Tag: donald trump

Very Close to a Nuclear Strike on Iran: We Can Save Ourselves

The 1984 British movie Threads opens with ordinary scenes in Sheffield, England, where a young couple learns they are expecting a baby. The story of their personal life is intertwined with the news of a growing conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, centered on Iran. We next learn that a nuclear weapon is used in an attack, followed by another. Before long, Sheffield itself is the site of hydrogen bomb detonations, with our protagonists either perishing in the explosions or subsisting under devastating conditions of starvation, civil unrest, radiation-induced and infectious diseases, and freezing temperatures over the coming days, weeks, months, and years. The film ends with the 13-year-old daughter of the young couple from the start of the film giving birth to a deformed clump of flesh months after being raped in a lawless and collapsed society.

Forty-two years after this brilliant movie first gave people in the UK and beyond just a glimpse of the unfathomable consequences of nuclear war, watching the opening scenes is even more grim than it has been in the intervening decades, given just how eerily similar they seem to be to our current moment. With the US and Israel continuing to wage war on Iran, and their respective leaders having been repudiated in public polls and elections, the prospect of nuclear weapon use and a wider nuclear war is seemingly more real than ever before. But unlike in the 1980s, when the general public was well aware of what was at stake, having been frightened by Ronald Reagan’s saber-rattling and educated about the dangers of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War, including through cultural interventions like popular films, today, when President Trump repeatedly threatens to annihilate Iran, the media and the general public seem to shrug and move on to other news of the day, checking perhaps on what Kim Kardashian had for breakfast.

The seriousness of Trump’s threats cannot be overstated. The two of us have been warning in Al Jazeera and other outlets that, sick and desperate as such threats might be, it behooves the world to take them seriously and make sure a nuclear attack on Iran, or anywhere else for that matter, never happens. Recently, we have been joined by popular media figure Tucker Carlson and other commentators. The internet is abuzz with such warnings.

The logic is simple. Trump and Netanyahu are both desperate to salvage what little credibility they may have with their publics by demonstrating that this war with Iran was not a total failure. If the purpose of the war had been to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon or weapons, then having Iran acquire a nuclear weapon or weapons would be the ultimate repudiation of their efforts and proof of their folly.

Both US and Israeli intelligence agencies report that Iran has shifted the locus of its nuclear enrichment from Fordow and Natanz to the Kuh-e Kolang underground complex widely known as Pickaxe Mountain. The complex is buried under 300 feet of granite, which makes it impenetrable for U.S. or Israeli conventional weapons, including the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), which Trump has threatened to use. Tucker Carlson shared that he had an “informed source” who told him, “Bibi calls Trump about it [a nuclear strike] every day.” Fortunately, Trump has not yet given the go-ahead.

The background to all this is that Iran has made clear that it will neither export its enriched uranium nor cease its enrichment activities, both of which it had done before Trump stupidly blew up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal or JCPOA. With the deal in place, Iran had also mothballed most of its centrifuges and, according to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, was only enriching to 3.67 percent – well below weapons grade. Ayatollah Khamenei had issued a fatwa against building an Iranian nuclear weapon, which remained in effect until he and other Iranian leaders were killed in a joint U.S./Israeli strike back in February. Now numerous Iranian leaders have publicly insisted that Iran needs a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against another U.S. and/or Israeli attack. There is evidence that some leaders of the IRGC have also adopted this view despite the fact that official Iranian government policy continues to reject such actions.

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Democrats Set to Reject President Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Request

Most Democrats were already opposed to an increase and are set to reject the requested $1.5 trillion defense budget, Bloomberg reported Sunday.

Now, after their party won majorities in the U.S. House and Senate during the midterm elections, Democrats are “signaling they will block any efforts to push it forward,” the outlet continued:

At the same time, Republican lawmakers returning to the lame-duck session before the new Congress is seated in January may not be able to muster the support or political will to ram through the massive defense spending package, especially amid the Pentagon’s unpopular war against Iran that cost many of them their jobs.

“We must push for the development of a more realistic and sustainable approach to our national security — one that does not require a defense budget in excess of $1 trillion or one paid for with draconian cuts to critical domestic programs,” Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement after the election.

President Trump said in January the 2027 military budget should be bumped to $1.5 trillion, Breitbart News reported.

He explained the proposed increase would support what he called the “Dream Military” that would ensure America stayed safe and secure:

He linked the feasibility of the higher budget figure to revenue generated from tariffs, claiming that “tremendous numbers” from tariff income had made the larger figure viable. “Because of Tariffs, and the tremendous Income that they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past … we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number,” Trump wrote. He added that this approach would also allow for “pay[ing] down Debt” and providing a “substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country.”

Trump later said there was an interest in increasing defense spending, adding that states should handle more of the domestic spending, according to Breitbart News.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal,” he noted.

“We are delivering on President Trump’s commitment to expand American military dominance for decades to come. Previous administrations underinvested in our military while our enemies grew stronger and more dangerous, so we are now changing the game,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said upon release of the president’s fiscal year 2027 budget. “This budget builds this arsenal without compromising readiness that will ensure we remain the world’s premier fighting force, we protect the homeland, and we create peace through strength now and into the future.”

A CNN exit poll suggested Tuesday that a majority of midterm voters said the Iran War and high gas prices factored into their vote, and President Trump acknowledged Wednesday that the conflict with Iran cost Republicans votes in the midterm elections.

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No, MAGA Didn’t Cut Israel Aid, They Hid It — And the Left Has the Same Plan

On the morning of Election Day, with polls open and the war in Iran dragging his party toward a historic beating, Donald Trump phoned into Fox & Friends with a surprise. The United States, he said, would stop sending roughly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel at the end of 2026, under a deal he claimed he and Benjamin Netanyahu had struck months ago. For a base that spent the past year watching its “America First” president drag the country into another Middle East war, it sounded like a long-overdue win.

It wasn’t, and the man who did more than anyone in Congress to force this issue into the open said so within hours. Rep. Thomas Massie called it “pennies on the dollar” and “a desperate Election Day lie,” warning that the same taxpayer money would simply flow through as military coordination instead of as a separate line item in the appropriations bills. He’s right, the paper trail proves it, and it fosters less transparency, not more.

Start with the motive, because Trump practically confessed it on air. He complained that Israel aid had become “a bad talking point” and asked why Republicans should “suffer the slings from lunatics” over money Israel doesn’t “need.” That is a campaign problem being managed, not a foreign policy being changed, and Bloomberg reported he pitched it explicitly as a way to blunt election-year attacks.

It also came with no plan. Trump never explained how the money would actually stop, even though the memorandum guaranteeing Israel $3.8 billion a year runs until September 2028 and Congress wrote those levels into the 2021 defense bill. A president doesn’t undo a statute on a morning show, and the deal he says was made months ago reportedly blindsided Israeli security and financial officials, who noted next year’s budget was already drafted around the existing agreement.

Meanwhile, Israel has been angling for more, not less. Axios reported a year ago that Israel was seeking an unprecedented 20-year security agreement likely worth at least $4 billion a year, repackaged with “America First” provisions to win over Trump’s base. Nobody negotiating a two-decade package is preparing to walk away from the money, which raises the obvious question of where it’s going instead.

The answer is the Pentagon. The Congressional Research Service, hardly a hotbed of antiwar agitation, laid out the mechanism months ago: replace grant aid with joint programs funded from defense accounts, and shift congressional oversight away from the foreign affairs committees toward the defense ones. The Quincy Institute was blunter, calling it not a reduction in support but a reorganization that moves billions out of State Department grants and into general Pentagon procurement.

That reorganization is already moving through Congress. The House-passed defense bill authorizes $750 million for U.S.-Israel cooperative programs and extends the weapons stockpile authority for Israel, and the source for that is AIPAC’s own press release celebrating it. The same bill creates a new U.S.-Israel defense technology initiative that critics warn would be harder for future Congresses to unwind and would shift the relationship away from highly visible aid votes. Lawmakers and military experts told The Intercept it was highly irregular, a near-copy of an AIPAC-backed bill that had already died.

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Trump’s ‘Doomsday Plane’ Left Nebraska And Flew East Across America – Nobody Is Saying Why

The Air Force’s E-4B “Nightwatch,” the airborne command post built to run a nuclear war, took off from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska on Thursday and flew east across the Midwest on a mission nobody has explained.

Flight-tracking data reviewed by the Daily Mail shows the jet crossing Illinois and Indiana into Ohio, where it was tracked at about 2:41 p.m. Eastern at 31,000 feet and a ground speed of 573 knots, roughly 660 mph. It then turned south over northern Virginia, west of Washington. The tracking images listed no destination, and the route alone does not show where it was headed or why. The purpose of the flight and the identities of anyone aboard have not been publicly confirmed, the Mail reported.

The E-4B is the National Airborne Operations Center: a modified Boeing 747-200 meant to let the president and senior military leaders direct U.S. forces, nuclear forces included, if ground command centers are destroyed. The Air Force flies four, all based at Offutt, and the Mail noted that one is kept ready around the clock when the president is in the country.

That keeps the innocent explanation in play. The same jets fly routine training and readiness missions, and a flight out of their home base is not in itself a sign of an emergency.

The airframes are a 1970s design, and the Air Force is paying for their replacement. In April 2024 it gave Sierra Nevada Corp. a contract worth about $13.08 billion to build the Survivable Airborne Operations Center, with work expected to run until July 10, 2036, according to The Aviationist. The aircraft type has not been announced.

The sighting comes as the Pentagon is working on continuity plans of its own. As we reported, it is planning for its major bases to survive 90 days without the power grid.

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The Inflation Hot Potato

They began, of course, with one of the most chaotic and intense years in recent American history. After a global pandemic brought almost all aspects of life to a halt, cities erupted in nationwide riots for much of the summer, and a seemingly endless stream of scandals and stunts like the Hunter Biden laptop drove the politically-active public to exhaustion; after all that, Joe Biden won the presidency.

Biden—the old-fashioned, centrist, familiar vice president from the Obama years—was supposed to represent a repudiation of the chaos of the Trump years, and of 2020 especially. The “adults were back in charge,” and politics could finally get boring again. Or so many thought.

Instead, the Biden years saw the government’s heavy-handed pandemic response drag on, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and, later, Gaza, and the consequences of the bipartisan economic response to the covid pandemic slam into the already-exhausted country in the form of a forty-year-high rate of price inflation.

The high prices especially drove many voters to abandon the Democrats in the 2022 midterms—although the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade earlier that year drove high Democratic turnout, which greatly minimized the expected “Red Wave.” Still, in 2024, voters seemed to snap all the way back in the other direction and handed Trump and the Republican Party the White House and both houses of Congress. And now, only two years later, Trump’s approval rating is at a historic low, and not only Democrats but even “democratic socialists” are enjoying all the political momentum, as we saw in Tuesday’s elections.

It can be tempting to chalk these dramatic political swings up to any one of the many stories that dominate the news cycle at the moment. Or, on the other side, to some seemingly inexplicable global forces of chaos that seem to be driving all aspects of public life these last few years.

But, in truth, there’s a very clear explanation for the political whiplash we’ve been experiencing in these last few elections: inflation.

Now, too often, any discussion of inflation becomes hyper-focused on one unusually high driver of last month’s CPI report or a slightly better-than-expected month-over-month reading in the core PCE.

But that is not how most people have experienced and are experiencing inflation.

To better understand how inflation has changed our politics, we have to zoom out.

As we cover here a lot, inflation has been a ubiquitous and escalating problem in this country for a long time. Prices naturally fall as economies grow. It’s only because the political class was able to take control of the monetary and banking system over the last fifty to a hundred years that the sort of permanent price inflation we’re supposed to consider normal is even possible.

In other words, inflation isn’t a new problem. But, back in 2019, it was mostly a background issue. Prices were rising, but slowly. And the entire field of “respectable,” establishment-friendly economists were telling everyone that the 2 percent inflation rate was optimal. Those obsessed with politics were focused on non-economic stories like the Trump impeachment, while the politically-disinterested majority were focused on their own lives.

But then covid started to spread, and state and local governments across the US began locking down the country with the full support of the federal government. And a primary aspect of that federal support came from the Federal Reserve.

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Trump DOJ Admits Handgun Ban Is Unconstitutional, Still Fights Gun Owners in Court

The Trump administration has admitted that the federal government cannot constitutionally prohibit licensed firearm dealers from selling handguns to law-abiding adults ages 18 to 20. Yet the Department of Justice is still fighting in federal court to prevent gun-rights organizations from securing lasting judicial protection against the very same unconstitutional law.

On November 4, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) filed a reply brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in FPC v. ATF, formerly Reese v. ATF. The filing challenges DOJ’s attempt to avoid further judicial relief nearly six years after FPC, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and the Louisiana Shooting Association first challenged the federal handgun purchase restrictions.

The plaintiffs have already won the constitutional argument. Now they are fighting to ensure that victory actually protects the people whose rights were violated.

DOJ Admits the Federal Handgun Ban Violates the Second Amendment

In January 2025, the Fifth Circuit ruled that federal restrictions prohibiting federally licensed dealers from selling handguns and handgun ammunition to adults ages 18 to 20 violated the Second Amendment. The decision represented a significant victory for young Americans who enjoy the same constitutional rights as other adults but have been denied access to the ordinary commercial handgun market.

On September 17, 2026, the Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion agreeing that the restrictions were unconstitutional. The DOJ acknowledged that these adults are among “the people” protected by the Second Amendment and that the government could not justify the prohibition under the Supreme Court’s historical-tradition standard.

But rather than agree to the broader judicial relief sought by the organizations that successfully challenged the law, the Justice Department now argues that its change in legal position makes the remaining lawsuit moot. Essentially, DOJ maintains that because the administration no longer considers the restrictions enforceable, a broader court order is unnecessary.

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THIS AGED WELL: Trump Bombing Iran Will Be The End Of His Presidency

Originally posted on April 23, 2025

The neocons want war with Iran, and they will do anything to get it — say anything, do anything, lie, steal cheat…whatever they need to do.

If we value our republic, we must stop this outcome in the Middle East.

America cannot afford another major war, and yes, this will be a major war, touching off a global conflagration.

People you are close to will die.

These deaths will not just happen in the Middle East, Iran has imported a vast cadre of terrorists inside the United States thanks to Manchurian candidate Biden. It could happen at a shopping mall, a gas station, a grocery store, a day care.

America will not be able live ‘life as normal’ after an attack on Iran.

We also can’t afford it. The Biden regime depleted our weapons stores in Ukraine. Our military is up to its eyeballs in DEI, Maoist indoctrination.

A war with Iran will not end well for us.

The globalist cabal sees the Ukraine war ending, time to start another one, to finish off America, and let the Chinese hordes mop it up afterwards.

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Tom Engelhardt on the Empire of Defeat

Honestly, it’s hard to believe that, once upon a distant time, I was born into an America still fighting a world war. No, it wasn’t World War I! I’m not quite that old! My actual birthdate was July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing. And though it ended in August 1945, in some strange sense, American-style war has never truly ended. Stranger yet, despite my country’s endless warmaking since then, the global war that concluded more than 80 years ago was the last truly victorious one this country has fought.

In the decades since 1945, the U.S. did indeed emerge as the world’s greatest power (along with the Soviet Union, which, of course, collapsed in 1991). And like all great powers, it did indeed fight endless wars. Remember, there was Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (to mention only the most obvious of the conflicts my country hasn’t been able to keep out of since 1945). And even now, the U.S. is still fighting (typically ineffectively) in Somalia (of all places!) and — with more to come after the U.S. midterm elections — Iran. (And I’m not even mentioning past, more minor conflicts in places like Panama or Libya.)

But here’s the strange thing and something I believe to be unique for a great power over the course of its rise and — as the very existence of Donald Trump as president of the United States (twice!) suggests — decline (not to say fall): in not a single one of those wars did my country even come close to winning. They were all functionally defeats (though the Korean War has always been seen, in sports terms, as a kind of a tie, since that peninsula ended up divided between North and South Korea).

And consider that ongoing reality (think: Iran today) all too historically strange, if not simply inexplicable, for a great imperial power. In short, the single most powerful country on the planet couldn’t win a single war — not one! — against distinctly lesser powers!

And then, of course, a near-majority of the American people elected Donald Trump who promised, at least the first time around, to keep us out of such wars (which he did then, except for some unsuccessful combat in Syria), only to launch a significant war against Iran the second time around that — shock! shock! — has turned out just as well as all the other wars I’ve mentioned. In short, you explain it (I can’t), but the greatest power on this planet, which for endless decades has poured literally trillions of dollars into its military and, in just the next fiscal year, is planning to add at least another $1.5 trillion to the Pentagon’s wildly out-of-control budget (and that figure may, in the end, prove a gross underestimate), unbelievably — or do I mean all too believably? — simply hasn’t won a war since the one I was born into in 1944 (and that’s not even to mention some of its other unsuccessful skirmishes in those years). Phew! No sentence can truly hold the full militarized mess this country has created over and over again in those decades.

Worse yet, as Trump’s Iran War suggests, its leadership seems to learn absolutely nothing from that reality — or do I mean surreality?

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Knives Out: Hegseth’s Wife Reportedly Paid By Trump-Connected Firm That Also Worked For Lockheed

Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, was paid last year by Watchtower Strategy, a Trump-connected Washington consulting firm that counted Lockheed Martin as a client the same year, according to Hegseth’s annual financial disclosure report, as Politico‘s Daniel Lippman first reported on Wednesday.

The disclosure lists her consulting work for the firm but not how much she was paid, according to Politico. Jennifer Hegseth, a former longtime Fox News producer, is the daughter of a late Lockheed Martin executive.

Watchtower was founded in January 2025 and sells strategic advice, advocacy and communications work. Its roster includes former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republican operatives Jeff Miller, Arthur Schwartz, Dan Conston and Brian O. Walsh. Lockheed was a Watchtower client last year, according to POLITICO Influence; asked whether it still is, a Lockheed spokesperson didn’t answer directly, saying only that the company routinely works with a number of firms.

Watchtower says she was hired for her TV contacts, not her husband’s job. A spokesperson said she helped the firm navigate conservative TV media and “has not interfaced with any clients nor does she provide any advice to Watchtower on defense matters.” The firm declined to say whether she still works there.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the Hegseths are “in full compliance with all ethics laws and regulations.” Jennifer Hegseth didn’t respond to Politico’s request for comment. She has been an unusually visible Pentagon spouse, and accompanied her husband to meetings with Republican senators during his confirmation fight.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who sat on the House Armed Services Committee and was Trump’s first pick for attorney general in 2024, wasn’t buying it.

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If You Lie to Voters About Not Starting a New War, the Voters Make You Pay

American voters have a long memory for one particular kind of broken promise. Tell them you will keep their sons out of a foreign war, then march them into one, and they will eventually send you a bill. In 1920 the Democrats paid it. On Tuesday, the Republicans did.

On election night 2024, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd, “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” Fifteen months later came Operation Epic Fury. Eight months after that, CBS News projects that Democrats will take both the House and the Senate. JD Vance, never one to bury the lede, summed it up on X: “The reason we lost is the war.”

Woodrow Wilson would have understood. He ran in 1916 on a slogan that a century of history teachers have never let anyone forget.

He kept us out of war, briefly

“He kept us out of war” carried Wilson to a narrow second term in November 1916. The voters took it as a pledge. It lasted about a month into his second term. On April 2, 1917, Wilson went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. Congress obliged four days later.

What followed was not what the brochure promised. The draft came. So did the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which made criticizing the war a good way to land in prison. More than 100,000 Americans died in uniform. At home, prices soared.

The voters started sending invoices early. In October 1918, Wilson publicly asked them to return a Democratic Congress as a vote of confidence. They returned a Republican one instead, in both chambers. Then came the hangover: the Senate’s rejection of Wilson’s League of Nations, his stroke in the fall of 1919, a wave of strikes, the Red Scare and a sharp postwar slump.

In 1920 the Democrats nominated James Cox, with a young Franklin Roosevelt as his running mate. The Republicans nominated Warren Harding, a man of no particular distinction who promised a “return to normalcy.” Harding took about 60 percent of the popular vote and 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127. It was the most lopsided popular-vote margin of its era. Voters were not endorsing Harding so much as firing Wilson’s war.

No more wars, he said

Trump did not have a slogan as tidy as Wilson’s. He had something better: a promise repeated so often that it became the soundtrack of the 2024 campaign. At the Republican convention he boasted, “I don’t have wars.” At a Pennsylvania rally that August he said, “we will have no more wars.” On election night it was “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” At his inauguration he said success would be measured partly by the wars America never gets into.

Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. Hormuz closed. Brent crude was still around $110 this week, about 50 percent above where it sat before the war. Every voter who filled a tank this year got a reminder.

By June, Trump had found a new position on his old promise. “I didn’t guarantee no war,” he told NBC. CNN’s fact-checkers helpfully listed the times he had done precisely that. Voters were not persuaded either. In a Fox News poll in September, more than 60 percent called the war the wrong decision and 71 percent said the administration lacked a clear strategy for ending it. Trump’s approval going into Election Day averaged about 38 percent.

Tuesday was the bill. CBS projects Democrats will hold somewhere between 251 and 268 House seats and at least 54 in the Senate. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas. Sherrod Brown is back in Ohio. Troy Jackson took Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. Vance blamed the war. Trump, asked about it, said it was “largely true” that the war cost Republicans seats. Then he blamed the gas prices instead, as though they had arrived from another planet. As for the war itself, Trump’s explanation was “You have no choice.”

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