This is an assessment of Trump's chosen war with Iran as carefully enunciated by former Pres. Bill Clinton. It's 24 minutes, but as sincere and straightforward as you'll hear. You need to take the time.
It's a Facebook REEL. Find it here:
Friday, May 8, 2026
Saturday, April 18, 2026
Thinking of my mom ...
When you get to my age you have time to let your mind sift back through the accumulated detritus of past years and sometimes revisit moments and experiences long thought forgotten. Sometimes, like last night, those bits and pieces trigger dreams and, if you're like me, dreams can trigger feelings that are as real and emotional as they are in the bright of day.
Last night I had a dream that was not about my mother, but in which she was just there, as if it was normal, and she was real. There was no plot in the dream that I can remember. Only that I was home in the old wooden house on US 41 next to the sawmill my dad owned and, I think, in the kitchen. In the dream, I was not directly engaged with my mom. She was just "over there" at the edge of my line of sight. It is a "still" scene. No movement or action that I can remember. I awoke immediately after that and was filled with the feeling of just having my mother near me again, a feeling of safety, and, somehow, warmth. I'm 83 now and and haven't felt that feeling since I left home for the last time in 1963 when I watched her and my dad standing at the Brooksville bus station as I left on a Greyhound bus for flight training in the Marine Corps. I was still a kid then. When a saw them next, four months later, I no longer was.
So, after my dream and maybe because of my dream, this day has became one of those when I'm thinking I need to begin getting all the papers I've kept through the years in order. You know those that intentionally or not, time-stamp events and seemingly document if not simply suggest who you've become and what your life was about. One of those papers was a piece I wrote on December 18, 1993, in honor of my mother's 75th birthday. It was a wonderful surprise organized by my sister, Vicki, to which her entire extended family and many friends were invited and who turned out in full in her honor. On that day the plan was for me to pick her up to have dinner with my two sisters. When she walked in to that room she almost fainted when over a hundred people started singing happy birthday. Her surprise was real and it was a joyous day.
So, the piece I had written in her honor is below. I was supposed to stand read it, but couldn't finish it. Vicki had to read what I couldn't. It's about who she was and, for me, will always be.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
It feels like something has shifted in the United States this week - Heather cox Richardson
April 10, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American<heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
It feels like something shifted in the United States this
week after President Donald J. Trump threatened on Tuesday that “a whole
civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As professor
of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy Mathias Risse of Harvard
University’s Kennedy School noted, the Geneva Conventions prohibit “acts or
threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians.” He
notes that Trump’s threat terrorized 90 million Iranians by threatening them
with genocide. Trump has continued to struggle to assert his power over
Iran since Tuesday, and has continued to fail. Yesterday former secretary of
state John Kerry told Jen Psaki of The Briefing that Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had urged presidents Barack Obama, Joe
Biden, and George W. Bush to strike Iran, and they all refused him. Only
Trump was willing to go along. But negotiations have been rocky all along, and today
Trump warned that if Iran didn’t come to a peace deal, the U.S. would launch
even deadlier attacks. “We have a reset going,” Trump told the New
York Post. At 9:31 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted:
“WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL RESET!!! PRESIDENT DJT.” At 12:27, Trump vented some
of his apparent frustration that the Iranians have been trolling him,
posting: “The Iranians are better at handling the Fake News Media, and
‘Public Relations,’ than they are at fighting!” A minute later, he posted:
“The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short
term extortion of the World by using International Waterways. The only reason
they are alive today is to negotiate!” Trump continues to try to shore up the international
right-wing authoritarian project even as people are turning against it. Today
he threw the economic might of the United States of America behind Hungarian
prime minister Viktor Orbán, who gutted Hungary’s democracy and turned the
country into an authoritarian state. Orbán is deeply underwater ahead of the
April 12 parliamentary elections in Hungary. Vice President J.D. Vance has
been in Hungary to support Orbán, and today Trump posted: “My Administration stands
ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen
Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it. We are excited
to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s
continued Leadership! President DONALD J. TRUMP” A recently revealed transcript of an October 2025 phone
call between Orbán and Russian president Vladimir Putin shows Orbán promising
to be a “mouse” aiding the “lion” Putin, telling the Russian leader: “In any
matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.” Tonight
Hungarians filled the streets to protest Orbán, chanting “Russians, go home.” Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported
today that Trump has repeatedly promised to pardon his top officials before
he leaves office and that he brings up the subject frequently. In a recent
meeting, he said: “I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the
Oval [Office].” In response to a request for comment by Meredith Kile
of People magazine, White House press secretary Karoline
Leavitt said: “The Wall Street Journal should learn to
take a joke; however, the President’s pardon power is absolute.” But Tuesday has given momentum to those trying to rein
Trump in. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the
House Judiciary Committee, made a record of Trump’s recent bizarre behavior
in a letter today to the president’s personal physician, Captain Sean P.
Barbabella. Raskin noted that “[e]xperts have repeatedly warned that
the President has been exhibiting signs consistent with dementia and
cognitive decline. And, in recent days, the country has watched President
Trump’s public statements and outbursts turn increasingly incoherent,
volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening.” Raskin recounted Trump’s wild
social media posts and weird performance at the White House Easter egg roll,
what the congressman called “a bizarre display that shocked tens of millions
of Americans and astonished observers across the political spectrum.” Raskin wrote that Trump’s “apparently deteriorating
condition has caused tremendous alarm across the nation (and political
spectrum) about the President’s cognitive function and continuing mental
fitness for the office of President, and prompted concerns about the
President’s well-being.” Raskin asked the White House physician to “[c]onduct a
comprehensive neuropsychological assessment of the President, including a
formal cognitive screening instrument, and publicly release the results;
[p]rovide a detailed report on the President’s current mental and physical
health status, including any medications he is currently taking and their
potential cognitive side effects; and [m]ake yourself available for a
briefing, under oath, with Members of the Committee on the results of this
assessment.” Former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg said
on Morning Joe today that the gradual destruction of the
United States under Trump changed suddenly on Tuesday. “For the leader of the
free world, the leader of this country, to just make a nakedly genocidal
threat against another civilization, as if the United States of America was a
death star that was going around blowing up civilizations, of course that
crosses a new line, and, of course, that’s a new low,” he said. Buttigieg continued: “I think the really important thing
to remember is that the effects of that kind of thing will outlive Donald
Trump long after he has departed the scene, the collapse in trust, not just
affection for the United States, but trust in the United States, and it’s
very important that not just allies but, frankly, also adversaries that we’re
negotiating with when we’re making a peace deal or some other kind of deal,
that they have a level of trust that there is stability in the United States.” Those trying to write off Trump’s threat as bluster or
just Trump being Trump were missing the point, he said. “[T]he reality is
that the whole country is being judged. Even though most Americans don’t
support him anyway. The whole country is being judged just for tolerating
that kind of thing at the White House.” The pushback against Trump is spreading across the United
States. Jess Craven of Chop Wood, Carry Water today called
out rock and roll legend Bruce Springsteen’s opening last night at his
concert in Los Angeles: “Good evening, Los Angeles,” he said. “Welcome to the Land
of Hope and Dreams tour. We begin tonight with a prayer for our men and women
in service overseas. We pray for their safe return. “The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the
righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in dangerous times. We are
here in celebration and defense of our American ideals, democracy, our
Constitution, and our sacred American promise. The America I love, the
America that I’ve written about for 50 years, that has been a beacon of hope
and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt,
incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration,” he said. “Tonight we ask all of you to join with us in choosing
hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over
lawlessness, ethics over unrivaled corruption, resistance over complacency,
truth over lies, unity over division, and peace over war.” — Notes: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5825822-trump-threatens-iran-military-strikes/ Bluesky: jesscraven101.bsky.social/post/3mj5hmbih4c24 atrupar.com/post/3mj5mgqot3o2a acyn.bsky.social/post/3mj46zxfhas2s ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mj66vbwqcc22 onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3mj6rzlvk322q numb.comfortab.ly/post/3mj5opytgek26 woodwardnick.bsky.social/post/3mj5hznvx7k2v tomshafshafer.bsky.social/post/3mj5symdq5k2f paulballen.bsky.social/post/3mj65gur3yc27 opheliapg.bsky.social/post/3mj5tnl3g222o You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an
American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or
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© 2026 Heather Cox Richardson |
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
"The Last Temptation of Trump at the End of a Failed War"
Trump has backed himself into a corner where making a deal with Iran risks appearing, in his eyes, like a humiliating failure
By Hussein Banai
Hussein is an associate professor of international studies at Indiana University, Bloomington
(This piece was originally published online by New Lines Magazine. Find the original article here : https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-last-temptation-of-trump-at-the-end-of-a-failed-war/)
===============================
When President Donald Trump takes to the airwaves to threaten to bomb a nation of 90 million people “back to the Stone Ages” and follows that threat — in less than 48 hours — with strikes on civilian infrastructure, the destruction of a major bridge between two populous cities and a warning, in an expletive-laden post (on Easter Sunday, no less), that the assault on the targeted country’s power grid has “not even started,” it is worth pausing to ask where this ends. On Monday, standing at a White House podium, he supplied his own answer: “The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” This morning, he doubled down in a post on Truth Social, writing, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These are the utterances of a man casting about for an act of sufficient magnitude to substitute for the coherent strategy he never bothered to contemplate. The trajectory they trace — from rhetorical escalation to intensified bombardment to potentially something indiscriminate or far worse — deserves a degree of serious examination that major media outlets are just beginning to realize. Understanding that trajectory requires grasping, above all, the particular trap into which American power has sleepwalked.
That trap is understood best through the central insight in “The Strategy of Conflict,” a 1960 book by the Nobel Prize-winning scholar Thomas Schelling: that coercive bargaining is fundamentally about the manipulation of shared risk rather than the direct application of force. The Trump administration appears to have believed that sufficiently severe military punishment would produce Iranian capitulation, yet what severe punishment actually produces, when it does not produce capitulation, is a bargaining environment in which both sides are looking for a way out that does not humiliate them fatally. Iran, operating from a position of strategic weakness but tactical asymmetric leverage, has every incentive to make that exit as costly and as visible as possible. The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a shipping lane; in Schelling’s terms, it functions as a hostage whose value rises as American desperation increases.
The exit ramp that is currently available — some version of a negotiated freeze accompanied by American military de-escalation — is precisely the kind of deal that Trump cannot accept, and the weight of that constraint is arguably the most dangerous structural feature of the present situation. A president who has staked his political identity on the narrative of strength, who entered this confrontation promising a different outcome than President Barack Obama achieved with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that restricted Iran’s nuclear program, and who has cultivated an image as the one leader capable of doing what his predecessors lacked the will to do, cannot emerge from Iran having visibly retreated.
Any deal that can be made looks, from his perspective, like a deal that mockers will spend the next decade calling a face-saving exit ramp. He knows this. His opponents know this. And the Iranians know this, which is why they have calibrated their pressure to produce exactly this dilemma.
What the historian Alex Hobson has described, in a New Lines essay, as the logic of the “humiliation entrepreneur” is directly relevant here. Both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have built their political brands around the principle that every insult and humiliation demands an equal or greater counter-humiliation, and the performance of dominance is central to their authority. In that framework, a negotiated exit is not merely a strategic setback but a form of emasculation, one that their entire political identity is organized to prevent, and one that Iran, with considerable sophistication, is now deploying as leverage.
Trump’s first prime-time public address on the war, on April 1, made it plain that he has no theory of how this war ends, only a compulsion to narrate it as already won. The speech contained four claims, recycled from weeks of prior statements: that the war was necessary, that it had succeeded, that it would continue and that it would soon be over. The logical incoherence of holding all four simultaneously did not appear to trouble him, which is itself the most important thing the speech communicated.
A president capable of strategic thought would have used the address to reframe the conflict’s objectives around what is actually achievable, to prepare the public for the kind of negotiated outcome that the situation now demands. Trump instead reached for something grander and vaguer, measuring the duration of the war with Iran against every major American military campaign from World War I through Iraq, casting the ongoing war — and himself — as qualitatively superior to historical precedents. This is the psychology of a man who experiences the gap between ambition and outcome not as a prompt for recalibration but as an affront to his self-understanding, and who will go to considerable lengths to close it by other means.
The campaign is extracting a toll in lives and equipment from the United States with which the official narrative has struggled to keep pace, and the gap between the administration’s repeated assurances that Iran’s military capacity has been largely destroyed and the observable reality of a war that continues to exact a price from the U.S. grows wider with each passing week. Each casualty, each piece of evidence that the war is not proceeding as advertised, each morning that gas prices remain elevated and public support continues to erode, adds another increment of pressure to a president whose self-image is organized around the appearance of invincibility.
A leader of steadier temperament, focused on the preservation of American national interests, might find in this accumulation of costs a reason to move toward the negotiating table. In Trump, the mounting pressure is more likely to produce the opposite impulse, a search for some action dramatic enough to recast the entire narrative at a stroke.
That search is already visible in the escalatory texture of his public statements. Each threshold crossed makes the next one easier to contemplate, and a president who has already ordered strikes on power plants and oil facilities — framing each escalation as a demonstration of will rather than a means to a defined end — has established a psychological and rhetorical pattern whose terminus is worth examining honestly. Targeting civilian infrastructure on this scale would constitute, under even a cursory reading of international humanitarian law, a war crime (a judgment now formally registered by more than 100 American international law scholars, military law experts and former judge advocates general in an open letter published by the journal Just Security in April) — and the administration’s willingness to threaten it openly signals how far the logic of escalatory improvisation has already traveled.
It is within this psychological and political nexus that the nuclear dimension enters as an ominous possibility. A president unable to achieve a decisive political conclusion through conventional means may begin to contemplate options that more conventional strategists would treat as categorically foreclosed. The comparison that would animate his self-understanding is with Harry S. Truman: the one American president who took the decision to use the bomb and, in doing so, in his own telling and that of his defenders, ended a war and imposed an American order on the wreckage.
That narrative — long since contested by historians who have argued that Japan was already seeking surrender and that the bomb served as much to signal American power to Moscow as to end the war in the Pacific — provides a template that is available to a president searching for a decisive act capable of cutting through the fog of a failing campaign. And to be the first American president since Truman to cross that threshold would be, in Trump’s own terms, to place himself beyond the reach of historical diminishment. In his imagination, moreover — organized around the display of will rather than the management of multilateral constraints — a nuclear demonstration against Iran would send a message to Beijing and Moscow with a clarity no conventional military action could match. It would establish, in terms no adversary could misread, that the U.S. is willing to cross any threshold necessary to prevail, a wager against the entire architecture of arms control built over more than six decades on the assumption of mutual constraint.
A nuclear strike on Iran is not probable. The institutional constraints within the American military and national security apparatus (yes, even as denuded as they are now), the likely resistance of senior commanders, the reactions of allies whose cooperation remains essential to American global posture, and the scale of the international response that would follow all constitute real friction. Yet friction is not impossibility, and the argument here concerns the structure of a crisis in which the range of possible outcomes has expanded to include what previous generations of strategists treated as foreclosed by a normative consensus — a so-called “nuclear taboo.”
It is worth recalling that Trump’s attitude toward nuclear weapons has never been one of categorical restraint. During the 2016 campaign, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reported that a foreign policy expert who had briefed Trump came away alarmed after the candidate asked three times why the U.S. could not use its nuclear arsenal. In a town hall with Chris Matthews that same year, when pressed on whether he would rule out nuclear use, Trump’s response was simply: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” A few weeks later, he told NBC’s Today show that while nuclear weapons were a “horror,” he would “never, ever rule them out.” And once in office, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s account of his tumultuous first term in their book “The Divider,” Trump suggested to his then chief of staff John Kelly that he wanted to use nuclear weapons against North Korea and blame it on someone else.
Taken together, these are not the passing provocations of a man who has internalized the logic of nuclear abstinence that has governed every American presidency since Truman. They are a pattern, and they belong to the same psychological disposition that is now operating under conditions of mounting strategic failure and wounded pride. The pathway to the unthinkable runs not through a single dramatic decision but through the incremental normalization of the unacceptable: civilian infrastructure targeted, international law dismissed, each escalation framed as strength rather than desperation, until the next step seems less like a crossing of civilizational boundaries and more like a continuation of what has already begun.
A leader who entered a war he did not understand, in pursuit of objectives he had not reconciled, and who now confronts a situation in which every available exit diminishes the political narrative he has staked his identity on, is a genuinely dangerous figure to place at the apex of nuclear decision-making. He has made a catastrophic mess of this confrontation and appears to care only about his own self-image. That is, in the end, what makes this moment different from other moments of great-power recklessness: not the structural pressures, which are real enough, but the character of the man they are bearing down upon.
Saturday, April 4, 2026
There’s a madman running the country
Today
is April 3rd, 2026, and the President of the United States has been hiding
from the American people all day inside the White House, moving between the
Oval Office and the Oval Office dining room. In this critically dangerous
moment that calls for visible strength, clear reassurance, and the steady
presence of a president who is capable of rising to the occasion, we are
instead being met with silence and closed doors. All while the situation
overseas has deteriorated rapidly in a matter of hours. A U.S. fighter jet
has been shot down, and multiple aircraft sent into the rescue effort have
also been hit. An American service member is now missing in action, with
bounties reportedly placed on his head. The
F-15E fighter jet was shot down over Iran. Two crew members ejected and
landed on Iranian soil. U.S. forces launched a rescue operation, sending in
Black Hawk helicopters to retrieve them. They were able to locate and extract
the pilot, but both helicopters came under small arms fire on the way out,
with crew members wounded before they made it back to base. An A-10 Warthog
sent in to provide air cover was also hit by Iranian fire. That pilot barely
made it to Kuwait before ejecting and being rescued. His aircraft was a total
loss. The
second crew member from the original F-15E is still missing. Somewhere on the
ground, alone, in hostile territory, separated during ejection, armed with
little more than a sidearm, trained to hide and wait, while forces close in
and civilians are being told to shoot on sight.
Four
American aircraft hit in a single day. Two destroyed. Multiple service
members wounded. And one missing tonight. And this happened less than 48
hours after the President of the United States stood in front of the cameras
and told the nation that Iran had been “completely decimated.” He said they
had no anti-aircraft equipment left and that their radar was “100%
annihilated.” He said we were “unstoppable as a military force.” CENTCOM’s
own commander said Thursday that Iran’s air defenses had “largely been
destroyed.” And then today happened. And everything they told us was proven
wrong by the people who were supposed to have no ability to fight back. As the
days get darker, we have to admit a hard truth. The United States has fallen
to a madman. I say that from a place of heartbreak. And I say that because I
don’t know what other word describes a president who receives news that an
American is missing on the ground in hostile territory, with a bounty on his
head and state television telling civilians to shoot on sight, and responds
by posting “KEEP THE OIL, ANYONE?” on Truth Social. That was his public
response. Four words about stealing oil while an American weapons system
officer was in such grave danger.
While
in hiding at the White House, Donald Trump did give two brief phone
interviews today. In one, with NBC News correspondent Garrett Haake, he
dismissed the entire day in seven words when asked if the day’s events would
affect any negotiations with Iran: “No, not at all. No, it’s war.” Which was
an odd choice of words to use to describe what is happening in Iran, since he
has continued insisting it is not a “war,” so he doesn’t have to get
congressional approval for this “war”. When The Independent asked what he
would do if the missing American is captured or harmed by Iranian forces,
Trump said, “Well, I can’t comment on it because, we hope that’s not going to
happen,” and ended the call shortly after. He offered no warning to Iran. No
projection of strength. No plan. He just ended the call. And
then the White House called a lid on the press for the entire day, officially
confirming that the president would not appear before cameras, and that he
would not face the American people on the single worst day of this war. By
the evening, and as the day worsened for Trump, according to ABC News, his
national security team had gathered at the White House for what can only be
described as an emergency meeting. Instead of gaggling with the press today,
before Easter weekend, his White House was in full crisis mode because
reality had finally broken through. This war is a disaster. And we
have to remember how it got to this point. The people who are normally in the
room for decisions like this, whether to send Americans into combat, whether
to escalate or pull back, whether the risk is worth the cost, are trained for
it. They’ve spent their lives studying warfare, understanding global
consequences, weighing what happens on the ground and what it means back here
at home. Donald Trump has never had that level of understanding. He has never
shown the ability to step back and ask the most basic question a leader
should be asking in moments like this: what does this look like in the bigger
picture? In his first term, he at least had people around him who could
ground him in reality, people who brought him real intelligence, real
consequences, real limits. This
time, he doesn’t. Now he is surrounded by enablers, people who benefit from
chaos, from escalation, from the dismantling of systems that were designed to
protect us. And to make it worse, he may never hear the truth again. Because
the generals who would have told him, who likely were trying to, were fired
yesterday. The day before the worst escalation of the war. On
Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth forced out three generals in a
single day. Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, a 38-year career
infantry officer, West Point Class of 1988, who served in the Gulf War, Iraq,
and Afghanistan, and commanded at every level from company to corps, was told
to retire immediately. He was roughly three years into a typical four-year
term. General David Hodne, who led the Transformation and Training Command
(T2COM), was also removed. So was Major General William Green Jr., the Army’s
Chief of Chaplains. No official explanation was given. But the word
circulating among active-duty and retired military, including Army Rangers,
who are expressing shock and outrage, is that General George opposed sending
ground troops into Iran. Although Axios described him as leaving over
“personality clashes.” And
this wasn’t an isolated move. Hegseth has now fired more than a dozen
generals and admirals since taking office. The Atlantic is reporting that
discussions are underway about the possible departures of Director of
National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary
Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. And the people
replacing them will be chosen by the same criterion that has governed every
appointment in this administration: loyalty at any cost. Even if it involves
the lives of our military members. And
while the generals who opposed a ground invasion were being fired, the
evidence that a ground invasion is coming has been mounting. Beyond the
buildup of troops in the region. On Polymarket, the prediction market
platform, the bet for U.S. forces entering Iran by the end of April is now
trading at 85%. That bet has generated more than $99.9 million in trading
volume as of Thursday. And the pattern of betting on this platform has been
alarming. Blockchain analysts identified six freshly created accounts that
collectively made $1.2 million by correctly betting on the exact date of the
February 28 strikes. Those accounts were funded within 24 hours of the
attack, and bets were placed hours before the first bombs fell. Someone
with access to classified war planning appears to be using that information
to place anonymous bets on the outcomes of American military operations.
People are profiting from this war. If
troops on the ground do happen, it won’t just make people rich. It has the
potential to get a large number of people killed. But Trump isn’t thinking
about that or truly does not understand the risk. He told the Financial Times
he thought the U.S. could take Kharg Island “very easily” and that Iran has
no defenses there. The intelligence says otherwise. Iran has been mining the
beaches, positioning shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles on the shoreline,
and moving additional troops onto the island. It sits roughly 20 miles from
the Iranian mainland, within range of missiles, drones, and artillery.
Retired Admiral James Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander,
said he would be “very worried” about such an operation and that Iran would
do “everything they can to inflict maximum casualties on U.S. forces.” And
today we saw what that looks like in practice: armed civilians jumping out of
a car and shooting at rescue helicopters with automatic rifles. That is not a
military force. That is the general population. And it is a preview of what
any American ground force would face. Trump
ran on America First. The only thing that is first right now is Trump and his
enablers. The rest of us are last. The world is last. The service members
risking their lives are last. The families waiting to hear if their loved one
is alive are last. The children who will inherit the consequences of this
madness are last. So what
do we do? We turn to Congress, because that is where every single one of
these threads converges. That is where the constitutional power to stop this
still lives. The War
Powers clock is ticking. The strikes began February 28. Without a formal
authorization for the use of military force, the legal basis for this war has
an expiration date. Congress can force that question. They can refuse to
authorize continued operations. They can refuse to fund the $1.5 trillion
defense budget proposal. Every dollar requires their vote. The power of the
purse is the most fundamental check in the entire constitutional system, and
it belongs to Congress. And I
want to say something about why the mechanisms of impeachment and the 25th
Amendment exist. They were not created as theoretical exercises. They were
built by people who understood that this exact scenario was possible, that a
leader could rise who would not leave voluntarily, who would not feel shame,
who would not resign the way Nixon did when the walls closed in on their
corruption. Nixon, for all his crimes, still had enough awareness of the
institution to know that staying would destroy it and that he, himself, would
face a worse fate. Trump does not have that awareness, and he does not have
that dignity. The mechanisms exist because the founders knew that someday a
president would lack both. That day has arrived. As I
wrote last night, JD Vance has a choice in front of him. He could invoke the
25th Amendment and become president. He would go into the history books as
the one to end Trump’s reign of terror. His presidency could shatter the MAGA
stranglehold, because that cult-like devotion is personal to Trump. It would
not transfer because Vance does not have “it”. He is described as creepy,
unlikable, and a chameleon with no fixed convictions. But he would be
president, and the spell would be broken. He will almost certainly never do
it, because the cabinet has been purged of anyone who would support the move.
But the option exists, and history will record whether he had the courage to
use it. If
Vance will not act, Congress can and must. If every Republican stood together
and said, “No more,” they could end this. They could vote to stop funding
Trump’s madness. Or they could take it one step further, and they could
impeach both Trump and Vance. They could install new leadership. They could
face the world and say, “Our government was taken over by a madman. He was
mentally incapacitated. We have cleared out that problem, and we are making
reparations to the world.” The
only way we get out of this war without mass American casualties is if the
people with the constitutional authority to act use it. And even then, I do
not know if we can undo what has already been done. We have destabilized an
entire region and broken faith with allies who may never trust us again. But
stopping it now is still better than letting it continue, and every day
Congress refuses to act, the cost in lives and in the damage to our standing
in the world grows. I know
how unlikely this sounds. I know the Republican caucus, as it exists today,
is not built for courage. But I also know that Congress is facing a very
messy midterm election cycle. It is in their best interests to come back from
vacation now and take a stand. They must act immediately. And our job, every
single one of us, is to make sure they hear from us so loudly and so
constantly that the political math of inaction becomes more dangerous than
the political math of standing up. Donald
Trump is a once-in-a-generation madman. Every century seems to produce one of
these figures who creep up and somehow convince people that they alone have
the answers to all of their problems. They make promises based on simple
solutions to complex problems. And then they deliver nothing, while taking
everything for themselves and their enablers. That is Trump. But
every madman loses in the end because of those same lies. And a new CNN poll
shows that the roughly one-quarter of Americans who view both parties
negatively, the double haters, favor Democrats in the upcoming midterms by 31
points. These are not party loyalists. These are the most disillusioned
voters in the country, the ones who look at the entire system and feel
disgusted, and even they have made a moral judgment about what the Republican
Party has become under Trump. His approval, according to the FiftyPlusOne
polling average, is at 37.2%, the lowest of this term, and falling. The
ground is shifting. Not because of one poll or one bad day. But because his
corruption and chaos are collapsing under their own weight. And that is why I
still have hope for America. And you should, too. I’ll
see you tomorrow, PS. You
can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack.
Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the
lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This
commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public
concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to
individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First
Amendment.
Picture
of the Day: NASA’s
image of Earth from space. No borders, flags, or wars. Just one planet,
fragile and whole, reminding us what we are actually fighting for. Sources: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-fighter-jet-f15e-downed-over-iran/ https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/iran-us-fighter-shot-down https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/04/03/f-15-crash-iran-missing/ https://www.airandspaceforces.com/iran-f-15e-downed-search-rescue/ https://time.com/article/2026/04/02/trump-speech-white-house-iran-war-update-end/ https://www.jns.org/news/u-s-news/centcom-chief-we-are-making-undeniable-progress-in-iran https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/3/trump-says-with-more-time-us-can-take-the-oil-in-iran https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/03/world/live-news/iran-war-us-trump-oil https://www.newsweek.com/iran-war-live-irgc-says-us-fighter-jets-downed-11779665 https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/politics/hegseth-removes-randy-george-army-chief-of-staff https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-ousts-army-chief-of-staff-gen-randy-george/ https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/hegseth-george-hodne-army-fired-iran https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/25/politics/iran-kharg-island-us-military-ground-troops https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/03/politics/cnn-poll-double-haters-democrats-midterms https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/approval/president https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/us-israel-iran-war-trump-live-updates-04-03-26 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/03/nation/trump-administration-iran-attacks-updates/ https://www.britannica.com/place/Kharg-Island Invite
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