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Transcript: As Trump Goes Off Rails on Economy, Fox Bursts His Bubble
New Republic • 1 week ago

Transcript: As Trump Goes Off Rails on Economy, Fox Bursts His Bubble

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it 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.Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech told a story about his economic successes that is pure fiction from top to bottom. But for Trump to tell this story all the way through Election Day this fall, he’s going to rely heavily on the MAGA and right-wing propaganda apparatus to do it for him. But here’s the thing: Sometimes the news is so bad that even Trump’s media allies can’t keep a lid on it. Trump was just hit with some very tough inflation numbers that showed up in a damning way on Fox. The network has also been surprisingly blunt about other recent bad economic news as well. And all this comes as a new poll shows enormous majorities rejecting the story Trump told in his speech. So can Trump’s propaganda network hold together his fictional story or not? We’re parsing through this with the excellent Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Matt, good to have you back on, man.Matthew Gertz: Always good to be here.Sargent: So we just learned that inflation was worse than expected for producers, which is a sign that more inflation might be coming. Listen to the news as it was described by Stuart Varney on Fox Business. The first voice is his, the second one is his guest, David Bahnsen.Stuart Varney (voiceover): Let’s begin with the latest read on inflation. This is important and it’s probably moving markets. It’s the producer price report. It came in hotter than expected—prices up 2.9 percent over the last 12 months. Now look at the core number. This pulls out the volatile prices for food and energy. Prices up a whopping 3.6 percent in the last 12 months. That is the highest reading since March of 2025. David Bahnsen (voiceover): This PPI number was not good. Varney (voiceover): No, it’s not. It’s not encouraging at all, is it? The Fed’s going to be looking at that for sure. Bahnsen (voiceover): They are. And so are the people that are making capital investments that are seeing higher prices.Sargent: This story generated a lot of bad headlines for Trump. USA Today said, “Price bump may signal inflation is on the rise.” Matt, this seems like bad timing for Trump after the State of the Union speech, which claimed this massive historic turnaround. What did you think of that?Gertz: Yeah, that’s really the issue. You have a situation where Donald Trump wants to talk about his golden age of America. He wants to talk about all the great jobs that he’s creating, how he’s got inflation squashed, how everything is going great. But the numbers that come out about this economy are not as rosy as he would like it to be. And in some cases we see Fox just rolling with his BS and parroting it as propaganda. But every now and again, especially on Fox Business, you see them coming to grips with reality—that the economy is sputtering, that everything is not as great as he would have it be. And when that happens, it creates some dissonance for the viewers.Sargent: I want to get into that dissonance at some length later. We like dissonance on here, especially with right-wing media. Can you, for now, though, map out for us the way right-wing media treats this stuff in a broader sense? The tariffs are deeply unpopular and have had all sorts of negative effects. Yet meanwhile, Trump is spinning a fictional story on the economy that numbers keep debunking. How does right-wing media, as a general matter, deal with all this?Gertz: In general you see them falling back on two narratives. Whenever there’s a good piece of news, it’s a sign that Trump’s economy is booming. Whenever there’s a bad piece of news, a bad number that comes out, it is evidence that Joe Biden is still waging war on the American business community in some way. This has worked well enough to get them through the day over the last year, but eventually you have to think that is going to run out. Not yet, obviously—you still see JD Vance out on the stump saying this is all Joe Biden’s fault. But Election Day is coming, and two years in, blaming your predecessor for the economy is just not going to sell to people.Sargent: We just learned that economic growth was far lower for the fourth quarter of 2025 than we thought—1.4 percent. Here’s Fox Business reporter Lauren Simonetti describing that.Lauren Simonetti (voiceover): OK, it was a bad miss. The economy grew at an annualized rate of just 1.4 percent at the end of last year, down sharply from the 4.4 percent growth in the prior quarter. What happened? The government shut down.Sargent: And here’s former torture memo author John Yoo discussing those numbers right after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs.John Yoo (voiceover): This might be a blessing in disguise, because we just had GDP report numbers from last year that showed the economy significantly slowed.Sargent: So Matt, here again, you see Fox Business and Fox News letting some bad news slip through. How often does that happen on those two channels?Gertz: It’s pretty rare. I don’t want to exaggerate this too much. In general, Fox News is a propaganda apparatus for Donald Trump, and they make really little bones about it, particularly compared to the first term—they have stapled themselves to him. But at the same time, during the daytime news hours and over on Fox Business, the audience is a little bit different than it is in primetime on Fox News. And because of that, I think you see the bad news slipping out a little bit more often, especially on Fox Business, which, as the name might suggest, has more of an audience of people interested in business news. They can’t entirely wave away the actual numbers that are coming out, because the audiences are people who are interested in business, who know some things about business, and are more likely to be the kind of old-school conservative business types than the new-school MAGA types on issues like tariffs.Sargent: Yeah, they’re a little less tethered to Trump and MAGA in a sense. Let’s listen to a couple more examples from Fox News. Here’s Fox’s Brian Kilmeade on the tariffs.Brian Kilmeade (voiceover): If you go blow up a fantastic deal with the EU by putting 10 percent on, they go and answer with more. And a lot of the goods that we get will affect what we are paying in the stores. If you affect what we’re paying at the stores, Republicans have almost no chance of holding the House and Senate. And might even lose the Senate.Sargent: And here’s Fox’s Shannon Bream on the Supreme Court decision on the tariffs.Shannon Bream (voiceover): We all know members that we’ve talked to on the GOP side of the aisle who are silently, quietly breathing a sigh of relief. There have been Republicans on Capitol Hill who have voted against some of the president’s tariffs. They think it’s actually hurt the economy and hurts their ability to go out and make the argument that this president is working to make things more affordable.Sargent: So Matt, what’s striking to me about this really is that here you see a bit of a divergence in interests between Fox News on one side and Trump and MAGA on the other. Fox News is heavily tethered to the business community in many ways, and the tariffs in particular are something that the business community really hates. So ... in addition to the audiences being a little different, their masters are a little different here, aren’t they? Can you talk about that split?Gertz: I think that’s right. To some extent you have a traditional business community that is wary of tariffs, and you have a MAGA audience that has bought into them to a greater degree. Notice, though, that no one is saying this was a bad idea for Trump to do this in the first place. Instead it’s always hedged as: Trump would be in a better spot if he were to get rid of these tariffs, it would be in the interests of the Republican Party candidates if there weren’t all of these tariffs. It’s always framed in a way where they’re trying to help Trump help himself.They’re part of the same team, all pulling for the same goals, rather than trying to actually criticize the president for his policy decisions.Sargent: They’re not allowed to really say anything like, boy, Trump really screwed this one up pretty badly, didn’t he?Gertz: No, that would be a bridge way too far. That’s the sort of thing that causes Trump to get angry and lash out at the network, which is something that we have seen him do over the years when he thought particular hosts got out of line. That’s happened less frequently, though, certainly in the second term than the first term. I think that’s largely a function of the fact that a lot of the old standbys in the Fox straight-news branch who might, from time to time, tell the truth—people like Shep Smith or Chris Wallace—aren’t around anymore. A lot of them were either forced out or left voluntarily. But it is much more of a new-school MAGA brand at Fox News now. The fact that we’re talking about Brian Kilmeade as the voice of reason is really a sign of how far things have gone.Brian Kilmeade is not ... a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. He is a hardcore conservative who supported Trump down the line. But nonetheless, someone whose familiarity with politics predates Donald Trump, and thus has some values from before the MAGA takeover of the party.Sargent: Let’s talk about the heavy lift that Trump’s propaganda apparatus has here, because it’s really heavy. Reuters had this new poll. It looked at some of the claims Trump made in his speech. So for instance, Trump essentially said, The economy is booming, we’re booming. And Reuters found that 68 percent of Americans say no, the economy’s not booming. Then Trump also essentially said, We’ve defeated inflation, which Biden saddled us with. Reuters found that 82 percent of Americans disagree with the statement that there’s hardly any inflation in the U.S. So that’s a heavy lift for the propaganda apparatus, isn’t it?Gertz: It’s definitely a heavy lift, which isn’t to say that there aren’t people at Fox willing to try to do the work. Sean Hannity, for instance, after the State of the Union on Tuesday night, went on Fox for a special edition of his show and he started by saying, “Moments ago, President Trump wrapped up yet another iconic, uplifting, patriotic State of the Union.” He said that Trump had championed our country and the achievements of “you, the American people.” And he said that Trump delivered a glowing speech that highlighted the triumphs, the struggles, the bravery of so many American people. “Under President Trump’s leadership, America’s full potential is unlocked and the state of our union, thankfully, is strong.” And that was just the monologue. Then he hosted a bunch of different Republican leaders, all of whom agreed that this was the greatest State of the Union they had ever heard.It’s interesting—I noticed the next morning that the Wall Street Journal, which is corporate cousin to Fox News, put out a report from their Korea bureau chief highlighting how North Korean state media had provided “unbridled flattery that underscores the dictator’s need to establish a cult of personality supremacy as a smokescreen for his nation’s woes”—basically praising Kim for nonsensical, meaningless accomplishments, saying that he was the greatest person in the world with unimaginable accomplishments and that their “future is infinitely bright and promising.” There’s basically no daylight between how North Korean state media talks about that country’s dictator and how Sean Hannity talks about Donald Trump.Sargent: Donald Trump actually exploded on Truth Social over the Supreme Court decision on tariffs, and he did something odd, which is suggest that it’s time for the court to rehear it, which I’m not sure is a thing or not. I’m going to read from the [post] that Donald Trump sent: “The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court concerning tariffs could allow for hundreds of billions of dollars to be returned to countries and companies that have been ‘ripping off’ the United States of America for many years, and now, according to this decision, could actually continue to do so at an even increased level. I’m sure that the Supreme Court did not have this in mind!”Trump then goes on and says: “Lots and lots of countries are taking advantage of us, have been taking advantage of us for decades.” They’ll now be entitled to an “undeserved windfall” from the United States. And then he concludes with this: “Is a rehearing or re-adjudication of this case possible???”Matt, I don’t know what to make of that. I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to rehear or re-adjudicate the case. And I also think the Supreme Court did have this in mind. What do you think of this?Gertz: The Justice Department, as this case was going through the courts, repeatedly said that it was not an emergency that had to be sped up in the process specifically because any funds that were tariffed could be returned by the federal government. That has been baked into their legal arguments over and over again this entire time. So the idea that we have just discovered that oh my God, the money that has been illegally taxed has to be returned is utter nonsense.It’s also interesting how he describes this as allowing the money to be returned to countries that have been ripping off the United States. One of his repeated lies throughout the entire debate about tariffs has been over who pays tariffs. He claims—and has claimed and told his supporters for years—that tariffs just get paid by foreign countries, and therefore now that the money has to be returned, it would theoretically go to foreign countries. In reality, we pay the tariffs. The cost is paid by the importer and gets passed on to the consumer. These are all taxes on us. We, for some reason, have huge tariffs on literally everything we buy now, and we are the ones who ultimately pay for them.On Fox, that has often not broken through to viewers, in part because people are so eager to support the president. So earlier this week there was a segment on Fox—Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union on Tuesday night and she described the tariffs as a massive tax hike on you and your family. And after that, Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones said that was 100 percent false—that there’s been zero inflation based on the tariffs, that you cannot say that it caused inflation on the American people—that it is lies that Trump’s trade policies forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs. But, in fact, that is the case! Fox doesn’t want its viewers to know that their prices are going up because of what Donald Trump has done. He doesn’t want them to know that either. But that is the state of affairs.Sargent: I think this is a good place to conclude. So basically Fox News mostly deceives people about tariffs. But as we went over earlier, it’s also an area where Fox News sometimes tells the truth because Fox News and Fox Business feel somewhat beholden to the business community as well. And yet here you’ve got Donald Trump signaling with this kind of rage rant that he simply will never, ever, ever give up on the tariffs. He’s going to keep running at it, he’s going to keep trying to inflict them on everybody, and he’s probably going to succeed in inflicting some tariffs on the American people for the rest of this year, potentially through the election. So where does that leave right-wing media? Where does that leave Fox News going forward? How are they going to try to contain this disaster so it doesn’t just murder Republicans in the midterms?Gertz: It leaves them in a very chaotic situation. I would say if there’s a guiding line, it’s that if Democrats are criticizing tariffs, the Democrats are wrong, but Donald Trump might want to back off the tariffs to help Republicans—because Democrats will attack them on tariffs. There’s a total incoherence, a mishmash of different talking points, all of which lead up to the idea that Donald Trump must be supported at all costs. And I don’t think there’s a way out of that trap for Fox News, Fox Business, for any of them. They have made their bed with Donald Trump, Donald Trump really loves tariffs, and so they’re all stuck with each other.Sargent: I will say that dissonance is going to get really shrill and difficult for them going forward, right through Election Day. Matt Gertz, thanks for coming on with us, man. Always super illuminating.Gertz: Thanks for having me.

The MAGA Plot to Take Down Canada
New Republic • 1 week ago

The MAGA Plot to Take Down Canada

When the fascist general Emilio Mola closed on Madrid in 1936, he made a haunting claim aimed at the city’s republican resistance. He would arrive with four columns of soldiers to besiege the city, and they would soon find help from a fifth column of sympathizers within. Well, if President Donald Trump were ever to march on Canada—a possibility roughly half of Canadians now fear—it is becoming abundantly clear that a fifth column would await him here too. Recent months have seen the escalation of a brazen campaign by separatists in the oil-rich province of Alberta to dismember the country and lease its resources to an expansionist American regime, with direct support from officials in the U.S. government.“There’s a real national security threat there,” Patrick Lennox, a former intelligence manager with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and security expert in the Albertan capital of Edmonton, told me. “This is the perfect scenario for foreign interference.”Alberta, often erroneously dubbed the “Texas of Canada” by U.S. media on account of its pro-oil, anti-government politics, has long been home to grievance movements lamenting perceived federal overreach. “Since the moment Alberta became a province [in 1905], there’s been a movement to separate,” said Duane Bratt, an expert in separatism at Alberta’s Mount Royal University.But a recent push for a referendum on independence has achieved unprecedented success, in no small part due to tacit support from the Trump-aligned provincial government.The province’s current premier, Danielle Smith, was one of the first Canadian officials to kiss the ring of Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and has long tested the limits of her powers to pursue his crusades and causes at home. “There is an ideological alignment with Trump,” Bratt said. “On gun rights, climate change, trans rights, renewable energy, wokeness … it’s all consistent with American right-wing movements.”On Thursday, she went as far as announcing a series of referenda, timed to coincide with a likely fall vote on independence, that would pack the ballot with proposals to seize control of the courts, withdraw from federal programs, and withhold public services from some immigrants, which she accused the federal government of deploying to “flood [Alberta’s] borders.”Though Smith has been ambiguous about her support for Albertan independence itself, she has worked for a referendum on the issue in virtually every other way. Her government massively lowered the threshold of signatures required to put the question to a vote, and overrode a court decision deeming a referendum unconstitutional. She has repeatedly refused to denounce those who would break up the country and reportedly said she’d stay on as prime minister of an independent Alberta.In the past, she’s been explicit that she views independence as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from the federal government, under rival Liberal leadership since 2015. And she’s had some success—Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, struck a “grand bargain” this year to put environmental progress on hold for the sake of the Albertan oil patch.But Smith is now increasingly herself under threat from separatists, whose power within her United Conservative Party, or UCP, has grown massively since reforms that have made it easier for fringe groups to challenge the party leadership. “The core people driving this are perennially aggrieved. They are always angry about something,” said Jason Kenney, Smith’s predecessor as premier and founder of the UCP. “And separatism is a perfect vessel for a wide range of grievances.”Kenney says it was this faction, radicalized by the pandemic and a drip-feed of alt-media outrage, that toppled his premiership and installed Smith in 2022. Now, he says, they’ve “apparently taken over most of the governing positions within the party”—and are using it to bring down the Canadian federation.Smith’s games have taken on new significance in light of Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex the country, and mounting evidence of an explicit U.S. strategy to exploit the Albertan independence movement to destabilize Canada.The referendum initiative is being spearheaded by a fringe group known as the Alberta Prosperity Project, or APP, headed by a trio of figures steeped in the conspiracy-addled world of the extremely online right.Jeffrey Rath, legal counsel for the group, is a typical figure. A cowboy-hatted lawyer who accused Covid-era health officials of “war crimes,” Rath maintains there is a global Communist conspiracy to kneecap Alberta’s economy—a belief he says U.S. officials now share.At the same time Smith was paving the way for a referendum, Rath made waves by announcing he had been secretly meeting with U.S. officials since April “to explore … the benefits to the United States” of Albertan separatism.The most recent of these meetings, in December, allegedly took place in a secure compartmented information facility, or SCIF, normally used for highly confidential meetings vulnerable to electronic surveillance. Rath said he discussed “communication plans” for several hours with U.S. officials who “go directly from our meetings to the Oval Office.”Rath emerged from that meeting claiming that the U.S. was “very enthusiastic” about Albertan independence, which would “free … the third-largest oil field in the world from control by the Communist Chinese.” He claimed the U.S. Treasury would grant a $500 billion line of credit to the new country, underwritten by access to Alberta’s natural resources. “When I listened to that interview … I just thought, ‘This is it,’” said Lennox. “This has become an act of conspiracy here.”Though Rath claims he wants independence, not statehood, he has suggested Alberta could switch to the U.S. dollar, and deploy American border enforcement to carry out mass deportations in the province. In March of last year, he even talked up the benefits of a status less than statehood, saying U.S. territories like Puerto Rico and Guam at least do not pay federal tax.Though U.S. officials have since tried to downplay their support for Rath’s cause, it makes a certain amount of sense. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy states explicitly that the government will “reward and encourage … movements broadly aligned” with its strategy to dominate the Western hemisphere and secure control over its natural resources.The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Lennox says, was a “warning shot” for resource-rich countries like Canada that could see their governments destabilized if they challenge the U.S. regime. In this respect, the APP is a useful tool.But the Trump administration’s crusade against Canada may have deeper causes. Figures like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, who has explicitly compared Canada to Ukraine, see Canada as a bastion of decadent liberalism in the West that must be broken and subdued, one way or another.“What we’re looking at here is a radical conservative attempt to reshape American foreign relations,” Michael Williams, an expert on the radical right at the University of Ottawa, told me. “The West is a cultural and political entity, and its greatness … is being undermined by liberalism. So you need to find ways to attack liberalism in any way that you can.”Rath’s comments—and his commitment to the wildest ideas of the online far right—suggest he is pleased to play the role of the useful co-conspirator. And many fellow Albertan separatists appear willing to follow him.“There’s an old fashioned word for that,” David Eby, premier of the neighboring province of British Columbia, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “That word is ‘treason.’”Fortunately, for now, support for independence in Alberta is extremely soft. In the most recent poll, separation receives less than 30 percent support, with fewer than 10 percent fully committed. Nearly three-quarters of Albertans say they’d move elsewhere if the province became independent.That includes Kenney, the former premier. “I am a proud Albertan, but I’m a Canadian first,” he told me. “And I don’t think I’d feel at home in a place like that.”Kenney maintains a substantial amount of separatist support comes from “frustrated federalists” who, like Smith, are trying to leverage independence to win concessions from the federal government.But if that faction is large enough, it might not matter what they want. Lennox sees troubling parallels between America’s engagements with the APP and Russia’s tactics in Ukraine’s Donbass region, which laid the groundwork for a more forceful annexation.If a “no” vote is narrow enough, Rath and his American backers could claim the result is “rigged,” necessitating the “liberation” of an oppressed minority—and its valuable strategic resources.That makes the stakes very high for Canada. Its committed federalists must find a way to shore up support in a famously unpatriotic country, all while facing a likely tidal wave of foreign influence operations that Canada is ill equipped to counter.“You have really got to care about this stuff to win these political fights,” said Williams. “Because the people on the other side are characterized more than anything by the fact that they really do care. They really do believe.”

Phase I Is Going OK Militarily. But It’s Phase II That’s Terrifying.
New Republic • 1 week ago

Phase I Is Going OK Militarily. But It’s Phase II That’s Terrifying.

When the U.S. and Israeli militaries launched offensive operations against Iran, President Trump delivered an address making two claims. First, that he was eliminating an imminent threat to the United States; second, that he was calling for the Iranian people to rise up and depose the existing regime. On the first count, there’s little evidence to support this assertion. On the second, ask the Kurds how well it turned out for them when they tried to rebel against Saddam Hussein after President George H.W. Bush called on them to do so in 1991 with implied US military support.But assuming that these reasons aren’t just a pretext for getting a cut of Iranian oil revenue (like U.S. operations in Venezuela turned out to be), even cursory analysis shows that Trump is unlikely to achieve either of these goals. There are only two realistic possible outcomes at the end of hostilities: Either the Iranian regime remains in power, or it doesn’t. Both scenarios end badly for the U.S., Iran, and the world in general.The first and more likely scenario is that Iranian leadership remains in the hands of the Guardian Council and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. Despite the successful decapitation strikes against Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders, we can already see the Iranian government naming successors and reconstituting its chain of command, while divvying out wartime responsibilities. The new leadership is younger and appears to be more hard-line than Khamenei was. For instance, IRGC security chief Ali Larijani is reportedly emerging as the kingmaker in the process of rebuilding the government. Larijani was reportedly the mastermind and driving force behind the massacre and execution of up to 30,000 civilians this past January, during the people’s uprising against the government.Based on what we have observed, the Iranian response strategy for this war is to inflict as many pain points as possible on Gulf States via long-range drones and missiles, while bleeding the U.S. and Israel dry of interceptor munitions. These munitions were already likely in critically short supply after the exchange of volleys in 2025. The U.S. production rate for defensive Theater High Altitude Air Defense, or THAAD, SM-3, and SM-6 missiles is low and requires years to scale up. Similarly, the U.S. is burning through its stocks of precision-guided attack munitions, which also take years to rebuild.At the same time, the nuclear carrier USS Gerald Ford is setting post-Vietnam records for deployment length, while 80 percent of her toilets reportedly are inoperative. Morale is reported to be abysmal.Trump administration officials have described this campaign as designed to last for “weeks.” During that time, the U.S. and Israel will likely be able to significantly degrade Iranian air defenses, missile production facilities, and naval assets. The missiles themselves are more difficult to eliminate, if you remember the Scud hunts of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Indeed, heading into the third day of the conflict, Iran is still launching volleys at targets throughout the region. But the campaign is unlikely to dislodge the Islamic regime. Because the U.S. has no intention of using ground troops, Iran can simply rope-a-dope and accept much more favorable terms when the U.S. is running out of offensive and defensive munitions to throw at them. Any attempts at revolting against the regime will likely be crushed ruthlessly, and there is little sign that its survival is in any sort of danger now. To their credit, the U.S. and Israel have not been engaging in war crimes by targeting energy and water infrastructure. Ironically, though, these are the targets that would most likely facilitate and encourage revolution. At the end of the day, the most likely result is an American acceptance of concessions from an even more radicalized Iranian government that is likely to decide that building and testing a nuclear weapon is the only thing that will guarantee its safety. Iran is also capable of replenishing its stocks of drones and missiles more quickly and cheaply than the U.S. can build the systems to shoot them down. In short, in some ways Iran will recover from this more quickly than the U.S.This new Iranian government will also crush public dissent even more ruthlessly, which is a high bar to begin with. It will be more hostile to America and more likely to support terrorism targeting the continental U.S. The regime still enjoys support from the fundamentalist portion of the public, even if it is the minority. It just happens that this minority is willing to kill as many people as necessary to remain in power. It will take years to rebuild U.S. stockpiles of interceptors, and some time to replace its precision fires munitions. U.S. carrier maintenance schedules will be disrupted for years, if not decades. Thus, after the shooting stops, the U.S. will have failed to achieve its goals of replacing the regime or of making it more hesitant to engage in operations against the U.S. or striking American targets in the region.But let’s say that somehow the Iranian regime gets overthrown. The odds are that will turn out badly, as well. The Trump administration failed to consider conditions on the ground and what happens after the revolution. There’s no government in waiting, no new constitution that can be copy-and-pasted. The government is full, top to bottom, with loyalists who think the punishment for not loving the Ayatollah enough is death. This means that the entire government apparatus needs to be emptied out and to start over, and particularly within the military, IRGC, courts, and police. The problem is, the U.S. tried to do this in post-Saddam Iraq as part of the de-Baathification program, and it was a catastrophe.There’s also still strong fundamentalist support for the government, in pockets. Sending the IRGC and police home without jobs is likely to produce a particularly bloody civil war and insurgency where both sides believe the other should either be put to death or utterly subjugated. If this sounds familiar, it’s basically the situation we created in Iraq. The number of peacekeepers necessary to tamp down an Iranian civil war would likely be over half-a-million troops in a nation of 90 million people. There is zero chance any country would want to put its sons and daughters in such numbers between factions that would do anything to tear each other apart. At the same time, these troops would be trying to nation-build in a country with no history of democracy, while defending a weak nascent government. Thus, I cannot envision a scenario in which any country would be willing or even capable of sending the troops necessary to tamp down an Iranian civil war.Alternately, when a power vacuum is created in a repressive state like this, usually someone (or multiple someones) even more ruthless fills it. We’ve seen this repeatedly in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Russia. So the alternative to a bloody civil war, if the regime gets overthrown, is something even more repressive, willing to put down pro-democracy factions and pro-Islamic Republic holdouts. Think of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or other ruthless dictatorships. The best that can be said for this scenario is the new leaders might be favorably inclined toward Trump (he likes dictators). But it’s more likely they fall into China’s or Russia’s orbit, given Iran’s economic and military ties with America’s adversaries over the past 50 years and the fact that neither of them has bombed Iran or assassinated its senior religious leaders. And with that reset, we’d be right back where we started, minus a hundred billion in munitions.Tactically, and operationally, the U.S. military is performing exactly as it should. However, at the strategic political and foreign policy level, the Trump administration is walking into a virtually unwinnable scenario. Iran will likely emerge from this with an even more hard-line Islamist government, which is even more hostile to the U.S. and more dedicated to putting down dissent violently. Iran will be able to rebuild its stockpiles of munitions more quickly than the U.S. and will be more dedicated to obtaining and demonstrating a nuclear weapon. Even the best-case scenario results in a brutal and protracted civil war in Iran, or a new dictator who reigns with an iron fist. It is evident that no one within the Trump administration has thought through how this will play out. One online commentator described it as the Trumpists are “underpants gnoming” their way through a conflict where the grand war plan has essentially three phases: I. Bomb Iran for two to three weeksII. ?III. U.S. wins and the Iranian people are freeI wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Trump, Pete Hegseth, or Marco Rubio to articulate what phase II is, because they clearly don’t know, either. Unfortunately, everyone is going to be a lot worse off for it.

Who’s Deciding Where the Bombs Drop in Iran? Maybe Not Even Humans.
New Republic • 1 week ago

Who’s Deciding Where the Bombs Drop in Iran? Maybe Not Even Humans.

Within hours of the first U.S. and Israeli weapons exploding in Iran on Saturday morning, at least 153 people, many of them children, according to the BBC, died in an explosion at a girls’ school in Southern Iran. The bombing was reported originally by the Iranian news agency. Israel said it wasn’t aware of any Israel Defense Forces operations in the area, and a U.S. spokesman said, “We take these reports seriously.”We don’t know if the children died because of Israeli or U.S. weapons. But it might not matter. The two militaries have been working together on the planning for this attack and have been sharing technology that Israel has been practicing with on the civilian population of Gaza for more than two years. Assuming the report is accurate, it means that we are immediately witnessing the fullest expression of the most inhumane weapons of the twenty-first century: autonomous bombs and missiles. Their “autonomy” refers to the fact that humans need not be “in the loop” in any meaningful way when deciding where to target or whether to launch such weapons. A combination of human intelligence collected over time; geolocation of mobile phones; and recent images taken by satellites, drones, or people who post images on social media sites contributes to the data these systems digest to guess if an enemy combatant is present at the suspected target. Military officers merely outsource their own moral and military judgment to proprietary systems. Then things blow up.When such systems get it wrong, they get it very wrong. Civilians, often children, pay the price for the errors of autonomous systems. We have seen it for five years in Ukraine. We have seen it for three years in Gaza. We see it in real time this week in Iran. And it’s unconscionable. There is a phrase that has quietly become one of the most consequential in American national security law, and it appears in no statute, no executive order, no treaty. It is a phrase that the Pentagon began demanding AI companies accept as a condition of doing business with the U.S. military: any lawful use.Last week, Anthropic, one of the most advanced artificial intelligence laboratories in the world, declined to accept those words without restriction. On February 26, CEO Dario Amodei released a statement listing conditions the Pentagon was imposing on contractors and said: “These threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”The next day, the Trump administration reached for instruments of punishment normally reserved for the People’s Republic of China. President Trump posted on Truth Social that “the leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic” had made “a DISASTROUS MISTAKE” and directed every federal agency to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology. Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security,” a designation typically applied to Huawei and other companies deemed to be extensions of hostile foreign states. Any contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the U.S. military was immediately barred from any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic had asked for two things: a contractual guarantee that its generative AI model, Claude, would not be used as part of autonomous weapons systems and a guarantee that it would not be used for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. These were not new conditions. Anthropic had maintained them explicitly in its usage policy since June 2024, before the Pentagon contract, worth up to $200 million, was signed in July 2025. The administration knew the terms. It signed anyway. And then it decided, months later, that those terms were intolerable.To understand what “any lawful use” means in practice, it helps to understand what it is designed to eliminate: the possibility that a private company could tell the U.S. military how its technology may or may not be used. In the Pentagon’s view, once a tool is purchased, the buyer sets the terms of its application. The vendor’s values, safety commitments, and ethical frameworks become, at the moment of transaction, irrelevant. The military has its own lawyers. It has its own review processes. It has its own standards. And given the degradation of legal safeguards and restrictions on the entire executive branch in the last year, almost any act of depravity or mass murder could be ruled “lawful” by a Pentagon that has purged itself of its most moral and ethical lawyers and leaders and a Supreme Court devoted to maximizing Trump’s autocracy.The same logic—that internal military review is sufficient to govern the deployment of powerful technologies—underwrote the expansion of the NSA surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden. It underwrote the algorithmic targeting programs in Yemen and Somalia, where AI-assisted kill lists generated strikes that killed the wrong people with a regularity that official reviews consistently declined to examine. In his February 26 statement, Amodei said: “Today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.” This technical conclusion is shared by a significant portion of the AI research community, grounded in the basic observation that large language models hallucinate, misidentify, and fail in ways that are not fully predictable. In a military context, an unpredictable failure is a dead civilian with no accountable author. The military wants a powerful tool, available at scale, deployable at speed, unconstrained by the values of its designers. It wants an AI that will do what it is told without the inconvenience of a conscience embedded in its terms of service.The category of “supply chain risk”—previously occupied chiefly by companies suspected of channeling data to Beijing—now encompasses companies that ask that their AI not be used to kill people without a human being making the final decision.The most alarming yet unsurprising element of what followed is how quickly the rest of the industry pandered to Trump. Within hours of the administration’s announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted that his company had struck a deal with the Department of Defense to deploy its models on classified networks. Altman claimed that OpenAI’s agreement included the same prohibitions on autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance that Anthropic had demanded—the exact conditions for which Anthropic had been declared a supply chain risk. This contradiction was left unaddressed. Elon Musk’s xAI, whose Grok system stands to inherit Anthropic’s classified network access, had already agreed to the morally noxious standard of “any lawful purpose.” Musk himself posted that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.” The immediate beneficiary of Anthropic’s ejection was its direct commercial competitor, operated by a man who is simultaneously one of the administration’s most powerful insiders. In military and intelligence matters, the stakes are quite high for this sort of crony anti-capitalism. A supply chain risk designation is not merely a policy decision. It is a weapon of economic coercion. It means that any company doing business with the Pentagon must certify it has no commercial relationship with Anthropic. The effect is not to remove Anthropic from one government contract. It is to make Anthropic radioactive to any enterprise with government ambitions, which in the technology sector is most enterprises. This could include major universities. Northeastern, Syracuse, Dartmouth, and Howard universities have all announced partnerships with Anthropic to meld its products with teaching and research missions. Claude was, at the time of its ejection, the only AI model deployed on the Pentagon’s classified networks. It was used, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, in the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. It could have been used in an operation against Iran (and might be used today, because Claude is embedded in many essential services used by the military, including services provided by Palantir). The military and Palantir chose Claude because it had the level of quality control necessary for the most sensitive and demanding tasks.The systems that will replace Claude in classified environments—Musk’s Grok and, presumably, OpenAI’s models under whatever deal Altman has negotiated—will arrive with fewer commitments to autonomous weapons restrictions and will be operated by companies that have demonstrated they will accommodate the administration’s demands. They are also notoriously shoddy products produced by megalomaniacal CEOs. This could endanger the U.S. service people and contractors, as well as further endanger Iranian civilians.What those systems will be used for, under what circumstances, with what human oversight, and subject to what review when something goes wrong—these questions have no public answers, because the administration’s entire posture has been that such questions are none of a private company’s business.When the government asserts the right to use powerful AI without vendor-imposed constraints, and punishes the vendor that declines to comply, it eliminates one of the only remaining points of friction in the kill chain. The vendors who remain are the ones who said yes. And what they said yes to was, deliberately and explicitly, left undefined. This was not a good situation last week. We should not have to depend on the whims of technology oligarchs to protect lives and our democracy. Sadly, that is the state of American governance in the twenty-first century.Democracies demand accountability. In many ways, accountability is forgotten in America. It’s been evacuated from our government by the Trump movement, first by removing legal safeguards and the inspectors general who were there to enforce them, and then by the imposition of opaque artificial intelligence systems throughout the bureaucracy, often at the direction of Musk’s boy army, DOGE. Accountability requires, at minimum, that someone be held responsible for consequential decisions. Someone should be punished when things go badly. Also, someone should be honored and rewarded when things go right. Autonomous weapons are, by design, accountability-dissolving machines. When an algorithm makes a targeting recommendation, and a human approves it in seconds without adequate information (or not at all, as many systems might be human-free), and the AI system that generated the recommendation is governed by a contract that says it can be used for “any lawful purpose,” the chain of accountability does not merely become hard to trace. It becomes nonexistent.While the Anthropic debacle is a fresh assertion of the autocratic power Trump wields over the private sector, it’s just a corrupt twist in a long plot the militaries of the world have been running for at least a decade.The war in Ukraine has become a laboratory for artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons. Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, civilians, farmers, and grandmothers are the subjects and victims of the experiment. What is being tested is nothing less than the proposition that machines guided by algorithms can make life-and-death decisions faster, cheaper, and more reliably than humans. We should be deeply unsettled by how enthusiastically this proposition is being embraced, and how little democratic deliberation has accompanied it.Ukraine and Russia have both deployed what analysts cautiously call “loitering munitions”—drones that can hover over a battlefield, identify targets, and strike, sometimes with minimal human intervention in the final moments of the kill chain. Ukraine’s Brave1 defense tech cluster, established in 2023, has accelerated the integration of artificial intelligence into drone warfare, enabling target-recognition systems that draw on machine learning to distinguish combatants from civilians—or, rather, to attempt such distinctions under battlefield conditions that confound even trained human observers. Russia, for its part, has deployed the Lancet-3, a loitering munition with alleged semiautonomous targeting capabilities, responsible for the documented destruction of Ukrainian armor, artillery, and infrastructure. The Lancet’s lethal power has rattled NATO planners who spent decades preparing for a different kind of war.The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned, repeatedly and with increasing alarm, that autonomous weapons systems risk violating international law precisely because the contextual moral judgments required in warfare—proportionality, distinction, precaution—are not reducible to pattern recognition. Yet the pressure of battlefield necessity, compounded by the venture-capital logic now deeply embedded in defense procurement, pushes development forward regardless. Ukraine’s innovative and genuinely heroic use of drone technology to resist a brutal invasion should not blind us to the longer arc. Every algorithm trained on Ukrainian targeting data, every autonomous engagement protocol normalized by this conflict, becomes a template. Silicon Valley’s defense-tech renaissance—Palantir’s celebrated role in Ukrainian battlefield analytics chief among them—is not driven primarily by solidarity with a besieged democracy. It is driven by contracts, markets, and the opportunity a live war provides to experiment.While Ukraine has been a vast lab, in which civilian casualties have been considered necessary externalities in the conflict, the genocide in Gaza seems like something far different. It is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a demonstration project. On December 26, 2024, The New York Times published one of the most significant pieces of investigative journalism to emerge from the Gaza war. Reviewing dozens of military records and interviewing more than 100 soldiers and officials, reporters documented how Israel had “severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians, adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties, routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing, and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.” This was not a rogue operation. It was policy, set at the highest levels soon after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians.That order—unprecedented in Israeli military history—transformed the rules of engagement within hours of the Hamas attack. Where previous conflicts had permitted strikes only when officers concluded no civilians would be hurt, or occasionally when up to five civilians might be endangered, the new order instantly elevated the acceptable threshold to 20 civilian deaths per strike as a standing baseline. Suddenly, the military could target rank-and-file militants at home, surrounded by families. The definition of a legitimate military target expanded to include lookouts, money changers suspected of handling Hamas funds, and the entrances to tunnel networks typically located inside residential buildings. A secondary order issued on October 8 went further still, declaring that strikes on military targets could “cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.” The effect was swift and catastrophic. Israel fired nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks—more than in the next eight months combined.Since October 2023, the Israeli military has deployed AI systems at a scale that has no precedent in the history of urban warfare. The most extensively documented of these is a system called Lavender, reported in April 2024 by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, based on testimony from multiple Israeli intelligence officers. Lavender used machine learning to generate a list of tens of thousands of Palestinians flagged as suspected militants—at one point reportedly numbering around 37,000 individuals—and operated with what sources described as a 10 percent error rate, which its operators were said to have accepted as tolerable. The Times investigation substantially confirmed and extended this picture. Intelligence officers, working under intense pressure to propose new targets each day after burning through a prewar database of vetted targets within the first days of the conflict, turned to automated surveillance systems and AI to triangulate data and locate militants at a pace no human team could manage manually. Israel has long maintained a database listing phone numbers and home addresses of suspected militants. Tapping Gaza’s telecom networks, intelligence officers tracked calls associated with people on the list. But the databases, according to six officers interviewed by the Times, sometimes contained outdated data, increasing the likelihood of misidentifying a civilian as a combatant. And the volume of calls was far too great for manual review. Artificial intelligence was deployed to close the gap.This is what the military-industrial complex looks like when it has been through the Silicon Valley wash cycle: the same logic of optimization, scale, and throughput that gave us recommendation engines and behavioral ad targeting now applied to the industrial generation of kill lists. The language is sanitized (“machine-assisted decision-making,” “target generation,” “automated computing systems”), but the function is not. Israeli intelligence officers themselves used starker language, describing their operations as a “mass assassination factory,” according to +972 Magazine.The IDF has disputed key elements of the +972 reporting, insisting that human commanders retain final authority over strikes and that AI systems function as decision-support tools rather than autonomous executors. The Times investigation added necessary nuance to this claim. Yes, human officers formally approved targets, but when hundreds of AI-generated targets are being processed each day, when verification is inconsistent across units, when a statistical model built on neighborhood cell phone data stands in for genuine surveillance of a specific building, the philosophical category of “meaningful human control” becomes a bureaucratic fiction rather than a genuine safeguard. The fog of war is more a flurry of drones and missiles now. The legal architecture that was supposed to govern these questions, such as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, has proven entirely inadequate to the speed at which autonomous and semiautonomous systems have been deployed. States with advanced militaries have systematically blocked binding treaty negotiations on autonomous weapons, preferring voluntary guidelines that impose no enforceable constraints. The United States, which provides Israel with the weapons, the intelligence partnerships, and the diplomatic protection at the United Nations that make the Gaza campaign possible, has been among the most consistent opponents of binding international rules.What was normalized in Gaza will not stay in Gaza. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand, and the thing that the framing of the current conflict as a local, bounded military operation most dangerously obscures. Every targeting algorithm stress-tested over Gaza’s densely populated streets, every AI system whose performance data is being collected in real time, represents intellectual property and operational knowledge that will flow, via export and emulation, through the global defense technology market into other conflicts, other theaters, other cities. Israel is among the world’s leading exporters of military technology, and its battlefield-proven systems have historically commanded premium prices precisely because they have been tested under live conditions. The Times investigation provides something these systems previously lacked: a detailed, independently documented record of how AI-assisted target generation performs at scale in a major urban war. There is a concept in ethics called “moral distance.” It refers to the psychological and cognitive space that separates a person who causes harm from the harm itself. Autonomous weapons systems are, among other things, moral distance machines. They allow states to industrialize killing while diffusing responsibility across systems, operators, commanders, procurement officers, software engineers, and shareholders, until no individual person feels or can be made to feel that they bear meaningful accountability for a specific death.The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a growing coalition of U.N. special rapporteurs have all called for a halt to the deployment of autonomous weapons systems without enforceable accountability mechanisms. These calls have been met with the polite indifference that powerful states reserve for international norms they find inconvenient.The question democratic societies must answer—urgently, before the template is fully set—is whether they intend to remain passive consumers of the demonstration, or whether they will demand that the architects of algorithmic warfare be held to the same standards of accountability they claim to believe in when the cameras are pointed somewhere more comfortable.The deaths of the girls in Southern Iran should haunt us forever. They did not ask to live in a world in which billionaires and their political partners play with remote-control toys for fun and profit. We have major moral questions to ask about how war should be waged going forward. But suddenly, this week, we have an urgent call to voice disgust as well as dissent.

What About Those Celebrating Iranians? We’ve Seen This Movie Before.
New Republic • 1 week ago

What About Those Celebrating Iranians? We’ve Seen This Movie Before.

The MAGA faithful, well schooled over the years in spotting what they believe to be instances of liberal “hypocrisy,” have taken to the interwebs since Saturday to say things like: Just look at all those overjoyed Iranians, you stupid libtards. Does this not make you happy? Is this not what the United States of America is supposed to be for? Is your hatred of Donald Trump so all-consuming that you’d rather see this operation fail, and the democratic aspirations of those poor Iranians, their breasts pounding with hope for the first time in decades, crushed?These are the kinds of questions that seem, to MAGA loyalists, to be conversation-enders—absolutely open-and-shut. But they are not open-and-shut at all. In fact, they’re quite jejune. If you know or bother to recall a little history—of the world, of the region, indeed of U.S.-Iran relations—you know enough to know that those celebrations, while absolutely, 100 percent understandable coming from members of the Iranian diaspora who have relatives who are either living grim lives or are in prison or perhaps dead, are alas premature.I’ll get to that history, but first, in the interest of transparency, let me answer the three questions I posed above. First, yes, the sight of Iranians celebrating is a nice thing to see, although only to a point, as I’ll explain. Second, yes, the spread of liberal democracy is what the United States of America is supposed to stand for; it simply isn’t clear to me (and many millions of others) that things are quite that simple here. We’ve observed Trump for over a decade, after all, and he has shown no such commitment to either democracy or liberation—he would just prefer for more people to be living under his book, as opposed to someone else’s. And it might surprise you to learn my answer to the third question: No, actually. I consider Trump a walking malignancy in virtually every imaginable way, a cruel charlatan and sociopath who has done untold damage to the nation and world over the years. But if the Islamic Republic were to fall tomorrow and Iran were to turn into another Sweden, and Trump got all the credit for it, I’d be very happy for the long-suffering people of Iran and would likely even admit that Trump did a good thing! Alas, there isn’t much chance of that happening. The odds are better than even that those hopeful people dancing in the streets Saturday will be disappointed. Perhaps crushed. I’m afraid history tells us so.Many of the people of Ukraine cheered the Wehrmacht when the Germans marched through in 1941. Why shouldn’t they have? The Germans were there to topple Stalin, who had starved four million of them to death in the prior decade. The Germans will save us from Dzhugashvili’s madness, many Ukrainians thought; indeed, quite a few became fascist fighters, under the leadership of the odious Stepan Bandera. Well … things didn’t quite work out as hoped. The Nazis’ economic exploitation of Ukraine was remorseless, their treatment of the population extremely violent and punitive. Ukrainians were Slavic and considered Untermenschen (under-men) by the Germans. QED. Eric Koch, chosen by Hitler to be the Ukrainian Reichskommissar, once said: “Even if I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Well, an interesting story, you say, but pretty remote from 2026 Iran. Not really, but—as you wish. So let’s consider the example of Iraq in 2003.Then, as now, there was much celebrating by Iraqis across the world when George W. Bush announced the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was fueled in part by the grotesquely irresponsible promises of people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz that the war would last about as long as one of Cher’s marriages.Chances are you know what happened. Or is your memory really that short? The war was a disaster for the United States for four years before the 2007 troop surge reduced the violence. As many as 200,000 Iraqis died. The whole mess, which the likes of Perle and Wolfowitz told us would pay for itself, cost the United States more than $2 trillion. Is Iraq a democracy today? Maybe, if you squint at it the right way. They have elections (which may be more than we can soon say). But the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute, which rates all the countries of the world on a set of democratic measures, calls Iraq an “electoral autocracy” (the third-worst of four categories) and places it in the bottom 30 to 40 percent of countries on its Liberal Democracy Index.Better than life under Saddam? Yes, but not by nearly as much as those 2003 Iraqis would have hoped. And that’s after many years of civil war and turmoil. Even cursory knowledge of this history ought to be enough to prevent any industrial-scale MAGA finger-wagging at those of us who aren’t popping champagne corks just yet. Finally, there are lessons to be learned from the last time an Iranian government fell. That was the Shah’s regime, of course, back in 1979, when Iran flipped from being a corrupt and savage American client state under the Shah to being a corrupt and savage bane of America under Ayatollah Khomeini. If you’re so inclined, read this brilliant and detailed BBC report from 2016, when new documents became available, about how the Carter administration tried and failed to manage the transition from the one to the other.Khomeini, in exile in Paris, made lovely promises. “You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” he said. He vowed that his Islamic Republic would be “a humanitarian one, which will benefit the cause of peace and tranquility for all mankind.”The central tension in Iran then was between the military and the clerics. The Carter team, once it gave up on the Shah, tried to manage events such that a new regime led by Khomeini would be Islamist but not radically so and would reach certain accommodations with secular parties and the generals. The military made a number of concessions, the BBC wrote, but: “All the concessions made by the military weren’t enough for Khomeini. On 15 February four senior military generals were summarily executed on the rooftop of a high school. It was just the beginning of a slew of executions.”The point is—these situations are easy to misjudge and extremely hard to manage by presidents who aren’t corrupt criminals. Power reverts toward the extremes in such cases because power gravitates toward people with money and guns, and peace-loving liberals who want secular democracy to flourish tend not to have stockpiled a lot of either of those things.Ah, but the MAGA acolyte will scoff—that was weak Jimmy Carter, not our latter-day Rambo, Trump. Think that if you wish. But two points. First, Carter is hardly the only president to have misjudged such situations. Johnson in Vietnam, Reagan in Central America, Bush in Iraq, Obama in Libya—these situations were all different, but they have one thing in common: an outcome considerably at odds with the one the president was trying to achieve and sold to the American people.Second, there is the matter of Trump himself. He knows nothing about Iran. That BBC article is around 4,000 words. I’d be shocked if he’s read half that many words about this country’s long and often glorious history. And it remains a mystery how he flip-flopped, to use a phrase Republicans once favored, from saying no wars to bleating: “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” That is so thoroughly neoconnish in sentiment that Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld couldn’t have said it better.I understand why Iranians are trying to be hopeful. The regime that has been destroying their country for 47 years is a nightmare. But this situation calls for a public that remembers a little history and demands democratic accountability. Trump has plenty of applauding seals.

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