Trump’s widening war of choice against Iran promises to make this even worse by disrupting the global economy and raising the price of oil, gas and other essential products. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman noted, the war’s cost looks much worse when measured in human terms: Replacing the three F-15E jets that were shot down over Kuwait will cost the equivalent of food for 125,000 Americans or health care for 100,000 children over the course of a year.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to brag about the economy, saying there is so much “winning” that people are begging him to stop and the affordability crisis is a “hoax” conjured by Democrats to undermine his MAGA Golden Age. Trump’s solipsistic alternate reality, though, does not change the facts. His approval ratings are at record lows, and a majority of Americans correctly blame him for the worsening economy.

But this is where the story gets more complex, and much more dangerous. The conventional wisdom holds that presidents and the incumbent party will be punished at the polls because of the economy, particularly in midterm elections. On the surface, the GOP’s wave of losses in 2025’s off-year elections would seem to fit that pattern and logic. In reality, matters are much more complicated.

Voters don’t experience the economy in a vacuum. They compare their lives and experiences with their neighbors and peers, the larger community and their sense of the country as a whole. Moreover, the economy is an abstract concept for many Americans, often making their judgments about its overall health wrong, as humans are not purely rational in their political decision-making. A wide range of factors influence voting and other political behavior, such as partisanship, political knowledge, identity, concerns about cultural and social change, media consumption, signaling from elites and personal affinity for a given candidate.

The argument that voters punish politicians for a bad economy also leans heavily on two assumptions that no longer fully hold: that America’s democracy is relatively healthy, and that leaders feel accountable enough to the public to change course — and will leave office when they are voted out. In the Age of Trump and amid rising authoritarianism, neither are guaranteed.

To the contrary, economic insecurity may actually make authoritarians like Trump more compelling to voters. This counterintuitive conclusion, based on new research from Northwestern University’s Center for Communication & Public Policy, has serious implications for how Democrats, the media and the mainstream political class think about elections, and politics more broadly.

The challenge, as explained to Northwestern Now by the center’s founder and professor Erik Nisbet, is that standard measures of democratic commitment are unreliable.

“Traditional surveys typically ask people whether they support democracy or value free expression,” he said. “Decades of research show that Americans overwhelmingly say ‘yes,’ but these self-reported attitudes often do not predict actual political behavior.” 

Some of the study’s key findings, which were published in the journal Perspectives on Politics, are revealing — and timely. Commitments to liberal democratic norms are conditional, not fixed. When people feel financially secure, support for democratic principles increases. When they feel economically disadvantaged, voters are more open to authoritarianism and autocracy, with characteristics including a biased press, weakened checks on executive power and attacks on the rule of law. Perhaps most striking is that for both liberals and conservatives, political ideology mattered less than economic stress and hardship.

Trump and the Republicans may well be punished at the polls in the near term. That’s the good news. The bad news, which Nisbet’s research makes uncomfortably clear, is that a sustained economic downturn doesn’t weaken anti-democratic movements — it fuels them.  

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America’s extreme — and steadily increasing — wealth and income gap has been politely described as a “K-shaped economy,” a sterile, technocratic term that obscures more than it reveals. What a K-shaped economy really means is an America where the rich and the plutocrats live in their own worlds, walled off, while everyone else is left to struggle. Moreover, in a K-shaped economy, the wealthy as a class have little if any sense of obligation to the common good. They instead use politics and the law to extract more wealth and resources from the American people while making themselves increasingly immune to democratic accountability.

In 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats made the democracy crisis and Trump’s authoritarian agenda the center of their campaign. That messaging did not move voters in sufficient numbers to elevate Harris to the presidency.

Nisbet was direct about what this means for Democrats. “The research suggests that messaging focused solely on abstract democratic ideals is unlikely to resonate with voters unless it is tied to their economic concerns,” he said. “Broader electorates require democracy narratives grounded in pocketbook realities.”

Looking to the midterms and beyond, the challenge for Democrats and the anti-Trump resistance is to connect economic pain to the threat authoritarianism poses to regular people’s wallets and day-to-day lives, something Harris and the party failed to do in 2024. The most effective argument is not an abstract one — it’s about corruption. Authoritarians and autocrats like Trump hate democracy because it places limits on their ability to rig the system for personal gain.

The president is a malign actor, a walking-talking moral hazard who is driven by gross self-interest and cares little, if at all, about the harm his actions cause. Like other autocrats and authoritarians, his political project is one of destruction rather than creation. If Trump becomes convinced that he’s politically doomed, he may choose to wreck the economy — and the country as a whole — so that his opponents inherit ruins. 

He has consistently advanced policies that cause measurable harm to the country, and his personality and character show a fascination with destruction and violence. To further sabotage and destroy America’s economy would be Trump’s way of punishing a country and people he views as not deserving of his greatness.  

From those ruins another authoritarian may emerge, one far more dangerous than Trump, with tens of millions of desperate Americans primed and ready to embrace anyone who promises them jobs, healthcare and a better way forward. Desperate people make poor choices.

The post Why many Americans would trade democracy for more money appeared first on Salon.com.

On Sunday, U.S. Central Command said seven American service members have been killed since the start of the campaign against Iran, with the troops dying in retaliatory strikes targeting U.S. forces in the region. The Pentagon said the remains of two previously unaccounted-for service members were recently recovered following earlier attacks on a facility housing American forces, and the latest fatality was seriously injured in Saudi Arabia during an Iranian strike in the region and has now died of their injuries.

CENTCOM Update

TAMPA, Fla. – Last night, a U.S. service member passed away from injuries received during the Iranian regime’s initial attacks across the Middle East. The service member was seriously wounded at the scene of an attack on U.S. troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia…

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 8, 2026

The fatalities mark the first confirmed U.S. deaths of the conflict, which began late last month when American and Israeli forces launched a sweeping bombing campaign targeting Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure.

Meanwhile, fighting intensified across the region over the weekend as Israeli strikes hit multiple sites inside Iran, including fuel depots and oil facilities around Tehran, sending thick smoke over parts of the capital. Iranian forces responded with waves of missile and drone attacks targeting Israel as well as U.S. positions and regional allies in the Gulf, further raising fears the conflict could widen.

Iranian officials on Sunday confirmed that Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain supreme leader, will assume the country’s top religious and political post. Long seen as a powerful behind-the-scenes figure within Iran’s clerical establishment, Mojtaba has been widely viewed as the most likely successor to his father. His selection marks the closest thing to dynastic succession in the history of Iran’s Islamic Republic.

The succession battle drew sharp warnings from Israel, which said it would target anyone who assumes the position if attacks against Israel continue. Israeli officials have warned that the next supreme leader “will not be safe” if the country continues directing strikes against Israel and its allies.

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President Donald Trump has also weighed in on the issue, suggesting the United States should have a role in determining Iran’s next leader and warning that any successor could face devastating consequences if hostilities continue.

The competing claims underscore the chaotic power struggle now unfolding inside Iran as the conflict enters its second week, raising fears that the leadership transition — combined with ongoing strikes and retaliatory attacks — could further escalate the war across the Middle East.

[UPDATE: Edited to reflect the selection of Mojtaba Khamanei as the new Supreme Leader of Iran.]

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Noem, who was removed from her position in Donald Trump‘s Cabinet this week, was the focus of the show’s cold open and weekly news segment. In the former, Noem herself offered a tearful goodbye during a Pete Hegseth press conference on the war in Iran.

“DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has been reassigned under the bus,” Colin Jost as Hegseth said, inviting Ashley Padilla‘s Noem to the podium.

“I just want to make it clear that I didn’t get fired, I self-deported,” she said. “I will not be ending my mission. As I told my plastic surgeon, the work is never done.”

Despite obviously botched DHS operations in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, Noem said she had “no regrets.”

“Like they say, ‘You miss 100% of the dogs you don’t shoot,'” she said. “I think I really nailed it. And by it, I mean my married coworker.”

Jost was also involved in the second roast of Noem. He led off the “Weekend Update” sketch by feigning shock at her firing, asking viewers to “name one to 20 things she did wrong.”

“On some level, I feel bad for Kristi Noem. Imagine being singled out as the worst member of Trump’s Cabinet,” he said. “That’s like someone coming up to you at a party and saying ‘We think you should leave you’re making Diddy uncomfortable.”

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Jost’s co-anchor Michael Che joined in on the pile-on, taking shots at Noem’s new position with the Shield of the Americas.

“[It’s] a brand new department located on a farm upstate,” he said.

Watch the segment below via YouTube:

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Speaking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox News‘ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Sen. Lindsey Graham promised that the Trump admin would extend its attacks in the Caribbean to include a war with Cuba.

Calling Donald Trump the “greatest commander-in-chief of all time,” the Republican senator from South Carolina told Bartiromo that he still believed the war with Iran would come to a swift and neat end.

“If we get in a fight, I want to win it and I want to win it quick,” he said, before holding up a baseball cap that said “Free Cuba.”

“You see this hat? … Stay tuned,” he said. “The liberation of Cuba is upon us. It’s just a matter of time.”

Graham said that the U.S. military was “marching through the world” and “clearing out the bad guys.”

“Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago,” he said. “Iran is going down and Cuba is next.”

Lindsey Graham: "If we get in a fight, I want to win it quick. I'm in Miami. You see this hat? 'Free Cuba.' Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. We're marching through the world. We're clearing out the bad guys. Cuba is next." pic.twitter.com/gIommBVScp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2026

Trump has been vague on U.S. plans for Cuba, offering ominous threats that the Communist Party of Cuba with “fall pretty soon.” The United States stopped the flow of oil to the country from Venezuela after removing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power. The fuel shortages have hampered the country’s industry and tourism and led to energy blackouts across the island. Speaking to reporters, Trump has said that Cuban leaders will be looking to “make a deal.”

“I’m going to put Marco [Rubio] over there and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready — after 50 years,” he told CNN this week. “I’ve been watching it for 50 years, and it’s fallen right into my lap because of me, it’s fallen, but it’s nevertheless fallen right into the lap. And we’re doing very well.”

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Trump had made similar statements a day earlier at the White House. While hosting MLS champion Inter Miami, he said that Rubio was ready to work on ending communist rule in Cuba once the war in Iran has concluded.

“[Rubio]’s waiting. But he says, ‘Let’s get this one finished first.’ We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen,” Trump said. “If you watch countries over the years, you do them all too fast, bad things happen. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to this country.”

The post “Stay tuned”: Graham promises “Cuba is next” in a global war against “bad guys” appeared first on Salon.com.

In the first week of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, the Trump administration has revealed something extraordinary about how it intends to wage war: not just with missiles and drones, but with narrative control so aggressive it borders on parody. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s turn at running the most powerful military in human history increasingly resembles one of his “Fox & Friends Weekend” segments. He held only the second Pentagon press briefing since October on Monday, two days into the war. That is not a communications strategy — it is the beginning of a cover-up. 

The obfuscation got even worse on Saturday when a reporter quizzed Hegseth aboard Air Force One. “Did the United States bomb a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran in the first day of the war and kill 175 people?” 

“No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Trump interjected. 

“Is that true, Mr. Hegseth, that it was Iran who did that?” the reporter followed up. 

“We’re investigating,” Hegseth demurred, before backing Trump’s assumption. “But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”   

Even some conservative commentators were unsettled by this exchange. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham called the strike “horrific news” and warned that the military would have to do a better job at addressing it publicly.

As Trump’s war with Iran grows more deadly and continues to widen, the Pentagon’s communications strategy is not even pretending to care about transparency, persuasion or even basic credibility. Since he took office in January 2025, Hegseth has done his best to turn independent journalism into a branch of the Defense Department’s communications office. Meanwhile, the people responsible for explaining military action have behaved less like public officials and more like pundits auditioning for the next viral clip.

The daily Pentagon briefings of the Gulf War era and the CentCom pressers during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were undoubtedly inadequate and often sanitized. And yet it represented a floor which I naively believed democratic accountability could not fall beneath without consequence. That floor has been demolished. 

In October, Hegseth introduced a 21-page set of reporting rules that essentially required journalists to submit their reporting for Pentagon approval before publication. Most major outlets refused. Rather than agree to censorship disguised as “credentialing,” companies including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and even Fox News surrendered their Pentagon press passes.

Their replacements are exactly who you would expect.

Pro-Trump outlets like One America News Network, conspiracy impresarios like Mike Lindell of LindellTV and a rotating cast of MAGA influencers were welcomed into the briefing room and declared journalists. Another granted access was Laura Loomer, who proudly calls herself “President Trump’s chief loyalty enforcer.”

The consequences of this coup are already visible in the public discourse. Americans are being asked to support — or oppose — a military campaign against Iran with almost none of the information required to make that judgment. What is the legal basis for these strikes? Has the War Powers Resolution been triggered, including the requirement that the president officially notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to a military action? What does success look like, and who defines it? What is the escalation threshold — at what point does Iranian retaliation become a pretext for a ground campaign? 

Instead, we are getting messaging in the style of machismo. Rather than make the case on the merits, the administration and its operatives have saturated social media with images and rhetoric meant to trigger patriotic reflexes among the American people. 

On Wednesday, the White House released a video on social media combining real footage of combat operations in Iran with computer-generated clips lifted from a popular combat video game. A day later, another video appeared online splicing together scenes from Hollywood action movies with actual war footage under the caption “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” War — particularly one involving nuclear-capable states in the Middle East — is not supposed to look like a highlight reel assembled by a 16-year-old editing gaming clips.

The spectacle reflects a broader transformation underway across the national security apparatus, as Trump’s cabinet increasingly resembles a cable-news panel.

Before being tapped on Thursday to replace Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin spent the week across all of cable news trying to sell the president’s war of choice. Speaking to Fox News, Mullin argued Trump was right not to brief Congress ahead of attacking Iran because “you just simply can’t trust” all of the elected representatives, specifically naming Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Both are Muslim. In another appearance, Mullin pivoted seamlessly from discussing military action abroad to denouncing immigration policies at home, treating the two issues as part of the same broader struggle for national survival.

Mullin’s cable news appearances offer a revealing preview of what the Department of Homeland Security might look like under his leadership. A former mixed martial arts fighter and plumbing company owner, Mullin speaks like a culture-war combatant and has cultivated the kind of blunt, confrontational style that plays well on television debate panels. He has embarrassingly conflated Iraq and Iran, and backpedaled on whether the U.S. is at war, but he has never shied away from a cable news hit. 

Mullin’s constant presence on television as a defender of Trump clearly endeared him to the president and is at least partially responsible for his nomination to succeed Noem, who was not fired because her policies failed. They are still the policies of the Trump administration. Noem was fired because she became a liability on television, unable to defend the indefensible without embarrassing the president in front of his real audience. She had grown unpopular with Trump’s base, overseeing the decline in support for his signature domestic policy, with Fox News host Tomi Lahren summing up the sentiment by saying in reaction to Noem’s ouster, “Good riddance and hide your dogs.”

After the crisis in Minneapolis, Republican senators trained their criticism on Noem, saying change was needed at the top, and many see Mullin as a steadier hand — meaning he performs better on camera. The department’s actual function is secondary to whether the person in charge can hold their own in a split-screen. Nevermind that Mullin, who, like Noem, also appeared on cable news the day a second U.S. citizen was gunned down on video by a DHS employee, told Fox News that Alex “Pretti was a deranged individual who came in to cause massive damage with a loaded pistol.”

Meanwhile, the administration’s hostility toward independent journalism continues to escalate. The Justice Department has subpoenaed journalist Seth Harp for reporting on the identity of a military official involved in the military incursion into Venezuela, which saw President Nicolás Maduro toppled and, along with his wife, seized and brought to New York to face criminal charges. Officials have also begun invoking the concept of “doxxing” — once used to describe online harassment — to criminalize reporting on immigration enforcement operations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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The Pentagon’s press restrictions are now the subject of a major lawsuit brought by the New York Times, which argues that the new media policy violates both the First and Fifth Amendments by granting the department “unbridled discretion” over who is allowed to report from inside the building.

When the traditional press corps was finally allowed back into the briefing room this week, what they found looked less like a government briefing than a political rally. Hegseth opened Monday’s conference with a line that perfectly captured the administration’s posture toward the war now unfolding in Iran. “This war,” he said, “will have no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.” Where previous administrations at least gestured toward international humanitarian law and democratic ideals, Hegseth openly mocked them. But most shockingly, that contempt extended even to the subject of American casualties.

At the same briefing, the defense secretary referred to weapons that had killed U.S. service members abroad as “every once in a while you might have a squirter that makes its way through.” At a briefing two days later, he lashed out at journalists for reporting on the deaths of American troops. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front page news” Hegseth complained. “The press only wants to make the president look bad.”

According to The Atlantic’s Nancy Youssef, Hegseth’s comments “sent a stunned silence through the briefing room.” Someone in the room, she recalled, said, “That was one of the most insulting things I have ever heard.”

Pentagon reporters are saying that military representatives now refuse to discuss operational details, referring nearly every inquiry to the White House. As CNN’s Brian Stelter recently reported, “virtually everything gets referred to the White House.” 

After begrudgingly acknowledging last fall that Congress had gotten more information from the Pentagon during the Biden administration, Republicans are now reportedly growing frustrated about Hegseth’s inability to message on Iran. 

But Republicans well understand that the people Trump promotes are rarely those with the deepest policy expertise. They are the ones who can most effectively defend the president on television. Hegseth’s path from Fox News host to defense secretary was the clearest example. Mullin’s trajectory now appears to follow a similar arc. This is the logic of the cable news Cabinet applied at scale: governance as content and television performance as the only qualification that actually counts.

The danger is that governance conducted as media spectacle inevitably prioritizes short-term political impact over long-term stability. Crises become opportunities for viral moments. That is the logic currently shaping how the Pentagon communicates about war. And if Mullin’s media tour is any indication, it is the same logic that may soon guide the nation’s domestic security apparatus as well. Trump’s wars — at home and abroad — are being narrated like a reality television show.

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U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth found that Lake’s leadership of the U.S. Agency for Global Media violated federal law because she was never formally nominated or confirmed to the position. The judge said Lake’s role failed to meet requirements under both the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

The ruling invalidates actions Lake took while running the agency between July and November 2025, including sweeping staff reductions and operational changes that sharply curtailed Voice of America’s operations.

Voice of America, which broadcasts news globally in multiple languages, has long served as a U.S. government–funded international news outlet intended to counter disinformation and promote independent journalism abroad.

During Lake’s tenure overseeing the agency, layoffs and contract cuts significantly reduced VOA’s workforce and programming, leaving only a small portion of its broadcasts operating. Critics argued the changes undermined the organization’s journalistic mission and weakened a key instrument of U.S. global media influence.

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The lawsuit that led to the ruling was brought by several VOA journalists and employees who were laid off during the restructuring. They said the decision represents an important step toward restoring the agency’s independence and mission.

The judge’s ruling effectively nullifies Lake’s decisions during the period in question, though the immediate operational impact on Voice of America and other U.S. government-funded broadcasters remains unclear.

Lake criticized the ruling and said it would be appealed.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media oversees several international broadcasters, including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, which provide news to audiences in countries where independent media may be restricted.

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Determined not to be left behind in the contest for maximal self-ownership, Donald Trump was up early on Saturday morning to issue, even by his standards, an incoherent stream-of-unconsciousness Truth Social post. It came complete with classic Trump moves: upside-down run-on sentences, the leaders of unidentified nations (no doubt holding back tears) saying “Thank you President Trump” and a self-canceling proclamation that Iran had “surrendered to its Middle East neighbors” and was now “THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,” but was also, somehow, unlikely to surrender or collapse “for many decades” into the future. I’m not much good at the poker table, but I believe that’s called a tell.

Life is too short to spend much of it troubled by the unbelievable stupidity of the people supposedly in charge of this country. We give each other these lectures, right? Stay hydrated, touch grass, see your friends, tell the people you love that you love them. Still though: How did we get here?

Unfortunately, there’s a real war happening to real people, including more than 150 children who were apparently killed when a U.S. missile struck a girls’ school in southern Iran on Feb. 28. So let’s get back to Hegseth, a classic example of the MAGA-sphere’s sociopathic inability to perceive other people as real or other perspectives as potentially legitimate. He somehow managed not to start pumping iron or drop to the stage for push-ups during his press appearance rather than using words, those known tools of the woke mind virus and trans agenda. It might also have been a tell for the “secretary of war” — now in charge of a war that isn’t a war — to loudly insist that the greatest military power in the history of the world is “winning” against an adversary with one-fourth its population, severely damaged military and civilian infrastructure, and an economy crippled by sanctions, mismanagement and environmental crisis. Who was he trying to convince?

First and foremost, of course, there’s the only audience that matters: Hegseth’s boss at the top of the worm-eaten executive branch, the guy whose skin appears to literally be rotting off his frame and who claims not to have “the yips” about using ground troops in a war of indefinite duration that was launched on invented premises with constantly shifting objectives.

Another Hegseth target was surely the mainstream media, which has been purged from the Pentagon and has been so badly burned by this administration’s relentless lies that it’s now disconcertingly reluctant to cheerlead for a war the public doesn’t want. (We can of course exempt Bari Weiss and CBS News, still boldly chasing the pseudo-centrist, pro-MAGA “vibe shift” that expired six months ago.) And let’s not forget the spineless but increasingly restless Republicans in the House and Senate, who can see the mounting daily cost of Trump’s Iran war — which by now could easily have funded the Obamacare subsidies they voted down — and who already fear an electoral Waterloo in November.

If Hegseth were capable of self-awareness, we might suggest that he was striking macho-man poses on the deck of a sinking ship in an effort to convince himself that his personal brand, along with the rest of the MAGA enterprise, wasn’t headed straight for the historical dumpster. Let’s put it this way: This recycled Fox News frat boy, whose bottomless stupidity and moral emptiness make the now-cashiered Kristi Noem look like a nuanced thinker, seems to be experiencing doubts he cannot quite suppress. If that’s how it’s going, then “America” isn’t winning anything, regardless of what does or doesn’t happen in Tehran.

We shouldn’t skate past the loaded question that lies beneath the surface of Hegseth’s bluster: Is the U.S. truly in the driver’s seat for this misguided war, or did Trump and his underlings get lured into this conflict by Bibi Netanyahu? Different things can simultaneously be true here; it’s not exactly a yes-or-no question. American neocons have longed to take down the Iranian regime since the early years of that nation’s Islamic revolution, and Trump’s decision to go to war represents an unexpected victory for foreign-policy hawks like John Bolton, his now-despised first-term national security adviser. Netanyahu has urged every American president since Bill Clinton to do this, and until now they have all resisted. That said, the increasingly toxic hard-right Israeli government and its relentless American supporters, as I wrote last week, have exercised a persistent long-term distortion effect that has reshaped U.S. policy and both political parties, and is only now starting to be decoupled.

It would be foolish to make confident predictions about what will happen in this war, except to say that nearly all potential outcomes are likely to create much bigger problems down the road. I make no claims to military expertise, but here’s my sophisticated meta-analysis of what actual military experts say: Nobody knows anything. There’s a cautious consensus that U.S. and Israeli forces are now playing beat-the-clock against a possible missile gap: They hope to destroy Iran’s extensive arsenal of ballistic missiles before the U.S., Israel and the Gulf states start to run out of expensive Interceptor missiles and other air-defense tech, which may or may not be in short supply.

You can find experts who argue that the semi-decapitated Iranian regime is close to collapse and searching for an exit strategy right next to experts who argue that Trump and his advisers have blundered into a Heffalump trap lovingly constructed from their own arrogance and moral blindness — with lots of help from Netanyahu — and will soon need to make excuses for another U.S. humiliation on the global stage. Many Salon readers, and many Americans in general (if we go by opinion polls), are likely to find the latter scenario disturbingly plausible.

But we don’t need to know exactly what will happen in this war to conclude that it was a bad idea, based on bad premises, that will lead to more bad things. As for the pundits and think-tankers and accused thought-leaders who once seduced themselves into supporting George W. Bush’s post-9/11 wars and are now repeating the exercise, like traumatized mice returning to the spot in the maze where the cheese used to be, what is there to say? The intellectual class has never been immune to the pathological American conviction that history is bunk.

There’s a painful well of comedy to be mined, as observed above, in the Trump administration’s ‘roid-ragey, AI-slop-infused war propaganda. In this case, the war itself is propaganda, a desperate effort to shift the narrative away from the Epstein files, the massively unpopular ICE crackdown and the stagnating economy, among other symptoms of the regime’s political implosion. None of this is entirely new: Since at least the Vietnam era, America’s attempts to project strength on the global stage have often looked like embarrassing weakness. But the shameless bigotry, delusion and narcissism of the MAGA regime acts as a force multiplier, revealing and accelerating the declining empire’s worst tendencies.

If military experts are perplexed about how things are going in the Middle East, foreign-policy experts are not. A survey of 949 international relations scholars conducted by researchers at William & Mary and the University of Georgia found that nearly 87 percent opposed the U.S. decision to attack Iran, while 81 percent believed the attacks would “probably” or “definitely” make the U.S. less secure. Financial markets have declined sharply since the war began while crude oil prices have spiked, from less than $70 a barrel to more than $90. More to the point for Donald Trump, gasoline prices in the U.S. are now higher than they were before the 2024 election, which might give him the “yips” in a way that the deaths of human beings never will.

American war-planners, it would seem, never considered the possibility that Iran would respond with “a massive and escalating bombardment” of its Gulf neighbors, which George Washington University scholar Marc Lynch describes as a clear and coordinated strategy meant to inflict “global economic pain to build pressure for a cease-fire.” Autocratic leaders of the prosperous Gulf states, Lynch writes, viewed Trump as a friend but now feel a “sense of betrayal” that he launched a war alongside Israel without consulting them, threatening their perceived “immunity from regional politics” and leaving them open to “catastrophic fallout” no matter how the war ends. Those sultans and emirs and sheikhs are learning “that the United States cannot be relied upon to protect them,” a historical lesson that counts double when you’re dealing with Donald Trump, who has no actual friends and no loyalty to anyone.

Trying to look manly and tough when your entire regime, from the top on down, consists of shifty characters with a wide range of obvious personality disorders might seem like a categorical error. But it’s a core principle of MAGA ideology, which teaches believers that there is no truth and that any level of cowardly and shameless behavior in service to the leader is a show of strength.

There’s no point in trying to catalog all the excuses Trump’s minions have offered about why they started this war and what its goals are. Plan A was threadbare, and they never had a Plan B. His followers don’t care, and the rest of us are inured to the endless lies. On Friday, Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” landing the phrase on the front of the New York Times. Shortly afterward, Karoline Leavitt explained that away as a metaphor: Maybe the Iranians would somewhat surrender, sort of unconditionally, without knowing they were doing that. These pathological losers are making America look like a failed state before the whole world, which might be funny if it weren’t terrifying.

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Trump and his handpicked team of the worst people you can imagine (his incompetent, mewling kakistocracy) are gleefully attacking women, immigrants, universities, public education, scientists, LGBTQ+ folks and our historic allies, as well as nonpartisan experts in economics and governance and foreign affairs — everything, in fact, that has made America creative, prosperous and secure.

It’s gotten so dire under Trump that good people of all sorts are leaving the country in numbers not seen since the Depression.

Another obvious irony is that MAGA’s self-styled supreme leader of this Christian white nationalist movement is no Christian. As a serial sexual predator, a habitual perpetrator of fraud, the most relentless liar on the planet and a lifelong supplicant of Mammon, Trump is by every measure anything but a follower of Jesus Christ. (While we are pointing out incongruities, it should be noted that with his very weird daily troweling-on of pancake makeup, he’s also only rarely “white.”)

As reported by Jonathan Larsen on his Substack, “The F**king News,” some U.S. military commanders have been telling their troops that the war on Iran is a Christian war. So it is more than fair to critique these so-called Christian leaders.

It hardly seems worth taking the time to pick apart Trump’s performative Christianity. He’s the guy who hawks Bibles and yet cannot name even one line of scripture he admires. (It’s too personal, you see. Oh, and he’s “probably equally” both an Old Testament and New Testament guy, 50–50.)

As a cultural Christian — I’m the grandson of a minister and was raised Presbyterian, and was active while our daughters were young — I’m not given to quoting scripture. Religious belief is personal, and I don’t appreciate it when people evangelize to me or, you know, try to write their beliefs into public policy. But this passage from Proverbs (6:16–19) is uncanny suited to our moment:

There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflicts in the community.

A quick check online shows that versions of that have been floating around in various online memes for some years. (For instance, back in 2019, Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator, was attacked by Trump supporters for posting the passage without comment.)

In the version I saw recently, above the verses is a photo of Trump, showing off some of the haughtiest eyes you’ve ever seen (imagine one of those tough-guy official portraits inspired by his mugshot, or the glare he gives a reporter who dares to ask him a real question). But, gosh, the manchild leader of the everyday American found himself a millionaire at the age of eight, so I guess he has an excuse for overall haughtiness, compared to the likes of you and me. He simply never learned better.

I may be only a cultural Christian, but as an old friend told me recently, she could go for more cultural Christians these days.

The post Trump’s misguided “Christian” war is anything but appeared first on Salon.com.

Estefany Rodriguez Florez, a Colombian journalist with the Tennessee news outlet Nashville Noticias, was taken into custody Wednesday during a traffic stop in Nashville, according to court documents and statements from her attorney. ICE officials say the arrest was part of an enforcement operation tied to alleged visa violations.

Rodriguez, who has lived in the United States for about five years, has a valid work permit and has been pursuing legal residency through her marriage to a U.S. citizen. Court records filed by her lawyer say she also sought asylum after previously receiving death threats related to her reporting in Colombia.

Her attorney’s emergency court filing contends Rodriguez was not shown a judicial arrest warrant at the time she was detained, and instead only received an immigration notice to appear before ICE. Advocates argue the arrest undermines journalistic independence and could chill coverage of immigration issues.

ICE officials have defended the detention, telling reporters Rodriguez was arrested under an “administrative warrant” and that she will receive due process in immigration proceedings. The agency also asserts her visa had expired.

Rodriguez’s work for Nashville Noticias has included reporting on police, community and immigration issues affecting the region’s Spanish‑speaking population, and supporters say her arrest could send a troubling signal to journalists covering similar beats. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists condemned the arrest and called for her release so she can continue her work.

🚨 NAHJ denounces the detention of Nashville reporter Estefany Rodríguez.

Rodríguez has lived and worked lawfully in the U.S. since 2021 while pursuing political asylum.

Journalists must be able to report without intimidation.

Read more: https://t.co/5YAIlAwmBV pic.twitter.com/PMWSKD5wNG

— NAHJ (@NAHJ) March 6, 2026

Her detention has prompted advocacy from press freedom and immigrant rights organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, which urged authorities to release Rodriguez and ensure protections for reporters.

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Rodriguez remains in ICE custody as her case moves through federal court, where attorneys are pressing for her release and arguing that constitutional rights were violated in the handling of her arrest.

The post Reporter detained for speaking Spanish in Nashville appeared first on Salon.com.

The funeral service drew an extraordinary lineup of national figures, including former presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, along with former vice president Kamala Harris and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Civil rights leaders, elected officials and thousands of mourners also attended the service honoring Jackson’s decades-long fight for racial equality, voting rights and economic justice.

Jackson, who died last month at 84, rose to national prominence as a protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. before launching his own influential civil rights campaigns and two historic presidential runs in 1984 and 1988. His work helped build what he called the “Rainbow Coalition,” a political movement aimed at uniting marginalized communities and expanding political participation.

The service, held at a large church venue on Chicago’s South Side, featured speeches, music and personal tributes that reflected Jackson’s influence on generations of political leaders and activists.

Obama delivered one of the most notable tributes, crediting Jackson’s political activism with helping inspire his own career and urging Americans to continue the civil rights leader’s work.

“Each day we’re told to fear each other,” Obama said during the service, warning against political forces that divide Americans and undermine democratic values. He called on the audience to follow Jackson’s example and “step up” to build a more just society.

Other speakers echoed those themes. Biden praised Jackson’s determination and commitment to social justice, while Clinton recalled Jackson as someone who pushed political leaders to address inequality and expand opportunity for disadvantaged communities.

Civil rights leaders also emphasized Jackson’s global influence and grassroots organizing. Throughout his career, Jackson advocated for voting rights, education access and economic opportunity, often traveling internationally to support human rights efforts and political negotiations.

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By the end of the ceremony, speakers framed Jackson’s legacy as one rooted not only in protest and activism but in coalition-building and political participation.

As mourners celebrated his life, many said the causes Jackson championed — from voting rights to economic equality — remain central challenges in American politics today.

The post Leaders gather to honor the life and legacy of Jesse Jackson appeared first on Salon.com.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump suggested new targets were under consideration and said the U.S. could expand its campaign against Iran.

“Iran, which is being beat to HELL,” Trump wrote, adding that the country “will be hit very hard.” He said areas and groups “that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time” were now being evaluated for potential strikes.

The comments come as fighting continues to escalate across the Middle East following Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last month. The attacks triggered retaliatory missile and drone strikes by Iran and widened the conflict to include U.S. military involvement.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has rejected Trump’s demand that the country agree to “unconditional surrender,” calling the idea unrealistic and vowing Iran would continue to resist U.S. and Israeli attacks.

Missile launches and airstrikes have continued across the region in recent days, targeting military facilities and infrastructure in Iran and Israel. The growing conflict has raised fears of a wider regional war involving neighboring Gulf nations and U.S. forces stationed throughout the Middle East.

The fighting has already caused significant casualties. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations said more than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed since the conflict began, though the United States and Israel dispute Iran’s characterization of some strikes.

Regional tensions also spilled beyond Iran and Israel. Several Gulf countries have reported intercepting Iranian missiles and drones, and airports and other infrastructure across the region have faced temporary disruptions amid security concerns.

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So far there has been little sign of diplomacy. Trump repeatedly said the conflict could end if Iran agrees to surrender, while Iranian leaders dismissed that demand and accused Washington of escalating the war.

With both sides hardening their positions and strikes continuing across the region, analysts warn the conflict could expand further unless diplomatic efforts emerge to de-escalate the fighting.

The post Trump: Iran will be “hit very hard” soon with new strikes appeared first on Salon.com.

Two weeks from today will mark the 23rd anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq; it brings a profound feeling of déjà-vu for me.

On the night of March 19, 2003, I sat at home watching the news — tense, sad and angry. I held pen and paper in my hand, ordering my children to be quiet as they moved between playing and watching the screen. I had skipped dinner with them and my wife, and it was not yet bedtime for the little ones.

We were watching CNN. Like other American networks, they had positioned cameras on the rooftops of the Al-Mansur and Palestine hotels in Baghdad.

At first, the feeling was eerie; the cameras peered into a city with dimmed lights, shrouded in silence.

Then, at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time (4:35 a.m. in Baghdad), the Athan al-Fajr, or dawn prayer, suddenly rose from the darkness of the Baghdad feed. From the numerous mosques along the Tigris, the sound on the TV was a layered, overlapping chorus of multiple mu’adhins. It was melodic and haunting, even as the world waited for the “shock and awe” to begin.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in New York and Aaron Brown, on the ground in Baghdad, acknowledged the sound directly:

Blitzer: “Aaron, right now, we’re not hearing air raid sirens. We’re hearing the call to early morning prayers, the first prayer of the day for Muslims. Maybe I’ll be quiet for a second and you might be able to make it out behind me. Just listen for a second.”

Brown: “As you look at Baghdad, it is eerie… you don’t see any sense of panic in the city, any sense of movement in the city, or frankly any sense of war in the city.”

About an hour later, as the first strikes hit, Brown highlighted the surreal nature of this split-screen reality: “It is hard to imagine what it would be like to live in this city at a time like this, to know what had happened and what is likely to happen.”

When President George W. Bush appeared live, nearly an hour later, CNN used a “picture-in-picture” format, which was still somewhat unusual. On one side was the president’s face; on the other was the live, active bombardment of Baghdad.

Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq had just expired.

Bush declared: “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

I stayed awake all night. My children were eventually put to bed, but my wife stayed up to watch with me for a few hours, her expression stoic.

It was too late for me to send reports for the following day’s edition of Asharq Al-Awsat, my London-based Arabic-language newspaper. Communication was not as advanced as it is today; the paper did not yet have an online edition, and we still used the telephone for routine contact.

When I went to my Washington office early the next morning, I saw parts of Saddam Hussein’s defiant speech, in which he declared: “The criminal, reckless little Bush and his aides committed this crime that he was threatening to commit against Iraq and humanity.”

My boss in London usually called me right after the daily reporters’ meeting, which drew up a blueprint for the day’s coverage.

When I picked up the phone, I began to weep loudly, repeating: “Al-Tatar dakhalo Baghdad” (“The Tatars have entered Baghdad”)

I must explain that the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols (or Tatars) remains a traumatic event deeply engraved in the Arab and Muslim mind as a definitive historical defeat. My boss was no less saddened, but our deadlines would not wait and we began to construct our coverage of the invasion.

During the period between that initial attack and the U.S. ground invasion, I covered press conferences at the White House and the State Department, and also experienced personal encounters, or perhaps confrontations, with Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Powell had just returned from New York after his now-infamous presentation to the U.N. Security Council, where he held up a small vial of white powder to illustrate the alleged danger of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons. “My colleagues,” he insisted, “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” We now know that all of that was false, to Powell’s everlasting shame.

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I was one of five Arab correspondents invited to meet with Secretary Powell in his office. While seated to his immediate left at a conference table, I asked a question that clearly irritated him. He looked at me directly and said, “Your questions seem to be more about Islam; this has nothing to do with religion.” His tone remained civil and diplomatic, but the underlying friction was clear.

By that time, I had already reached the conclusion that the Bush administration’s  “War on Terror” was, in many ways, a military campaign against Muslims in general

The following week, I interviewed Condoleezza Rice at the White House, alongside another Arab journalist. Rice was a primary architect of the Iraq invasion, famously warning about Saddam’s supposed nuclear program: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

I irritated her as well by “playing the race card.” I implied that, as a Black woman, she was an unlikely choice to lead the call for the invasion of a country in what we used to call the Third World. I also mentioned that Black American soldiers would certainly be among the casualties.

My déjà-vu experience today derives from that same kind of “shock and awe.” Indeed, the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran is much larger than the initial stage of the Iraq war. Another American president is declaring, on dubious or threadbare evidence, that another Muslim country is endangering U.S. security.

The tragic cycle of history feels poised to repeat itself. America has eliminated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just as it eliminated Saddam Hussein two decades ago, but just as much uncertainty hovers over what lies ahead. This current escalation suggests that the U.S. war machine is once again ignoring the human cost of “decapitation strikes,” as we saw with the apparent American missile strike on a Tehran girls’ school. For someone who wept at seeing the modern Tatars enter Baghdad, the prospect of a similar fate befalling Tehran is more than a strategic policy shift. It is the return of a recurring but never-banished nightmare about one civilization attacking another, driven by blind hatred.

The post Trump continues the “war on terror”: First Baghdad, now Tehran appeared first on Salon.com.

During the 2016 campaign the country was still dealing with fairly regular terrorist attacks from followers of ISIS, and despite Trump’s professed disdain for the leadership that took the U.S. into Afghanistan and Iraq, it was clear when you listened closely to him that he was contemptuous of their apparent unwillingness to take the gloves off. He was never some kind of peacenik. After all, Trump confessed to being a big fan of torture, casually saying, “Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your a*s I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works. And if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.” 

He repeatedly stated his belief that the U.S. should have “taken” Iraq’s oil. His supposed isolationism was nothing more than a crude way of differentiating himself from the decisions of his predecessors. 

Trump was talked out of military action by his advisers more than once during his first term, and he seemed more or less content with ordering assassinations and limited bombing strikes. But there was one big decision he made in 2019 that telegraphed and previewed his true beliefs about warfare: his pardoning, over the strenuous objections of the military brass, of service members and contractors accused of war crimes.

One was known to shoot at unarmed civilians to “make them afraid” and was serving a 19-year sentence for ordering the murder of two unarmed Afghan villagers. Another was awaiting trial on charges of killing a suspected Afghan bomb maker. Then there was the Navy SEAL who had been accused and acquitted of murder but was convicted of posing with a mutilated corpse of an Iraqi soldier. Over the objections of top SEAL commanders, Trump reversed his demotion and invited him to a Christmas party at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump made his philosophy known in October 2019 when he tweeted, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” At the time, it seemed odd that he tagged “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth in the post. But Hegseth had been publicly and privately lobbying for the pardons, and he and Trump had a meeting of the minds on the subject.

Aside from all Hegseth’s character flaws and a lack of experience that should have disqualified him for the job, it was largely that episode that horrified so many political observers when Trump nominated him as defense secretary. Here was someone who openly supported war criminals, defended the barbarity at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and believed torture to be justified. 

Now that Trump has finally let his warmongering flag fly the way he always wanted to, we are seeing exactly how dangerous this partnership may end up being. 

Hegseth’s intentions as secretary were never secret. Since his confirmation he has crusaded to rid the Pentagon of “wokeness,” by which he means any desire for diversity, intolerance of racism and bigotry, and adherence to the rules of war. He has purged the military’s top brass of many of its Black and women officers, and he took an ax to the Judge Advocate General’s office, which administers the military justice system. All of this was done in service of his aim of returning the Pentagon to a “warrior ethos” — which is really nothing more than a simple-minded call to be more macho and violent. The fact that he chose to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War should settle any dispute about his worldview.

Now that Trump has launched a growing war with Iran, which he seems convinced will result in Middle East peace — something he announced he had achieved with the Gaza ceasefire deal — we are about to see how this warrior ethos works in practice. 

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From the carnage inflicted on Indigenous and enslaved peoples to barbarity in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war — celebrated repeatedly by Trump during the 2016 campaign — and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, America has plenty of blood on its hands. Atrocities have been a feature of warfare since time began. But over the centuries, humans developed rules of warfare designed to, at least in theory, minimize the blood-letting. Since the horrors of the 20th-century’s two world wars and the development of technology that can deliver mass injury and slaughter, it has become more important than ever. 

America used to at least give lip service to the rules of war, if only for the self-serving reasons that it would protect their own troops. But Trump and Hegseth’s overwhelming hubris seems to preclude even that as a concern, with the defense secretary callously dismissing the deaths of American service members and the president shrugging off the possibility of reprisals on American soil. 

On Feb. 28, just as the war had started, an airstrike hit an elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab, near the adjacent naval base operated by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. More than 175 civilians were reportedly killed, many of them children.  According to the New York Times, the available evidence suggests it was a U.S. missile that hit the school. The administration says they are investigating. 

No one has implied this was a targeted attack. One assumes that it was a mistake resulting in “collateral damage,” as the military likes to call it. But it is a perfect example of the kind of stories we are going to start seeing juxtaposed with Hegseth’s grotesque rhetoric in these first few days of the war. He has cheered the conflict as having “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.” The Israelis, he said, are “good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” Hegseth’s irresponsible commentary will have the effect of robbing the U.S. military of any benefit of the doubt, as it well should. 

America had already squandered most of its moral authority with the Iraq debacle, and Trump’s paeans to peace notwithstanding, it’s clear that we’ve now embraced a mercenary foreign policy in which there are no rules nor restraint. The president said as much in January when he was asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” 

It appears he meant it.

The post Trump and Hegseth are writing their own rules of war appeared first on Salon.com.

The review, convened by the Pan American Health Organization and led by health experts, was supposed to be held in April. At the meeting, a panel would determine if the U.S. could keep its measles-free status. The status is granted to nations that have not had a continuous spread of measles within one year.

U.S. health officials requested that the meeting be delayed until November, according to Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon. Officially, the delay is to give the agency more time to collect and analyze data from the ongoing nationwide measles outbreak.

Pan American Health Organization spokesman Sebastián Oliel said the delay was due to the “extent of the analysis” being conducted by the CDC in the midst of multiple outbreaks.

Dr. Walter Orenstein, a member of the committee that reviews measles reports, questioned the delay.

“I don’t see why a delay of that long would be needed,” he told The Times. “It is awfully coincidental, with the midterm elections.”

Social media scientific communicator Dr. Lucky Tran criticized U.S. officials for the delay.

“This is a reckless, accountability-dodging move that puts politics over public health,” he said in a post on X.

Nearly 2,300 measles cases were reported in 2025, with another 1,136 cases in the first few months of 2026, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control. It is the worst year for measles cases in the U.S. in more than two decades, since it was officially eliminated in 2000.

South Carolina has been hit especially hard, with roughly 990 cases reported through yesterday. The vast majority of those infected were children who were not vaccinated against measles.

The post “Awfully coincidental”: Review of US measles status delayed seven months appeared first on Salon.com.

A petition entitled “Health Not War!” was launched on Monday, written in large part by Charles Eisenstein, a senior advisor and speechwriter for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy‘s 2024 presidential campaign.

“We remind members of Congress, and the Trump administration, that our nation has squandered $8 trillion on regime-change wars since 9/11. We remind them that our nation’s infrastructure, its middle class, and its health have all been hollowed out to fund these wars,” the petition reads in part, calling on members of Congress to support a war powers resolution on Iran.

“We call on them to turn America’s attention, money, technology, science, and resources toward rebuilding our nation from the inside out,” it says.

“I believe that most people who identify with MAHA are also anti-war,” Eisenstein told Salon. Eisenstein said his petition aims to create “a national peace movement that unites left and right” that is consistent with previous MAHA policies.

“‘End the forever wars’ was a major plank of the Kennedy 2024 campaign, Eisenstein said.

Others close to Kennedy have voiced their disdain for the conflict they see as a product of Trump’s brash foreign policy.

“This is absolutely devastating,” former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, told Salon, calling it a “catastrophe.”

“It’s a circus of miscalculation. Everything about it is wrong,” he said. Kucinich, who served in Congress for 16 years and was Kennedy’s 2024 campaign manager, said that the decision to go to war “isn’t [Kennedy’s] call,” as he must “wear two hats” as HHS secretary and nominal MAHA leader.

“He’s not going to attack the president. That’s not going to happen. Kennedy helped create the president. He’s hardly a vassal,” Kucinich said. “People in that cabinet know that they’d better stay in their lane.”

Kucinich has long opposed U.S. military intervention, going so far as to sue President Barack Obama over his 2011 intervention in Libya. He is worried about the ripple effects of the decision to invade, especially within America’s foreign policy more broadly, which he says is becoming “a very malign intent to dominate.” This is despite Trump’s prior claims he would avoid foreign wars.

“Foreign wars do not make America great again — he made that clear.”

Eisenstein said the war is a bad look for MAHA and Kennedy’s work at the HHS. “It associates the noble goals of the movement with an immoral war,” he said. “In my opinion, HHS was one of the few bright spots in the Trump administration.”

David Murphy, founder of the food and health policy group United We Eat, said that MAGA should be “putting the Constitution first,” criticizing Trump’s “command” of the military.

“When hostilities proceed without congressional authorization or an attack on the United States, honoring Congress’s constitutional role is essential to preserving democratic accountability for future generations,” Murphy said in a press release for the petition.

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A possible consequence of MAHA’s disagreement over MAGA foreign policies is the threat of losing Republican voters in the upcoming midterms. While Kucinich noted a “convergence” of political beliefs within MAHA, a February report from MAHA Action President Tony Lyons warned that “the Republican party is renting MAHA voters.”

“Embracing RFK and Trump’s MAHA message earned the GOP the most votes in American history,” Lyons wrote, pointing to data that showed 4-6% of new Trump voters in 2024 did so because of the movement.

Kennedy has enjoyed broad support from the Trump administration, with an administration lawyer saying on Thursday that Kennedy has “broad, unreviewable authority” in his position, specifically on his measles vaccine policy, even as the country strains under a historic measles outbreak.

“If the secretary were to say, under my judgment herd immunity is the best way, that would be unreviewable,” the lawyer said.

For its part, the White House is rejecting any kind of gulf between MAGA and MAHA. “While the U.S. military wrecks the Iranian terrorist regime, the Trump administration remains laser-focused here at home to deliver on the President’s MAHA agenda: from cracking down on artificial ingredients in our food supply to revising federal Dietary Guidelines to finally lowering prescription drug prices,” the White House told Scripps News in a statement.

Kucinich posited that MAHA and its voters are becoming increasingly outside the president’s control.

“MAHA is evolving as a political movement. It is a movement that goes beyond who the president is,” Kucinich said, noting that the anti-war petition is a “signal” to pay attention to. “It means neither MAHA nor MAGA is being dragged into a war without objecting.”

The relationship between MAHA and MAGA has also been strained recently by Trump’s executive order protecting producers of the herbicide glyphosate. Kennedy has publicly supported the decision, which resulted in harsh blowback within the movement.

“I just feel like it is the ultimate betrayal,” Shaughnessy Naughton, the president of the science-forward political action committee 314 Action, told Salon. “I think this is a big problem for the MAHA movement.”

The post Iran war enrages Make America Healthy Again movement appeared first on Salon.com.

One method, practiced in cities like Detroit, has been to demolish swathes of empty buildings abandoned by white flight, allowed to decay by a tax-starved municipal government, and withheld from Black residents by “blockbusting” agents selling them only after massive markups. The logic, according to its proponents, is to make space for majority-Black populations to flourish. But in “Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures,” author Nicholas Caverly records his observations and research from field work in Detroit, arguing that those demolitions have largely maintained rather than removed racial inequities.

Caverly, a professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, recently spoke to Salon about the problem of demolition in its current form, and the potential for a model with more community input.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Your research covers decades of policy where empty buildings have been torn down en masse with the idea that their removal will heal racial inequities. You’ve also said that it’s much more complicated than what policymakers claim.

There’s been about 200,000 empty buildings torn down since the 1970s, and the goal is informed by the idea that racist disinvestment is a problem and white flight is a problem, and empty buildings are a physical scar of that problem. And so could we just tear these things down and address the problem? I spent a couple of years talking to city residents, demolition workers, and unsurprisingly, it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s not just about saying, how do we tear down the remains of inequities that we know that have existed in the past, but also the fact that when you’re tearing things down, you’re creating new problems too, new kinds of anti-Black distributions of economic opportunity, environmental contamination, and so on.

I think Detroit is kind of emblematic of uneven conditions that we see across the United States, and the kinds of questions we should be asking about what happens after the demolition takes place. Is this land that should be funneled into big, private development projects, in a way that might reproduce the same systems? Or is this land that could be kind of held in stewardship, or some kind of community-scale needs? What would it look like to actually change the way that land is managed in Detroit?

What do arguments in favor of mass demolition miss, and why are they persuasive anyway?

We have all these empty buildings that are monuments to white racism. So if we look at the way that we got hundreds of thousands of empty buildings into Detroit, these are things that are connected to longstanding property regimes that channeled home ownership opportunities towards white families and away from families of color. These things have been talked about a lot in the United States. So there’s an idea that if we could just tear them down, that would create a clean slate and we could move forward — the same logic that is applied to Confederate monuments.

In the latter case, it’s a question of who do we censor in our public spaces, how we make sure our public spaces are accountable to people. But simply tearing down a statue or tearing down an empty building doesn’t change this underlying system. It can produce a kind of symbolic change, but it doesn’t necessarily change the structural conditions. And that is something people recognize on the ground. Like when I would talk to people, they would raise concerns about how the demolition contaminates the ground around them. It’s got poisonous lead in it from paint. So we have to be careful, and also think of how to build different kinds of systems. We’d have to think about what it looks like to produce actually equitable distributions of resources and distributions of burden.

In Detroit, which you build your study around in your book, what are the processes by which land is then converted into a given purpose — and do those processes give a hint to the public over the intended purpose?

I think absolutely it provides a hint. For example, the Detroit demolitions for a while were managed by an institution called the Detroit Land Bank Authority. They no longer manage demolition, but they are the titleholder to publicly-owned land, and are still the largest single landowner in the city of Detroit. The goal of the Land Bank Authority was to create a single titleholder that would be able to package up and create large development, facilitate large development projects. And while the Land Bank Authority has been able to kind of affect some of those projects by bundling pieces of property together to make them interesting to a highly highly-capitalized developer, they have also struggled because the kind of contiguous empty land that you might anticipate might appear after a demolition is never fully empty. There’s sometimes people who live there, or there are different owners of record.

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And so the Land Bank wasn’t able to fulfill a lot of its desires for big development. What that opened the door for people to think about what it would look like to build things like community land trusts, a kind of common opportunity of stewardship. I think that the scale of empty land in Detroit has opened up some really interesting conflicts that show us that there isn’t necessarily one future after you tear something down — it’s contested, and it’s open to people to try to shape what the future of their city looks like.

You’re skeptical of the claim that Black communities in general will benefit from municipal demolition in the form that it has taken, not least because it’s such a broad categorization. So who are actually the main beneficiaries from these demolitions and subsequent lack of care in development?

I think that it depends on how we’re going to classify benefit. There was a big hope with demolition because of the way it was framed for city residents, especially starting around 2014, which is when there was this big influx of federal funding for building demolitions in Detroit and also other places like Milwaukee, Baltimore and Stockton. Federal funds were shifted to demolition from a variety of other things. And there was an argument that if we shift funds into demolition, we’re going to increase property value and create jobs. These are seen as net goods in the United States.

It is true that property values increased in Detroit following demolitions, and that is good if you own your home and you’re able to pay increasing taxes for it. It wasn’t so great for people who didn’t own their home and who had to deal with spiking rents. It isn’t so great for people who are having difficulty paying their rising tax bills. And it didn’t necessarily address many of the concerns that Detroiters had around making sure there was affordable and accessible housing. We would like quality housing to be something that people can afford.

You’ve gone in detail about specific mechanisms of demolition, like algorithms, for example. For mapping, pricing, contract processes and so on. Could you explain how those actively reproduce class and racial hierarchies?

Demolitions, as I said, were framed as a way of increasing property value. That was one of the things that helped to authorize more than $250 million in federal money for demolitions in Detroit, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars across the United States. And that meant that public institutions that organized demolitions had to provide a lot of data to show that the buildings they were tearing down were increasing property value in ways that would kind of ripple out.

Home ownership in the United States, as you know, was created on racist terms. They were provided to white possible homeowners and denied to most everybody else, especially Black possible homeowners. And those are inequalities that continue to exist in our contemporary housing landscapes. They are inequalities that continue to exist in part because of the ways that mortgages are approved or denied. And so demolition administrators saw increasing property value as a way to create this kind of algorithmic change in the underwriting landscape for people applying for mortgages or home renovation loans in Detroit.

They thought that demolition was an investment in expanding access to home ownership, which it did do. If we look at the number of mortgages that were issued in Detroit following demolitions, they did increase. And yet, that didn’t actually address the concerns that many Detroiters had, which was that housing was unaffordable, and that access to high-quality housing was incredibly limited. And so part of what I write about when I’m talking about algorithms is how when we have these algorithmic ideas of equity or equality in which the goal is to equalize access to homeownership, but we don’t interrogate the very thing that’s at the heart of homeownership, which is that homes are not accessible to everybody. We pass by the opportunity to invest our resources in other kinds of things like producing more housing.

Are there any models that you have in mind for what steps governments should take to actually help communities and not only improve their material conditions, but institutionalize their say in the policy process?

If we had we wanted to think about what are some best practices, I’m going to give two things. Number one is to create systems that actually listen to people, not just saying, well, we’re interested in community input, but then we’re not going to give it any actual power. So this might range from participatory budgeting to participatory planning, that gives meaningful input to people who show up in their communities. We’ve got lots of evidence for how that isn’t an effective way of of changing who is centered within our ideas of policy and our ideas of urban design.

One way that I saw that come up in Detroit is people talking about what to do with contaminated soil produced by demolitions. People would say, “well, we’ve got to figure out what to do with the soil. We don’t want it to just go get dumped on some other community that is, for example, living next to a landfill or something; we should try to imagine a broader distribution of soil.”

And then as far as broad things that I could point to or a place that I could point to, I think of Montgomery County, which is in Maryland just outside of D.C., which had some longstanding laws that did not address some really big problems. But over the past 40 years or so produced some really meaningful investments in social housing, public transportation, public art, education. And I think looking into those kinds of examples in which people, decades ago, came together in moments like the Civil Rights era and created a local way of trying to create more livable and just cities in Montgomery County.

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Donald Trump, the so-called “president of peace,” is here to overcome the “stupid and naïve” deals of previous presidents, he has said, by waging war with those countries that won’t make a deal with us — after we broke the last deal we had with them.

On Wednesday Trump announced the U.S., in cooperation with Israel, had “completely obliterated” Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons “a number of months ago” and then, seconds later, told us we had to attack the Islamic Republic on Saturday “because in two weeks they’d have a nuclear weapon.” From obliteration to a viable threat in months. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment — and is almost certainly a complete fabrication. Which part? It’s Trump, so probably both statements. We didn’t obliterate Iran’s nuclear capabilities months ago, and they likely weren’t two weeks away from firing a nuclear weapon when the U.S. and Israel attacked them on Saturday.

The administration still hasn’t told us what imminent threat actually prompted the war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said we were dragged into it. Trump said we dragged Israel into the conflict because he had a “feeling” we were about to be attacked — so he acted first. In the Indian Treaty Room Wednesday afternoon, the president backtracked and seemed to support Rubio’s contention. 

The administration has laid out four objectives in attacking Iran: to stop the country from producing new missiles, eliminate its navy, prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon and ensure Iran “cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.” Trump called Iran the “world’s number one sponsor of terror,” but he also said he thought the U.S. and Iran would be able to negotiate.

“We thought we had a deal, but then they backed out,” Trump said. “Then they came back and we thought we had a deal, and they backed out. I said, ‘You can’t deal with these people. You got to do it the right way.'”

There is little doubt what the president meant by “the right way.” White House Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us from the briefing room Wednesday afternoon that Trump is a president of “peace and diplomacy first” but also a “man of action,” and that the “specter of a nuclear-armed Iran ended” with Operation Epic Fury.

As she rattled off all the property that has been destroyed and the people that have been killed, Leavitt sounded like an anchor on “NFL Game Day” talking about game highlights. “Absolutely crushed,” she said of Iran, observing that the country was “paying in blood.” If it sounds like a cheap rip-off of the WWE, well, that’s how Trump rolls. Leavitt also leaned into her favorite antagonist — the press. There has been “a lot of misreporting and intellectual dishonesty” from the media, Leavitt said, before she once again engaged in intellectual dishonesty and provided disinformation to us as to why America is in an undeclared war with Iran. 

We really shouldn’t over analyze this. Donald Trump took action because he wanted to. And, as usual, whatever he says afterward is inconsequential and often irrelevant to the action he has already taken. He simply bombed Iran because he felt like it. He threatened Spain, our ally — like he did Greenland, which is also our ally — simply because he wanted to. Trump loves trying on his big boy pants and threatening anyone he wants. As Leavitt told us Wednesday, the president doesn’t bluff. He floats trial balloons and if no one pushes back, he pushes forward.

He broke a nuclear deal with Iran, crafted by the Obama administration, that ensured the regime could not develop nuclear weapons. Then he bombed them. Then he wanted to negotiate with the Islamic Republic and said they’re difficult to deal with. No one doubts they are difficult to deal with, and few want to. Leavitt said Iran’s leaders “lied, they delayed, they tried to string the United States along.” Or as my father, the car salesman, would describe it, “they were negotiating.”

No one wants to side with Iran, but the real question is why we would expect them to negotiate with us after Trump reneged on the last deal. What are negotiation tactics for one man is fodder for war to others — especially if one or both sides are spoiling for a fight.

Trump was certainly doing that. His decision to go to war is a clear effort to unite the country against a long-time foreign enemy. It has the effect of diverting attention from quieting the dystopian actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in many of our larger cities, the shooting and detention of American citizens, and the still-volatile scandal surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files. 

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After 47 years of Iran’s violent rhetoric and behavior, Trump said the U.S. has had enough. If you agree with the president — and on the face of it many will — then we should also hold our own country responsible for its past actions. The U.S., in partnership with Britain, overthrew a democratically-elected Iranian government in 1953 and supported the shah because of a J.R. Ewing “oil business” mentality that existed among America’s government, richest oil companies and closest ally.

Today’s Iranian leadership is the twisted child born from U.S. foreign policy at the height of the Cold War and the reaction of the radical religious movement that exploited and filled Iran’s power vacuum.

The White House tried on Wednesday to praise those who have given their life to this most recent and confusing horror show. The six American service members who died in this undeclared war were “heroes,” Leavitt said. “The best of us. They laid down their lives for their country.”

Who would say otherwise? What we all want to know is why? Why now? Despite the many stories told by Trump and his staff, those questions remain mostly unanswered. The administration’s inability to effectively convince the American people of the need for action has also deeply divided Congress, which is hardly a shock in today’s confusing political environment. Again, confusion is the brand.

The only thing that makes sense is that the reason for these and future casualties is because the president of peace, who “has solved eight wars,” determined that someone had to die — and their number came up.

Donald Trump said he hated war. He promised he’d keep us out of forever wars. He started one in Iran. His recent post on Truth Social said we had enough weapons to wage war forever and it would be productive in Iran. I guess he’s created a carve out. 

It is not a coincidence that on Feb. 11, Benjamin Netanyahu visited Trump at the White House. We do not know what was said between the two men, and while correlation is not causation, the Israeli prime minister didn’t travel to Washington and meet privately with the president to discuss the back nine at Mar-a-Lago. Those closest to Trump have hinted that they engaged in “very important” and “strategic” communications. It seems we may now know what that was about. 

Who dragged whom and where they dragged each other is irrelevant. They have opened Pandora’s box in the Middle East. It is a distraction and a stratagem. It sows confusion. It is Donald Trump’s brand.

The attorney general has been called before a subcommittee to discuss her handling of the Epstein scandal? Bomb Iran. The stock market took a dive? Bomb Iran. Trump’s immigration policy is tanking? Bomb Iran. Gas still isn’t at $1.85 a gallon? Bomb Iran. Trump is betting on several things, the key of which is keeping us so confused that we never notice what’s going on. 

Trump has already declared Operation Epic Fury an unqualified success. If it were to end today, maybe so. Few are mourning the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even in his own country. But the creeping fog of war is messy, and beyond anyone’s control. The administration’s decision to bomb Hezbollah in Lebanon means the war is already spreading and could easily grow out of control.  

In a 212-219 vote, the Republican-controlled House on Thursday rejected a resolution that would have restricted Trump’s war in Iran. The Senate had blocked a similar war powers resolution the day before. “I hope this one doesn’t come back to bite us in the a*s,” a Texas GOP representative told me. “I don’t know if we have a handle on this yet.”

There is little doubt that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a political lightweight incapable of passing a mirror without pausing to smile and preen. If things take a turn for the worse, it is doubtful he has the wisdom and gravitas to handle it.  

But Trump doesn’t care about that anymore. He just wants to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, for whatever reason that strikes his fancy at the time. And no one has yet stopped him.

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For the administration’s critics, Noem’s dismissal will be especially pleasing. Since she was confirmed by the Senate in January 2025, the former secretary, even by the low standards set by a Cabinet filled with toadies, has excelled in debasing herself to please her boss. To meet the eye-popping deportation numbers set as goals by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, she turned the Department of Homeland Security into a disaster zone that was as inept as it was lawless.

Noem transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to function as an authoritarian secret police, but without the sleek, efficient evil a Hollywood rendering would bestow on the SS. Federal immigration agents were instead slipping on ice or shooting unarmed protesters, all while whining about how persecuted they were. She herself became a public joke because of her over-the-top portrayal of a corrupt apparatchik, complete with her vicious dog-shooting story, ridiculous flattery of Trump and demands for ever-fancier private jets to share with her partner in repression — and adultery, if credible reports are to be believed — Corey Lewandowski.

But if there was one symbol that resonated the most for Noem’s grasps for power, it was her face. The 54-year-old appears to have undergone such extensive plastic surgery in an attempt to mimic Trump’s cartoonish ideas of what is “hot” in a woman that she is both hard to look at and impossible to match to photos of her younger, normal-looking self. Many women in the president’s orbit have adopted what has become known as “Mar-a-Lago face,” a look that includes heavy fillers, cosmetic procedures and caked-on makeup to be visibly appealing to a man who apparently avoids wearing his glasses in public. When a Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, was published in December, it became notorious for, among other revelations, a photograph of press secretary Karoline Leavitt that appeared to show extensive injection spots for lip filler. (The president, unbothered by the appearance, keeps openly lusting over Leavitt’s “machine gun lips” that “don’t stop.”) But no one has gotten more attention for her dramatic visual transformation than Noem.

In the end, though, Noem could not save herself, and for reasons that are related to why she likely felt the pressure and need to have plastic surgery that most men in her position don’t reckon with: gender. As a woman, the former secretary was far more disposable to Trump than a man in her position. It’s a lesson she should have learned when he passed her over as a potential running mate for the charisma-free JD Vance. The same president who was found civilly liable by a jury for sexual assault, who calls female reporters “piggy” or scolds them for not smiling, who spent over a decade partying with Jeffrey Epstein will be pleased to have a woman to blame for his administration’s hemorrhaging of public support on what was once his biggest issue, immigration.

It would be one thing if Noem were uniquely incompetent. But as bad as her press coverage has been, it is no worse than what many of the men occupying top spots in the administration are facing.

Pete Hegseth has repeatedly confirmed suspicions that he, as a former Fox News host with a rumored drinking problem, isn’t up for the job of defense secretary, from the time his team accidentally leaked confidential battle plans to an Atlantic reporter to his recent tantrum when news outlets published the names and photos of service members killed in the Iran war.

FBI Director Kash Patel is just as comically corrupt as Noem, whether abusing his private jet privileges to hang out with the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Olympics or reportedly diverting agency resources to surround his girlfriend with security like she’s a princess.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick got caught in an obvious lie about his relationship with Epstein, insisting he barely knew the man, when in reality they were business partners who were photographed on vacation together.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to be beloved by Trump, even as he has made dubious claims about childhood diseases, oversaw a purge of medical and science professionals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggested that bird flu be allowed to spread unimpeded, falsely linked Tylenol to autism and continues to pursue dangerous and unpopular anti-vaccine policies, despite promising he would leave vaccines alone during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

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A telling detail showing the role gender played in Noem’s dismissal is reports of Trump’s dislike of her rumored affair with Lewandowski. It’s unlikely that the president, with his long list of confirmed and rumored adulteries, is experiencing a newfound moral disapproval of infidelity. And despite reports of a tense confrontation following Noem’s congressional hearing on Tuesday, he also seems to like Lewandowski personally. After all, Trump has kept him around for over a decade. But the widespread coverage of Noem and Lewandowski’s relationship in reputable outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic paints the adviser as the secondary person in the relationship. Lewandowski is portrayed in a role that, on the right, is usually reserved for women: as Noem’s support staff, cheering on her presidential ambitions and making sure she has her favorite blanket on the plane. To Trump, who has rigidly hierarchical notions of gender, that probably seems emasculating.

But more than anything else, Noem is in many ways taking the fall for Stephen Miller. While she is morally and professionally responsible for her blunders as secretary, she was also reportedly acting on direct orders from the White House deputy chief of staff, who appears to be the most powerful person in the administration besides Trump.

It’s Miller who set impossibly high arrest quotas for ICE that could only be met with policies Noem enacted, such as targeting people with legal asylum status for deportation or encouraging mass detentions on flimsy grounds that are usually overturned by courts. The blatant white supremacist imagery and rhetoric coming from DHS sounds far closer to Miller’s overheated rhetoric about the evils of diversity than Noem’s more careful language. And it’s Miller who was seen dancing with Noem to “Ice, Ice Baby” at the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party.

The Department of Homeland Security’s failures are objectively as much, if not more, the fault of Miller than Noem, but there is no evidence he is paying any price for setting an agenda that was bound to go as badly as it has. To the contrary, the simultaneous announcement of GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma as Noem’s replacement, suggests there will be no scaling back from Miller’s demands on the department should he be confirmed by the Senate. He is a belligerent MAGA foot soldier who has drawn headlines in the past by complaining that teaching kids anti-racism impedes on lessons about Jesus.

Swapping Noem for the Mullin is an even trade, with one notable exception: He’s a man, and she’s not. Like a lot of men who please Trump, Mullin pretends to be a tough guy without actually backing it up. That was always where this was headed, no matter how much Trump-pleasing work Noem did — or had done. 

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According to a Truth Social post from Trump early on Thursday afternoon, Noem will be replaced at DHS by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., as of March 31. Mullin is a vigorous supporter of Trump and the MAGA movement, and his vacated U.S. Senate seat is likely to remain in Republican hands.

Earlier this week, Noem faced a humiliating and highly unusual personal grilling before judiciary committees in both the House and Senate, as Democratic members asked embarrassing questions about her personal life, including Noem’s alleged relationship with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who has been serving as an unpaid special government employee under this administration. Noem did not directly deny an affair with Lewandowski in response to repeated questioning, as her husband sat behind her in the committee chamber.

“I think the ridiculousness of this and the tabloids that you are quoting and referencing are insane,” Noem said. “This is a thing I have refuted for years.”

She was also pressed by members of Congress over a $220 million ad campaign from the department that prominently featured her, as well as contracts agreed by the department that appeared to be non-competitive, in violation of government statutes. agreed to with only limited competition between contractors.

In Trump’s Truth Social post, the president said Noem “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results” but said she was being moved to a newly invented position as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere,” to be announced this weekend. He thanked Noem “for her service at ‘Homeland.'”

Formerly known as the avidly pro-Trump governor of South Dakota, Noem was tapped lead DHS shortly after the 2024 election, and now becomes by far the most prominent Trump Cabinet official ousted during the second term. She was reportedly considered as a possible running mate on Trump’s 2024 ticket, though she was passed over in favor of JD Vance, then a newly-elected Ohio senator, after Noem published a book in which she boasted about shooting a poorly-behaved family dog.

Noem led DHS through the first year of Trump’s second term in office, overseeing both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection as the agencies saw an unprecedented surge in funding and resources, growing to become an ever-present force in American life. Under Noem’s leadership, the agencies adopted wearing masks to conceal their identities, while rushing to complete quotas imposed on them, with the administration demanding 3,000 deportations a day.

Earlier this year, Noem sought to pin ICE and CBP’s violent crackdown in Minneapolis on White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s closest adviser. A source told Axios that Noem had said, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”

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U.S. public opinion has largely turned against Trump’s immigration enforcement policy, and coupled with the rumors about Noem’s private life, that apparently made her position untenable. Immigration was previously understood as one of Trump’s strongest issues in public polling, most Americans now disapprove of the administration’s handling of the issue. Two prominent GOP senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, publicly turned against Noem on Jan. 27, asking the president to fire her.

The GOP’s mass deportation policy came to a head in Minneapolis after officers under the DHS killed two American citizens within a two-week period in January, first Renee Nicole Good, a mother and Minneapolis resident, and later Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse working at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital. Prior to these killings, DHS employees had killed six people as part of their immigration crackdown, though it was the videos and the nature of the killings in Minneapolis that escalated the political fallout.

Following the killing of Pretti, who was tackled by a group of officers and shot numerous times by two different officers, congressional Republicans turning on Noem as a scapegoat, along with CBP’s former “commander at large,” Gregory Bovino, whose title was dissolved after the killings. Bovino’s apparent demotion came after he made demonstrably false claims that Pretti was aiming to kill federal agents. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” Bovino said.

Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” was sent to Minneapolis to assume command of operations there, vowing to continue the deadly operation, while promising that it would be “safer.”

“What we’ve been working on is making this operation safer, more efficient, by the book,” Homan said at a Jan. 29 press conference. “The mission is going to improve because of the changes we’re making internally.” None of these changes, it appears, was enough to save Kristi Noem’s job.

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The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, 2026, set off the process of selecting a new supreme leader. It is only the second such transition in the Islamic Republic’s 47-year history and the first since the ailing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini transferred power to Khamenei in June 1989.

As stipulated in Article 111 of the Iranian Constitution, a three-person Interim Leadership Council was created on March 1, 2026. It consists of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, who is also a candidate for supreme leader.

The council has temporarily assumed the duties of the supreme leader until a new one is appointed by the Assembly of Experts – an elected body of 88 clerics. The assembly is expected to swiftly elect the next supreme leader, especially with Iran being in a state of war.

Assuming it can be carried out, a swift succession is meant to signal to domestic dissidents and external enemies alike that the regime – or ruling system, nezam – remains in place. During the assembly’s first meeting to select a new supreme leader on March 3, Israel bombed its building in the city of Qom. The building was evacuated before the strike, and no casualties were reported.

Some media reports have portrayed Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as a top contender, even though he lacks the status of a senior cleric. Although his is just one of a number of names that has been talked of as a potential successor.

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israel would kill any successor to Khamenei that is selected. Nevertheless, the Assembly of Experts appears determined to carry out its constitutional duty and appoint a new supreme leader.

As a scholar of Iranian politics, I argue that the succession process, irrespective of its outcome, has never been free or transparent.

The history of succession

The Iranian supreme leader serves for life and is the highest religious and political authority in the Islamic Republic.

He is the commander in chief of the armed forces and oversees other key institutions, such as the judicial branch and state media.

He also supervises the Guardian Council, which has the power to vet electoral candidates and veto parliamentary legislation.

In this capacity, the supreme leader has the final say on foreign policy and different areas of domestic policy.

The first leader of the Islamic Republic – Khomeini – ruled between 1979 and 1989. In addition to being a revolutionary and charismatic figure, Khomeini was a grand ayatollah and a “source of emulation,” or marja’ al-taqlid.

A grand ayatollah and source of emulation is among a select few of the highest-ranking clerics. He is considered a “sign of God” in Twelver Shiism, the largest branch of Shiism and the state religion of Iran. A grand ayatollah and source of emulation has the authority to make legal decisions for his lay followers and for lower-ranking clerics in Iran and the wider Shiite world.

There are several dozen grand ayatollahs and sources of emulation in the world. Most of them reside and run seminaries in the holy cities of Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq. Shiites can choose which one they want to follow as a senior figure of the faith, making the institution decentralized.

The electoral facade

The members of the Assembly of Experts serve eight-year terms and are authorized to elect, supervise and, if necessary, dismiss the supreme leader. Article 111 of the Iranian Constitution grants the assembly the authority to remove the supreme leader if he is deemed incapable or unqualified politically and religiously. However, it is unlikely to do so given that its members are first vetted by the Guardian Council before being elected by a popular vote of Iranian men and women ages 18 and older.

It should be noted that the members of the Guardian Council are appointed by the supreme leader and the chief justice, or head of the judiciary, who is also appointed by the supreme leader.

Therefore, through the council, the supreme leader approves the candidates. They are potentially elected to a body that oversees him, making the process far from free and fair.

In the last election for the Assembly of Experts in March 2024, which had a historically low voter turnout of about 40%, the Guardian Council disqualified many candidates.

This was particularly the case with moderates and reformists, who tended to oppose the supreme leader on various issues. For this reason, the assembly has not been known to seriously supervise or challenge the supreme leader, and its proceedings have remained strictly confidential or closed to the public.

The 1989 succession

As Khomeini approached the end of his life in 1989, the constitution was amended so that a lower-ranking cleric like Khamenei could assume the position.

As a seminary student of Khomeini who was more interested in politics than religion, Khamenei ranked below an ayatollah. Within the Shiite clerical hierarchy, and like other Islamic scholars who studied under an ayatollah, he earned the title Hojjat al-Eslam, or “proof of Islam.” He possessed the foundational knowledge of Islam without the advanced and independent reasoning – ijtihad – required for an ayatollah.

After being appointed to succeed Khomeini, Khamenei’s rank was elevated overnight to a grand ayatollah. The reason for the appointment was that Khamenei was a longtime loyalist and regime insider, even though he lacked the charismatic and religious authority of Khomeini.

Until 1989, Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri – a prominent theologian and revolutionary leader – was expected to take over as the supreme leader. That year, however, he was ultimately passed over by Khomeini and detained by the Revolutionary Guard.

Montazeri succumbed to this fate because he had questioned Khamenei’s qualifications as supreme leader and condemned the regime for its repression, especially the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 by a committee of four prosecutors. After continuing to criticize Khamenei in 1997, Montazeri was placed under house arrest under the pretext of protecting him from hard-liners. In 2003 he was released by the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who had received pressure from parliamentarians to do so.

The situation with succession today

For years, rumors circulated that Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the recently slain supreme leader, could be named the next one. However, such a scenario seemed unlikely during the lifetime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who openly opposed it.

He did so to avoid antagonizing parts of the political and religious establishment that categorically reject hereditary or dynastic succession. After all, the concept is considered antithetical or anathema to the Iranian Revolution, which deposed the monarchy led by the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in 1979.

From a political perspective, Mojtaba has never held public office. By contrast, his father served as Iran’s third president between 1981 and 1989.

Religiously speaking, Mojtaba – like his father before he became the supreme leader – is only a midranking cleric, though he teaches theology at the renowned Qom Seminary. As with his father, and for political purposes, the Assembly of Experts would have to elevate Mojtaba’s status to a grand ayatollah, even without the requisite religious credentials.

It is worth mentioning that Mojtaba is being considered for supreme leader alongside some seniors clerics whose credentials come closer to that of a grand ayatollah. Alireza Arafi, whose name has also come up as a potential successor, attained the rank of an ayatollah, or mujtahid, after publishing over 20 books and articles on Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy.

That said, in 2022 his religious qualifications were called into question. That year he joined the Assembly of Experts without taking the required written exam administered by the Guardian Council, even though he had been a member of it since 2019. Instead, he was appointed to the assembly by Khamenei through a legal loophole and without being elected. This incident indicated that Arafi was favored by Khamenei and may have an advantage as a candidate for supreme leader.

Another candidate, Ayatollah Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri, is an Islamic philosopher and theoretician. In this capacity, he serves as the head of the Qom Academy of Islamic Sciences and has been a member of the Assembly of Experts since 2016.

Yet another contender is Ayatollah Hashem Hosseini Bushehri. He was educated in the Qom Seminary and became the Friday prayer leader of the city. Alongside Arafi, Bushehri serves as a deputy chairman of the Assembly of Experts.
As the current conflict continues, and even with the Interim Leadership Council in place, the Assembly of Experts is under immense pressure to rapidly rule on succession to preserve the system.

Mojtaba Khamenei’s election, as I see it, would continue the trend of prioritizing political preferences over religious principles that started in 1989.

This piece includes material from an earlier one published on May 23, 2024.

Eric Lob, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Sheehy joined the U.S. Capitol Police‘s attempt to remove a man protesting the U.S. and Israel‘s war with Iran. The hearing of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee featured senior military officials testifying on military readiness. Former Marine Brian McGinnis began protesting around thirty minutes into the hearing.

“America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel,” the veteran said, as police and Sheehy struggled to remove him.

Senator Sheehy joined Capitol Police in lifting up and ejecting anti war protestor Brian McGinnis from a SASC subcommittee hearing. McGinnis is a Green Party candidate running for Senate in N.C. An antiwar activist filmed the video below: pic.twitter.com/0dVA0ORWXQ

— Alan He (@alanhe) March 4, 2026

McGinnis clung to the hearing room door as police puled him away. The Green Party candidate running for a Senate seat in North Carolina stuck his arm between a door and its jamb. With his arm lodged, he yelled, “No one wants to fight for Israel.”

An audible snap can be heard in the video after Sheehy joined the effort to remove McGinnis. Another protestor yelled, “A U.S. senator just broke the hand of a Marine.”

The police and Sheehy eventually pulled McGinnis back into the room to remove his hand from inside the door jamb. He later confirmed that his arm was broken online.

Capitol Police said in a statement that McGinnis “put everyone in a dangerous position by violently resisting and fighting our officers’ attempts to remove him from the room.” They added that he “got his own arm stuck in a door to resist our officers and force his way back into the hearing room.”

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“Protests are not allowed inside the congressional buildings,” the agency wrote. “There are plenty of other spots on Capitol grounds, outside, where demonstrations are allowed.”

Sheehy called McGinnis an “unhinged protestor” and said he joined in his removal hoping to “deescalate the situation.”

“This gentleman came to the Capitol looking for a confrontation, and he got one. I hope he gets the help he needs without causing further violence,” Sheehy wrote.

Capitol Police were attempting to remove an unhinged protestor from the Armed Services hearing. He was fighting back. I decided to help out and deescalate the situation.

This gentleman came to the Capitol looking for a confrontation, and he got one. I hope he gets the help he… https://t.co/MU1THo8fKA

— Tim Sheehy (@TimSheehyMT) March 4, 2026

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Because of Gabbard’s past support of whistleblowers, increased public profile as DNI and ongoing rumors concerning the state of her relationship with Trump, which has appeared to be in constant flux, this case has attracted substantial media attention since it was first revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 2. The story has many layers, and the media has missed several key points involving Gabbard’s conflict of interest and how the whistleblower system has been an abject failure.

“Exquisitely” classified

As an attorney who represented Thomas Drake, one of the earliest intelligence community whistleblowers to have used the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I know this territory intimately.  

According to the Journal, an intelligence community whistleblower filed a highly-classified complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), an independent watchdog office, in May 2025. Among the allegations was a claim that Gabbard’s office blocked the proper distribution of the complaint for eight months — including to Congress — for political reasons. Another alleged that lawyers, presumably from the DNI’s Office of General Counsel, failed to refer a potential crime to the Justice Department for political reasons.

We don’t know the substance of the intelligence report underlying the whistleblower complaint, but the government claims it is “exquisitely” classified, which raises an immediate problem: That’s not a real classification level. The report apparently involves an intelligence service intercepting a conversation between two foreign nationals about Iran and Jared Kushner’s influence on his father-in-law, the president. At the time, the Trump administration was considering a strike on Iran, which in fact occurred at the end of June 2025.

Under law, the ICIG is required to assess whether a whistleblower complaint is credible within two weeks of receipt. If the complaint is deemed credible and raises an “urgent concern,” the inspector general then has seven days to share it with lawmakers. This is where things started to go sideways.

Sinister snafus

On June 4, 2025, acting ICIG Tamara Johnson initially determined that the complaint met the definition of an “urgent concern” under applicable law, but she could not determine whether the allegations were credible. Specifically, she found that the allegations involving restricted distribution did not appear credible, while she was unable to reach a determination on the failure-to-refer allegations. 

A few days later, Johnson received new information that gave her clarity and led to her finding that the restricted distribution allegation did not appear credible. She was still, though, unable to assess the credibility of the failure-to-refer allegation. In an interview with MeidasTouch, the whistleblower’s lead counsel, Andrew Bakaj, also conceded that he’s “not familiar as much with that particular [failure-to-refer] allegation.” I don’t know what that means exactly, other than that perhaps both Johnson and Bakaj found the failure-to-refer allegation trickier to navigate. That could have been because it’s hard to prove a negative, or because they weren’t sure it amounted to a possible federal crime that would legally require them to refer it to the Justice Department.

Whatever the case, neither finding was shared with the whistleblower or their counsel for a staggering eight months, an omission that created a second problem. If the whistleblower had learned of the credibility and urgent concern determination in a timely manner, that would have allowed them to go to Congress last summer. Instead, the government is now scrambling, saying that its unprecedented delay proves the claim could not have been urgent.

Regardless of the government’s determination, the whistleblower is still permitted to share the complaint directly with Congress. The only hiccup is that the DNI must provide guidance on how to do so securely, which brings us to a third problem: Instead of providing guidance, Gabbard — the former champion of whistleblowers — apparently sat on the complaint for eight months and stonewalled the whistleblower and their lawyer. 

And worse, during this delay, she reportedly planted a mole in the ICIG’s office to snitch about the situation directly to her — obviously compromising the office’s independence. This fourth problem makes the first three look like sinister, rather than innocent, bureaucratic snafus.

How the whistleblower process should have worked

According to reports, the employee properly followed the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA) — a misnomer because what it actually provides is an investigative process, not protection. Under the ICWPA, an intelligence community  employee “who intends to report to Congress a complaint or information with respect to an urgent concern” may do so to their intelligence agency’s inspector general or the ICIG. A determination must be made within 14 days on whether the complaint appears credible and raises an “urgent concern.” Those initial steps appear to have occurred. 

Once the ICIG determines that the complaint credibly raises an urgent concern, they  then forward it to the relevant agency head — in this case, Gabbard — who has a week to transmit it to the congressional intelligence committees. 

I’m surprised that no one has pointed out that since she and her general counsel were subjects of the complaint, Gabbard and her office have a clear conflict of interest in making any determination. This made it clearly inappropriate for them to have played a substantive or even a procedural role in its handling. This is spelled out under a number of different authorities, including executive branch ethics regulations, which cover the DNI, and intelligence community constraints. 

It’s baffling, to say the least, that Gabbard did not recuse herself from this matter.

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But her inaction worsened the conflict. Instead of making a determination and then notifying the whistleblower’s counsel — or letting him know they did not have enough information to do so — Gabbard doubled down. During the eight months she held onto the complaint, she apparently stonewalled the whistleblower and refused multiple times to supply their lawyer with guidance on how they could securely share the complaint directly with the congressional intelligence committees, which was the whistleblower’s statutory right. When the delay became public, Gabbard responded by tossing up a confetti of excuses. 

Amateur Hour

When the fracas became public, Gabbard decided to litigate it on X and go personal on the whistleblower, inadvertently telegraphing her weak position. She posted a Trumpian tweet: “Senator Mark Warner and his friends in the Propaganda Media have repeatedly lied to the American people that I or the ODNI ‘hid’ a whistleblower complaint in a safe for eight months…This is a blatant lie.” 

Her spokesperson characterized the complaint as a “politically motivated individual weaponizing their position in the Intelligence Community, submitting a baseless complaint and then burying it in highly classified information to create false intrigue.” (Since that individual remains anonymous, I’m not sure how Gabbard is assessing their motivations, and whatever those motivations might be, it’s irrelevant to the merits of the complaint.)

Gabbard’s often-contradictory excuse salad for the irregularities in handling the complaint didn’t help matters. The delay, she variously said, was due to the government shutdown, the complaint was a nothingburger, it required special handling because of its highly-classified content, it was found not credible, staff overturn slowed down processing, it was administratively closed, it was just gossip — and now it is subject to “executive privilege.” 

This last excuse is especially concerning. Executive privilege is the president’s power to withhold sensitive information and private discussions from Congress and the judicial branch to guarantee frank conversations with other executive branch officials. To my knowledge, no presidential administration has ever claimed that raw foreign intelligence itself is subject to executive privilege. While it has occasionally been asserted with regard to senior White House aides’ communications, in this case it’s unclear who, exactly, is asserting executive privilege over the intelligence report, on what basis and why. 

The icing on the cake of Gabbard’s nonsense, though, was when she claimed she wasn’t even aware of her responsibility to produce security guidance to the whistleblower’s counsel. As a lieutenant colonel in the military and a former congresswoman who served on the Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence & Special Operation, coupled with her admirable support for whistleblowers in the past, her alleged ignorance of how DNI works with respect to intelligence community whistleblowers defies credulity.

Whistleblower Déjà Vu​​

After 9/11, National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake began having contact with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under the ICWPA regarding a number of urgent concerns, including the NSA’s mass domestic surveillance that stripped away privacy protections for Americans. The process ultimately backfired on him. When the New York Times exposed the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, the government needed a fall guy. The agency referred Drake for criminal prosecution in what was the signature Espionage Act case of this century. The charges ultimately collapsed, but not before putting Drake through a harrowing ordeal detailed by The New Yorker, “60 Minutes” and the documentary “Silenced.”

In 2019, another inspector general whistleblower used the ICWPA to complain that Donald Trump engaged in improper dealings with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, alleging that the president pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political opponent, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter. In that case, which eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment, the inspector general deemed the report credible and an urgent concern, and forwarded it to Joseph Maguire, Trump’s acting DNI, who stopped the process cold. Maguire later said in a congressional hearing that he initially did not transmit the complaint to Congress because of executive privilege concerns.

Here we are again, having washed, rinsed and repeated the process with the same shampoo in a different scent. Some members from the Gang of Eight — the bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence committees — read a version of the whistleblower complaint, but it was apparently redacted. Some Democrats complained it may not have contained enough information to have allowed lawmakers a proper evaluation of the allegations.

Back in 2013, a number of people — ironically including one on the Gabbard whistleblower’s team — criticized Edward Snowden for not “going through proper channels.” Rather than blaming whistleblowers for not using corrupted channels, it’s time to admit that making the director of national intelligence an intermediary in the reporting process is a major error of the ICWPA. The position of DNI was created to fix major structural failures in how U.S. intelligence agencies coordinated before 9/11. It was supposed to improve information-sharing, not stymie it.

It has failed on all counts.

We don’t know why Gabbard continues to aggressively obstruct this whistleblower complaint. It sounds like she’s more concerned with protecting Jared Kushner, and perhaps Trump himself, than the public she’s supposed to serve. But we do know this: The ICWPA system for intelligence community whistleblowers depends on the knowledge, trust, credibility and good faith of the director of national intelligence. It’s a fatal flaw to make that person an intermediary, much less a gatekeeper, on a whistleblower’s path to congressional oversight. 

Tulsi Gabbard is clearly unqualified, unfit and too compromised for her job. But the ICWPA is ill-suited for those it is supposed to protect.

The post Tulsi Gabbard’s conflict of interest — and hypocrisy appeared first on Salon.com.

That is how the president strategizes. And let’s face it, it’s worked pretty well for him so far. 

Trump recovered his fortune by being rescued by a game show producer. Aside from being found civilly liable by a jury for sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll and being convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush-money case, he has managed to evade accountability for all of his crimes and abuses of power. Tens of millions of Americans even put him back in the White House after he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election and inspired an insurrection. He seems to think all this came about as a result of his strategic brilliance, or maybe his genetic superiority. But the fact is that it’s just plain old luck. Some people have more of it than they deserve, and he is definitely one of them. Over the course of his life, Trump has made decisions that would have destroyed the fortunes and reputations of anyone else. His greatest superpower is the ability to survive his own monumentally terrible judgement. 

Now, as he wages war against Iran in a widening conflict that is quickly engulfing the entire Middle East, Trump is putting that preternatural resilience to what may be its greatest test. The Islamic Republic is proving an able military enemy, and with only one ally — Israel — at his side and tepid public support, the president has no plan for how win or for what comes next. Apparently, he’s just going to “figure it out.” 

Part of that, the nation discovered on Tuesday, is an old method: using the CIA to arm and train unorganized opposition. The Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is in talks about arming Kurdish forces to lead an effort to “dislodge the regime.” According to CNN, the CIA is already engaged on the ground and Trump has been speaking with Kurdish leaders.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the rumors of a Kurdish insurgency “completely false.” But the New York Times reported that the CIA had already “given small arms” to pro-American Kurdish forces in Iran before the current war started in hopes of destabilizing the Islamic Republic. 

The CIA and U.S. military’s use of foreign militias has a long — and checkered — history spanning at least 65 years. The record shows that they have rarely had any positive effect, and most often, they have made situations worse. 

Throughout the Cold War and beyond, America attempted to overthrow governments or fight proxy wars that often led to wider conflicts or the imposition of regimes that were worse than those they replaced. Far too often, it was done for the same reason Trump is citing now with Iran — to install, or at least create the conditions for, a new regime that “we can work with.” And sometimes, that has meant having little concern for the country’s people or democracy.

Consider the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 or the Reagan administration’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista government. The former saw the CIA, in a plan that began under Dwight D. Eisenhower and was approved by his successor John F. Kennedy, training a group of Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro to make a secret landing in Cuba and fight their way to Havana, leading a popular uprising to topple the president. The group were captured immediately, leading to international embarrassment for the U.S. and for the young president, who took responsibility in public and, behind closed doors, vowed to never trust the CIA again. 

In 1963, the agency supported a military coup by South Vietnamese forces against Ngo Dinh Diem, the country’s president. The act, which was intended to stabilize the country in its fight against North Vietnamese communists, did the opposite, helping to transform America’s role in the conflict from advisory to an all-out war that left over 58,000 U.S. service members — and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian military and civilians dead.  

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, under successive Republican and Democratic administrations, the CIA supported Operation Condor, a network of right-wing dictatorships throughout Latin America including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. 

Then there are the more recent covert adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 1980s, the U.S. supported the Mujahadeen militants in their war against the Russians. Unfortunately, the Mujahadeen became disillusioned with their helpful allies and became the Taliban. That didn’t work out too well either. The CIA had been in Iraq in various capacities for decades before the first and second war, and they even went in prior to the 2003 invasion to — wait for it — establish contact with the Kurdish forces to secure their help. 

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But perhaps the most relevant precedent in Iran is the original CIA-backed overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s democratically-elected prime minister, in 1953, which restored power to Reza Pahlavi, the last shah. This was done primarily to restore control of Iranian oil fields, which Mossadegh’s government had nationalized, to British energy companies. As with Afghanistan, this act sowed seeds of resentments and helped lead to the revolution in 1979, which got us to where we are today. 

The first days of the war have been chaotic, as Trump, members of his administration and his congressional allies have given competing rationales to justify the war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio seems to have landed on the doltish explanation that because Israel was planning to attack Iran, the U.S. had no choice but to join the campaign to preempt Iranian retaliation against American assets in the region. The implication of this slip was stunning: That America was a passive, secondary partner to Israel and could wield little influence over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For his part, Trump said on Tuesday he just “had a feeling” they were going to attack.

The administration has been all over the map, insisting that they were annihilating Iran’s nuclear program, which they previously claimed to have obliterated; degrading the regime’s missile capability; promoting regime change and supporting a popular uprising; and making sure Iran can’t project power in the rest of the Middle East. Trump even suggested the war was revenge for Iranian threats against him.

It’s impossible to be sure just why they chose to attack the regime when they did, other than the fact that Trump has almost certainly been persuaded by the likes of Rubio and long-time Iran hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that it will mean another path to glory. The problem is that they apparently forgot to plan what comes next. 

Trump has said that he hopes Iran will be another Venezuela, a simple decapitation mission in which the people who replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s supreme leader who was killed on Saturday in an air strike, would be eager to be bought off and do his bidding under threat of more bombing and carnage. But a problem emerged. Trump complained that the people he’d apparently been told were good candidates to become his puppets have all been killed. “I guess the worst case is we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person,” he said to reporters in the Oval Office. “That could happen.”

Indeed it could.

Trump exhorted the Iranian people to rise up against the government and threatened the authorities, telling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps via video they would get immunity if they laid down their arms. Who they are supposed to surrender to is unclear, to say the least, and how any of this could possibly come to pass without a U.S. presence on the ground is virtually impossible. While Trump has said that hasn’t ruled out sending in combat troops, it’s hard to imagine that he’s so far gone that what the Defense Department has dubbed Operation Epic Fury would be nothing compared to the fury unleashed by the American people if he launched some kind of ground invasion. 

We had better hope Trump gets lucky once again. Otherwise, the results of his and Netanyahu’s war in Iran are likely to be as successful as previous U.S. efforts at regime change have been — which is to say not successful at all.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained Monday that the administration’s decision to attack Iran, is partially a function of Israeli policy, saying that the United States’ junior partner in the Middle East was planning to attack Iran with or without American support, leaving the administration’s hands tied.

“The president made the very wise decision — we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said at a press conference. He later denied making the statement, and later, Trump contradicted him, saying that Iran was planning to strike first.

Rubio’s comments came after Republicans spent the prior weekend falling in line with Trump’s message, despite the fact that the president (and most of his surrogates) explicitly campaigned in 2024 on not launching new wars.

Entanglement in the Middle East comes despite weak support among the American public. A flash Reuters and Ipsos poll found that just 27% of American adults support the war, with 43% disapproving of the war and 30% unsure at this juncture. Other surveys have found simultaneously more support for the war, as well as more opposition to the war, with fewer respondents answering “unsure.”

Regardless, Republicans are rallying around the president, who has earned the distinction of launching more attacks on individual countries than any other commander in chief. So far, Trump has attacked seven countries: Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, alongside a spate of killings of boaters in the Pacific and Caribbean. The U.S. has also this week launched military actions in Ecuador, though details are scarce.

Trump, meanwhile, is signaling that the new war “can be fought ‘forever,’” saying in a recent Truth Social post that “we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons.” Some experts have openly disagreed, saying some weapon stockpiles, particularly of certain missile interceptors, could run low.

Democrats have been more divided on the war, with some opting to oppose it outright and others, including the party’s leaders, opting to object to the process by which the administration decided to go to war.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for example, said in a statement that “The administration has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat.”

“Confronting Iran’s malign regional activities, nuclear ambitions, and harsh oppression of the Iranian people demands American strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity,” Schumer said. “Unfortunately, President Trump’s fitful cycles of lashing out and risking wider conflict are not a viable strategy.”

As recently as February, Schumer boasted that, under his leadership, America has supported Israel more than ever before.

(Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images) A plume of smoke rises after a strike on the Iranian capital Tehran, on March 3, 2026.

“I’m going to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs. I will continue to fight for it, and we delivered more security assistance to Israel, our ally, under my leadership than ever, ever before,” Schumer said, per a report from The Forward.

More consequentially, Democratic leaders have also been standing by as pro-Israel groups attempt to sway party primaries. When asked by journalist Wajahat Ali whether he would recommend that Democrats stop taking money from AIPAC, Jeffries has said that he plans to continue fundraising as he has been doing and would allow Democrats to fundraise as they see fit.

This comes as pro-Israel networks are creating new groups to influence Democratic Party primaries that don’t have the same name recognition as groups like AIPAC or Democratic Majority for Israel.

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Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim reports that a new committee, the Article One PAC, is helping support the favored pro-Israel candidate in a North Carolina primary. As of Wednesday, the primary was still too close to call and headed for a recount.

The committee had previously supported former Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way, the preferred candidate of the pro-Israel lobby, in a recent New Jersey primary. Now it’s supporting Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., in a North Carolina primary to the tune of $600,000. Foushee had previously said that she would not accept money from AIPAC in the race.

Nida Allam, who ran against Foushee in the primary, told Salon that the reported donor network supporting Foushee shows that the Democratic Party “works overtime for its corporate donors and warmongering lobbies at the expense of everyday people.”

“I would not be surprised if AIPAC was supporting my opponent — she’s taken photo-ops with Netanyahu and refuses to call Israel’s actions a genocide. That’s exactly the type of politicians AIPAC loves to prop up,” Allam said.

Jeffries’s campaign declined to comment for this article. Foushee’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Democratic National Committee has also buried its post-2024 election autopsy, which, per Axios, found that Vice President Kamala Harris lost significant support due to the Biden administration’s unwavering military support for Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel’s response has been widely criticized as going above and beyond retaliation, targeting Palestinian civilians and children in what countless experts call a genocide. While it’s impossible to determine whether a single issue might have cost Harris the election, the report’s conclusion — and its burial — highlights the relative lack of movement within the party on this issue.

This maneuvering from the Democratic leadership is happening as Americans’ sympathies, and especially those of Democrats, shift away from Israel. A recent Gallup poll found that, for the first time, the plurality of Americans sympathizes more with Palestinians than Israelis, 41% to 36%. This is most pronounced among Democrats, with 65% sympathizing more with Palestinians compared to 17% who sympathize more with Israelis.

Similarly, among independents, the plurality sympathizes more with Palestinians for the first time ever, with 41% sympathizing with Palestinians more and 30% sympathizing with Israelis more.

While Republicans have not seen the same magnitude of a shift, there have still been changes: sympathies for Israelis have fallen to 70%, while sympathies with Palestinians have risen to 13%.

Taken together, the Republican support for war and the Democrats’ status quo approach to Israel and Palestine paint a picture of two parties that are out of step with voters when it comes to American policy in the Middle East.

James Zogby, a former member of the DNC and the founder of the Arab American Institute, told Salon that this lack of change is itself typical, at least in his experience with the Democratic Party.

“You’ve got people thinking that, if we just don’t talk about this issue and we just focus on affordability — they’ll pick some aspect of [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s win — forgetting that the real reason Mamdani won had to do with how freaking authentic he was,” Zogby said. “There’s partly a fear of still talking about Israel because of the donors. There’s also a fear because the consultants say, ‘This is a distracting issue. This is a controversial issue. We don’t talk about that. We talk about things that people really care about.’ And they don’t have a clue what people really care about. So there’s this lack of imagination. They’re stuck in a mindset that they can’t get out of.”

At the same time, Zogby said, public support has helped buoy grassroots, outsider candidates in Democratic Primaries, including progressives like Analilia Mejia, who recently won a primary in New Jersey, despite significant spending from pro-Israel groups.

Zogby also noted that, despite increasingly critical perspectives on Israel gaining traction in the GOP, no coalitional organization exists to pressure elected Republicans on this issue. Zogby shared a story from the 1992 presidential primaries, when a Republican insider asked him for help crafting a proposed party plank for the GOP, which would have expressed support for President George H. W. Bush’s efforts to convene the Madrid Peace Conference.

“They would not even allow a second of his amendment in the platform debate; he was crushed. He presented it in dead silence. No one seconded it. End of debate. There’s not a lot of discussion that goes on over there,” Zogby said. “The difference here is that on the Democratic side, there is a real coalition that has been around since ‘84 and it does include my community. It also includes progressive Jews and includes Black voters, Latino voters, Asian voters increasingly and young kids, college kids.”

What’s unclear is whether and to what degree either party will stand to suffer or gain politically from their opponents’ positions in the midterms. While it’s commonly recited that voters don’t normally make their decisions based on a party or candidate’s foreign policy, an unpopular new war in the Middle East, which an ally ostensibly dragged the U.S. into, may push the issue higher in terms of voters’ priorities.

The post Both parties at odds with own voters over Middle East policy appeared first on Salon.com.

Lewandowski has an unusual role at DHS, where he is not a paid government employee but is nonetheless acting as a top official, helping Noem run the sprawling agency. For months, members of Congress have asked the agency to detail the scope of his work and authority.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., asked Noem whether Lewandowski has “a role in approving contracts” at DHS. Noem responded with a flat denial: “No.”

But internal DHS records reviewed by ProPublica contradict Noem’s Senate testimony. The records show Lewandowski personally approved a multimillion-dollar equipment contract at the agency last summer.

That was not a one-off. Lewandowski has approved numerous contracts at DHS and often needs to sign off on large ones before any money goes out the door, the current and former department employees said.

Last year, Noem imposed a new policy that consolidated her and her top aides’ power over all spending at DHS, requiring that she personally review and approve all contracts above $100,000. Before the contracts reach Noem, they must be approved by a series of political appointees, who each sign or initial a checklist sometimes referred to internally as a routing sheet. Typically, the last name on the checklist before Noem’s is Lewandowski’s, the DHS officials said.

Under federal law, it is a crime to “knowingly and willfully” make a false statement to Congress. But in practice, it is rarely prosecuted.

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson reiterated Noem’s claim. “Mr. Lewandowski does NOT play a role in approving contracts,” the spokesperson said. “Mr. Lewandowski does not receive a salary or any federal government benefits. He volunteers his time to serve the American people.” Lewandowski did not respond to a request for comment.

Several news outlets, including Politico, have previously reported on aspects of Lewandowski’s involvement in contracting at DHS.

There have been widespread reports of delays caused by the new contract approval process at the agency, which has responsibilities spanning from immigration enforcement to disaster relief to airport security. DHS has asserted that the review process saved taxpayers billions of dollars.

A similar sign-off process exists for other policy decisions at DHS. One of the checklists, about rolling back protections for Haitians in the U.S., emerged in litigation last year. It featured the signatures of several top DHS advisers. Under them was Lewandowski’s signature, and then Noem’s.

Lewandowski is what’s known as a “special government employee,” a designation historically used to let experts serve in government for limited periods without having to give up their outside jobs. (At the beginning of the Trump administration, Elon Musk was one, too.) Special government employees have to abide by only some of the same ethics rules as normal officials and are permitted to have sources of outside income.

Lewandowski has declined to disclose whether he is being paid by any outside companies and, if so, who.

The post Kristi Noem misled Congress about top aide’s role appeared first on Salon.com.

In a week where she was called to testify before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees about her time in Donald Trump’s Cabinet, Noem was asked to respond to accusations that she held up Federal Emergency Management Agency contracts and lived for free in the house of the U.S. Coast Guard commandant. 

In his opening statement Wednesday, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary committee said Noem was “living rent-free in the official waterfront residence reserved for the commandant.”

An Aug. 15 Washington Post report claimed Noem was living in the commandant’s house at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin acknowledged that Noem was living there because of threats to her safety. Noem rejected the accusation this week, saying she is renting an apartment with her own money.

“Let me clarify a couple things. I’m not in the commandant’s house. I’m in a Coast Guard house, but not the commandant’s house,” she said to the committee. “The commandant is in his house.”

Senate Democrats released a report Wednesday finding Noem’s policy of personally approving FEMA expenditures over $100,000 has held up over 1000 contracts, grants and awards. The report from Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Andy Kim, D-N.J., states that “the Secretary’s directive delayed approval or left approval pending for 1,034 contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards as of September 8, 2025.” The delays included funding for survivors of the fatal July 2025 flash floods in Texas and Hurricane Helene.

“Communities across our country are bearing the consequences of Kristi Noem’s failures as Secretary,” Kim said in a press release. “For an administration that touts the importance of efficiency, her needless red tape is proven to have left vulnerable communities without crucial funding when they needed it most.”  

A spokesperson for DHS denied the report’s findings.

“Contrary to claims in the forthcoming report, there are no systemic delays. There is no evidence of a three-week average wait for aid decisions,” the spokesperson said. “In fact, Secretary Noem’s review process was specifically designed to break through bureaucratic red tape and expedite funding requests that had previously languished for years under prior administrations.”

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Joint U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran over the weekend plunged the region into conflict. Hundreds of civilians have reportedly been killed in Iran. Casualties have been reported in multiple other countries, including Israel, Oman and the U.A.E.

Many Americans were still in the region as hostilities commenced, and were left with little help from both the State Department and U.S. embassies. President Donald Trump said there was no evacuation plan in place following the strikes, because the joint operation “happened very quickly.”

“We thought and I thought…we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

Consular services were suspended by the U.S. embassy in Qatar, which advised Americans to “shelter-in-place” or leave if possible, though the embassy would not be providing assistance. The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem said it is “working closely with Washington to support American citizens in the region” but did not mention arranging evacuations.

The situation and lack of a solid evacuation plan have left Americans in the region with “very limited” options available, according to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

“As of now, the best option is utilizing Israel’s Ministry of Tourism shuttle bus to Taba, Egypt and getting flights from there or going on to Cairo for flights back to the US,” Huckabee wrote on social media on Monday.

One traveler said she had to “self-evacuate” from Kuwait, reportedly driving for eight hours to reach King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, before flying to Cairo.

“The government of the U.S. did not help us at all, even though they’re saying that they are on the news,” travel influencer Alyssa Ramos said in a video on Instagram. “That is lies. Please, don’t believe it.”

Ramos said the cost of traveling from Kuwait to the airport in Saudi Arabia was $1,200, relying on locals for assistance, along with an SUV ride from a Bahraini driver. Ramos also said that her group chat for people looking to use her “land evacuation” plan has roughly 800 members.

“We’re arranging spreadsheets with transportation companies to get [travelers] in groups to help get [them] out,” Ramos said.

Democratic politicians criticized the Trump administration for not having an evacuation plan in place prior to the strikes.

“Warnings to citizens to evacuate 3 days into this war, when airspace is closed, is a clear sign of ZERO strategy and planning,” Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., wrote on X. “This Administration must immediately develop a plan to get our citizens out of harm’s way.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., blasted the administration for “refusing to help people leave the region.” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., demanded that Rubio “immediately schedule U.S. government evacuation flights for the stranded Americans in danger.”

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Around 1,500 Americans across the Middle East are requesting evacuation assistance from the Department of State, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio reported that “9,000 Americans have been able to leave the region” since the U.S. launched strikes on Iran began last Saturday.

A joint statement to Rubio from 61 Democratic lawmakers called the issues Americans abroad are facing “predictable” and pushed the State Department to “help those Americans affected return to the United States safely and quickly.” In a statement to Salon on Thursday, the State Department said that “over 17,500 American citizens” have returned from the Middle East since February 28.

“We have assisted nearly 6,500 Americans abroad, including offering security guidance and travel assistance,” the department reported.

Rubio urged Americans to call a State Department hotline for assistance on Wednesday, but that hotline merely told callers “do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation at this time.”

“There are currently no evacuation points,” a recording obtained by ABC stated.

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“This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president,” Hegseth said.

When reached by Salon, the Pentagon declined to offer clarification on Hegseth’s comments.

U.S. and Israeli forces launched joint strikes on Iran on Saturday. The airstrikes left widespread destruction throughout Iran, and resulted in the deaths of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several high-ranking Iranian military officials. The civilian death toll is reportedly in the hundreds.

Hegseth told reporters that Iran has been waging war against the US for “47 long years,” dating back to the overthrow of the shah in 1979. He called the strikes “retribution against their ayatollah and his death cult” while denying that. the U.S. sought to remove the ayatollah from power.

“This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change and the world is better off for it,” Hegseth said.

When asked about a timeline for operations, Hegseth lashed out at the press, stressing that the US has “set the terms of this war from start to finish.”

For his part, President Donald Trump warned that more strikes are planned for Iran.

“We haven’t even started hitting them hard,” Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “We’re knocking the crap out of them…We’ve got the greatest military in the world, and we’re using it.”

Trump offered a clearer view of the timeline for the operation than Hegseth. He said that he expected the conflict to come to an end within the month.

“I always thought it would be four weeks,” he said, “And we’re a little ahead of schedule.”

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Despite Trump’s rosy outlook, support for U.S. strikes against Iran is low among Americans. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that roughly 27% of Americans support the strikes, while more than 70% either oppose them or are uncertain. On Capitol Hill, members of Congress are notably divided on the legality of the strikes.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., defended the operation. Both lawmakers are strong supporters of Israel. Gottheimer said the strikes, “with our key democratic ally Israel” were carried out to “defend our national security,” while Fetterman praised Trump for being “willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region.”

Most Republicans voiced support for the strikes, but there were some notable outliers in the GOP.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a co-sponsor of a bipartisan war powers resolution meant to pull the U.S. out of the conflict, called the strikes a distraction from the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

“Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will,” Massie said.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. said he “sympathy for the plight of the Iranian people” while has decrying the airstrikes as the start of “yet another preemptive war.”

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., called for Congress to “rein in this president” and asked the upper chamber to vote on a separate war powers resolution from Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

“It should have been brought to the floor before this President sent troops into harm’s way with no explanation or plan,” Kelly wrote on X.

Legislators will vote on both resolutions this week, though their futures are uncertain. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., gave the odds for Massie’s resolution passing the House at “40 to 60 percent,” while Fetterman said Kaine’s resolution is “an empty gesture.”

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Links to the offline files now return a “page not found” error on the department’s website.  DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre told CBS News that they have “not deleted any files from the library” and that the files will be available after “redactions are made.”

“Our team is working around the clock to address victim concerns, redact personally identifiable information and any images of a sexual nature,” she said in a statement.

The removed files related to Trump were first discovered in a Feb. 24 investigation by NPR. The outlet found several documents that were withheld centered on an FBI investigation into claims that Trump sexually abused a minor in the 1980s.

The DOJ said many of the offline files will be reuploaded by the end of the week, but it is unclear if the pages related to this investigation and other tips against Trump will be reentered into the database.

In a press conference on Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the case files total 6 million pages. Blanche said that the files they did not publish were withheld to protect survivors and avoid interference with ongoing investigations. However, some lawmakers who reviewed the unredacted files claim they found withheld information that didn’t meet that criteria.

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During their review, Epstein Files Transparency Act co-sponsors Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., initially found the names of six wealthy men were not in the public database.

“If we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those 3 million files,” Khanna said last month.

Files related to those men, including retail billionaire Les Wexner, have since been uploaded to the database.

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A letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Bondi and her testimony, in which she claimed there is no evidence Trump committed a crime in the files. “When confronted with her lie, she did not retract her statement, she doubled down,” the letter said. “We request that you immediately appoint a special counsel to investigate Attorney General Bondi for committing perjury. America cannot have a liar and a criminal as our top law enforcement officer.”

“If Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche doesn’t want to be complicit in a cover up, and go down with his ship, then I sure hope he responds and appoints a special counsel,” Lieu told The Hill Wednesday.

The representatives sit on the House Judiciary Committee where Rep. Lieu first accused Bondi of lying when she testified on Feb. 11 for the first time since taking office. He showed video footage of Trump and Epstein at a party, asking if there were underage people at the party.

“This is so ridiculous,” Bondi said. “They are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done. There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime.”

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“I’m going to put up another document from a witness who called the FBI national threat operation center because I believe you just lied under oath,” Lieu replied showing a document with allegations against Trump from a limo driver’s tip. “You need to interview this witness immediately.”

“Don’t you ever accuse me of a crime,” Bondi said.

An NPR investigation published Tuesday found several documents were removed or withheld from the public database including the tip from the limo driver to the FBI’s national threat operation center.

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