Stock Trading in Congress

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'Americans need clarity': Trump energy secretary slammed for Iran war comments Secretary of Energy Chris Wright made the rounds of US media on Sunday — and users on the social media platform X were not impressed with what he had to say. Speaking with ABC News’ Martha Raddatz on “This Week,” Wright said that he believes the war in Iran “will certainly come to an end in the next few weeks. Could be sooner than that, but the conflict will come to the end in the next few weeks.” He also predicted that gas prices would decline once the war concludes. “We’ll see a rebound in supplies and a pushing down of prices after that,” Wright predicted, adding he is “very aware” of a “short-term disruption” occurring. “Look, you never know exactly the time frame of this, but, in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing,” Wright told CNN. Similarly, speaking to Kristen Welker of NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Welker asked Wright if Americans should brace for the price of oil to exceed $200 per barrel. “Iran calls us the 'great Satan,'” Wright replied. “I don't think we are the great Satan. We're not.” Welker asked, “That's a no?” Wright told Welker, “I would pay no attention to what Iran says, but…” “Dodging by dismissing foreign rhetoric dodges the point,” posted an X user called Hosky.Watcher. “Whether you tune out Iran or not, Americans need clarity on price risk and government plans to protect households if oil spikes. This matters beyond talking points.” A user called FankachCrypto seemed confused by the implications of Wright’s statements, asking “Wright optimistic—Iran scrap wraps in weeks. Oil steady, markets exhale. De-escalate or bluff? Less confident, a user called George Lewis observed to NBC News that he cannot “envision the slightest reality associated with his rhetoric. Therefore, for the sake of all of those who are actually risking their lives for this hyperbolic BS. I say ‘God’ be with you. Thank you” Tim McCormack, commenting on the Wright interviews, observed that the energy secretary “fails to mention Iran has not attacked any country in the last 200 years, and not executed any coups. He also fails to state the number executed by the US and Israel. Hmmmm.....” Perhaps the consensus was summed up by someone known as orangbiasa, who tweeted that “US Energy Secretary Wright says the Iran conflict will end in the ‘next few weeks,’ with oil supplies rebounding and energy prices falling once the war concludes, per ABC News. This likely won’t be enough to calm oil markets.”

'Americans need clarity': Trump energy secretary slammed for Iran war comments

'Biggest jerk of the week, month, year and decade': Tea partier tears into Trump President Donald Trump and his key supporters are “jerks,” according to a former Republican congressman who once supported Trump. “Of course, the biggest jerk of the week, month, year, and decade is always Donald Trump, but there’s only so much space here to write about all the horrible things he does in a single day, much less a week,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) wrote for his Substack on Sunday. “F—— Trump.” Before issuing that statement, Walsh took down several of the most important people in Trump’s orbit that are helping him implement his agenda. These include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who Walsh denounced for associating with a former insurrectionist that was involved in the January 6th coup attempt; Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who bragged about Trump “blowing the hell” out of Iran; and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who refused to condemn fellow Republicans Reps. Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Randy Fine of Florida after they made hateful comments about Muslims. “At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that most of Trump’s administration hasn’t actually read the Constitution,” Walsh opined. “Heck, some of them haven’t even read their own agency guidelines. Joseph Guy, the head of the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO), who is supposed to protect the human rights of incarcerated immigrants, testified that he had not read the OIDO standards book—the one he is required by law to implement. That explains a lot.” The Illinois ex-Republican added, “Meanwhile, a DOGE staffer tasked with eliminating more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants because of ‘DEI’ couldn’t accurately define what DEI is in embarrassing testimony this week. Shameful.” Although Walsh originally supported Trump, he has since become an outspoken critic of the president. Earlier in March he said that he feels like he has to “grab [his] mistake” and is “at war” all the way “from eight in the morning till eight or nine at night” because of his opposition to Trump. In February, as Trump’s plan to invade Iran became evident, Walsh accused people who still support Trump despite his flip-flopping on keeping America out of war of being in a “cult.” “This is what America looks like when one of our two major political parties has become an authoritarian-embracing cult,” Walsh explained. “And I’ll throw in for good measure — hey, MAGA, MAGA — this is what America looks like when the people who voted for Donald Trump don’t get what Donald Trump said he would give them, but they still praise him to the high heavens.”

'Biggest jerk of the week, month, year and decade': Tea partier tears into Trump

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Trump told his conspiracy believers that he would “drain the swamp” & expose Epstein’s network. Now he claims the Epstein files never existed, triggering a MAGA crisis of faith so deep it's even shaking some of his most loyal insiders. Share the truth.

Charlie Kirk's organization targets high school students with MAGA messaging During a late 2010s conversation on WURD-FM (a Black talk radio station in Philadelphia), one of the guests commented that if you think Millennials are liberal or progressive, wait until Generation Z becomes more involved in politics. But in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump made gains with Gen-Z voters — much to the frustration of Democrats. And Turning Point USA, the MAGA youth group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, is still trying to convert Gen-Z to far-right MAGA politics and evangelical Christian nationalism. Turning Point, now led by Charlie Kirk's widow Erika Kirk, is heavily focused on college campuses. But in a video posted by the New York Times on March 15, reporters Michael Anthony Adams, Mark Boyer and Luke Piotrowski examine Turning Point's high school outreach with Club America. According to the report, "At least eight Republican governors have partnered with Turning Point, vowing to bring Club America to all of their public high schools. But here in New York, where Democrats govern and a statewide embrace of TPUSA's conservative Christian ideology is unlikely, students like Jacob Kennedy are still trying to launch Club America, even if that means an uphill battle." Kennedy, an evangelical Christian fundamentalist, told the Times, "I have grown up in a Christian home, which follows mostly the values of conservative beliefs. It's my first year at a public school. I did not feel accepted to share my conservative beliefs and my religion." But some of the New York State parents in the video want to make sure that liberal and progressive politics also have their outlets in high schools. One of them stressed, "If there’s going to be a Club America, by God, there needs to be a Club Progressive." Another had much more biting things to say about Turning Point and Club America's far-right agenda, commenting, "I would just like to say, 'Welcome to Germany, 1939.'"

Charlie Kirk's organization targets high school students with MAGA messaging

Energy Secretary Says ‘No Guarantees’ Oil Prices Will Fall Soon Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the Strait of Hormuz, a critical passageway for oil shipments, remained unsafe for tanker passage. Iran has been firing projectiles and laying mines.

Energy Secretary Says ‘No Guarantees’ Oil Prices Will Fall Soon

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Liar Trump falsely claims that tariffs are paid by other countries, not by American consumers.

Fact: US importers pay the tariffs as customs duties, then pass the higher costs to retailers, who pass them to US consumers.

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The divide tearing America apart just hit a new extreme: conservative The word "polarization" was being used to describe the United States' political environment long before Donald Trump launched the MAGA movement with his 2016 campaign. During the 2004 presidential election, quite a few political journalists stressed that liberal and progressive urban Americans and rural Republicans were living in two different worlds. And 12 years before that, during his 1992 presidential campaign, paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan (a major influence on Trump and MAGA) said the U.S. was in the middle of a "culture war." But Never Trump conservative David French, in his March 15 column for the New York Times, argues that the United States' political polarization is entering an even more dangerous phase than before. "Does anyone think a healthy nation with a healthy political culture would elect a man like Donald Trump not once, but twice?," French comments. "The eternal return of President Trump is a sign of our national sickness, and a recent Pew Research Center study shows us exactly what that sickness is. We despise each other, and demagogues rise when hatred increases. It's as predictable as night following day." French continues, "In a 25-country survey, which included a cross section of European, Asian, African and American nations, the United States was the only country in which a majority of adults surveyed said that the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens were either bad or somewhat bad. Even countries torn apart by violence and civil strife — countries such as Nigeria and Mexico — had higher views of their fellow citizens." Big chunks of the U.S. population, French warns, don't review their political opponents as the loyal opposition — they see them as flat-out evil. "If you're a Republican or a Democrat," French argues, "the best way to imagine the other side's view of you is to simply mirror your own attitude. They despise you with the same intensity that you despise them. They view you with the same sense of threat and alarm that you view them…. American hatred is growing so great that partisans, perversely enough, often view kindness and tolerance from political opponents as a threat…. Civility itself is a questionable value. It's a version of 'respectability politics' when the times call for direct, aggressive action against your evil political opponents. This approach is profoundly dangerous to our republic."

The divide tearing America apart just hit a new extreme: conservative

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The Trump administration has the answers many academics are too afraid to seek President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon and other federal agencies to begin releasing government files related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena – called UAP – in February 2026, following years of pressure from Congress, military whistleblowers and the public. Congress formally mandated UAP investigations through the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2022. The Pentagon’s official UAP investigative body, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, now carries a caseload exceeding 2,000 reports dating back to 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed this figure earlier this year. The cases were submitted by military personnel, pilots and government employees describing aerial objects that could not be explained as known aircraft, drones or weather phenomena. Governments in Japan, France, Brazil and Canada also have their own formal UAP investigation programs. Yet modern research universities remain almost entirely absent from this conversation. No major university has established a dedicated UAP research center. No federal science agency offers competitive grants for UAP inquiry. No doctoral programs train researchers in UAP methodology. The gap between what governments openly acknowledge and what universities are willing to study is, at this point, difficult to explain on purely intellectual grounds. I have navigated this gap while conducting my own UAP research. My work developing the temporal aerospace correlation tool, a standardized framework for correlating civilian UAP sighting reports with documented rocket launch activity from Cape Canaveral, is currently under peer review at Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies. Designing that framework meant making methodological decisions without community standards, without institutional funding and without the professional infrastructure many researchers in established fields take for granted. What is missing is not interest or data – it is the shared scaffolding that turns isolated curiosity into cumulative science. Stigma is measurable The most rigorous evidence for the gap between faculty interest in UAP and faculty willingness to study it UAP comes from peer-reviewed studies by Marissa Yingling, Charlton Yingling and Bethany Bell, published in the scholarly journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Across 14 disciplines at 144 major U.S. research universities, 1,460 faculty responded to their 2023 national survey. Most surveyed believed UAP research was important. Curiosity outweighed skepticism in every discipline that was part of the study. Nearly one-fifth had personally observed something aerial they could not identify. Yet fewer than 1% had ever conducted UAP-related research. The gap was not explained by intellectual dismissal, but it was in part explained by fear. Researchers were not primarily deterred by intellectual skepticism because they doubted the topic’s merits. Instead, they feared they might lose funding, face ridicule from colleagues or find their careers quietly derailed. Faculty reported being told to “be careful.” A 2024 follow-up study found that roughly 28% said they might vote against a colleague’s tenure case for conducting UAP research, even when they personally believed the topic warranted study. Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities suppress anomalous questions not because those questions are unanswerable, but because they fall outside the boundaries the community has collectively decided are worth investigating. Sociologist Thomas Gieryn called this suppression “boundary work,” referring to the active process by which scientists police what counts as legitimate science. For UAP researchers, the data and tools to study the phenomenon exist. What may not exist is social permission to use them without professional consequence. Creating an academic discipline Academic disciplines do not emerge spontaneously. They require dedicated journals, agreed-upon methods, graduate programs and professional societies. The history of cognitive neuroscience demonstrates how disciplines emerge. Before the 1980s, researchers at the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology faced resistance from both parent disciplines. These fields achieved mainstream acceptance only after targeted funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, new brain-imaging tools and the gradual formation of academic programs that created career pathways for researchers. Researchers at the nexus of these fields did not wait for central questions to be resolved. They built infrastructure, and the infrastructure made progress possible. UAP studies as a discipline is developing some of these elements, but largely outside universities. The Society for UAP Studies, a nonprofit of scholars and researchers, operates Limina as a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal and has convened international symposia drawing researchers from physics, philosophy of science and the social sciences. But a nonprofit scholarly society without tenured faculty does not constitute a discipline. To turn UAP studies into a recognized academic field would require three things. First, funding. The Yingling studies found that competitive research grants would do more to unlock faculty participation than any other single factor. Without grants, researchers cannot hire students to assist them, maintain instruments or sustain the multiyear projects that produce meaningful results. Second, shared methodological standards – these would entail agreed-upon procedures for collecting, recording and evaluating UAP reports – would mean findings from one research group can be compared and built upon by others. Third, institutions could publicly affirm that they will evaluate appropriately rigorous UAP scholarship on its scientific merits during tenure reviews. Several universities have already done this for gun violence research and psychedelic-assisted therapy studies. These are not isolated examples. Research into near-death experiences and adverse childhood experiences followed similar trajectories, moving from being a professional liability to mainstream legitimacy after the removal of institutional barriers. The international comparison This gap in UAP scholarship is unique to the United States. France’s GEIPAN, a dedicated investigation unit within its national space agency, has operated since 1977. It has publicly archived approximately 5,300 French UAP cases, of which about 2% to 3% remain unexplained after rigorous analysis. In 2020, Japan formalized UAP reporting protocols for its Self-Defense Forces, the branch of the Japanese military responsible for national defense. By June 2024, more than 80 lawmakers had formed a parliamentary UAP investigation group that by May 2025 had formally proposed a dedicated UAP research office to the defense minister. Canada launched its own multiagency UAP investigation survey in 2023. None of these actions has produced a corresponding response from American research universities. Universities provide independent, peer-reviewed analyses that government programs structurally cannot. The University of Würzburg in Germany became the first Western university to officially recognize UAP as a legitimate object of academic research in 2022, when it formally added UAP investigation to its research canon. Researchers at Stockholm University and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden have been actively publishing peer-reviewed UAP research since 2017, most recently in Scientific Reports in October 2025. Congress has passed legislation, the Pentagon is reporting on its investigations, and the president has directed federal agencies to begin releasing records. So the question no longer is whether governments take UAP seriously – it is whether universities will follow, and which ones will get there first. Darrell Evans, Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability, Purdue University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Trump administration has the answers many academics are too afraid to seek

Iran has Trump over a barrel after his bungling I was telling you the other day that the Iranians have the president’s number. They know that all they have to do to win this war is exhaust his will to fight with enough “economic pain.” Donald Trump’s will to fight was already limited, as the point of the war was creating conditions in which an old, depleted and unpopular president looked big, tough and loved on American TV. But I’m having second thoughts. Trump is going to want to TACO – I would guess very soon – but war against this regime isn’t like invading Venezuela. Trump might want to quit, but the Iranians are setting things up so he will have to ask for their permission. The risk could be worse even than a forever war: The US “must consider the possibility that they will be engaged in a long-term war of attrition that will destroy the entire American economy and the world economy,” said Ali Fadavi, advisor to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' commander-in-chief, according to AFP. What I’m thinking of is this morning’s attacks on three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow section of the Persian Gulf through which passes about 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. The Iranians had brought the shipping lane to a stand-still since the start of Trump’s war. That’s the chief reason oil prices soared Monday. (In my neighborhood in New Haven, the price at the cheap gas station spiked by about 80 cents in the last week.) Because Iran has also been mining the waters, shipping firms have asked the US Navy for escorts. Trump hyped the possibility to ease markets, but the Times reported today that the Navy has declined all requests. Last night, Trump said US forces destroyed 10 “mine-laying vessels,” but the AP described them as “inactive.” Trump was warned. He was told that a war with Iran could trigger oil shocks, especially at home, where the affordability issue is the primary force eating the heart out of his presidency. But the risks were “downplayed,” the Times said, in favor of a plan to “decapitate” Iran. While the military told Trump the regime would fight to the death, “other advisers remained confident that killing Iran’s senior leadership would lead to more pragmatic leaders taking over who might bring an end to the war.” Obviously, that didn’t happen. First, because Israel, not the US, killed Ali Khamenei. Second, because his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, is more determined to prolong combat to avenge the deaths of his dad, mom, wife and son. Yesterday, a US official tried to commence ceasefire talks. Khamenei said no. Trump thought Iran was going to be another Venezuela. In addition to the Times reporting, that’s clear from his demands. He said he wanted “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” He said he wanted a say in who is chosen to be Iran’s next leader. He called on the dissidents to rise up and overthrow the government. He suggested the US would take a stake in Iran’s oil reserves. All these things happened, to varying degrees, in Venezuela. No one appears to have told Trump that the new enemy is Iranian or that Iranians don’t roll over. But even if someone had, it probably would not have changed his thinking. Things are going badly at home. A made-for-TV war would change the subject. And anyway, what’s one s------- country compared to another? Iran’s agency was minimized so much in Trump’s war-planning that it was just assumed oil prices would return to normal at the end of the war. “The purposeful disruption in the oil market by the Iranian regime is short term, and necessary for the long-term gain of wiping out these terrorists and the threat they pose to America and the world,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. But, as they say, the enemy gets a vote. This morning, Iran took responsibility for attacking three oil tankers. A drone strike also hit a port in Oman. Now, the AP said “the Iran war has blocked the Strait of Hormuz.” In response, the International Energy Agency said member countries would release a historic 400 million barrels of reserve oil. But, according to the Times, oil prices shot up anyway. Meanwhile, when asked about reopening the strait, the president told Newsweek: “It’s working out very well, and I think you are going to see that." Trump is lying, because lies are pretty much all he and his top aides have left. Evidently, they thought this war was going to be easy-peasy. There was no plan for regime change, according to US Senator Chris Murphy, after a classified briefing. There was no plan for stopping Iran’s nuclear program. And there was no plan for the Strait of Hormuz. “They don't know how to get it safely back open,” Murphy said, “which is unforgiveable, because this part of the disaster was 100 percent foreseeable.” The US energy secretary tried easing concerns Sunday by saying oil prices will drop once the US stops Iran’s ability to attack oil tankers. “We’re massively attriting their ability to strike with missiles and drones, and that rate of attrition will increase in the coming days,” Chris Wright told Fox. “Energy will flow soon.” But even if that was achieved today, it would be “months before we started to see oil come down,” according to CNN. “One oil analyst said it could take one to three months after the conflict is over to start getting oil back to normal through the Strait of Hormuz.” And that’s assuming the US has the capacity to reopen the strait and guarantee safe passage for oil tankers in the future. Some experts say that would likely take a massive ground invasion, a generation-defining investment of resources and manpower that American public opinion is united in saying is out of the question. Iran is winning, suggested Newt Gingrich. Without a plan for the strait, Iran has Trump over a barrel. “If they can’t keep it open, this war will in fact be an American defeat before very long, because the entire world, including the American people, will react to the price of oil if the strait stays closed,” he said. Trump finds himself in a place familiar to previous presidents mired in forever wars. He can’t leave without hurting himself. He can’t stay without hurting himself. He’s going to lie in the hope that lying frees him from responsibility. But as the saying goes, the enemy has a vote. Chickening out is no longer an option. He can TACO when Iran says he can.

Iran has Trump over a barrel after his bungling

The real winners of Trump's war Today I want to talk about who’s getting the most out of Trump’s war. That war is costing the U.S. about $1 billion a day. The Pentagon’s budget is around $1 trillion this year, and Trump wants an additional $500 billion. Because of the war, the cost of oil has topped $100 a barrel, and the price of a gallon of gas at the U.S. pump now averages $3.67 — up from $2.92 before the war. The strain on the federal budget has given Republicans an excuse to demand further cuts in federal assistance to people in need. JD Vance recently kicked off a “war on waste and fraud” by announcing suspension of Medicaid payments to Minnesota, charging that the program is rife with fraud perpetrated by “bad actors in our society … [who] decide to make themselves rich.” But if you want to find real waste and fraud, look no further than Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War.” A new analysis by government watchdog Open the Books found that as the 2025 fiscal year was ending, Hegseth’s Pentagon spent: nearly $100,000 on a Steinway grand piano to outfit the home of the Air Force chief of staff; $60,719 on premium office furniture, including at least one luxurious $1,844 Aeron Chair; $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands; $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $6.9 million on lobster tail, $15.1 million on ribeye steak, and $1 million on salmon; $124,000 for ice cream machines; and $26,000 for sushi preparation tables. The Pentagon has failed every audit since it was legally required to start submitting them in 2018, and reports say it will continue to fail them at least through 2028. The ballooning profits of military contractors are helped by their near monopoly on defense production. Since the 1990s, the number of prime contractors for the Defense Department has shrunk from 55 to five. Keep following the money. These giants have been spending more on enriching their investors than expanding production. Between 2020 and 2025, top military contractors devoted $110 billion to stock buybacks and dividends — more than double what they spent on capital expenditures — which boosted their stock values and the pay packages of their CEOs. And who are their biggest investors and CEOs? Trump loyalists. Larry Ellison’s Oracle provides Hegseth’s war machine with cloud infrastructure and enterprise software. (Reminder: Ellison is the second-richest person in America and a Trump loyalist on the verge of owning a media empire comprised of CBS, CNN, TikTok, Comedy Central, and HBO.) Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured billions in contracts for launching sensitive satellites and space surveillance. Musk’s xAI has received a Pentagon contract to develop advanced AI tools. (Reminder: Musk is the richest person in the world and spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump reelected in 2024.) Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies has landed multibillion-dollar defense contracts, including a $10 billion agreement with the U.S. Army to provide AI-driven data analytics and software to integrate AI, surveillance, and battlefield management systems. (Reminder: Thiel is a billionaire who contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, including $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, and then $10 million to getting JD Vance elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022.) Not to forget Big Oil, now enjoying windfall profits as global oil prices soar. (Recall Trump asking oil company executives for $1 billion for his 2024 campaign, in return for undisclosed favors.) Among others benefitting from the turmoil is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, who’s busily raising at least $5 billion or more for his private-equity investment firm from governments in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Finally, there’s Trump’s on-again, off-again ally Vladimir Putin. In just two weeks of war, Russia has reaped an estimated $6.9 billion from the increase in oil prices and the easing of sanctions. What to do? At the very least, Congress should: Prohibit defense contractors from making campaign donations or lobbying Congress. Why should taxpayers subsidize these activities? Tax windfall profits from Trump’s war (or from any war). America has had windfall profits taxes during wartime before. Given the size of current windfalls, we need it again. Cut the defense budget. Start by cutting it 10 percent each year it fails audits. This is particularly important during the Trump-Hegseth era of defense bloat. As long as Trump and his Republicans control Congress and the executive branch, these reforms don’t have a prayer. Still, Democrats should introduce them and push for them. Let Trump and his Republicans go on record voting against them. Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

The real winners of Trump's war

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Trump is eager to declare victory, but a battered Iran still has cards to play