#david e. sanger

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 22, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jun 23, 2025

Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”

On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”

At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”

On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.

One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.

Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.

Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.

“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “​​This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”

But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.

In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”

Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[misfitwashere]

June 23, 2025 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 24

READ IN APP

In a timeline of Trump’s decision to drop 12 of the reportedly 20 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs the U.S. military possessed on Iran, New York Times reporters confirmed what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo judged from the beginning: Trump wanted in on the optics of what seemed to be Israel’s successful strikes against Iran.

Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported conversations with administration officials who confirmed there was no new intelligence to suggest Iran was on the brink of producing nuclear weapons.

Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper reported yesterday in the New York Times that Trump had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu against striking Iran but changed his mind after seeing how Israel’s military action was “playing” on television. The reporters write: “The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.”

Trump began to hint he had been part of the operation, and military advisors began to draw up plans for a strike. According to the reporters, by June 17—three days after his military parade had fizzled and more than 5 million Americans had turned out to protest his administration—Trump had decided to bomb Iran.

Rather than keeping the mission quiet, Trump issued increasingly aggressive social media posts appearing to hint at a strike. David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited reports from Israeli intelligence saying that Iranian officials had removed 400 kilograms (about 880 pounds) of enriched uranium from the Fordo enrichment plant to another nuclear complex, although at least some equipment and records would likely have remained there.

Republicans have talked about bombing Iran to stop its nuclear aspirations since the early 2000s, but the relationship between the U.S. and Iran relating to nuclear technology actually reaches back to 1953. In that year, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom supported a coup against the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he called for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which British interests controlled a majority stake.

In his place, the former leader of the country, Mohammad Reza Shah, retook power. In 1954, Iran accepted a 25-year agreement that gave western oil companies 50% ownership of Iran’s oil production.

At the same time, President Eisenhower proposed trying to defang international fears of nuclear war by shifting nuclear technologies toward civilian uses, including energy. On December 8, 1953, he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City on how atomic energy could be used for peaceful ends. The initiative, known as “Atoms for Peace,”

provided reactors, nuclear fuel, and training for scientists for countries that promised they would use the technology only for peaceful civilian purposes.

In 1967 the U.S. supplied a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium to Iran, and trained Iranian scientists in the United States. In 1974, according to Ariana Rowberry of the Brookings Institution, the shah announced he intended to build 20 new reactors in the next 20 years.

Then, in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran forced out the shah and put Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power. In 1980, after the U.S. admitted the shah into the country for cancer treatments, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Iran, imposed sanctions, froze Iranian assets in the U.S., and ended the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran.

Iran turned to Pakistan, China, and Russia to expand its nuclear program. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased until Republican politicians talked about bombing the sites of Iran’s nuclear program. Famously, Arizona senator John McCain joked about bombing Iran in 2007 when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ classic song “Barbara Ann.”

McCain lost the 2008 election to Democratic president Barack Obama, and in 2013 at the beginning of his second term, Obama began high-level talks to cap Iran’s enrichment of uranium that could be used for weapons. In 2015, forty-seven Republican senators, led by then freshman senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, tried to blow up the talks, sending an open letter to Iranian officials to put them on notice that “the next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

This was an astonishing breach of the longstanding U.S. tradition of presenting a united front in foreign negotiations. Nonetheless, in 2015 the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s enriched uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

At about the same time, negotiators settled an unrelated case between the U.S. and Iran at The Hague, involving the return of American prisoners to the U.S. and Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. to Iran. Since Iran was cut off from international finance systems at the time, the U.S. returned some of those assets in 2016 as Swiss francs, euros, and other currencies. Donald Trump, who was then running for the presidency, insisted that the Obama administration had sent “pallets of cash” to Iran as part of a deal to free the prisoners. “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power,” Trump told reporters.

Then, in 2016, voters put Trump in the White House. Although the nuclear deal appeared to be working, Trump left it in 2018, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” Without the U.S. the agreement broke down. Iran resumed its program for enriching uranium.

A week and a half ago, on June 12, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched strikes against Iran, and on June 21, Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, claiming that after 40 years of Iranian hostility, “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

In fact, the effect of the strikes is not at all clear, although Trump insisted yet again this afternoon that “[o]bliteration is an accurate term!... Bullseye!!!”

Trump’s strikes on Iran underscore how Republican leaders see governance. They seemed to see the careful negotiations under Obama and the international inspections that certified Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA as signs of weakness, preferring simply to use American military might to impose U.S. will. Trump has combined that dominance ideology with his enthusiasm for performances that play well on television.

This afternoon, Iran responded to the U.S. strikes with its own missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, after warning of the upcoming attack to enable Qatar to intercept the missiles.

Trump posted on social media: “Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired—13 were knocked down, and 1 was ‘set free,’ because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”

Ten minutes later, he posted: “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”

Republican dominance politics began in the 1950s as a way to prevent the federal government from protecting Black and Brown civil rights. Since then, it has reinforced the idea of asserting power through violence. And it has always reinforced the power of white men over women and racial and gender minorities.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The administration has claimed this power as part of its campaign to scare immigrants from coming to the U.S. by demonstrating that they could end up in a third country with no recourse. The court majority did not explain its reasoning; the three liberal justices—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—dissented sharply.

“In…earlier rulings, the court cleared the way for the government to treat as many as a million migrants as removable who previously weren’t,” legal analyst Steve Vladeck told Angélica Franganilla Díaz and John Fritze of CNN. “And today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”

—

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

June 22, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Jun 23 Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”

On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”

At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”

On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.

One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.

Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.

Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.

“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “​​This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”

But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.

In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”

Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

NYT: Want a Job in the Trump Administration? Be Prepared for the Loyalty Test.

 David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

At the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., prospective occupants of high posts inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies typically run through a gamut of three to four interviews, dominated in recent weeks by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful. The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump. The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.

This account is based on interviews with nine people who either interviewed for jobs in the administration or were directly involved in the process. Among those were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020. Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn’t get the jobs. Three of the people interviewed are close to the transition team and confirmed that loyalty questions were part of some interviews across multiple agencies, and that the Trump team researched what candidates had said about Mr. Trump on the day of the Capitol riot and in the days following. Candidates are also rated on a scale of one to four in more than a half-dozen categories, including competence.

Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, declined to address specific questions about the topics being raised in job interviews. Instead, she said: “President Trump will continue to appoint highly qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to make America great again.” Previous administrations, of course, have also been interested in whether new hires were aligned with the president’s agenda. But the distinction between Mr. Trump’s process and past ones is that the interest goes well beyond alignment on policy. The Trump transition team appears to be trying to figure out whether prospective hires have ever shown a hint of daylight between themselves and Mr. Trump on specific issues, particularly as he tried to revise the history of his final weeks in office and its aftermath. Mr. Trump has maintained that Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, was actually an event filled with “love.” He has insisted that no one who was arrested was armed; criminal indictments say otherwise. He has described people convicted and imprisoned for their role in the Capitol attack as “hostages” and he has claimed, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

[...]

‘Traitors’ and ‘Snakes’

Mr. Trump has long been fixated on the concept of loyalty, but past criticism is not always a deal breaker. Vice President-elect JD Vance once called himself a “Never Trump guy” and said Mr. Trump was “unfit” for the office. Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, once described Mr. Trump as a “con artist” who couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. Many of the people who worked for Mr. Trump in his first term and, to a lesser extent, those entering his next administration have said something critical about him at some point in time, given his hostile takeover of the Republican Party in 2016. But he has transformed the G.O.P. in his image, and many of those past critics have now become vocal defenders of the Trump worldview. Mr. Trump has told advisers that his biggest regret from his first term was appointing “traitors,” some of whom came to view him as a threat to democracy. He has singled out for especially harsh attacks his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, who has called Mr. Trump a fascist; his defense secretaries, Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper; and his attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William P. Barr.

Mr. Barr is a staunch conservative who satisfied Mr. Trump right up until the final weeks of his presidency, when he refused to use the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.

[...] Mr. Trump had grown convinced that the “deep state” was out to get him during his first impeachment trial, which focused on his effort to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate the son of his political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

[...] At the time, Mr. Trump brought back into the White House his close aide and “body man,” John McEntee, to serve as his loyalty cop. Mr. McEntee had no experience in government hiring but Mr. Trump appointed him in early 2020 to take over the powerful presidential personnel office — giving him the specific task of finding and firing the “snakes.” Mr. McEntee got to work fast. He and his team incorporated a questionnaire designed to test loyalty in the hiring of government employees. As they were doing that, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were quietly working on a plan, called Schedule F, that would make it much easier to fire career civil servants. Such employees have protections to keep a stable level of expertise from one administration to the next, regardless of whether the presidency switches from one political party to the other. Mr. Trump’s allies have made clear that Schedule F will be brought back in his second term.

Want to get hired on in the 2nd Trump Misadministration? You have to show loyalty to Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election outcome by expressing the false belief that the 2020 election was “stolen” and also believe that the violent Trump-incited January 6th Insurrection was “acceptable.”

[democracyunderground]

David E. Sanger - “New Cold Wars” with Russia & China | The Daily Show

[minosbull]

his morning’s press conference with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth featured an apparently angry Hegseth yelling at the media for contradicting President Donald Trump’s claim that last weekend’s strikes against Iran had “completely obliterated” its nuclear weapons program. Hegseth seemed to be performing for an audience of one as he insisted on the made-for-television narrative the administration has been pushing. He said: “President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a resounding success resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12-day war.”

D-Day, the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion of France, took a year of planning, involved 156,000 Allied soldiers and 195,700 naval personnel, and required cooperation of leaders from thirteen countries. It remains the largest seaborne invasion in history.

After a Senate briefing on the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told reporters: “To me, it still appears that we have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months. There’s no doubt there was damage done to the program, but the allegations that we have obliterated their program just don’t seem to stand up to reason…. I just do not think the president was telling the truth when he said this program was obliterated.”

Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported today that it remains unclear where Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is.

This afternoon, Zachary Cohen, Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood, and Jennifer Hansler of CNN reported that the administration has been engaged in secret talks to ease sanctions on Iran, free up $6 billion in Iranian funds currently in foreign banks, and help Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a nuclear energy program, all in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear enrichment program.

Trump ran his 2016 campaign in part by attacking President Barack Obama for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was a much more stringent deal than the one suggested in the CNN article.

But there is perhaps a different angle to this deal than the Obama administration’s. The idea of building nuclear power plants in the Middle East was central to Trump’s 2016 bid for office. Members of Trump’s inner circle, including Michael Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, hatched a plan for a joint U.S.-Russian project to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. In June 2016 they formed a company called IP3 International, short for International Peace, Power and Prosperity.

The focus of the Trump administration on the concentration of wealth and power among the very richest people in the world is creating a backlash at home. Sahil Kapur of NBC News noted on Monday that polls show voters oppose the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill by large margins. A Fox News poll released June 13 showed that only 38% of registered voters support the budget reconciliation bill that benefits the wealthiest Americans, while 59% oppose it. Independents oppose the bill by a margin of 22% in favor to 73% against, and white men without a college degree, Trump’s base, oppose the bill by 43% to 53%. That negative polling holds across a number of polls.

The Republicans are trying to pass their entire wish list in one giant package under “budget reconciliation” because in that form it cannot be filibustered in the Senate, meaning the tiny Republican majority there would be enough to pass it. Because budget reconciliation is one of the only forms of legislation that can’t be filibustered, Republicans have thrown into this measure a wide range of things they want.

The bill contains an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, as well as cuts to Medicaid, to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and to energy credits designed to help Americans switch to sustainable energy. It also contains a number of policies designed to shape America as MAGA Republicans wish. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the measure the House passed will increase the national debt by $2.4 trillion over the next ten years.

But the Senate has a nonpartisan officer known as the Senate parliamentarian, who interprets Senate rules and procedures and tries to keep measures within them. Senators can ignore the parliamentarian if they wish, but that is rare.

The current Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has held the office since 2012. She has judged that many of the things Republicans have crammed into the bill do not qualify for inclusion in a budget reconciliation bill. This may be a relief for some Republicans, who did not want to have to vote on unpopular provisions, but will cause trouble in the conference as MacDonough said today that some of the measures Republicans counted on to save money, including big pieces of the Medicaid cuts, do not fit in a budget reconciliation bill. Republicans had counted on those cuts to save the government $250 billion, thus helping to justify further tax cuts.

Some Republican senators have called for overruling MacDonough, but today Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SC) said the Senate would not take that approach, instead looking at ways to fix the measure so it would be within the parameters necessary for a budget reconciliation bill.

The Senate hoped to begin voting on its version of the bill tomorrow in order to pass the bill by July 4, as Trump has demanded. One of the reasons for the hurry is that the administration has significantly overspent the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency could run out of money by July, three months before the end of the fiscal year, potentially breaking the Antideficiency Act that prohibits federal agencies from spending more federal funds than Congress has appropriated.

The budget reconciliation bill provides about $75 billion in additional funding to ICE over the next five years.

The bill’s redistribution of wealth upward has made it enormously unpopular in an era when, according to the antipoverty charity Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world’s population has gained at least $6.5 trillion since 2015. And, just as extreme exhibitions of wealth drew popular anger in the late-19th-century Gilded Age, the wedding this weekend of billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sánchez in Venice, Italy, which Reuters reports will cost between $46.5 million and $55.6 million, has drawn protests against oligarchy.

Images from that wedding party contrast sharply with video of activists in wheelchairs arrested at the Russell Senate Office Building on Wednesday, hands zip-tied, as they protested cuts to Medicaid in the budget reconciliation bill.

At the same time, the administration's overreach on migrant deportations has also galvanized opposition. A new Quinnipiac poll shows that 64% of registered voters support a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants. Only 31% want most of them deported. That percentage has swung 9 points toward legalization since Trump took office. Trump is also underwater on immigration more generally, with 41% approving of his stance and 57% disapproving.

Nearly half of registered voters—49%—said they do not think democracy is working in the United States, while 43% say it is. Sixty percent of those who do not think it is working told Quinnipiac pollsters they blame Republicans, while 15% blamed Democrats. Twenty percent said they blame both parties.

Voters in New York City showed their frustration with politics as usual on Tuesday when they elected 33-year-old New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to be the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. Mamdani promised to address the cost of living, to raise taxes on the rich, and to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.”

Mamdani’s promise to change the political status quo echoes the one Trump used to win in 2016, but this time around, Trump is part of the status quo being challenged. On Wednesday, Trump called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic” who “looks TERRIBLE.”

Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN), who has falsely described himself as an economist and misrepresented his education as well as his work experience and who been under investigation for campaign finance irregularities, referred to Mamdani in a social media post as “little muhammad,” calling him “an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York.”

Ogles asked the Department of Justice to denaturalize and deport Mamdani, saying a line in a rap song Mamdani performed showed “material support for terrorism.” Mamdani, who is Muslim, was born in Uganda to Indian-born Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, who is now a professor at Columbia University, and filmmaker Mira Nair. Mamdani became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018.

The Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee called Ogles’s post “racist drivel” and noted that Ogles faked a $320,000 campaign loan, lied about being an economist, and was fired from a law enforcement job for not showing up. Former Illinois Republican congressman Joe Walsh was more direct. Over Ogles’s post, he commented: “A sitting Member of Congress calling for an American citizen to be stripped of his citizenship & deported, all because of that American citizen’s political views. This is fascism.”

—

Notes:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-hegseth-melt-down-leaked-iran-strike-intel-1235373030/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/19/white-house-saudi-arabia-nuclear-technology-house-oversight-inquiry-report

https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/06/fox_june-13-16-2025_national_cross-tabs_june-18-release.pdf

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/polls-trump-bill-unpopular-republicans-stare-deadline-passage-rcna213724

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/26/politics/us-iran-talks-nuclear-program

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/26/congress/senate-gop-dealt-major-blow-on-megabill-health-care-plans-00425256

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/26/megabill-stuck-senate-parliamentarian-00428299

https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/resources

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/16/ice-cash-crisis-immigration-crackdown-trump

https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3926

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-mayor-zohran-mamdani-trump-biden-1561ca0aa1821f88b97603f00221b64f

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/26/billionaires-wealth-oxfam-report#:~:text=The%20wealth%20of%20the%20world's,to%2014.6%25%20of%20global%20output.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/06/26/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-wedding-guests-cost-venue/84331934007/

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchezs-celebrity-venice-wedding-facts-figures-2025-06-24/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/06/25/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-luxury-weddings/84333258007/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/nyregion/mamdani-speech-watch-party.html

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ethics-troubles-gops-andy-ogles-become-even-serious-rcna186362

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayoral-candidate-b2777183.html

https://www.the-independent.com/voices/nyc-mayoral-candidate-zohran-mamdani-democratic-socialist-b2777213.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5372203-tennessee-republican-calls-for-mamdani-to-be-denaturalized-deported/

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/my-body-of-work-speaks-for-itself-tennessee-andy-ogles-says-in-response-to-inflated-resume-claims

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/us/politics/iran-nuclear-program-uranium.html

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/politics/more-than-30-arrested-at-senate-building-while-protesting-medicaid-cuts/3944587/

X:

HomelandDems/status/1938337019618381988

WalshFreedom/status/1938330196517482971

YouTube:

watch?v=g5c2xdtH410

Bluesky:

acyn.bsky.social/post/3lsjuom6ahs2k

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lsj4mekt2k2z

atrupar.com/post/3lsj3wr4itl2g

gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3lsjprsrrtc2w

mehdirhasan.bsky.social/post/3lshkavoit22t

jenrice.bsky.social/post/3lsklfvocus2i

[virtualnews360]

Face the Nation: Molly Ball, Ramesh Ponnuru, David Sanger

Face the Nation: Molly Ball, Ramesh Ponnuru, David Sanger – CBS News Assista à CBS News Perdeu a segunda metade do show? O mais recente sobre o impacto do desligamento e as perspectivas de um acordo de longo prazo para manter o governo aberto. Seja o primeiro a saber Obtenha notificações do navegador para notícias de última hora, eventos ao vivo e relatórios exclusivos. Agora não Ligar Source…

[xtruss]

One Hundred Days: How President Trump’s Second Term Is Changing

The Executive Power, The Press, Foreign Policy, The Federal Government, Civil Service, Diversity and Equality, Immigration, The Economy, Culture and US Imperialism!

— The New York Times | April 30, 2025

The Executive Power, The Press, Foreign Policy, The Federal Government, Civil Service, Diversity and Equality, Immigration, The Economy, Culture and US Imperialism!

There have never been 100 days like this.

President Trump was sworn in for a second term in January intent on transforming America and its place in the world. From his first hours in office, he has relentlessly driven domestic, economic and foreign policy in risky new directions; taken a chain saw to the federal work force; challenged the authority of the courts; and sought to purge liberal influence from government, education and culture.

The result has been a chaotic blur of new initiatives; judicial, political and economic backlash; and neck-snapping reversals. It has tested the nation’s ability to process disruption — and of American democracy’s resilience in the face of a president whose views of his power have prompted warnings of creeping authoritarianism.

The consuming conflicts of one day regularly give way to wholly new ones with stunning rapidity: pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, stripping out-of-favor officials and former advisers of security details, proposing to turn Gaza into a resort town and Canada into a 51st state, blaming a plane crash on diversity initiatives, presiding over a contentious cabinet meeting with Elon Musk, installing his personal lawyers to run the Justice Department, firing inspectors general, closing down U.S.A.I.D., igniting a global trade war, berating Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office, deporting migrants without due process and edging toward a constitutional crisis by defying judges on multiple occasions.

If the 100-day mark is an opportunity to pause to reflect on what this presidency has meant so far — and what it could mean in its remaining 1,361 days — it offers one clear lesson. In this second time around, Mr. Trump is intent on using every hour to pursue an agenda shaped by a shifting mix of grievance, short-term political calculation, long-held belief and the experience of his first term.

Here’s a deeper look at how Mr. Trump has already made his mark.

— Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman

Foreign Policy: Treaties, Alliances and Soft Power Are Out. Raw Power Is Back In.

— By David E. Sanger

Doug Mills/The New York Times

“I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States,” President Trump said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in their now-famous altercation before cameras in the Oval Office in late February. “But you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out” with the Russians.

And lose, he went on to suggest.

It is hard to encapsulate the revolution in America’s approach to the world in these past 100 days in any one episode. But with that public humiliation of Mr. Zelensky, once regarded as Churchill in a T-shirt, Mr. Trump sent a clear signal about what was to come: the end of an era that began 80 years ago when the United States helped design a world of rules, international agreements and norms to constrain the powerful from seizing territory and to empower the weak without resorting to war.

So the real message of that argument was that international law was out and power — raw, preferably nuclear-backed — is back in. In Mr. Trump’s view, the world is divided into two kinds of countries: those that “have the cards” and those that don’t. With nothing to put on the table, Mr. Trump was arguing, Mr. Zelensky would have to take whatever terms being given to end the war.

That reflects Mr. Trump’s long-held view of how the world works. Unconstrained by establishment advisers, he seems determined to deal largely with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China. In this spheres-of-influence world, international law is fine until inconvenient, borders are up for negotiation, and the vague soft power gains of providing aid to the world’s neediest are unnecessary.

The other message of the encounter between the American and Ukrainian leaders was that Mr. Trump wanted to switch sides and normalize relations with Moscow. At a minimum doing so would open up business opportunities. Some around him argue it could interrupt Russia’s burgeoning partnership with China.

No one knows how this grand experiment in raw geopolitical power politics will play out. Most European leaders say they are horrified; Asian allies are more circumspect, but fear empowering Mr. Xi to test the theory by squeezing Taiwan.

Tellingly, on his first trip abroad in his new term, for Pope Francis’ funeral, Mr. Trump held one detailed conversation, with Mr. Zelensky. He shook the hands of a few European leaders, but passed on the chance to talk about tariffs, or the future of alliances. Instead, he headed straight for his airplane to return to the America he says comes first.

Immigration: Trump’s Immigration Measures Cause Fear, But No Surge In Deportations

— By Hamed Aleaziz

Rebecca Noble/Reuters

Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University, was on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends when she was surrounded by federal agents, some of their faces obscured by black masks.

Supporters say her offense appears to have been that she was the co-author of an opinion essay in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’s support for Israel. She was swept up by the government as part of what the Trump administration has described as a campaign against antisemitic activists on campus.

President Trump rode to re-election on promises to crack down on immigration, and he has taken extraordinary measures to do so. He has targeted student visa holders and legal permanent residents who took part in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. He has jettisoned due process and sent undocumented immigrants to a megaprison for terrorists in El Salvador, including at least one by mistake.

The administration has placed migrants’ names in Social Security’s “death master file” to cut off their access to bank accounts and other financial services. He has pressured countries to retrieve their citizens, sent people to third countries far from their homes and invoked a wartime law to remove migrants without due process.

He has fulfilled a signature campaign promise, essentially sealing the southern border with Mexico even as he welcomes white South Africans as refugees.

U.S. border officials also are using more aggressive tactics, which the administration calls “enhanced vetting,” at ports of entry to the United States, prompting concerns even among American allies about travel to the United States.

But for all of the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s campaign, his efforts continue to fall short of the mass deportations he vowed to carry out. Overall, the number of flights and their destinations look largely similar to those under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Federal Government: Musk And Trump: A Partnership And A Bureaucratic Bull Rush

— By Theodore Schleifer

Eric Lee/The New York Times

Even Elon Musk seemed a little surprised to be there.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Mr. Musk said with his trademark staccato laugh. The press pool walked into the Oval Office and saw the world’s richest man and his young son X over President Trump’s right shoulder. “Come here often?”

Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were about two weeks into a presidential partnership that had turned into a bureaucratic bull rush. Mr. Musk had turned federal agencies inside out, but he had offered no public explanation of his grand strategy. Inside the Oval, with X on his shoulders, Mr. Musk said again and again that it was all about rooting out fraud. And, in his telling, there was plenty of it.

U.S.A.I.D.? Fraudsters. The Social Security Administration? Fraudsters. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Fraudsters.

Those are just three of the agencies where Mr. Musk and his team of almost 100 aides have run roughshod, getting into seemingly daily fights (and lawsuits) against the federal bureaucracy. He has narrated it all in real time on social media. Mr. Musk has sought to cut the number of people drawing a government paycheck by hundreds of thousands, and to give the president more authority than Congress would like to unilaterally reduce federal payments.

Over 250,000 people have had their jobs cut, planned to be cut or have taken a buyout, according to a New York Times tally.

But while Mr. Musk’s group took drastic actions like shutting down America’s foreign assistance agency, the effort is not expected to come close to fulfilling Mr. Musk’s promise of cutting a trillion dollars of waste out of the federal budget.

Mr. Musk has also angered several top Trump officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio during an explosive cabinet meeting in March, and gotten into a power struggle with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over the I.R.S.

For all the drama, Mr. Musk’s relationship with the president has proved durable. Mr. Trump has for the most part been fine having Mr. Musk around, and clearly Mr. Musk likes being there. It is a transactional relationship for two deeply transactional leaders. Mr. Musk has said he will leave Washington next month, but few think he will be out of the picture.

Retribution: A Campaign To Exact Revenge, Using The Powers of The Presidency

— By Charlie Savage

Haiyun Jiang For The New York Times

Perhaps the most salient example of President Trump’s penchant for revenge came on April 9, when he directed the Justice Department to try to pin a crime on a specific person: Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official from his first administration.

Mr. Krebs had enraged the president by contradicting baseless claims that Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election because electronic voting machines were compromised. But there was no evidence to believe Mr. Krebs had broken any laws.

That did not stop Mr. Trump, whose message was clear: Opposing him publicly means risking punishment at the hands of the federal government.

Since returning to the presidency, Mr. Trump has brazenly used his official powers to carry out a retribution campaign against his perceived enemies. His subordinates have fired career prosecutors at the Justice Department who played a role in investigating Mr. Trump or his supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The president terminated taxpayer-financed security protection for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who led the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, and others who went on to criticize Mr. Trump, including John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.

The president has threatened his perceived opponents with state sanctions. He has urged the Federal Communications Commission to remove the licenses of broadcast networks that have covered him in ways he does not like.

Mr. Trump is bullying universities, demanding ideological changes to hiring and academic policies and freezing huge research grants.

He has signed executive orders singling out law firms that employed or represented people he considers opponents. He has signed presidential orders that target former officials he dislikes for “reviews” by the federal government, in search of any evidence that could be used to prosecute them.

Some of Mr. Trump’s targets have capitulated, but others are fighting him in court. Yet even if he ultimately loses, his legal bills are being paid by taxpayers.

And Mr. Trump’s weaponization of law enforcement power for revenge may be the most aggressive move of all. Mr. Krebs has since resigned from his job and said he must focus full time on defending himself.

Tariffs And Trade: Trump Called It ‘Liberation Day.’ But His Tariffs Triggered Panic.

— By Ana Swanson

Ashley Gilbertson For The New York Times

On April 2, President Trump walked out in front of a crowd of officials, reporters and workers in hard hats assembled in the White House Rose Garden and unveiled his plans for remaking the global trading system. The president hoisted up a poster with the tariffs he planned to charge on imports from foreign countries and said the day would be remembered as “Liberation Day.”

“We are finally putting America first,” Mr. Trump said.

The announcement ended up triggering panic among foreign officials and investors, and tipped the United States into a full-blown trade war with one of its biggest trading partners, China.

While Mr. Trump is often cast as a product of the 1980s or the 1950s, he has lately taken to pining for the period after 1890, when tariffs were the primary expression of economic policy. In February, he added a 10 percent tariff to Chinese exports, saying that Beijing needed to halt exports of fentanyl and the chemicals that make it. Beijing retaliated, putting its own tariffs on U.S. products and introducing other measures to hurt U.S. companies.

The same situation played out in March, when Mr. Trump added another 10 percent tariff on Chinese exports, and China answered with more restrictions of its own.

But it was after Mr. Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April that tensions really surged. China was the only country to immediately retaliate, and Mr. Trump singled them out for punishment. Just hours after his own tariffs went into effect, Mr. Trump decided to pause them for 90 days for other countries, but he announced drastically higher rates for Chinese imports, writing on social media that the country “PLAYED IT WRONG.”

Products from China — the second-largest source of goods for the United States — now face a minimum tariff of 145 percent, and in some cases the levies are much higher. U.S. exports now face a 125 percent tariff going into China. For entrepreneurs and farmers that rely on trade between the countries, particularly small businesses, that has been crippling. Some companies have stopped trade altogether, and bookings for the ships that carry freight from China to the United States have plummeted.

U.S. officials have toyed with the idea for years of “decoupling” from China for national security reasons. With little warning, the countries have suddenly dived into that scenario.

Trump officials, including Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, have described the situation as “unsustainable.” But the United States and China have not held substantive talks, and it is not clear how the governments will resolve the rift. So for now, the standoff continues.

Economy: Expecting Recession? How Trump’s Shifting Policies Have Upended The Economy.

— By Ben Casselman

Karsten Moran For The New York Times

In a Fox News interview with President Trump in early March, Maria Bartiromo pointed out that there were “rising worries” about an economic slowdown.

“Are you expecting a recession this year?” she asked.

“I hate to predict things like that,” Mr. Trump replied. “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.”

News coverage of the interview focused on Mr. Trump’s refusal to rule out a recession. But his answer was arguably less remarkable than the fact that Ms. Bartiromo felt the need to ask the question at all.

When Mr. Trump took office, he inherited an economy that was the envy of the world. Yet within weeks, consumer confidence was plummeting, businesses were pausing planned expansions and investors were questioning the safety of U.S. government debt. Forecasters debated which was more likely: a mere recession, or “stagflation,” in which growth stalls while inflation rises.

Those fears are the result, most directly, of Mr. Trump’s ever-shifting trade policies, which threaten to drive up consumer prices, disrupt global supply chains and inspire retaliatory tariffs from U.S. trading partners.

But the disruptions are not limited to trade. Mr. Trump’s threats to fire Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, have roiled financial markets. His immigration policies have led some employers to complain that they are struggling to find workers. The administration’s cost-cutting efforts, led by Elon Musk, have resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs and resignations among government workers and put billions of dollars in federal funding in limbo.

Perhaps more than any specific decisions by the administration, business leaders say that the near-constant shifts in policy — tariffs that are imposed and then suspended, workers who are fired and then reinstated — have made it almost impossible to plan ahead. Economists say that uncertainty alone could be enough to cause a recession if businesses respond by pulling back on hiring and investment, as surveys show many have already begun to do.

Still, the evidence of a downturn has so far shown up mostly in surveys and anecdotes, not in measures of actual economic activity. Job growth has been solid. Layoffs remain low. Consumer spending faltered at the start of the year but has since rebounded. That suggests that while the risk of a recession has risen, one is not yet inevitable.

Imperialism: Greenland? Canada? The Canal? The Mystery Behind Manifest Destiny

— By David E. Sanger

Ivor Prickett For The New York Times

Walk into the Oval Office these days and there is an unfamiliar visage on the wall, just above the gold-enhanced mantel: James K. Polk. For those with only vague memories of high school American history, his appearance is no accident. It was Polk, the 11th president, who seized Texas and much of the Southwest and pushed America’s borders to the Pacific.

He was, in short, the hero of manifest destiny, a phrase President Trump revived for his inaugural address. When visitors come to the White House now, Mr. Trump, not known for his intense study of his 19th-century predecessors, notes that Polk “got a lot of land.”

Which helps explain Mr. Trump’s fascination with acquiring Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal and turning Canada into the 51st state.

It started in earnest 13 days before his inauguration, when Mr. Trump, at his Mar-a-Lago club, was asked whether he would rule out using “military or economic coercion” to get the lands he covets. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said, insisting that economic or national security imperatives were so vital that “you might have to do something.”

Ever since, he has repeated the threat again and again, unconcerned that his words were fueling resistance movements from Denmark — which protects Greenland — to Canada, where the Liberal Party has been revived because it is standing up to Mr. Trump.

He is hardly the first to be interested. Secretary of State William Seward sought Greenland after he bought Alaska in the 1860s. Harry Truman wanted it in the opening days of the Cold War. But only Mr. Trump has talked about actually taking it by force. And that, of course, is unnecessary. The United States once had dozens of bases on Greenland, but it shrunk them down to one. An existing treaty allows Mr. Trump to greatly expand the American presence.

The United States could do the same in Panama, and already an American hedge fund has struck a deal to buy out some Chinese facilities. Canada, on the other hand, has no interest in becoming the 51st state, a phrase Mr. Trump has used so often it has become distinctly unfunny to the Canadians.

Diversity Ans Equality: In A Moment of National Tragedy, Trump Equates Diversity With Incompetence

— By Erica L. Green

Top: Kenny Holston/The New York Times Bottom: Doug Mills/The New York Times

It was the first national tragedy of President Trump’s second term: An American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River in late January, killing 67 people. After a moment of silence and condolences for the families whose loved ones were still being pulled from the water, Mr. Trump saw fit to cast blame.

Citing no evidence, Mr. Trump said diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered standards for air traffic controllers.

It was a crescendo moment in Mr. Trump’s campaign to eradicate programs and practices aimed at reversing the effects of systemic inequities from the federal government, and virtually every sector of American life.

In his remarks, Mr. Trump equated diversity with incompetence, and effectively aligned himself with people who use diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., as a proxy for race, a dog whistle for white grievance, and a catchall for societal ills.

The programs were created to serve as guardrails for civil rights enforcement, and to help remedy inequities faced by groups that have historically been discriminated against, such as minorities, women and people with disabilities.

But Mr. Trump left no doubt about his intent when, during his remarks, he also blamed what he characterized as Obama-era policies for the hiring of ill-equipped air traffic controllers. “They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white,’” he said. “We want the people that are competent.”

The declaration reflected Mr. Trump’s instinct to frame major events through his political lens, and use tragedies to further his ideological goals.

On his first day back in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that required the elimination of all D.E.I. programs, personnel and practices, in an effort to deliver on his promise to usher in a society that is “colorblind and merit-based.” The order unleashed an avalanche of activity throughout the federal government that has sought to reframe the country’s history of racism and discrimination by denying that it existed.

Culture: For Trump, The Arts Had Become ‘Too Wokey’

— By Robin Pogrebin

Just a few weeks into his second term, President Trump stunned the arts world by making himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

He fired board members who had been appointed by Democrats, breaking with precedent at the institution, which had prided itself on bipartisanship since its founding. And the president — who boycotted the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term after several of the stars it featured criticized him — told his new board of loyalists that he would like to see “slightly more conservative” figures celebrated.

While Mr. Trump complained that the center’s programming had become too “wokey,” his new team has been vague about its plans besides promising “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.” But his takeover incited a backlash, prompting several prominent acts, including the popular musical “Hamilton,” to cancel upcoming engagements at the center.

It was a shocking turn of events, given that U.S. presidents rarely pay much attention to arts or culture, let alone seek to play such an active role in them. But it underscores the lengths to which Mr. Trump has gone as he aggressively moves to bend some of Washington’s biggest cultural institutions to his will, while seeking to impose his views of American history, diversity and gender on federally funded entities.

Mr. Trump also took aim at the Smithsonian Institution — which includes 21 museums, libraries and the National Zoo — accusing it of promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Having tried eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term only to be blocked by Congress, where the programs enjoy bipartisan support, Mr. Trump is targeting both in other ways this time around.

The humanities endowment canceled most of its grants and made plans to redirect some resources toward Mr. Trump’s priorities, including his proposed patriotic sculpture garden called the National Garden of American Heroes.

And the arts endowment announced that it would require organizations seeking grants to promise not to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “gender ideology.” Those requirements are being challenged in court amid questions about what kinds of cuts the Trump administration might seek at the arts endowment.

Social Media: At the White House, A Cascade of Content For Social Media

— By Shawn McCreesh

Doug Mills/The New York Times

In President Trump’s White House, the Substance is the Show.

One of the defining characteristics of the second Trump administration is how so many of its top officials behave like influencers.

There is a constant cascade of content meant for social media consumption. The images, videos and stunts served up to the public are meant to provoke, to hype, to bend reality. And yet, in their way, they are oftentimes some of the truest and most defining expressions of the administration and its approach to policy and governing.

Elon Musk waving around a chain saw was more than an instantly viral moment. It so clearly communicated how he saw his role in Washington — more so than any interview or soft-pedaling explanation he or the president would offer about what the Department of Government Efficiency was up to. It is a defining image of the first 100 days.

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, using men in a Salvadoran prison as props for her social media content said so much about what was to come as the administration began its campaign of sending migrants there without due process.

Attorney General Pam Bondi giving binders of what she called the “Epstein files” to right-wing influencers was a stunt so hollow it actually backfired — it turned out there wasn’t much in there, and the influencers revolted. But it also seemed to communicate something about the administration and where its priorities lie, and how it feels the need to please some of the basest parts of its base.

In the span of a month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted 16 videos and still photos of himself working out with troops around the globe. That the posing and posturing for the public continued even as the Pentagon descended into turmoil over his rocky leadership seemed to say something, too.

Mr. Trump has often sought to create his own versions of reality, taking steps to constrain independent news coverage while amplifying the voices of influencers and openly supportive outlets he has invited into his orbit. And how his cabinet members behave is completely in keeping with that approach.

— Doug Mills/The New York Times, Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times, Tyler Hicks/The New York Times, Graham Dickie/The New York Times, Eric Lee/The New York Times, Scott McIntyre for The New York Times, Secretaría De Prensa De La Presidencia, via Reuters, Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times, Doug Mills/The New York Times, Pool photo by Jim Watson

— Produced by Jeffrey Furticella, Rebecca Lieberman, Matt Ruby and Marisa Schwartz Taylor.

[royaltrouble]

World Leaders Join Mourners for Pope Francis' Funeral: Watch Live and Follow Updates

World Leaders Join Mourners for Pope Francis’ Funeral: Watch Live and Follow Updates April 26, 2025, 3:30 a.m. ET David E. Sanger David E. Sanger traveled to Rome with President Bush and former President Bill Clinton for the funeral of John Paul II in 2005. He has returned for Pope Francis’ funeral. From left, President George W. Bush, his wife Laura, former President George H.W. Bush and…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 23, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jun 24, 2025

In a timeline of Trump’s decision to drop 12 of the reportedly 20 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs the U.S. military possessed on Iran, New York Times reporters confirmed what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo judged from the beginning: Trump wanted in on the optics of what seemed to be Israel’s successful strikes against Iran.

Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported conversations with administration officials who confirmed there was no new intelligence to suggest Iran was on the brink of producing nuclear weapons.

Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper reported yesterday in the New York Times that Trump had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu against striking Iran but changed his mind after seeing how Israel’s military action was “playing” on television. The reporters write: “The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.”

Trump began to hint he had been part of the operation, and military advisors began to draw up plans for a strike. According to the reporters, by June 17—three days after his military parade had fizzled and more than 5 million Americans had turned out to protest his administration—Trump had decided to bomb Iran.

Rather than keeping the mission quiet, Trump issued increasingly aggressive social media posts appearing to hint at a strike. David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited reports from Israeli intelligence saying that Iranian officials had removed 400 kilograms (about 880 pounds) of enriched uranium from the Fordo enrichment plant to another nuclear complex, although at least some equipment and records would likely have remained there.

Republicans have talked about bombing Iran to stop its nuclear aspirations since the early 2000s, but the relationship between the U.S. and Iran relating to nuclear technology actually reaches back to 1953. In that year, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom supported a coup against the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he called for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which British interests controlled a majority stake.

In his place, the former leader of the country, Mohammad Reza Shah, retook power. In 1954, Iran accepted a 25-year agreement that gave western oil companies 50% ownership of Iran’s oil production.

At the same time, President Eisenhower proposed trying to defang international fears of nuclear war by shifting nuclear technologies toward civilian uses, including energy. On December 8, 1953, he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City on how atomic energy could be used for peaceful ends. The initiative, known as “Atoms for Peace,”

provided reactors, nuclear fuel, and training for scientists for countries that promised they would use the technology only for peaceful civilian purposes.

In 1967 the U.S. supplied a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium to Iran, and trained Iranian scientists in the United States. In 1974, according to Ariana Rowberry of the Brookings Institution, the shah announced he intended to build 20 new reactors in the next 20 years.

Then, in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran forced out the shah and put Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power. After the U.S. admitted the shah into the country for cancer treatments, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Iran, imposed sanctions, froze Iranian assets in the U.S., and ended the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran.

Iran turned to Pakistan, China, and Russia to expand its nuclear program. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased until Republican politicians talked about bombing the sites of Iran’s nuclear program. Famously, Arizona senator John McCain joked about bombing Iran in 2007 when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ classic song “Barbara Ann.”

McCain lost the 2008 election to Democratic president Barack Obama, and in 2013 at the beginning of his second term, Obama began high-level talks to cap Iran’s enrichment of uranium that could be used for weapons. In 2015, forty-seven Republican senators, led by then freshman senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, tried to blow up the talks, sending an open letter to Iranian officials to put them on notice that “the next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

This was an astonishing breach of the longstanding U.S. tradition of presenting a united front in foreign negotiations. Nonetheless, in 2015 the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s enriched uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

At about the same time, negotiators settled an unrelated case between the U.S. and Iran at The Hague, involving the return of American prisoners to the U.S. and Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. to Iran. Since Iran was cut off from international finance systems at the time, the U.S. returned some of those assets in 2016 as Swiss francs, euros, and other currencies. Donald Trump, who was then running for the presidency, insisted that the Obama administration had sent “pallets of cash” to Iran as part of a deal to free the prisoners. “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power,” Trump told reporters.

Then, in 2016, voters put Trump in the White House. Although the nuclear deal appeared to be working, Trump left it in 2018, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” Without the U.S. the agreement broke down. Iran resumed its program for enriching uranium.

A week and a half ago, on June 12, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched strikes against Iran, and on June 21, Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, claiming that after 40 years of Iranian hostility, “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

In fact, the effect of the strikes is not at all clear, although Trump insisted yet again this afternoon that “[o]bliteration is an accurate term!... Bullseye!!!”

Trump’s strikes on Iran underscore how Republican leaders see governance. They seemed to see the careful negotiations under Obama and the international inspections that certified Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA as signs of weakness, preferring simply to use American military might to impose U.S. will. Trump has combined that dominance ideology with his enthusiasm for performances that play well on television.

This afternoon, Iran responded to the U.S. strikes with its own missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, after warning of the upcoming attack to enable Qatar to intercept the missiles.

Trump posted on social media: “Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired—13 were knocked down, and 1 was ‘set free,’ because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”

Ten minutes later, he posted: “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”

Republican dominance politics began in the 1950s as a way to prevent the federal government from protecting Black and Brown civil rights. Since then, it has reinforced the idea of asserting power through violence. And it has always reinforced the power of white men over women and racial and gender minorities.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The administration has claimed this power as part of its campaign to scare immigrants from coming to the U.S. by demonstrating that they could end up in a third country with no recourse. The court majority did not explain its reasoning; the three liberal justices—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—dissented sharply.

“In…earlier rulings, the court cleared the way for the government to treat as many as a million migrants as removable who previously weren’t,” legal analyst Steve Vladeck told Angélica Franganilla Díaz and John Fritze of CNN. “And today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[misfitwashere]

June 22, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 23

READ IN APP

Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”

On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”

At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”

On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.

One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.

Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.

Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.

“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “​​This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”

But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.

In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”

Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.

—

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

June 26, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Jun 27

This morning’s press conference with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth featured an apparently angry Hegseth yelling at the media for contradicting President Donald Trump’s claim that last weekend’s strikes against Iran had “completely obliterated” its nuclear weapons program. Hegseth seemed to be performing for an audience of one as he insisted on the made-for-television narrative the administration has been pushing. He said: “President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a resounding success resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12-day war.”

D-Day, the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion of France, took a year of planning, involved 156,000 Allied soldiers and 195,700 naval personnel, and required cooperation of leaders from thirteen countries. It remains the largest seaborne invasion in history.

After a Senate briefing on the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told reporters: “To me, it still appears that we have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months. There’s no doubt there was damage done to the program, but the allegations that we have obliterated their program just don’t seem to stand up to reason…. I just do not think the president was telling the truth when he said this program was obliterated.”

Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported today that it remains unclear where Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is.

This afternoon, Zachary Cohen, Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood, and Jennifer Hansler of CNN reported that the administration has been engaged in secret talks to ease sanctions on Iran, free up $6 billion in Iranian funds currently in foreign banks, and help Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a nuclear energy program, all in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear enrichment program.

Trump ran his 2016 campaign in part by attacking President Barack Obama for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was a much more stringent deal than the one suggested in the CNN article.

But there is perhaps a different angle to this deal than the Obama administration’s. The idea of building nuclear power plants in the Middle East was central to Trump’s 2016 bid for office. Members of Trump’s inner circle, including Michael Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, hatched a plan for a joint U.S.-Russian project to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. In June 2016 they formed a company called IP3 International, short for International Peace, Power and Prosperity.

The focus of the Trump administration on the concentration of wealth and power among the very richest people in the world is creating a backlash at home. Sahil Kapur of NBC News noted on Monday that polls show voters oppose the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill by large margins. A Fox News poll released June 13 showed that only 38% of registered voters support the budget reconciliation bill that benefits the wealthiest Americans, while 59% oppose it. Independents oppose the bill by a margin of 22% in favor to 73% against, and white men without a college degree, Trump’s base, oppose the bill by 43% to 53%. That negative polling holds across a number of polls.

The Republicans are trying to pass their entire wish list in one giant package under “budget reconciliation” because in that form it cannot be filibustered in the Senate, meaning the tiny Republican majority there would be enough to pass it. Because budget reconciliation is one of the only forms of legislation that can’t be filibustered, Republicans have thrown into this measure a wide range of things they want.

The bill contains an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, as well as cuts to Medicaid, to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and to energy credits designed to help Americans switch to sustainable energy. It also contains a number of policies designed to shape America as MAGA Republicans wish. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the measure the House passed will increase the national debt by $2.4 trillion over the next ten years.

But the Senate has a nonpartisan officer known as the Senate parliamentarian, who interprets Senate rules and procedures and tries to keep measures within them. Senators can ignore the parliamentarian if they wish, but that is rare.

The current Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has held the office since 2012. She has judged that many of the things Republicans have crammed into the bill do not qualify for inclusion in a budget reconciliation bill. This may be a relief for some Republicans, who did not want to have to vote on unpopular provisions, but will cause trouble in the conference as MacDonough said today that some of the measures Republicans counted on to save money, including big pieces of the Medicaid cuts, do not fit in a budget reconciliation bill. Republicans had counted on those cuts to save the government $250 billion, thus helping to justify further tax cuts.

Some Republican senators have called for overruling MacDonough, but today Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SC) said the Senate would not take that approach, instead looking at ways to fix the measure so it would be within the parameters necessary for a budget reconciliation bill.

The Senate hoped to begin voting on its version of the bill tomorrow in order to pass the bill by July 4, as Trump has demanded. One of the reasons for the hurry is that the administration has significantly overspent the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency could run out of money by July, three months before the end of the fiscal year, potentially breaking the Antideficiency Act that prohibits federal agencies from spending more federal funds than Congress has appropriated.

The budget reconciliation bill provides about $75 billion in additional funding to ICE over the next five years.

The bill’s redistribution of wealth upward has made it enormously unpopular in an era when, according to the antipoverty charity Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world’s population has gained at least $6.5 trillion since 2015. And, just as extreme exhibitions of wealth drew popular anger in the late-19th-century Gilded Age, the wedding this weekend of billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sánchez in Venice, Italy, which Reuters reports will cost between $46.5 million and $55.6 million, has drawn protests against oligarchy.

Images from that wedding party contrast sharply with video of activists in wheelchairs arrested at the Russell Senate Office Building on Wednesday, hands zip-tied, as they protested cuts to Medicaid in the budget reconciliation bill.

At the same time, the administration's overreach on migrant deportations has also galvanized opposition. A new Quinnipiac poll shows that 64% of registered voters support a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants. Only 31% want most of them deported. That percentage has swung 9 points toward legalization since Trump took office. Trump is also underwater on immigration more generally, with 41% approving of his stance and 57% disapproving.

Nearly half of registered voters—49%—said they do not think democracy is working in the United States, while 43% say it is. Sixty percent of those who do not think it is working told Quinnipiac pollsters they blame Republicans, while 15% blamed Democrats. Twenty percent said they blame both parties.

Voters in New York City showed their frustration with politics as usual on Tuesday when they elected 33-year-old New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to be the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. Mamdani promised to address the cost of living, to raise taxes on the rich, and to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.”

Mamdani’s promise to change the political status quo echoes the one Trump used to win in 2016, but this time around, Trump is part of the status quo being challenged. On Wednesday, Trump called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic” who “looks TERRIBLE.”

Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN), who has falsely described himself as an economist and misrepresented his education as well as his work experience and who been under investigation for campaign finance irregularities, referred to Mamdani in a social media post as “little muhammad,” calling him “an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York.”

Ogles asked the Department of Justice to denaturalize and deport Mamdani, saying a line in a rap song Mamdani performed showed “material support for terrorism.” Mamdani, who is Muslim, was born in Uganda to Indian-born Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, who is now a professor at Columbia University, and filmmaker Mira Nair. Mamdani became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018.

The Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee called Ogles’s post “racist drivel” and noted that Ogles faked a $320,000 campaign loan, lied about being an economist, and was fired from a law enforcement job for not showing up. Former Illinois Republican congressman Joe Walsh was more direct. Over Ogles’s post, he commented: “A sitting Member of Congress calling for an American citizen to be stripped of his citizenship & deported, all because of that American citizen’s political views. This is fascism.”

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The New York Times

Tyler Pager Adam Rasgon David E. Sanger Natan Odenheimer and Jim Tankersley

President Trump said Thursday he will decide whether the United States will attack Iran “within the next two weeks,” adding in a statement released by the White House that “there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future.”

For days, Mr. Trump had mused publicly about the possibility of bombing Iranian nuclear sites, suggesting that strikes could be imminent, while also insisting that it was not too late for talks. With his comments on Thursday, he appeared to opt for some breathing room to give diplomacy a chance.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy to the Middle East, has maintained correspondence with Iranian officials. She declined to provide any further details. Iran pulled out of talks with American officials about a nuclear deal after Israel began attacking Iran last week.

Ms. Leavitt said any nuclear deal with Iran would have to include a ban on enriching uranium and block Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

After days of back-channel discussions, the Europeans, who have been effectively sidelined since the war started, are now trying to exert what limited leverage they have as weapons suppliers or potential peacemakers to try to end the war.

At talks in Geneva on Friday, they are expected to urge the Iranians to return to negotiations, even as Mr. Trump mulls the possibility of American military action against Iran. The meeting would be the first formal gathering between Iranian and Western officials since Israel began attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The diplomatic efforts came as the Israeli military launched its latest wave of strikes on Thursday against targets in Iran, including a nuclear complex. Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said the country would step up its attacks on Iran to “remove the threats to the state of Israel,” after a barrage of Iranian missiles hit several locations, including a major hospital complex in southern Israel.

Here’s what else to know:

Potential U.S. involvement: Israel has pressed Mr. Trump to use powerful American weapons to attack Iran’s underground nuclear sites, and the prospect of American involvement has added to fears that the war could spiral into a wider conflagration in the Middle East. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has warned that the United States would suffer “irreparable” harm if it joined the Israeli campaign.

Hospital attack: At the Soroka Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, melted plastic and burned wiring in the ruins of the building hit by an Iranian missile filled the air with a foul smell. The hospital said the building had been largely evacuated in recent days, and that it was treating several patients with minor injuries. It is the first Israeli hospital to be hit directly since the war with Iran began last Friday, the Israeli military said. Read more ›

Damage in Iran: The Israeli military said it struck a number of targets in Iran — including an inactive reactor at Arak, to prevent the site from producing material for nuclear weapons, and a nuclear production facility in the Natanz region. Iranian state media reported that Israeli warplanes struck the nuclear facility at Arak and said that there was no serious damage.

Missile interceptors: Israel has a world-leading missile interception system, but as the war drags on, Israel is firing interceptors faster than it can produce them. That has raised questions within the Israeli security establishment about whether the country will run low on air defense missiles before Iran uses up its ballistic arsenal, according to eight current and former officials.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/19/world/iran-israel-trump-news