Articles & Videos
All PoliticsPolicyEconomyCivil RightsJusticeInternationalConflict & SecurityClimate & EnvironmentTechnologyHealthMediaCulture & Society
51:19
Camels, Cults and Candace
Transcript: Trump Accidentally Hurts GOP’s 2026 Hopes in Wild Tirades
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.After we recorded this episode, Trump gave a speech demanding for a third time that Republicans pass the SAVE Act, reinforcing the dynamic we discuss here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.President Trump has been demanding that congressional Republicans pass the SAVE Act, which is a massive voter suppression measure. In several angry rants, he’s demanded that they do this rather than doing anything else. But a funny thing is happening. Trump’s order to Republicans is actually trampling on the GOP’s midterm message. Republicans badly want to appear really, really focused on costs and the economy, and a new poll shows they’re in a big hole in the midterms—yet Republicans are still totally in thrall to Trump. So now what do they do?Few people are better at explaining what’s really going on among House Republicans than congressional scholar Norm Ornstein. So we’re asking him to decode the latest madness for us. Norm, good to have you on.Norm Ornstein: Always good, Greg.Sargent: So let’s start with Trump. He erupted on Truth Social, demanding that Republicans pull out all the procedural stops to pass the SAVE Act. First, very briefly, Norm, what’s in the SAVE Act?Ornstein: Greg, to start with, every Republican out there, [their] talking point is “this is about voter ID,” which is supported by 90 percent of Americans. That’s not what the SAVE Act is about. The first thing it’s about is proof of citizenship before you can register to vote, much less vote. You have to go physically, now, even if you’re registered, to a voting office to re-register with a passport, a passport card, or a birth certificate. And to get a passport or passport card if you don’t have one, you need not just any birth certificate—an embossed birth certificate—all of which are costly.That’s bad enough, but then it gets much worse, because the SAVE Act requires every state to hand over all of its sensitive voter information to the Department of Homeland Security. And that includes a lot of stuff people don’t want shared, which then will cooperate with the Social Security Administration and the IRS, which is a danger to Americans. They also require the states then to use a program in the Department of Homeland Security called, ironically, the SAVE program, which is a faulty and biased voter-purge software. This software, which has a 14 percent error rate, would then take many voters off the voter rolls, unable to vote, requiring an enormously costly appeal, which most people would not take. And you could be sure that far more of the ones who are purged from the voter rolls will be those who don’t like or would not vote for Donald Trump or Republicans.It is nationalizing the election process in a bad way.Sargent: I mean, that is a massive, massive voter suppression effort. It would really knock out millions and millions of voters. Trump really wants this to pass—on Truth Social, he said the following in great anger: “It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as president, will not sign other bills until this is passed, and NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION GO FOR THE GOLD...DO NOT FAIL!!!”He’s really worked up. So, Norm, he says he doesn’t want the watered-down version. I guess he’s referring to the fact that the House already passed a version of the SAVE Act, which had a lot of these pieces, but not the functional end to mail-in balloting. He wants more. You don’t have 60 votes for this SAVE Act, right? Is that the fundamental problem?Ornstein: The fundamental problem that Republicans have is that the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass, is one that they have used over and over when Barack Obama was president, when Joe Biden was president. Democrats, even when they had 59 votes, couldn’t get anywhere if all the Republicans opposed it. That’s where they are now. They have 53 Republicans and they don’t have seven Democrats to pass the SAVE Act. So if they’re going to do this, they are going to have to violate their own promises and change the rules so that you can get to a point where a majority can pass the bill.Sargent: Right. In another eruption on Truth Social, Trump said the Senate should focus “exclusively, if necessary,” on the SAVE Act. Now it seems to me there’s no way this thing passes the Senate. And given that, all he’s accomplishing here is telling the base that congressional Republicans are failing his greatness, which could hurt turnout in the midterms and hurt Republicans.Ornstein: This is bizarre in some ways—by promising that he won’t sign anything else, he is not only taking off the table getting funding for TSA, FEMA, and the other parts of the Department of Homeland Security, but he’s also blowing up whatever is left of the agenda of House Republicans, who are teetering at the edge of losing their majority and want to have something to show for it.At the same time, I would disagree with you in this sense, Greg, and I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. We’ve looked at approval ratings for this president, including for the core issues on immigration, on the economy and the like, and he’s in the toilet and Republicans are in the toilet. They are increasingly concerned in the Senate that not only do they have to worry about seats that would otherwise be in play, like Susan Collins in Maine, but they’re now in trouble in Ohio, potentially in Texas, maybe even in a few other states like Montana, where they otherwise would have felt secure, or Nebraska.If Senate Republicans believe that they could lose their majority in the Senate, they will in a nanosecond change their rules to jam through the SAVE Act so that their voter suppression can guarantee them a victory even when the vast majority of voters are opposed to them. I’m a little more worried about their being able to do this—not because Donald Trump is bloviating about it, but because they’ll do anything to save their own skins, even if it destroys democracy.Sargent: Is there any indication, though, that passing the SAVE Act would necessarily help Republicans? In the midterms, you’re looking at a highly engaged electorate and a lot of those voters are Democratic. And if anything, what Republicans really need most to get through these midterms is some of those low-engagement Trump voters to show up. I’ve got to think that in the crowning irony of all crowning ironies, passing this thing would actually disenfranchise enormous numbers of these low-propensity Trump voters. Am I wrong about that?Ornstein: It is certainly entirely possible, if you think about who the voters are who don’t have a passport, who don’t have a birth certificate handy, who otherwise would have trouble coming up with what is a poll tax—$130 to $165 to get a passport, $65 for a passport card, but to get that you need a birth certificate. Somebody texted me today that they just got a birth certificate—it cost them $80 to get the embossed one. Women who have changed their names when they got married, and there are probably more traditional Republicans in that group than Democrats, have to jump through additional hoops. It’s entirely possible, since the electorate has changed and there are more working-class, lower-[income] voters who are Republicans now than in the past, that it could backfire.And if it were just a voter ID, or even the hurdle of a passport—which is unconstitutional, it requires a poll tax—but if it were all of that and that were all, I would say you don’t know who will be disenfranchised, even though it’s a horrible thing to do in a democracy, to take away legitimate votes. It’s the other part of it that we talked about before: giving all of this sensitive voter information to the Department of Homeland Security. And frankly, even if the dumbest member of the Senate, Markwayne Mullin, gets confirmed, it’s not going to be a whole lot different than it was under Kristi Noem. You do not want to trust people who want a police state to have this sensitive information and to use it as a cudgel. And then of course, there are many other measures that Trump will use to try and go after voters and keep the elections from being legitimate. But that’s a whole other story.Sargent: There’s this interesting tension and conflict among Republicans right now, and it centers on vote-by-mail. You’ve got a lot of Republicans who actually understand that vote-by-mail is their friend in some states. And Donald Trump still doesn’t understand that, because in his own head, the only thing he’s able to think about with vote-by-mail is that it somehow was connected to his 2020 loss. He’s not able to think his way out of that thought bubble. So you’ve got all these Republicans who don’t want to do some of this stuff in the SAVE Act—secretly. They can’t say that out loud, but Donald Trump is trying to force them to do it. It couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer assholes, really.Ornstein: That’s certainly true. What I would also say about mail-in voting, though, Greg, is they want to take away the ability for Americans living abroad to vote. They would leave some segment of military voters, but there are millions of Americans abroad who would lose their franchise.At the same time, look at what the Postal Service has just done recently—quietly—it’s gotten almost no attention. When you put a piece of mail in the mailbox, as soon as it gets to the post office, it’s been postmarked. So I put a piece of mail in today, on March 9, it gets picked up, it would be postmarked either the 9th or at the latest the 10th. They’ve now said that they will not give a postmark to a piece of mail—not when it’s picked up, not when it goes to the post office—but until it gets to the sorting center. What’s going to happen is, if we still have voting by mail, where in most states, if you’re postmarked, your vote-by-mail [ballot], before Election Day—even if it arrives after, because the mail sometimes is slow—it can be counted. They are going to hold a lot of pieces of mail, probably mostly coming from Democratic precincts and areas, until after the election and postmark them then. So they’ve got other ways that they’re misusing government agencies—with, in this case, a board of governors tilted toward Trump and a head of it who is a Trumpy guy—trying to take away the franchise as well. It’s really pretty awful.I want to circle back and say that this notion of taking sensitive voter information is not an entirely partisan issue. In Idaho, which is as red a state as you will find, the state has said, no, we are not voluntarily going to turn over our voting data to you—you can misuse it, and besides, the Constitution gives the authority over elections to the states. Who are you to take away that authority from us? So there’ll be pushback on this, but if they pass the SAVE Act, it’s not voluntary anymore. It would be mandatory.Sargent: Democrats really have to have an enormous team of lawyers in place to handle all this stuff. I think that they will. I sure hope so.A new NBC News poll finds Democrats leading Republicans in the generic House ballot matchup by six points among registered voters, 50 percent to 44 percent. And that matches what the averages of many other polls show. Nate Silver’s average has Democrats leading by 5.4 points—that’s nearly six points. That seems like more than enough to take the House, Norm. Do you expect that to hold?Ornstein: I do, and I expect it maybe even to widen. As more people suffer the consequences of this misguided war as it goes on—gasoline prices up, an economy that’s likely to take a significant blow from it, inflation that’s up—all of that is going to have an impact. What we’ve seen with special elections, and admittedly those are lower-turnout elections, but circling back to what you were saying before: If you curtail the votes of lots of Americans, we will end up with fewer voters. And the motivated ones now are more Democrats than Republicans. We’re likely to see another blow for Republicans in Congress.But it gets back to a fundamental point here, Greg, which is Trump’s standing and the Republican standing has declined dramatically. If you were a normal president with a normal party, you would look at that and say, maybe we should revise our policies to take into account what is really hurting voters. Instead, they double down on those because they believe that even if voters have turned against them, they can use this voter suppression. And God knows we may well see Trump declare martial law, say that we’re under attack. We may very well get an Iranian sleeper cell doing a terrorist attack at home and he will suspend the elections. I don’t put anything past these autocratic thugs.Sargent: I think they might try something like that. I don’t think they’ll succeed, though, Norm—do you?Ornstein: I hope you’re right. I just don’t know. And part of the reason I don’t know, Greg, is I don’t know how far this Supreme Court will go to slap down a president like Donald Trump if he goes to extremes. And we know he’s fully capable of going to extremes. We know that Republicans in Congress, with their own necks on the line, are not likely to rebel against him.Sargent: Well, Republicans, as I’ve said before on here, are acting like they think they’re facing an election. They don’t act that way outwardly, but you can see the signs, the leaks and so forth. So they seem to think they’re facing one.The NBC poll also finds that Trump’s approval on inflation and cost of living is down at 36 percent, with 62 percent disapproving. That’s abysmal. Fifty-five percent say his tariffs have hurt the economy. Circling back to what you said earlier, there’s a very reasonable chance this goes significantly further south for them, because the war is going to really hit the economy hard. So he is going to deteriorate more. It’s possible he gets into the 20s on the economy, potentially.And now you’ve got Republicans who are desperately trying to figure out a way to convey to voters that they’re focused on costs. You’ve got Trump blowing that up for them. If you’re a Republican—no wonder you’re retiring. What do you think they’re thinking right now? What do you think the candid view is inside the Republican conferences right now?Ornstein: I think they are dismayed and scared to death. And privately, I know many of them ridicule Trump and the people around him. They were thrilled, most of them, when Kristi Noem was canned. They would love to see clowns like Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick and Kevin Hassett go by the boards. But this is a cult, Greg, and they’re still sticking with the cult—until maybe there will come a point when they don’t.But let’s face it: for all of those abysmal numbers, that core base still is with their cult leader, Donald Trump. And until that really begins to crack, I don’t see the vast majority of House or Senate Republicans—who are privately appalled—speaking up and doing anything about it. What we’re going to see, no doubt, is more retirements, more people who can’t look themselves in the mirror in the morning, or just are too conflicted with what’s going on and want to get out of there.Sargent: For sure. Norm, you’ve been around a long time. I want to just ask you this question pretty straightforwardly. If we have elections that are free and fair, it’s sure looking like Republicans are going to lose pretty badly. You’re talking about some nightmare scenarios. There’s reason to think they won’t get away with some of that stuff. There are maybe other reasons to think they might. What does your gut tell you? What’s your deepest feeling here? Do you think we’re going to have an election, and will Democrats win it?Ornstein: I think the odds are better than even that we will have an election. I think they will make it as uphill as they possibly can. But if there is any semblance of fairness, Democrats win the House and very, very possibly win the Senate. And let me just say, Greg: if that doesn’t happen, we’re toast as a country.Sargent: Norm Ornstein, that seems like a good place to end. Always good to talk to you.Ornstein: Yeah. Sorry I have to be Debbie Downer.
White House: War Isn’t Hell. War Is Effing Awesome. You Are Hell.
Last week, the White House tweeted out a montage of a so-called “killstreak” sequence from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III crossed with drone video of lethal strikes on Iran. The intro to Childish Gambino’s “Bonfire” played over the carnage, a song that includes these lyrics: “Drop it like the Nasdaq / Move white girls like there’s coke up my ass crack.” To be clear, those lyrics aren’t heard in the video. Just the intro. Still. @WhiteHouse is the account of the executive branch of the United States of America.This is Operation Epic Fury, as named by Secretary of Warfare III Pete Hegseth. President Trump, long in cognitive peril, has lost control of whatever creaky reference set—Patton, Apocalypse Now, Shark Week—he used to deploy to get MAGA androgens pumping. So the snickering gamers who now run White House comms are left to hype the bloodbath. As The New Republic’s Grace Segers and Tori Otten recently reported, the gamification of violence is this administration’s trademarked move.Steven Cheung, the White House comms director formerly of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, was proud as punch of the video. When Drew Harwell at The Washington Post explained the snuff video in a tweet, Cheung shot back, “W’s in the chat, boys!” That’s streamerspeak for a high five. Cool.This aesthetic seems very pimply incel. But the Twitch memes are blending seamlessly with the equally bloodthirsty rhetoric of the higher-ups, the delusional Christian nationalists who issue actual commands. Brains like those of Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, have steeped in the twisted Book of Revelation for so long that their hearts, too, thrum to cartoony gamer apocalypses involving psilocybin-style hallucinations. We also learned last week, according to some 200 complaints filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that U.S. troops were told that a war in Iran is God’s plan, and that Trump has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.” Armageddon is in the chat, boys.Armageddon is a fictional battlefield, and it appears once in the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, that sketchy final entry that reads a bit like Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. Revelation doesn’t mention feeding the poor or welcoming the stranger, as the Gospels do; it mentions dragons, lakes of fire, and a lamb with seven eyes. And the war in Iran is being led by men who like that Bible.Revelation 16:12-16 has it that frog-like spirits in Armageddon pour out of the mouths of a dragon (Satan), a beast (Antichrist), and false prophets (liberals, according to Hegseth) to perform miracles and gather global leaders for a final war. In one scene, a woman on the moon gives birth while a red dragon with seven heads waits to devour her newborn. In another, an angel opens a bottomless pit, which then explodes with locusts with human faces. Many theologians, including Martin Luther, have considered Revelation the least Christian book of the Bible. Indeed, you’d hardly recognize the peacenik Jesus in the Book of Revelation. He’s been crueltymaxxed. With a sword in his mouth, this “Jesus” slaughters numberless people without mercy, while also appearing as a white horse with eyes of flames, a bloody robe, and a tattoo. “The wrath of God” becomes a wine press, and “the blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.” Quite a killstreak, even for God and the Pentagon. Small wonder that among Revelation’s devotees was one Charles Manson.Cold comfort: America’s hawks don’t talk in neocon doublespeak anymore. The last forever wars in the Middle East were framed by folks like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney as somehow involving important-sounding things like “stability in the region,” “national security,” and of course “WMDs.” True, there were also earnest Christians in the Situation Room back then. Those pious warriors—notably, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush—spoke righteously of freedom.Twenty years ago, in other words, neocons and neolibs could justify war with “values” (coded Christian) and “interests” (coded capitalist). Violent superstitions were supposed to belong to the other side. Today, Trump’s men have no problem citing pure pinwheel-eyed science fiction as a rationale for war. In the end, the U.S.-Israel war in Iran is unpopular, unconstitutional, and without secular justification. If, as Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio say, regime change is off the table, and if, as Trump has said, Iran’s (reportedly nonexistent) nuclear program is already “obliterated,” there’s simply no case that destroying Iran advances American interests. This is why Republicans in Washington are not talking much. They’re either falling mutely in line with Trump or pointing vaguely to Sunday school lessons to explain the war, which has killed over 1,000 civilians so far, according to one human rights group.Way back in 2001, Operation Enduring Freedom may have been predicated on hopes for something like nation-building. But nation-building is far too woke for Trump’s guys. Operation Epic Fury is just a bunch of men, several with extremely violent personal histories and fantasies, jacked up on geopolitical rage and a meme set that combines medieval superstitions, Call of Duty, and the glorification of violence as an end in itself.
The Unbelievable Madness of Our War With Iran
I wrote in July 2024 about my fear that, emboldened by unconditional U.S. support, Israel might launch a full-scale war against Hezbollah in Lebanon that could drag in the United States. Clearly, I failed to comprehend the scope of Netanyahu’s and Trump’s barbaric ambitions.I was right about one thing: Israel did invade Lebanon on October 1, 2024, only four days after assassinating Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, and 12 days after triggering the pager explosions that killed 42 and maimed almost 3,000. While the two countries agreed to a ceasefire eight weeks later, Israel routinely violated it and faced no consequences. And yet the Israeli invasion and continued bombardment of Lebanon now seem relatively inconsequential when compared to the regional conflagration Israel and the U.S. have ignited by attacking Iran.Within the first day, the United States and Israel conducted approximately 900 airstrikes, killing hundreds of civilians. The strikes targeted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose martyrdom sparked riots among Shia communities in Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, and Pakistan. Iran selected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the country’s new supreme leader. While Khamenei Sr. had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, in 2003 against the production of nuclear weapons, analysts fear that Mojtaba will impose no such restrictions.Iran retaliated within hours, launching missiles at Israel and at U.S. military facilities in Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Within the first few days, Iran also hit Oman, the Azerbaijani enclave of Nakhchivan, a British base in Cyprus. Turkey intercepted two Iranian missiles. Although the Houthi movement in Yemen had not yet joined after the first week, Iran-backed militias in Iraq fired missiles and drones at Israel and at U.S. bases in Jordan.Meanwhile, in addition to launching thousands of airstrikes against Iran, Israel again invaded Lebanon, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to increase military aid to the Lebanese army, which did nothing to slow Israel’s blitz over Beirut. Israel continued its bombing campaign in Iran, evidently using AI to select such targets as a public park because it was named “Police Park.” No one checked that it had no relation to the police, indicating a lack of human oversight.The number of countries actively or potentially involved in hostilities is growing, with no sign of concern from Israel or the U.S. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian announced that Iran would stop attacking the Gulf Cooperation Council states unless attacks were launched from their territory. Soon after, Israel attacked a desalination facility and struck 30 oil storage tanks, derailing the possible reduction in hostilities with the GCC. Residents of Tehran captured videos of the apocalyptic aftermath: massive black clouds and fires burning uncontrollably, followed by a black rain of oil. Targeting oil and water facilities marked an escalation that the Gulf states in particular wish to avoid; in the GCC, 100 million people depend on desalinated water.Although air defenses have deflected most Iranian projectiles, the Gulf countries’ image of peaceful luxury—an image purchased with hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. weapons—has been shattered. Gulf states are furious with Trump for sacrificing their safety and economic viability for a war that will result either in complete chaos in Iran that could destabilize the entire region or the survival of a regime that is even more hostile, paranoid, and determined to go nuclear. Emirati billionaire Khalaf Al Habtoor channeled the frustration of many in a post on X aimed at South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Netanyahu, who has pushed for years for the U.S. to attack Iran. Habtoor wrote, “I say to him clearly: We know full well why we are under attack, and we also know who dragged the entire region into this dangerous escalation without consulting those he calls his ‘allies’ in the region.” The post was later removed. Although they previously welcomed Trump’s presidency, the GCC states are learning the wisdom of Henry Kissinger’s observation, “To be an enemy of America is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”Leaders around the world appear to be struggling to respond to an American administration that is no longer constrained by pretending to care about human lives, the law, or the cost of its hubris. In Europe, only Spain refused to allow the U.S. to use its bases to attack Iran, while France, Switzerland, and Slovenia condemned Trump’s attacks as a violation of international law, as did Russia, China, Chile, Venezuela, and Pakistan. And yet as the price of fuel and food begins to climb, the rest of the world will experience the consequences of failing to hold Israel accountable for its flagrant violations of international law. Israeli impunity, combined with America’s campaign to destroy institutions like the International Criminal Court that could hold Israelis or Americans accountable for war crimes in Palestine or Iran, threaten to destroy the system that prevented a third world war for over eight decades.Those who are suffering most are the thousands of innocent people inside Iran. The savagery of the American attack became almost immediately apparent when its initial wave of airstrikes targeted a girls’ elementary school. Three separate precision munitions hit the school, indicating that it was attacked intentionally. Given that the school had been a separate civilian facility for a decade, the notion that the missiles were actually intended for the nearby IRGC facility strains credibility. Instead, this appeared to indicate that the U.S. had adopted Israel’s Dahiyah doctrine, named for a Beirut suburb that Israel completely flattened during the 2006 war. IDF Commander Gadi Eisenkot articulated the doctrine as follows: “We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction.” What he described is antithetical to international law, where the principle of proportionality is foundational. Israel has long demonstrated its contempt for international law.Now self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has eagerly followed suit, declaring that the U.S. military would no longer be governed by “stupid rules of engagement.” Hegseth seems to believe that if the U.S. had been willing to kill more civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. might have won. Yet it was the civilian toll of the U.S. War in Afghanistan that drove the population to support the return of the Taliban rather than suffer the violence of ongoing American occupation. America’s toll on the civilian population of Afghanistan and Iraq pales in comparison to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, which Hegseth appears impatient to emulate.Americans are generally insulated from the tragic human toll of their government’s military interventions abroad; instead, the cost will be felt at the gas pump or perhaps the Republicans’ electoral chances in the upcoming midterms. Not in the loss of a child, a grandparent, a newborn baby to indiscriminate and inescapable violence.And yet some Americans may pay the ultimate price, as speculation swirls about what was once considered unthinkable: a U.S. ground invasion. The majority of Americans already oppose Trump’s war on Iran; no modern U.S. president has started a war with so little public support. If Trump sends U.S. troops into Iran, the results would be catastrophic—for Iranians, for the region, and for American soldiers.Many veterans of the so-called “war on terror” have viscerally rejected the possibility of yet another unnecessary war in the Middle East, a sentiment embodied in horrifying footage shot of a protest in a Senate committee hearing. Security officers and a senator drag a uniformed Marine out of the room so violently that they break his arm. Just before you hear his bones snap, he shouts, “No one wants to fight for Israel!” The fears I expressed 20 months ago now seem almost quaint, in the face of what Trump and Netanyahu have unleashed.
Neocons Got What They Want in Iran. They Still Want More.
“Donald J. Trump saved the world from real chaos,” Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “Thank God Trump did this.” What did Trump do? Graham and Bartiromo were only taking up half of the screen, so you could see for yourself: smoke rising from a bombed oil refinery and a compound of some sort being targeted—and taken out—by an airstrike. If you were to expand your search slightly outside the confines of Fox News, you would find other images of what Trump is doing. A New York Times forensic analysis found that a U.S. airstrike hit a girls’ school, killing more than 200—many of them children. Tehran, Iran’s capital, has been shrouded in toxic black smoke and rain for over a day, a result of the Israeli attacks on oil refineries. “Something like a black monster has swallowed the sky over Tehran,” a 27-year-old told Time. “It’s as if all the cars and the street pavement have been coated in black paint.” The air, she continued, was “unbreathable.” Those airstrikes have killed thousands of civilians, but there are no signs that the regime is on the verge of toppling, let alone giving in to Trump’s demand of an “unconditional surrender.” Iran has lashed out against at least a dozen states in the region and has closed the Strait of Hormuz for the first time in history—triggering the largest increase in oil prices ever. If Trump saved the world from real chaos, what do you call this? Fake chaos? Graham: Donald J. Trump saved the world from real chaos. Thank God Trump did this. pic.twitter.com/8J98hZY6P0— Acyn (@Acyn) March 8, 2026Graham, for his part, does seems to be vaguely aware that all of this devastation is ostensibly working toward something. Posting on X on Saturday morning, he shared an Axios report about America’s “dismayed” response to the Israeli strikes on oil refineries that were leading to the toxic rain in Tehran. The South Carolina senator insists “our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses.” But there’s not much sign that anyone who is actually overseeing this war, either in Israel or the United States, shares this goal. All parties seem to be content with devastation and chaos. Naturally, Graham is one of the architects of this war. He advised the Israeli government on how best to lobby Trump to try to topple the Iranian regime. He did his own part too, playing a word association game with the president in the weeks leading up to the conflict. “I say Franklin Roosevelt, what do you say?” Graham asked. The correct answer: “You have nothing to fear but fear itself.”Massive destruction, an entrenched regime, bombs flying across the Middle East, oil prices over $100 a barrel—presumably that is the kind of stuff Trump was fearing. For Graham, it didn’t matter. This was a war of liberation, one that Israel and the United States could bring to an Iranian people who were ready to rise up against their rulers. (They might have overlooked that the Iranian regime massacred thousands of protesters well in advance of Operation Epic Fury.) It has apparently now dawned on Graham—thanks to that toxic cloud hovering over Tehran—that the way the war is being conducted may not actually be conducive to liberation or uprising. The Iranian people may look outside their window at the black toxic goo covering their windows and cars and reasonably conclude that the people responsible for it don’t really care about their well-being. Nor is it clear that Graham understands that the Israeli and American officials overseeing the war may not hold the Iranian people in particularly high regard. But Graham did his part: He got Trump into a war from which he cannot easily extract himself. And that’s really all that Graham is good for. All this talk about caution is clearly falling on deaf ears. The goal is to tip Iran into chaos—not to liberate it. But Graham may already be moving on to the next chaotic proposal—and in doing so, he sums up the entire neoconservative approach. He concluded his interview with Bartiromo with a fashion show. He dutifully held up one hat emblazoned with the slogan “Make Iran Great Again”—an absurdity given what Trump is actually doing to the country. Then he held up another that read “Free Cuba.” Over a week in, one could not reasonably conclude that the United States and Israel are on the verge of accomplishing their goals, vague and shifting as they are. But Graham doesn’t mind—he’s high on his own supply and ready to move to regime change in Cuba. This is U.S. foreign policy now: maximal devastation and chaos, minimal planning and goals, and a dose of haberdashery. We’re just leapfrogging from slogan to slogan, from war to war. Graham will be there, every time, to cheer it on.
What Can an Oscar Mean for Palestinian Stories?
Cinema that takes on the life and times of Palestinians has rarely been celebrated in the West. Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013), both by the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, were Oscar nominees for best foreign film, and Paradise Now won a Golden Globe in 2006. Last year, No Other Land (2024)—a brutal, indispensable record of the erasure of Masafer Yatta—took home best documentary at the Academy Awards. “It’s difficult to review No Other Land, a documentary by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activist film-makers on the destruction of villages in the West Bank, on a formal level,” The Guardian’s reviewer Adrian Horton remarked. “The usual rubric for evaluating non-fiction cinema does not really extend to films whose existence was actively challenged throughout filming, whose makers’ equipment and livelihood were constantly at risk.”Despite the unfavorable conditions under which the film was made, the filmmaking is deft and persuasive verité, mixed with just enough tonal levity and thoughtfully juxtaposed archival to give you a sense of the difficulty of making any sort of life for oneself as your community and those nearby are terrorized and dismantled by state-sanctioned settlers. It took home the Oscar despite not receiving a single distribution offer from a studio, streamer, or mini-major.This year’s international feature category became a battlefield of sorts around what narratives the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is winning to amplify and which ghosts it is unwilling to unearth, as three very different movies about the plight of the Palestinians vied for a spot among the nominees for the first time: Palestinian entry Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, Jordanian entry Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, and Tunisian entry and eventual best foreign film nominee Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. The major distributors refused to touch these films, just as they passed on No Other Land. Yet this trio stood out in an American media environment that has often shunned or silenced Palestinian voices.* These films do not just ask for empathy; they each demand an accounting, both for the past and the present.No wonder then that a screening in Jerusalem of Jacir’s Palestine 36 in January was shut down by the city’s police, with Israeli Minister of National Security Avshalom Peled placing a citywide ban on the movie, which was partially filmed there. Widely programmed on the fall festival circuit since a world premiere at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, the movie is a sweeping historical reconstruction of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt against the British Mandate. There is a desperate, almost miraculous tenacity to its very existence; the shoot was to commence in 2023 in the West Bank but moved to Jordan as the geopolitical landscape succumbed to total conflagration, only to return to Palestinian soil in late 2024 after multiple interruptions. It stands now as a singular artifact—the only feature to physically navigate the psychic and material upheavals of the first two years of this ongoing catastrophe. These films do not just ask for empathy; they each demand an accounting, both for the past and the present.The resulting film plays like a corrective to the grand colonial myths of Lawrence of Arabia–style British adventuring and benevolence. Its narrative is anchored by Yousef (Karim Daoud Anaya), a farmer who works in Jerusalem by day and returns to the hills of nearby Al Basma at night. The opening scenes bluntly announce the film’s thesis: At a Mediterranean port, Arab stevedores unload barrels; one, destined for a Jewish importer, splits open like a piñata to reveal rifles. Simultaneously, the British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope (played with velvety hauteur by Jeremy Irons) inaugurates the BBC-like Palestinian Broadcasting Service from a transmitter in Ramallah, murmuring about harmony as Arab and Jewish dignitaries look on. (The station, we are reminded, preferred light Western songs and orientalized discussions of Arab culture to politics.) The juxtaposition is unsubtle: Beneath the civilities, there are guns.Within days, a general strike and tax boycott convulse the country, aimed at halting Jewish settlers who, in the film, erect stockades on property lacking Ottoman-era title. In the first act, they begin to make their presence felt along the margins of the narrative, a nameless other depicted not unlike Native Americans in an early John Ford picture about how the West Was Won. Jacir crosscuts between Jerusalem—where Palestinian men debate how best to respond—and Al Basma, where Yousef’s family has long lived and where a series of radicalizing events takes place. His father is killed by settlers and his younger brother detained by them, for no particular reason. Yousef, when not on his farm, is a driver in the city for a well-heeled columnist, Amir, played by Tunisian actor Dhafer L’Abadine. His well-appointed dwelling and increasingly conciliatory attitude in the geopolitical chessboard of Jerusalem contrast throughout the film with the modest dwellings of Yousef’s family and the village that they help support. Perhaps the story’s most tragic figure, Amir thinks his wealth will ultimately protect him from what’s coming, along with the payments he has been accepting on the side from a settler organization.The movie’s version of history is not without its elisions. When the British government releases the Peel Commission report—proposing the partition of Mandatory Palestine into a small Jewish state, a larger Arab state, and a neutral Jerusalem—the dinner guests in Amir’s salon dissolve into tears and gunfire punctures the night. Soon after, there is a set piece in which villagers, bearing no discernible ill will, stray near the timber palisade of a Jewish encampment; a guard in a watchtower fires, and a man falls. The settlers are filmed as silhouettes behind slats, voiceless and distant—an abstraction of menace rather than a community with its own fears and factions. The revolt in Jacir’s telling seems to materialize fully formed after episodes like these. Omitted is the slow build toward all-out fighting: the tit-for-tat ambush of a bus by Arab underground members, killing two Jews, and the retaliatory murders of two Arab laborers by members of the Irgun, the Jewish paramilitaries. Violence, which had long flickered intermittently between the parties, has a hazy single ignition point in this version of history. Still Jacir’s fictional film, which features beautifully restored archival of Mandatory Palestine, delivers the outlines of that critical moment in the region’s history with an emotional wallop and presents a meticulous portrayal of the experience of dispossession.Cherien Dabis’s remarkable All That’s Left of You, Jordan’s submission for this year’s Oscars, is perhaps the most structurally ambitious and aesthetically assured of the three films. It tells a story that spans generations, from the Nakba to the first intifada. Spanning seven decades, it is a multigenerational tapestry that traces the psychic scars of a single family through the upheavals of 1948, 1978, and 1988. The film initially centers on a teenager named Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) in the late 1980s, whose experience of a moment of casual violence in the occupied West Bank propels us into the story of his family across the preceding decades. His mother, Hanan (played by Dabis herself with a weary, translucent grace), begins to recount a history of dispossession. We see the family’s flight from Jaffa in 1948—like Amir’s family in the Jacir film, they are well-to-do, with a gorgeous family compound that will belong to settlers in the city soon to be rebranded as Tel Aviv—as a sensory trauma that exists in the present tense of her delicate, often elegantly composed tableaux. The dialogue can be flabbily expository at times and, at over two hours, the movie is, like so much contemporary cinema, longer than it probably needs to be. That’s largely thanks to the remarkable faces Dabis has assembled; she and Saleh Bakri, as her despondent husband, Salim, give fabulous performances as their characters cope with the aftermath of Noor’s encounter with an Israeli bullet while attending a protest, and the heartrending choice they ultimately have to make in its wake. As the sweep of events moves on to 1988 and beyond, the movie uses the changing value and ultimate loss of their family home as a way to explore a series of relationships riven by systematic displacement. In the film’s capstone section, the couple, now octogenarians, visit Salim’s former home, in what is now called Tel Aviv, for the first time. It has been nearly 70 years since he fled and his father was dragged off their land. In a sequence in which they walk around like ghosts, eating at cafés and walking amid Tel Aviv’s dynamic, cosmopolitan charms, neither can escape the haunting sense of loss as they try to come to grips with a society built on the ruins of their own.Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab is the only one of the three Palestinian movies to have garnered an Oscar nomination this year. An austere chamber piece, Ben Hania’s film stays in the cramped, desperate offices of the Red Crescent dispatchers who are trying to navigate an IDF-enforced “permission” system to get aid to the wounded—a system designed to fail. It revolves around a 70-minute call from a 6-year-old girl named Hind Rajab, whose pleas for help from a car riddled with bullets in Gaza in 2024 became the defining audio of the genocide; the Kia Picanto she was trapped in was shot at least 335 times by the Israel Defense Forces. The docudrama reconstructs the final hours of her life from the perspective of the helpless individuals who kept her company and hoped to save her life.Ben Hania uses the actual audio recording of Hind’s call to the Red Crescent with performers playing the staffers (Saja Kilani and Motaz Mahlheez)* who attempted to save her. It is a harrowing, claustrophobic experience and a hauntingly effective choice, imbuing an emotional intensity it might not otherwise have. The waveform of Hind’s actual voice—small, terrified, asking not to be left alone in the dark—shimmers on the screen, a digital ghost that no amount of diplomatic “concern” can exorcise.The movie is a quiet indictment of the failure of systems, be they humanitarian, political, or moral, to protect the most vulnerable of us.The movie mines the psyches of the first responders and their increasing rage about all the road blocks, literal and metaphorical, that stand in the way of helping. (Attempts to rescue Hind also led to the deaths of the ambulance drivers who tried to reach her.) The movie is a quiet indictment of the failure of systems, be they humanitarian, political, or moral, to protect the most vulnerable of us. It is a confrontation with the reality of what the world allowed to happen to a child, while NGOs, ambassadors, foreign ministers, and the entertainment industry were debating the wording of their press releases. It was in this spirit that Ben Hania refused to accept the “most valuable film” award at the annual Cinema for Peace gala in Berlin during last month’s 76th Berlinale, which was riven from the start with debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Germany’s complicity with the ongoing genocide. “Peace,” she said, “is not a perfume sprayed over violence.” A prize, she suggested, cannot launder the conditions that make such films necessary in the first place. Her indictment was unsparing. The Israeli army, she argued, killed Hind Rajab and her family, “with the complicity of the world’s most powerful governments and institutions,” including that of the German government, which directly supports the Berlinale. In that context, gratitude felt obscene. “I feel responsibility more than gratitude,” she told those gathered, among them former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.Hind Rajab is not the front-runner in the race for best international feature film at the Academy Awards. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, also nominated for best picture and best director, is the overwhelming favorite, with Neon’s Palme D’or–winning It Was Just an Accident from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi as its chief rival. Hind Rajab does, however, have serious backing. The film’s emergence as a contender was helped by Hollywood heavyweights who joined the project as executive producers ahead of* its Venice premiere: Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Brad Pitt, and Jonathan Glazer, who famously used his acceptance speech for 2023 best foreign film Oscar for The Zone of Interest to refute “his Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an Occupation which has led to conflict for so many people.”An Academy Award nomination is a limited thing: It cannot change policy. The genocide continues apace, with hundreds of Gazans killed in shooting and bombings since the latest “ceasefire” went into effect late last year. But if it invites a wider audience to take this history and present more seriously, then the nomination of The Voice of Hind Rajab will have done more good than the majority of nominations ever do.Still, such breakthroughs feel increasingly hollow and illusory. Despite the win for No Other Land last year, Hollywood major streamers, who used to brag about their “diversity initiatives,” have continued to treat it like radioactive material. More galling is the cost paid by those who made it. Its co-director Handan Ballal was attacked by a group of Israeli settlers and arrested shortly after he returned from his Oscar win to the West Bank. This February, he and his family were assaulted again, leaving his brother severely injured. That’s not as bad as what happened to Awdah Hathaleen, however—a collaborator and activist who helped film the documentary and who was murdered this past July. He wasn’t killed in the “crossfire” or an “accident.” He was shot in the chest by an Israeli settler, Yinon Levi—a man who had faced sanctions from the U.S. during the Biden administration, only to have those sanctions lifted when Trump took office. Awdah’s death and the continued abuse of Ballal’s family is a reminder that in the West Bank, the “Oscar-winning” sheen provides no shield.* This article originally misstated the length of the films’ run in LA and New York. * This article originally misstated the actors who play Red Crescent dispatchers in The Voice of Hind Rajab. It also misstated when Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Brad Pitt, and Jonathan Glazer joined the project as executive producers.
Should Stoners Have Guns? It Depends on How Much John Adams Drank.
The oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week in United States v. Hemani were lively and at times illuminating. But not because they clarified the Second Amendment. Rather, they showed how unworkable the court’s current framework has become.For nearly two hours, the justices and the lawyers debated drugs, alcohol, gummies, cough syrup, Ambien, ayahuasca, anabolic steroids, and marijuana. They also wandered into the drinking habits of John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. (Answer: They held their own and then some.)The spectacle was entertaining. It was also revealing, and what it revealed was the incoherence of the court’s current Second Amendment framework.The case itself is straightforward.Ali Hemani, a Texas resident, was charged under a federal law that makes it a crime for anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” to possess a firearm. Federal agents found a Glock pistol and marijuana in his home. Hemani admitted he used marijuana roughly every other day.A federal district judge dismissed the charge, construing the statute to require being under the influence of drugs at the time of possession. The Fifth Circuit agreed. Now the Supreme Court must decide whether the statute violates the Second Amendment as applied to Hemani.But the case arrives as the latest stop in a very peculiar doctrinal journey.In 2022, the court adopted a new test for gun regulations. Under that framework, restrictions on citizens’ gun use are constitutional only if they are consistent with the nation’s historical “tradition” of firearms regulation, especially—though not exclusively—around the time of the founding.That is why courts confronting challenges to gun restrictions now have to delve into antediluvian gun regulations, while also confronting a thicket of questions about which historical laws and which historical periods matter and which ones don’t.Little wonder that the court’s guidance has produced chaos in the lower courts. Monday’s argument illustrated why.Representing the federal government, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris defended the statute by invoking that historical tradition. The Second Amendment, she argued, allows the government to temporarily disarm habitual marijuana users while they continue using drugs regularly.That is a sensible—if not irresistible—line of argument. But to frame it in terms the court demands, Harris had to analogize it to early American laws dealing with “habitual drunkards.”From that premise followed an extended seminar on the alcohol consumption of the founding generation. Justice Neil Gorsuch took the lead. “John Adams took a tankard of hard cider with his breakfast every day,” he noted. “James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day.” Thomas Jefferson, Gorsuch added, claimed he was not much of a drinker. He merely had three or four glasses of wine a night.Would those men, Gorsuch asked, count as “habitual drunkards”? Would they therefore be disarmed under the government’s theory?The justices proceeded through a parade of modern hypotheticals. What about someone who takes one sleep gummy every few nights? What about a person who uses marijuana once or twice a week? What if someone takes a spouse’s Ambien tablet without a prescription? Under federal law, that is technically unlawful drug use.The argument stretched on for nearly two hours and featured discussion of cough syrup, prescription stimulants, sleep aids, and psychedelics, during which there was often laughter in the courtroom.There is an element of comedy here. But it is not simply the image of baby boomers in robes talking about drug use. The justices know roughly as much—or as little—about controlled substances as the average citizen. And their questions were thoughtful and serious.They were just aimed at the wrong issue. Why should we care whether marijuana use today resembles the drinking habits of colonial “habitual drunkards”?The pertinent question in the case is much simpler. It is whether the drug use in question creates a meaningful risk that firearms will be used dangerously.That is the point that actually matters. And it can be framed in two ways.First, it may simply be the best reading of the statute Congress enacted in 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Congress sought to keep guns away from people whose behavior made them dangerous or irresponsible.Alternatively, the Second Amendment itself may require interpreting the statute in a way that avoids unnecessary infringement of the individual right recognized in District of Columbia v. Heller and its progeny.Either way, the focus should be the same: dangerousness, not colonial drinking customs. Imagine a simple hypothetical. Suppose scientists suddenly discovered that snuff—a tobacco product popular among the Founders—caused certain users to become violently psychotic.Under any sensible reading of the 1968 gun law, habitual users of that substance would fall squarely within the category of people Congress intended to disarm. Not because of an analogy to colonial cider drinkers, but because the drug makes people dangerous—and dangerous people should not have guns.That is the logic Congress relied upon. And it is the logic courts should apply.Sometimes that judgment might require expert evidence. It might involve administrative agencies tasked by Congress with evaluating the effects of particular drugs. That is how courts—and society—should evaluate scientific questions such as when drug use becomes dangerous. But when the opinion comes down this summer, expect pages of discussion about “habitual drunkards,” founding-era drinking customs, and the elusive meaning of “historical tradition.”The court may not affirm the Fifth Circuit outright. It could remand the case and ask the lower courts to apply its framework more carefully—in other words, to clean up the mess.But the clean solution is sitting in plain view. The Second Amendment does not prevent the government from disarming people whose drug use makes them dangerous with firearms. Courts should apply ordinary tools of statutory interpretation to determine when that condition exists.They should rely on expertise and evidence, not scavenger hunts through colonial history.
This War With Iran Will Cost More Than We Can Afford
With “affordability” the Democrats’ watchword of the moment, I’m surprised more haven’t pointed out that President Donald Trump’s undeclared war on Iran costs more than Americans can afford. By this I don’t mean American soldiers killed (seven thus far), which of course is the greatest concern. Nor do I mean how many other people will be killed (1,663 so far, according to The Independent, including 175 at a girls’ school struck by one of our Tomahawks and another 83 children in Lebanon, according to that country’s Health Ministry).Rather, I’m thinking about the secondary but nonetheless urgent matter of dollars and cents. Five days before the war began, I pointed out that Trump’s Treasury was, as Kris Kristofferson would say, busted flat in Baton Rouge. Already Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill had pissed away $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years, nearly doubling the budget deficit. The Supreme Court’s cancellation of Trump’s illegal 10 percent tariffs on all foreign products meant Trump might end up tripling the budget deficit over the next decade. Trump is trying to recoup his tariff losses by imposing temporary tariffs under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. But Trump’s own lawyers have argued in court that such an application is illegal, a conclusion with which 24 Democratically controlled states agreed in a lawsuit filed March 5. Worries about the budget deficit already had the bond market raising the cost of government borrowing. The outbreak of war pushed the 10-year yield on Treasuries even higher as the price of oil shot past $100 per barrel, thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. This is a president, you may recall, who won in 2024 on the strength of his promise to lower inflation. Instead, we’re getting an oil-driven inflation spike. On top of that, last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released an unexpectedly poor jobs report showing the loss of 92,000 jobs in February. The simultaneous occurrence of an oil-price spike and a possibly faltering economy means we may get our first serious bout of stagflation since the 1970s. Did I mention the stock market has been tanking since the war began? So much for Pam Bondi’s “the Dow is 50,000” deflection. The Dow closed Monday at 47,740.80.All these economic setbacks argue powerfully that Trump will follow the Venezuela playbook in Iran by cutting military intervention well short of accomplishing regime change. In Venezuela, Trump has nothing to show for January’s invasion except theoretical control over some oil fields that U.S. energy companies demonstrate no interest in developing (though one ironic consequence of our Iran bombing campaign is that it’s lifted petroleum prices to a level where refining Venezuela’s “dirty” oil might make better economic sense). But if Trump follows the same strategy in Iran, he’ll be able to claim (as he couldn’t in Venezuela) that his bombing campaign weakened a military threat against other nations. And certainly Iran’s offensive capabilities, including its nuclear program, are weakened considerably already, especially against Israel.On the other hand: Over the past week and a half, the Iranian theocracy’s fury at the United States and Israel surely increased one thousandfold. Iran has long been the world’s leader in state-sponsored terrorism—and terror attacks demand relatively little in the way of sophisticated or expensive technology. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, created in response to the 9/11 attacks, has—as the terror expert Bruce Hoffman recently pointed out—diverted its resources away from fighting terror and toward expelling undocumented immigrants. Will Trump want to take the risk that leaving Ayatollah Khamenei fils in charge will leave Americans vulnerable to a possible terror attack?Trump’s cynical rejection of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous Pottery Barn rule (“You break it you own it”) may not carry the day. Events could well dictate a longer-term military commitment in Iran, not unlike the one President George W. Bush stumbled into in Iraq. Recall that Dubya, like Trump, campaigned in 2000 against nation-building and “overcommitting our military around the world.” Between Dubya’s tax cuts and his military commitments, the younger Bush ended up turning a $128 billion budget surplus bequeathed by President Bill Clinton into a $1.5 trillion budget deficit, a 1,204 percent change in the wrong direction. When the Iraq War began, calculating its monetary cost was considered so very unpatriotic that poor Lawrence Lindsey, director of Dubya’s National Economic Council, got himself cashiered for telling Congress it might be as high as $200 billion. At the time, the Pentagon line was that it would cost $50 billion. The actual cost of the Iraq War was, by 2008, an estimated $3 trillion, according to Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard’s Linda Bilmes. When I spoke to Bilmes on Monday, she said she now puts the cost “somewhere probably around $6 trillion.” And that war, Bilmes pointed out, began when interest rates were much lower than they are today. Using a different methodology, Brown University researchers concluded five years ago that the Iraq War cost $8 trillion, a figure Bilmes does not judge unreasonable.Prior to the Iraq War, presidents and Congress actually tried to pay for their wars by floating war bonds and, yes, raising taxes. The 1991 Persian Gulf War was largely funded by U.S. allies. Bush the Younger broke this pattern, inspiring the journalist Ronald Brownstein to write in 2003: “Old question: What did you do in the war, Daddy? New answer: I pocketed a large tax cut, honey.” Trump is following the same reckless model. Even if, as Trump has pledged, he ends the war in “four to five weeks,” Bilmes figures the Iran war will run up a tab of $50 billion to $75 billion. The carrier groups sent to the region each cost about $9 million per day. There are three of them, so that’s $27 million per day. The three F-15s we’ve lost so far cost about $350 million. Munitions, according to a March 5 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Affairs, cost about $775 million per day, and so on. Bilmes told me she wasn’t figuring in the increased likelihood that Trump, who’s asked for a 50 percent increase in the Pentagon budget, will get that request taken more seriously because of the Iran war. Say that, instead of the $500 billion increase Trump wants, Congress agrees to give him a $150 billion hike. Over 10 years, Bilmes noted, that will be well over $1 trillion.If Trump commits ground troops—an option he’s lately giving serious thought to, according to NBC News—then the war’s duration will be much greater. It isn’t hard to imagine a rerun of the Iraq War: swift victory followed by two decades’ fighting off insurgent attacks. If the Iran war follows that template, expect it to cost (following Bilmes’s Iraq calculation) $3 trillion per decade.Even the more hopeful scenario of a short-term war is more than the United States can afford. The longer-term scenario is so much more prohibitive that a tax increase will become inevitable. The good news is that by then Trump will be so unpopular that Democrats will easily retake Congress and the White House. The bad news is that Democrats will be so busy cleaning up the GOP’s ungodly mess that there may not be much left over to address the country’s other festering problems.
Headlines
(6,300) 6,300 headlinesPage 1 of 630