Donald Trump and maga Republicans are supporting maniac threats to destroy an entire Iranian civilization

Echo essay in The New Yorker magazine: In his April 2026 reporting, David Remnick frames the second term of Donald Trump as a profound global threat, characterizing the administration's actions as a "strategic failure and moral calamity". Remnick's analysis focuses on the degradation of democratic norms and international stability.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran

From the first day of his failed administration beginning in 2016 and continuing the second term in 2024, Trump has posed an emergency to both his country and the world. April 10, 2026

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. 

In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985, until his death in 2006, by cardiac arrest. 

For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his administration, posed an emergency to both our country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. When it came to North Korea, for example, he alternated between cooing words of affection for Kim Jong Un and issuing taunts that mixed nuclear brinkmanship with masculine insecurity: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024, campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. 

Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. 

Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s 2018, abandonment of that deal. 

For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out much of Iran’s defense and intelligence leadership, apparently believing that the regime would somehow give way to “moderates” and “pragmatists.” Instead, the theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. He has humiliated and betrayed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun 💥🤢 is not yet known. 

Published in the print edition of the April 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “Global Threat.”

Question to Donald Trump and maga Republicans? Has Iran surrendered yet? Multiple choice answers are "yes" or "no".

An opinion essay published in the New Yorker magazine, by David Remnick.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, two months into Trump's illegal war of choice, the chief offender of truth is Donald Trump himself.

Donald Trump's war on truth. Who knew? 

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, Dpma;d Trump announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could soon be heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all the President’s men followed his lead: they blamed
the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while the President has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the Donald Trump's cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. Trump loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The most cruel irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦

Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans have not yet explained why the American military must be put in harm's way in Iraq

Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder have become reliable prophets in predicting how Donald Trump continues to pursue the dismantling of American democracy.  Cox Richardson compared Donald Trump's demonic intentions to the actions of Adolf Hitler, as she published in November 2024 in the Milwaukee Independent:  "Adolf Hitler’s, on January 30, 1933, took an oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and in three months he dismantled that constitution. By March, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it."

This echo opinion published in The New Yorker describes the evil result of that and other dire predictions about Donald Trump.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth

(Donald Trump has no idea what the five letter  one syllable word means.)

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation and then threatens freedom of the press back home. By David Remnick editor of The New Yorker magazine.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were soon over heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” 

(Hmmm, turns out the Rumsfeld decisions cost Americans 2,400 military lives in his failed Afghanistan war and another 4,400 were killed in the Iraq disaster. Donald Rumsfeld died on June 29, 2021 in Taos, New Mexico.) With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces. But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. 

Donald Trump's need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shit-posting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained? 

Donald Trump's cult advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, (aka "Whiskey Pete") who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too. Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” 

Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.” 

Carr’s saber rattling threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975, book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.” 

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all Donald Trump's cult of men followed his lead: they just blamed the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. 

Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦








Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stand with European allies to support Ukraine

Thanks to the Philadelphia Inquirer for publishing this article. Main stream media (MSM) are neglecting this important story about the Ukranian resistance against Russian aggression. 

Echo report published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Trudy Rubin and an appendix by David Remnick*: 

Elite units from Ukraine’s intelligence agencies hit key Russian sites

Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the military sites from which Russia launches its attacks.

EASTERN UKRAINE — Slava’s appearance had changed dramatically from a year ago when we last met in Kyiv. His eyes were weary, and his deep black beard was now grizzled with gray.

The Ukranian 43-year-old former commercial director and journalist had volunteered early in the war, and now commanded an elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s military intelligence service. His unit conducts some of the country’s most dangerous missions. And those missions never end.

Operating from the zero line, his men are called in to launch long-range drones that attack sites deep inside Russia. Their goal is to destroy Russian military logistics at the source.

Before an assignment, they return to home base, pack up every conceivable drone and piece of equipment they may need, and head for the front lines to reinforce or assault.

“We do R&D in the trenches when we find a problem we didn’t expect,” he tells me.

The United States never gave the green light for Kyiv to use its longest-range U.S.-made ATACMS missiles to target Russian aerodromes or military production sites, so the Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the specific locations from which Russia launches bombs, missiles, and Shahed drones.

Drones can’t substitute for ATACMS, which can cover a huge area and pack a much more powerful explosive payload than unmanned aerial vehicles, as Slava told me while we bumped along over a dirt road to a HUR testing site, somewhere heading east. “You need 20 to 30 drones to cover the same area as one of the missile systems,” he continued, “but in terms of the economics of war, the drones are much cheaper than a missile.”

The most stunning drone success story was Operation Spiderweb, which destroyed or damaged around 40 Russian warplanes, including supersonic bombers, worth billions of dollars. It was conducted by Ukraine’s chief internal intelligence agency, and HUR’s friendly rival, the SBU.

Two days later, an SBU sea drone hit the base of the Kerch Bridge from Russia to Crimea, which can no longer handle heavy trucks or rail traffic because of a previous Ukrainian strike.

“The main task is to make Crimea a big burden so army logistics can’t work, because for the Russians as well as us, logistics is crucial,” said Slava. “They reconstruct quickly, but even spotty hits increase the difficulty for them.”

“Sea drones pushed out the whole Russian fleet from the Black Sea,” he recalled with relish. Sea drones (which look like large covered rowboats) with hidden missiles shot down two Russian helicopters and a warplane in a single day.

In new developments, drones are starting to hit the Iranian-designed Shaheds, he told me, and, of key importance, “anti-Shahed interceptors are almost ready.” In another breakthrough, hitting a swarm of 30 FPV drones is now “nothing at all,” when last year the technology for that was just emerging.

The June attack, at five different military airports, was done with 117 cheap FPV drones smuggled deep inside Russia within wooden containers on commercial flatbed trucks driven by unwitting Russians.

Less noticed in the West, however, on the very same day as Spiderweb, ❗HUR (aka Ukraine Intelligence) hit two trains and a newly built part of a railway in the occupied Donbas region that “blew up a whole Russian logistical supply chain.”

“But the Russians learning quickly,” he added. “We always have to create new technology. Every three months, technology becomes obsolete.”

Nevertheless, like every drone expert I met with, he believes U.S. war doctrine hasn’t caught up with the new era of drone warfare, which demands military decentralization and bottom-up initiative.

“The Russians are learning from us, but the U.S. is still based on old doctrines of war,” he said. “You should be more flexible. What America needs to understand is the need for decentralization. Not the generals’ world vision.”

In direct conflict with Russia today, the U.S. would be in trouble, Slava said. “If not speaking of deep strikes, but in direct contact, they could do nothing. Their tanks, armor, all would be hit by drones because their doctrine of war is obsolete. The reason we weren’t seized in first three days of the war is because Russian doctrine was still like in WWII.”

Europe, he said, grasps the shift because it sees Russian aggression up close.

“The Europeans are not just open, but ready to do whatever they can to learn from us. They are afraid, because they fear the future. The Poles have a fresh experience of war, transferred from generation to generation. They understand that if the Russians come, they will kill them just for the fact they aren’t Russians.

“The Europeans have plenty of training centers and invite our specialists to come there. War is constantly changing so they need to invite us to share our experience because we don’t have anything stable. Everything is constantly changing here.”

But Slava too bemoans the lack of resources that prevent Ukraine from pushing new technologies much further and faster. “Holding Russians back is a function of money for R&D. Either we get certain technology or someone sitting in the trenches.”

And either the Pentagon pays attention to Ukraine’s drone advances, or it falls behind Russia in hands-on knowledge of how to fight new wars to come.

*Appendix echo published in The New Yorker by David Remnick:

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. 

Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.”

















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Donald Trump keeps maga Republicans in his evil cult using fear as leverage without regard for the U.S. Constitution

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Comment echo by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine:  The Politics of Fear

As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump made his world view plain: there was “us” and there was “them.” Once he was in the White House, the fear factor would prevail.

“the man demeans anything he touches”,  Murray Kempton

The young Donald Trump was the Nelson Muntz (a major character and recurring antagonist of The Simpsons cartoon)  of Jamaica Estates, in Queens, New York. (Or was he its Draco Malfoy (as in Harry Potter) ❓ Scholars will debate such questions for generations.

In any case, Trump was, from his formative years, a spoiled bully. The Trump family, whose fortune was made in outer-borough real estate, had a cook and a chauffeur, and “Little Donny” was a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. 

When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred Trump, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York. This was just the sort of place, it was hoped, where Donald would mature into a young man of rectitude and self-regulation.

That, in fact, did not happen. Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him. Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an astute early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”

At home, Trump apprenticed with his father, collecting rents and learning the finer points of discriminatory housing. He eventually came under the tutelage of the attorney and sybarite Roy Cohn. What lessons Trump learned from Cohn were entirely malevolent: Never show weakness. Never apologize, never explain. Attack, never defend. Engender loyalty through intimidation. With his curious coif and self-satisfied expression, Trump made himself a presence in Page Six. Indecency and aggression were his brand. Cruel, narcissistic, duplicitous—the list is long and by now so familiar that even some of Trump’s supporters concede that his most poisonous attributes are, to use the D.C. lingo, baked into the cake.

In 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York papers after the arrest of five Black and Latino teen-agers who became known as the Central Park Five. (Their convictions for rape were eventually overturned.) His screed resonates as a credo today:

Former New York City Mayor Koch stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. . . . I recently watched a newscast trying to explain the “anger in these young men.” I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.

The ad led Murray Kempton*, New York’s greatest columnist, to consider the spectacle of Trump—“the man demeans anything he touches”—as he moved through the big city:

To boast of hating used to be an embarrassment for the worst of people. I knew the Birmingham police commissioner who jailed [the civil-rights activist] Fred Shuttlesworth, again and again. He was always a mean man and now and then a vicious one, but he went to his grave denying that he had ever hated anyone. Time was when people who sent hate letters had the shame to keep themselves anonymous.

But not Trump. His insistence on a message of contempt was not something that he concealed. To the contrary, his hunger for attention was, then as now, embodied by his preposterous signature. As a businessman, he was often accused of cheating his contractors; as the star of “The Apprentice,” he was himself only more so, a puffed-up cartoon C.E.O. who relished making his would-be employees stammer, quake, and cry. As a Presidential candidate, he made his world view clear: there was “us” and there was “them.” And, with him in the White House, the fear factor would prevail. (Or, as he once told Bob Woodward, “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”)

“I’m scared,” a twelve-year-old girl in North Carolina told Trump during his first Presidential campaign. “What are you going to do to protect this country?”

“You know what, darling?” Trump said. “You’re not going to be scared anymore. They’re going to be scared.”

Six months into his second term, Trump has made it evident who “they” are; the population of the unnerved is diverse. (If that word is still legal.) It includes immigrants, university presidents, media executives, the heads of cultural institutions, librarians, scholars, scientists, trans people, government contractors, and dedicated federal employees. Some suffer for Donald Trump's pique (i.e., his irritation) and are deported in handcuffs and leg-irons. 

Some are forced to pay millions in tribute in order to go on conducting scientific research or broadcasting the news. Others must hire lawyers to fend off phony accusations of treason. In Congress, fear keeps the Republican majority in line and causes all too many Democrats to mind their language. Trump once derided his own Secretary of State and national-security adviser as “Little Marco,” and he has been an entirely obedient satrap ever since. The Cabinet is a quivering collection of yea-sayers.

This response brings the President no end of titillation. “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’ ” he bragged, after certain law firms started making their pitiful arrangements with the White House. “They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’ ”

Fortunately, there are encouraging instances of self-possession in various corners of the country. There are civil-rights groups and judges who have refused Trump’s most blatant challenges to the rule of law. Some artists, too, have set an example. Lately, there is Amy Sherald, who withdrew her solo show scheduled for September at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., rather than have her painting “Trans Forming Liberty” “contextualized” by an accompanying video. And then came Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s still vital, still scabrous “South Park,” which recently ran an episode about a naked President, his shortcomings pitilessly exposed.

But, even as Trump’s disapproval ratings climb, the Democratic Party continues to languish; its leadership is woefully scattered and deficient. Still, resolve comes in many forms. 

Cartoon bullies line Nelson Muntz do not inevitably prevail. If individuals and institutions can muster that resolve in far greater numbers, neither will Donald Trump prevail. ♦

* Murray Kempton obituary in The New York Times: "He wrote about everything and anybody -- Tonya Harding and Warren Harding, Fidel Castro and Mussolini, Harry Truman and Sal Maglie, St. Francis of Assisi and James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover.

Donald Trump and Republicans cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein clinet list: Obviously the GOP cannot handle what the truth might reveal

In other words, Trump finally meets the conspiracy theory he cannot make go away with lies and propaganda tag lines.

Michael Wolff on MAGA’s Revolt Over Jeffrey Epstein
The journalist talks about his interviews with the infamous abuser, and the political fallout from the White House’s attempt to close his case. Echo report with The New Yorker, an interview with David Remnick, on July 18, 2025

There's well-documented history between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and Celina Midelfart can be added to those deep connections. Reportedly both the president and the accused pedophile dated the Norwegian beauty in the 1990s. She was even the real reason Melania Trump refused to give Donald her number when they initially met — because he was on a date with Midelfart when the real estate mogul tried to pass along his digits to his future wife.

The sense that the White House is covering something up about Jeffrey Epstein has led to backlash from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even after Epstein * was convicted for hiring an underage prostitute, for which he served a brief and extraordinarily lenient sentence, Epstein remained a playboy, a top political donor, and a very good friend of the very powerful—“a sybarite,” in the words of the journalist Michael Wolff, “in that old-fashioned sense [that] ‘my identity comes from breaking all norms.’ ” 

Wolff got to know Epstein and recorded, he estimates, a hundred hours of interviews with him. After Epstein was arrested again, in 2019, and was later found dead in his jail cell in what was ruled a suicide, it has been an article of faith within MAGA that his death was a conspiracy or a coverup, and the Trump campaign promised a reveal. Attorney General Pam Bondi initially asserted that she had Epstein’s so-called client list on her desk and was reviewing it, but now claims that there is nothing to share. Do the Epstein files have something incriminating about Donald Trump? “The central point from which this grew is the [Bill] Clinton relationship with Epstein,” Wolff tells David Remnick. But the MAGA believers “seem to have overlooked the Trump relationship [with Epstein], which was deeper and longer.” The men were “probably the closest friend either of them ever had,” until they reportedly fell out over real estate in 2004. Now Trump is frantically trying to control the narrative, pretending that he barely knew Epstein. This, Wolff thinks, “may be the beginning of Donald Trump’s lame-duck years.”

* Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to prostitution-related charges in Florida and was required to register as a sex offender.

Donald Trump and the Republicans create one hundred days of chaos

Echo opinion published in The New Yorker by David Remnick

100 Days of Ineptitude

Donald Trump incompetent administration 
ImpeachTrumpNOW

Eight years ago, in this space in The New Yorker magazine, a survey of the first hundred days of the initial Trump presidency described just how “demoralizing” the Repubican Administration had already proved for any citizen concerned with the fate of liberal democracy. In both rhetoric and action, Donald Trump had undermined the rule of law, global security, civil rights, science, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. As we noted,The 

"A hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office."

Trump never concealed his motives or his character. He came to office in 2017 celebrating the illiberalism of Andrew Jackson and William McKinley and waving Charles Lindbergh’s banner of “America First.” At the Inauguration, he took in the spotty attendance on the Mall and instructed his press secretary to declare the crowd the “largest ­audience to ever witness an Inauguration—­period.” Trump went on from there, demagogue and fantasist, striving to ban travellers from predominantly Muslim countries and to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Media-drunk, he tweeted at Kim Jong Un, Hillary Clinton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, while hate-­toggling between CNN and MSNBC. He appointed Michael Flynn, a QAnon❗ favorite, as his national-security adviser––until he regretfully had to fire him three weeks into the term. He amused himself by antagonizing close European allies and declaring nato “obsolete.”

There were many more moments of chaos and cruelty to come, but now we know that Trump’s first term, his initial attempt at authoritarian primacy, was amateur hour, a fitful rehearsal. The reflexes and ambitions were all there; he just didn’t know yet what he was doing. His victory over Clinton had been a shock, so when he frantically prepared for office he threw together a motley staff of bug-eyed ideologues, silver-haired establishmentarians (who “looked the part”), and family members and retainers who hoped to profit from the job while getting off on all the super-cool trappings of power. 

As a result, his first term was characterized by an ambient contempt for him inside his own Administration. 

His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was reportedly convinced that Trump was a “moron,” and both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and the chief of staff, John Kelly, eventually concluded that the Commander-­in-Chief was, in a word, a fascist.

Trump still managed to exact plenty of damage, yet the feuding in his midst, along with the episodic flashes of congressional opposition, popular protest, and resistance in the courts, forestalled some of his fondest ambitions from being realized. Time ran out. He lost reëlection. His insurrection failed.

But he was not done. During his four-year interregnum at Mar-a-Lago, Trump gazed down the fairways and concluded that Joe Biden was too diminished to win again. On this, he was right and the Democratic leadership deluded.

 What’s more, Trump resolved to be himself, only more so: Trump Unbound. While the commentariat saw his increasingly bizarre improvisations at the lectern as no less disqualifying than Biden’s confusion during the fatal debate, Trump kept faith with his dominant source of inspiration––retribution. With a wink, he denied any knowledge of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s vision for the ­exercise of executive power, but few doubted that he would enact its plans. For would-be advisers and Cabinet officers, obedience was the sole qualification. 

In fact, the Trump Republican Administration is now stocked with the greasily sickeningly obsequious cult Republicans, like attorney general Pam Bondi (IMO her next job should be to recreate the character of Nurse Cratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest). Rank incompetence also seems no impediment to employment. 

How else to explain Pete Hegseth’s move from the weekend desk at Fox News to the big office at the Pentagon? And in what other Administration would put bulbs as dim as Howard Lutnick or Peter Navarro, be called upon to craft the future of the world’s largest economy?

SignalGate is one example of Donald Trump administration incompetence but also symptomatic of growing stupidity

The Greater Scandal of SignalGate published in The New Yorker magazine by David Remnick:

For the cover of the April 7, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Barry Blitt borrows the visual imagery of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” to convey the sense of impending doom that seizes anyone who turns on the news lately. And in the wake of Signalgate, as David Remnick writes, it has become clear not only that the Trump Administration has made no attempts to disguise its autocratic intentions but also that its “qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals.”

The spectacle of incompetence and the attempts to smear a reporter are a misery; even worse is the encroaching threat of autocracy that cannot be concealed or encrypted.

Every era produces its own emblematic array of knuckleheads and butterfingers: Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops. The Three Stooges. The 1962, Mets. Beavis and Butt-head. Wayne and Garth. In Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic, “Dr. Strangelove,” the fools wield apocalyptic weapons rather than custard pies. 

Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, grows so feverish and paranoid about a Communist plot “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” that he goes “a little funny” and orders a thermonuclear strike on the Soviet Union. But such fantastical heedlessness is the province only of comic fantasy, no?

In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled “Houthi PC small group.” Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.

The comedy of Goldberg’s reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that Vice-President Vance and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers. 

More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the Administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their President would have them do: they attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter (who proved far more concerned about national security than the national-security adviser), and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. 

Everyone from Cabinet members to the Trump press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger.

This spectacle of breezy contempt regarding questions of process and policy was humiliating, for sure, but hardly an amazement. 

In the chat, Vice-President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seem to compete in their denigrations of the Europeans. (“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Hegseth tells Vance. "It’s PATHETIC.”)😓💢

And yet, much of what is so depressing about the chat is how familiar we are with the details and its spirit. Vance has, publicly and repeatedly, unburdened himself of his and Donald Trump's unwarranted disdain for Europe—most flagrantly in a speech in Munich, in February, when he lectured European leaders on their supposed failures in the realms of immigration and free speech.

This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.

Similarly, it does not require months of painstaking investigative reporting or a middle-aged tech fail to discover that another member of the group chat, Steven Witkoff, the President’s leading shuttle negotiator, is no more steeped in the granular details of diplomatic history and strategy than any other New York real-estate developer from the eighties in Trump’s circle. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, following recent conversations in Moscow with Putin, Witkoff consistently parroted Russian talking points and relayed that the Russian dictator (“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy”) had been “gracious” and gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump as a gift for the President. (Trump, in turn, “was clearly touched” by the painting, Witkoff reported.) Throughout, Witkoff’s grasp of the conflict was so wobbly, so Moscow-inflected, that one could almost hear the guffawing from the Kremlin. In a moment of contemplation, Witkoff admitted, “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure. I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And, no, it was anything but that, you know.”

Pete Hegseth is less prone to misty self-reflection. But his incompetence might have been predictable. Last December, after Trump nominated Hegseth, a weekend host on Fox News, to lead the Pentagon, Jane Mayer wrote a meticulously reported piece in this magazine on his florid background: his bouts of excessive drinking and profoundly sexist behavior on and off the job; his failures at managing enterprises somewhat larger than a dry cleaner but infinitely smaller than the Pentagon. No matter. Congressional Republicans were not inclined to deny Hegseth his appointment or to risk the President’s wrath. 

And they were similarly accommodating for another participant in the hapless Signal chat, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence.

And so the week’s scandal is rather like the ending of an O. Henry story, surprising yet inevitable. If a journalist is mistakenly dropped into a group text among the leaders of the American health bureaucracy, will we faint when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., refuses to recommend proven vaccines?

It would be unwise to dismiss the importance of secrets in this or any other Administration, but the point is that Trump and his ideological and political planners have made no secret of their intentions. While Richard Nixon tended to save his darkest confidences and prejudices for private meetings with such aides as Henry Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman, Trump gives voice to his id almost daily at the microphone or on social media: the autocratic actions intended to undermine the law, academia, and the media; the disregard for democratic partners and the affection for all manner of authoritarians; the hostile designs on Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico, and Europe; the ongoing attempt to purge the Republican Party of any remaining dissenters; and the constant effort to intimidate his critics and perceived enemies.

The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of “this too shall pass.” But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 7, 2025, issue, with the headline “Signal Failure.”