Donald Trump and maga Republicans are enabling failed incompetent foriegn policy, They have fallen in Iran and cannot get up!

Trump’s extended ceasefire shows his desperation to exit his failed and illegal Iran war — but he doesn’t know how. Americans are endangered by Trump's inability to conduct a foreign policy that goes beyond threats and military force. Echo opinion published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Trudy Rubin.

In 1966, the famous American psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with a description of a mental bias that became known as “Maslow’s hammer.”  “If the only tool you have is a hammer, I suppose it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail,” Maslow contended. Or, as some have reworded his theorem: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This is a good diagnosis for how Donald Trump has trapped us all in his unnecessary and illegal war with Tehran. A war from which he can’t find a good exit.

It also explains why he indefinitely extended an April 21, ceasefire deadline with Iran, announced on Tuesday evening, even though he’d just threatened to resume bombing if there was no nuclear deal by then.  (Like Douglas Shields from Pittsburg wrote in a letter to the New York Times: "seen more stable direction from a weather vane — and at least it knows which way the wind is blowing. At this point, the only consistent policy is inconsistency, and even that seems subject to revision.") 

As Maslow would no doubt have diagnosed, Trump is a bully whose modus operandi is to browbeat, insult, and threaten opponents and allies (especially those who respond with timidity). He is impatient and seeks quick hits and big headlines.

Overseas, the military hammer has become his preferred tactic so long as the strike is quick, as in Venezuela and the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

But, when an adversary is tougher and the fight more complex, with a strategy that outflanks his erratic tactics, POTUS is flummoxed. The illegal Iran war has laid bare how Trump’s strategic and cognitive weaknesses endanger Americans, as well as the entire world.

“Trump did not know what he was getting into,” I was told by Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon, and one of the smartest Mideast analysts in the field. “This is the first real foreign policy crisis he has faced, and he has no idea what he is doing. It’s scary 😱😰😧.”

POTUS swallowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pitch that Iran’s Islamic regime could quickly be toppled by U.S.-Israeli bombing and replaced by more malleable secular leaders. 

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) Director John Ratcliffe called such regime-change scenarios “farcical,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them “bullshit,” according to a New York Times investigation. But given his lack of knowledge about Iran and his conviction that his instincts trump expertise, the president picked up his military hammer.

Trump underestimated Iranian leaders’ tolerance for pain and determination to salvage their Islamic republic (even though their numbers were decimated and their country’s economy was in shambles).

But, most importantly, said Crocker, Trump failed to foresee (even though he was warned) that the Iranians had a critical card to play: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz through which about 20% of the world’s energy resources flow. Iran had never tried to close the strait before, but U.S. and Israeli bombs convinced its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that this was a necessary option.

“Iran now knows they can close the strait,” Crocker said. “Every day that the strait is closed adds to the economic pain of the U.S., Europe, and Asia. This has terrible consequences globally. They have turned the Strait of Hormuz into the Strait of Iran.”

Even Trump, with his unfettered verbosity, has referred to it by that name.

Last week, Iran offered to reopen the strait, but made clear its military would still control traffic in and out and charge tolls to passing tankers. Unsatisfied with this unpleasant option, Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to blockade Iranian ports so its oil exports were also halted.

But, Iran’s current leaders are betting, probably correctly, that they can withstand that pain longer than Trump can, with his eye on rising gas prices and midterm elections. Tehran says it won’t return to talks until the U.S. blockade is lifted.

Faced with this standoff, and the choice whether to resume bombing or extend the ceasefire deadline again,👀 Trump blinked.

Let me be clear, I am glad he backed down. But it revealed his desperation to exit the mess he has made.

“Iran has won the first round,” Crocker contended. “This is not going well.”

Trump’s problem is that he now has only bad options to reopen the strait.



Some right-wing hawks are advocating that he pick up the hammer. Fox News’ Hugh Hewitt actually recommended Trump go “full Sherman,” recalling the famed Civil War general’s scorched-earth march to Atlanta, and proposing POTUS destroy all of Iran’s oil and energy infrastructure.

Not only would this be a war crime affecting civilians and a further blow to global energy prices, but it would be unlikely to move the survival-intent hard-line IRGC, which now appears to be running the show.

Moreover, the worst possible option — which would be totally insane — would be for Trump to launch a land war in Iran to try for real “regime change.”

Iran was not an immediate threat to the United States before Trump started this war, and even he knows that sinking into such a bloody quagmire would probably set him on the path to bipartisan impeachment.

The only way out, said Crocker, is to try to swap a simultaneous end to the U.S. blockade against Iran’s ports for a full Iranian opening of the strait. Ideally, this would mean no IRGC control of shipping or tolls on vessels entering or leaving.

“This will be harder for Trump to do now, when he is weaker,” Crocker said. Especially when the Iranians know he is eager for an offramp, after he extended the deadline.

“But it is pretty apparent to everyone, except Donald Trump,” Crocker added, “that he’s not going to bomb Iran out of anything. The only way he can leave [the war] and save face is to get back to the status quo ante on the Strait of Hormuz.”

As for a return to talks on eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, Crocker believes that “at some point we will go back to the table.” However, he noted, the nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama — which would have halted Iran’s nuclear program for 15 years had Trump not withdrawn from it — took two years to complete.

For future negotiations to have a chance, Trump would have to abandon his “I win, you lose” approach to diplomacy. He would finally have to assemble and listen to an expert team instead of sending his ill-informed real estate buddy and son-in-law.

Hope springs eternal, but this hope requires a suspension of disbelief.

True, Trump is desperate to end his misbegotten Iran venture, but he seems to believe he is winning. On Truth (Fake❗ ) Social, he was posting New York Times clips from 2004, citing the top ratings of “The Last Season of My Apprentice Juggernaut.” In other words, how can such a winner be wrong❓

The best we can hope for is that fear of higher gas prices will keep Trump’s hammer in abeyance — and that he will find a way to negotiate the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, declare a fake victory, and bring the troops home.

Perhaps after this Iran debacle, the U.S. public will grasp the danger of leaving a one-tool 🔨president in charge of foreign policy and the nuclear button when they vote in November — and choose legislators who are willing and able to rein him in.

Donald Trump unilateraly declared a cruel World War in Iran causing international chaos without any definable purpose.

'This excellent essay published in the New York Review of Books by Fintan O'Toole is a brilliant review about how Donald Trump unilaterally decided to put Americans into another unwinnable and unjustified Middle East war.  It is like Mr. O'Toole is able to sit inside of Donald Trump's demented unconsciousness.  A brutal review about the horrible decisions (like a "crazy historical pageant") made by past administrations reminds us about how this Trump World War in Iran is doomed to fail. Nevertheless, even in failure, Israel is achieving the goal to disable its enemies while the United States is paying the bills, with U.S. military blood, to fund an unwinnable war. 

Signifying Absolutely Nothing

Mr. O'Toole writes:  In Donald Trump’s World War against Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But, up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.

It is apt that Trump’s declaration of war was disembodied: a prerecorded video message announcing a major combat operation that had yet to begin. Time in that video is completely distorted; events that are about to happen are referred to in the past tense. Throughout it gives the feeling of being in a time warp: Trump cited as a casus belli “the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel” in 1983. The forty-three-year gap between provocation and retaliation is a void between cause and effect into which all temporal logic vanishes.

In that eight-minute video, Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.

Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

To say that these are reruns is not to deny the novel elements in Trump’s warmongering. His boldest innovation is to invoke not past glories but past disasters, summoning the ghosts of the United States’ catastrophic interventions in Iraq. In the Republican primary debate in December 2015, Trump declared American and Iraqi deaths in that conflict to have been pointless:

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East [sic], we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away [sic], and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It is hard to think of any precedent for a leader stirring the memories of a war he regards as a colossal waste in order to justify starting a new one.

More profoundly, Trump’s rhetoric diverges from its Iraq War templates in signifying absolutely nothing. It is in itself (though of course not in its consequences) entirely free of external referents in the real world. Trump, with that strange honesty of his, indicated this himself by the manner of his declaration of war. Such announcements have an established visual language of solemnity and moral magnitude: the live address to the nation and the world from the White House, the rows of five-star generals in the Situation Room, the military briefings, the sense of historic moment. Trump’s video and his schmoozing of guests at Mar-a-Lago on the night of Friday, February 27 (“Have a good time, everybody…. I gotta go to work,” he told the attendees), seemed as deliberately flippant as his dismissal of the likely deaths of Americans: “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.” (“That’s the way it is,” he said later, after the first US soldiers were killed.)

The word “important” was used the following evening: Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the MAGA fundraiser that Trump attended on Saturday night as “more important than ever.” It was certainly more important than providing any rationale to the American people for their embarkation on another war. This is a war of choice, but it was presented to the American people more as a war of caprice, initiated in the festive atmosphere of a Florida resort and announced in cut-and-paste phrases from half-remembered conflicts.

The casual nature of the declaration of war matched the unmoored nature of Trump’s imperial cosplay. The rhetoric he seemed vaguely to be recalling had relationships to actual events. The “imminent threat” motif was, in 2003, a reckless and dishonest exaggeration. But there was at least the truth that Saddam had previously developed and used chemical weapons. The idea of enemy soldiers surrendering en masse was not fanciful—it happened in both Gulf Wars. The call for the people to rise up against their oppressors in 1991, had some substance: Kurdish and Shia opponents of Saddam had rebelled in the recent past and did so again.

But, what recurs now is pure linguistic gesture—the second time as empty effigy. The idea that Iran poses an imminent threat to the US is not merely not credible—credibility is entirely irrelevant. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration went through the motions of presenting a case that Saddam might have weapons of mass destruction and might wish to use them against the US. It was a bad case, concocted to provide the pretext for putting into action a preconceived plan: violent regime change in Iraq. But, some people in the American and British administrations at least half believed it, and more importantly, they wanted other people—their own citizens and foreign governments—to believe it too. Some effort at persuasion seemed to be an accepted precondition for war.

This time, Trump can’t be bothered to lie, if by lying we mean stating a claim that is intended to deceive. No one in his administration believes in the imminent threat, and no one outside it is expected to believe in it either. “Imminent threats” here functions like a TV trope, a corny catchphrase—it might as well be “Follow that car!” or (in words Trump has actually used, in his belligerent demands that Greenland be ceded to him) “The easy way” or “the hard way!” It signals only that Trump is going through the motions of wartime leadership and that, at best, his followers should likewise go through the motions of being led into war.

Even while declaring war, Trump made a mockery of the supposed Iranian threat: “We obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.” Now its missile industry will “be totally again obliterated”—the “again” suggesting that he believes he had wiped it out before. And his characterization of Iran’s alleged intentions to rebuild its nuclear weapons program dissolved into bathos:

We warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.

The imminent threat, then, comes from Bond movie villains who love doing evil but are crippled by chronic indecision, less Dr. No than Dr. Maybe. Trump made the ayatollahs sound risibly inept and hopelessly out of touch. The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying. Compared with the hair-raising language Trump has habitually used about immigrants in the US, his evocation of the Iranian menace was notably underpowered. He is good at conjuring monsters—this time he barely tried.

The idea that the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian armed forces should surrender their weapons in return for immunity is equally free of any objective correlative. It harks back to 1991 and 2003, when there were huge numbers of American and allied forces on the ground, in Kuwait and Iraq, to whom Iraqis could surrender. Whom now are they supposed to surrender to? A bomber pilot 50,000 feet above them? And who has the authority to grant members of the regime’s forces, who have committed atrocities against Iranians and foreign civilians, immunity from future prosecution? Trump told the Iranian people that their country is “yours to take.” How could they possibly take it without being free to act against those who have murdered and tortured with impunity, and how could it be theirs if crucial decisions about their future have already been made by Trump himself?

The most cynical of Trump’s retreads of the neoimperial past is his incitement of the Iranian people to rise up against the Islamic Republic. In echoing Bush’s call to the Iraqis in 1991, Trump was recycling a moment of great betrayal. Those Iraqis who believed America’s implied promise of support against Saddam paid for their naiveté with their blood. The US refused to give the rebels arms captured from the Iraqi regime’s forces, instead opting to destroy the weapons, return them to the regime, or (in a grotesque irony) give them to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. 

Although the Americans had total dominance over Iraqi airspace, the decision was to stand back as Saddam unleashed helicopter gunships on the rebels. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Shias were killed, along with some 20,000 Kurds.

Even if young Iranians don’t remember what happened in Iraq thirty-five years ago, they certainly remember what happened in their own country earlier this year. On January 13 Trump posted a message to those engaged in mass protests against the regime in Tehran: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He warned that there would be “very strong action” if the regime executed protesters. There was no action, and help was not on its way. The government massacred an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 protesters. This is the most gaping vacancy of all—Trump gestures toward two American incitements, one historic, one extremely recent. Both deployed words that were fatally empty of meaning.

These vacuities are part of a greater absence: there is no story. America’s wars beyond the Western Hemisphere have always been underpinned by grand narratives: making the world safe for democracy (World War I), defeating fascism (World War II), saving civilization from communism (Korea and Vietnam), upholding international law and the sovereignty of nations (Kuwait), responding to the atrocities of September 11 through the “war on terror” (Afghanistan and Iraq). Each of these stories had sufficient purchase on reality to command widespread initial (if by no means universal) consent. There seemed to be a cause large enough in its historic import to be worth killing and dying for. Even when, as with the invasion of Iraq, the stated rationale was quickly exposed as fraudulent, the drama of retaliation for September 11 and the reassertion of American power after the exposure of terrible vulnerability held their grip.

Insofar as Trump’s imperial posturing has a story line, it is supposed to be written in the National Security Strategy published in November. The tale it wants to tell is one of hemispheric hegemony: the US must control all of the Americas.
Where does Iran fit into that script? Nowhere. Its significance is, in fact, dismissed in a few lines:

Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.

Given that Trump never knowingly engages in understatement, this is a rare example of verbal deflation. The fake news to be discounted is those hyped-up headlines portraying Iran as anything other than a decisively weakened foe. Not only, moreover, is Iran less troublesome, but the whole region is becoming steadily less important to the US: “As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” The broad scenario is one in which Iran is, at best, a minor blot in the rearview mirror as America’s interests move elsewhere.

There is no American narrative for this war because it is not primarily an American story. It belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu. He has long sought to frame the Iranian regime in the most extreme terms imaginable—as the successor to the Nazis. “As the Nazis strived to trample civilization and replace it with a ‘master race’ while destroying the Jewish people,” he said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in 2015, “so is Iran striving to take over the region and expand further with a declared goal of destroying the Jewish state.”

As a political fable this is potent stuff. Doing a deal with a Nazi-like state in which it promises not to develop nuclear weapons—as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, together with Germany and the European Union, did that year—is delusional, since the supposed purpose of the Iranian state is, like Hitler’s Germany, the mass extermination of Jews. That deal had to be torn up, and in 2018 Trump duly withdrew the US from it.

But vile as the Islamic Republic may be, it is not remotely like Nazi Germany. The allegory serves a specific purpose: to preserve Israel’s monopoly on the possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Trump clearly doesn’t believe it, since his stated goal has been to make precisely the kind of bargain with Iran that the Nazi analogy is meant to preclude. The incoherence of Trump’s war aims is rooted in this gross discrepancy between his desire for a settlement with Iran—“We sought repeatedly to make a deal”—and Netanyahu’s vision of an apocalyptic battle in which the only possible outcomes are the binary opposites of absolute triumph or utter extinction. Trump’s playbook is The Art of the Deal; Netanyahu’s is the Book of Joshua.

There are, as a result, two different endgames for this war, one ultimately bureaucratic and diplomatic, the other existential. Trump started to threaten Iran again in recent months as a tactic for achieving the first. He has collapsed into the second, adapting Netanyahu’s existential dread as if it applied to the United States as much as to Israel. This means getting into a much more unbounded conflict than he seems to have imagined.

This is, in a sense, a proxy war, but one in which America is the proxy. It manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness. Marco Rubio’s admission that the US attacked Iran because it knew that Israel was about to do so—and thus feared that America would be a target of Iranian retaliation—depicts Trump not as a mighty leader but as a helpless follower. Instead of leaning on a rival boss, he is being led by Netanyahu into a generational conflict to remake the entire Middle East.

The dramatic first act of the war—the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and (according to Trump) another forty-seven senior officials “in one shot”—is a spectacular success that also exemplifies these contradictions. From an Israeli point of view, the more Iranian leaders killed, the better. Yet, Trump told Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent, that his administration had identified possible leaders to replace Khamenei, but “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” 

On March 3, Trump’s account tipped further into morbid farce: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead…. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

In this telling, the war’s opening act was a literal overkill. Combined with self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s bizarre statement that “this is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change,” it suggests that from the very beginning America’s war stumbled over its intended limits. It was supposed to be a Venezuela-style operation in which the enemy leader was eliminated and replaced by a more compliant figure within the same regime. This new leader (of another oil-rich nation) would have been placed on notice that the US could and would kill him at any time if he disobeyed. Essentially, the Islamic Republic was to remain intact, except that now it would operate on license from Trump.

The terms and conditions of such a license most definitely do not include democracy or human rights. Hegseth has insisted that the objective of the war “doesn’t include nation-building or democracy building goals.” A free Iran is no part of the envisaged outcome. If the people were to rise up at the risk of being slaughtered, they would be doing so merely to put in place a government that would be free to maintain the same levels of internal repression and theocratic control, so long as its foreign policy remained acceptable to Washington. That is hardly a cause worthy of martyrdom.

Yet even this contradictory approach seems to have unraveled as soon as the war started. The old adage that no military plan survives first contact with the enemy has been given a new twist: first contact was not chastening but excessively efficacious. From the American point of view the almost instant wiping out of so much of the senior Iranian leadership raised the stakes beyond what Trump initially wanted. The limited goal of bringing the regime to heel expanded immediately into its unconditional surrender and potential annihilation. And this escalation occurred without the administration giving any prior thought to what the implosion of Iran might mean, either for its own citizens or for the wider region. Or what an unchecked air war directed by Netanyahu looks like: Gaza.

Here we see how the current problem of American military power lies not in its limits but in its virtual limitlessness. It is not just that the US military is vastly superior to that of any immediate battlefield opponent. It is that it’s untethered from the need to place a set of actions within a comprehensible story. For the first time in US history, American physical dominance is being fused with American political anarchy. Freed from all the entanglements that come with having to launch a ground invasion, air war can overfly not just morality and law but arguments, rationales, the calibration of risks to rewards and of suffering to satisfaction. Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification.

This cutting of the bonds that tie war making to grand geopolitical narratives is a kind of liberation. The agony of America’s post-1945 wars has been their gradual inducement of a sense of futility. The wars stop making sense, and thus the human and financial sacrifices come to seem pointless. What’s happening now under Trump is one sort of answer to the anguish and humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan in his first term. Wars can stop making sense only when they are supposed to make sense in the first place. They become pointless only when there is meant to be a clear point. Futility arises only when a stated goal is not being achieved in spite of all the anguish and effort. If there is no goal—or if, as now, there are so many contradictory objectives that they cancel one another out—nothing can be futile.

This negative logic is reinforced by Trump’s own psychological condition. The attack on Iran is what war making looks like in an authoritarian state: not politics by other means but the absence of politics by other means. It is another stage in the working through of a disinhibition that is both institutional (the Republican-dominated Congress refusing to fulfill its constitutional obligation to restrain executive power) and personal (the president’s combination of inherent narcissism with the effects of old age). As Trump told The New York Times in January, he regards himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

One constraint that used to operate within Trump’s own mind was a squeamish reluctance to get blood on his hands, a fastidiousness about actual killing somewhat akin to his notorious germophobia. We know that this extended in his first term to the idea of bombing Iran. After the Iranians shot down an unmanned American surveillance drone in June 2019, he ordered retaliatory strikes. But when he was told there would likely be 150 casualties, he called the planes back. As he posted on what was then Twitter, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die.” Now the specifics of how many will die are no longer of concern to him: unnumbered deaths often happen in war.

It is obvious that making war is a useful distraction—for himself as well as for the world—from the Epstein scandal. But it is also now the purest form of self-pleasuring. Usually a president going to war is taking on burdens. Trump is shrugging them off, entering a state of weightlessness where all thought of consequences and all concern for mundane irritants like inflation and affordability are left behind. He declares war from his vacation home at Mar-a-Lago because it is a kind of leisure activity. Strikingly, in rebutting allegations that he will lose interest if the Iran adventure goes on too long, he used a term from his favorite hobby, golf. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told the New York Post. The yips are a sudden onset of nerves that cause a golfer to miss an easy putt.

What is weightless for Trump lies very heavy on the American republic. The anarchic nature of his war does not make it merely aberrant. The lurch from declaring fears about Iran to be mere media exaggerations to invoking imminent threat, from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize to luxuriating in lethality, is the essence of the autocrat’s monopoly on unpredictability.
Self-contradiction is a test of loyalty: the sycophants will fall over themselves to justify the leader’s wisdom even when it is the opposite of yesterday’s wisdom. When the leader can make up a war as it goes along, his whims have become law.

Extreme violence is now a large part of this repertoire of arbitrariness. Trump has pushed domestic terror to the point where his agents can murder American citizens on the street without accountability. He is now pushing the use of overwhelming force abroad into a terrain where accountability becomes impossible because there are no clear objectives by which to distinguish purpose from pointlessness, right from wrong, success from failure. But what happens abroad does not stay abroad: one of the things Trump has never lied about is that for him the real war is on the home front. He is showing that he can declare it however and whenever he feels like it. 💢❗😡😢

—March 12, 2026

SignalGate! Donald Trump obviously never learned the President Truman lesson "The buck stops here!"

The Signal group chat, and the dangers of a president who believes his administration is beyond accountability.

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Globe Opinion columnist Renée Graham.

SignalGate❗

Donald Trump could have tamped down the roiling scandal now being called “Signalgate.” (Yes, it’s a gate.)

Its facts are unassailable. In fact, Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to a text chat session with several high-level Cabinet members — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Vice President JD Vance — to hash out plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.

In a jawdropper of a story, Goldberg wrote that he knew two hours before the rest of the world when the first bombs would drop on March 15 because Hegseth “had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.” All of this, inexplicably, unfolded on Signal, an encrypted phone app.

On Wednesday, Goldberg and Shane Harris, a staff writer for The Atlantic, published even more damning details with additional text messages that starkly contradict Hegseth’s snippy denial, “Nobody was texting war plans.” 🤥

Morover, the security breach story also burns the administration’s false claims — including those made by Gabbard and Ratcliffe under oath at a Senate Intelligence Committee ❗hearing on Tuesday — that the text chain did not reveal classified information. 🤥

Jeffrey Goldberg and Harris wrote: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying🤥 about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.”

Here’s another conclusion.

Trump should have admitted that *egregious* mistakes were made by Waltz and Hegseth. 

Trump should have demanded the resignation of at least one of them. That would have given the public some sense that the administration was treating this colossal security breach with the gravity it warrants. Perhaps Goldberg and Harris would not have felt compelled to write another bombshell story to counter the administration’s ridiculous narrative.

"the closest Trump ever comes to admitting a mistake is when he rips a former appointee who balked at doing whatever terrible thing he commanded them to do"

That’s why Trump spent the days since The Atlantic story dropped trashing Goldberg, a journalist Trump has despised since his first White House term for writing things that Trump did not like. 

Clearly, that’s the administration’s (failed defensive) strategy, with Vance claiming on X/ that Goldberg “oversold what he had,” Waltz calling Goldberg a “loser” and a liar, and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, dismissing the stories as “another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

“Hoax” is MAGA code for “attention must not be paid.”

Even as evidence mounts against the confederacy of dunces who used a commercial app to conduct classified business about an imminent bombing attack on a foreign country, Trump has shown no inclination toward removing those responsible because that would be akin to admitting that he was wrong in nominating them in the first place.

The closest Trump ever comes to admitting a mistake is when he rips a former appointee who balked at doing whatever terrible thing he commanded them to do — and then it’s not about his lack of judgment but that someone, in his view, turned out to be disloyal.

This time Trump took no chances with critical thinkers or anyone with a shred of a conscience. He’s surrounded himself with loyalists whose only qualification is their deathless deference to him. In doing so, he has assembled the least qualified Cabinet in history, and the fallout from his arrogant miscalculation is unfolding in boldface headlines. Despite Trump’s many attempts to downplay the story, it clearly isn’t going away.

But, as a genetic serial liar, Trump is even more emboldened in his second term. After dodging any accountability for the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection, postelection interference to overturn his losing outcome in the 2020, presidential race, and his mishandling of classified documents, he believes that he is untouchable and owes no explanations to anyone about anything.

A leader who won’t own a wrong decision or immediately act to correct it is too dangerous to lead. Trump being Trump, he’ll probably stick with Waltz and Hegseth no matter how much Signalgate continues to metastasize. But it’s this nation and the world that will continue to pay an impossibly high price for having a president who will always favor obedience and sycophancy over competence and accountability.

This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham.

Donald Trump's jealousy meter went berserk when Zelenskyy told the truth on Meet the Press

In my opinion, the Zelenskyy interview with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker caused the Trump jealosy meter to fly out of control. In responsse, the Trump-Lie-Meter was driven to upstage Zelenskyy's credibility.

'Flailing and thrashing around' Trump buried by conservative for Ukraine 'betrayal'. Echo report published in RawStory by Tom Boggioni:

"Trump is living in misinformation space", Zelekskyy 🌌🚀

Both Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were raked over the coals by a longtime columnist for the conservative National Review for nothing less than their "betrayal" of the people of Ukraine.

National Review's Jim Geraghty reported Trump, and Rubio are getting played by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, and getting nothing in return for turning their backs on Ukraine and the NATO countries that are battling Russian expansionism.

Reacting to comments from both Trump and Rubio on Tuesday, Geraghty wrote, "... so far in his second term, regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump offered to Vladimir Putin that Ukraine will not retake all its annexed and occupied sovereign territory, that Ukraine will not join NATO, that there will be no U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil after the war, and that the U.S. will lift sanctions on Russia." before noting, "

And in exchange, Putin offered . . . well, nothing, really."

With that in mind, Geraghty singled out Rubio telling reporters he agreed with the Russian delegation to “lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.”

That led the conservative columnist to bluntly ask, "What 'mutual geopolitical interest' do we have with the regime that fired a missile into Kyiv’s main children’s hospital? " before adding, "Russia has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, and more than 6 million Ukrainian citizens live under the brutal hand of occupying Russian forces, and our government is talking about 'historic economic and investment opportunities' with them?"

As he noted, Russian has little to nothing that America needs by pointing out, "Grain? Oil? Natural gas? We already have that stuff; there is more than we need, and plenty is available for export. I thought the Trump plan was to build us into an energy production superpower."

Reporting that Rubio also stated a peace settlement would be brought about in "a way that’s enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged,” Geraghty questioned Rubio's wisdom.

"Does Rubio envision Putin recognizing Ukraine as a legitimate and independent country? He has never done that. Down to the marrow in his bones, Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia that can never be allowed to pursue its own separate path," he wrote.

As for Trump's demands that Ukraine hold a new election as part of the settlement, Geraghty wrote that the mere thought of that being acceptable when nearly 20 percent of Ukraine is living under a Russian occupation is absurd by pointing out, "This would be akin to running an American presidential election with only 40 of the 50 states able to participate."

Noting Trump's claims that the Ukraine president is unpopular in his own country, the columnist concluded, "Trump’s absurd claim that Zelensky has a 4 percent approval rating is a hint that Trump is flailing and thrashing around, trying anything to justify his current de facto pro-Russian stance."  (Just a reality check on February 20, 2025 Trump has a 49 percent DISAPPOVAL rating and it continues to go down....he is "under water" and jealous about Zelenskyy's Ukranian populatiry.)

Republicans will do a favor for themselves and their cult leader Trump by rejecting unqualified cabinet nominees

Echo opinion published in The Columbian a Vancouver, Washington newspaper, by Carl P. Leubsdorf is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News

Even Trump's (grade of "C") - more of less best choices, like Secretary of State-designee Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary-designee Scott Bessent and Agriculture Secretary-designee Brooke Rollins, earned their jobs by their fealty to Trump. Rubio and Bessent abandoned past positions on Ukraine and tariffs, respectively, to bring their views in line with his.

Most won’t encounter confirmation problems.
Unfortunately, however, their level of expertise and competence is not matched by Trump’s choices for Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Education and director of the FBI.

The Republicans in the House and Senate will lose nothing if they impeach Trump. At a time with the GOP has a political majority in all three branches of government, this is the pefect time to declare him to be incompetent❗

Each is a strong candidate for rejection. Here’s why:

• Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth — National Guard service, even on active duty, is no qualification to run the sprawling Pentagon. And the Fox (Fake❗)News anchor’s denigration of women in the military and history of questionable sexual conduct should disqualify him at a time the Pentagon is coping with these issues. His standing took a new hit with the release of emails in which his own mother called out his history of sexual misconduct. “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote in the 2018 email which The New York Times obtained from an unnamed family member. In addition, a lengthy review of Hegseth’s record by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer disclosed allegations of financial and personal misconduct in several prior positions.

• Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard — Between her questionable ties to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and statements echoing Russian criticism of the U.S. role in Ukraine, the former Hawaii Democratic congresswoman would seem like an especially bad choice to manage the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
• Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — When Trump rewarded Kennedy for his support by naming him to “run wild” over the nation’s health programs, he opened a pandora’s box that could threaten the very health of Americans he has vowed to improve. Not only has Kennedy denigrated the need for childhood vaccinations, he is yet another nominee with a history of sexual misconduct.
• Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon — The former president of World Wrestling Entertainment and his first term Small Business Administrator also has sexual misconduct issues. A lawsuit accuses McMahon and her husband, WWE founder Vince McMahon, of ignoring alleged sexual abuse by a WWE employee against teenaged boys. In 2010, she resigned from the Connecticut State Board of Education after the Hartford Courant reported she misrepresented her education qualifications.
• Federal Bureau of Investigation director — Trump plans to demand the resignation of FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican he appointed after firing his predecessor, and install Trump loyalist and fierce FBI critic Kash Patel, a major perpetrator of the falsehood that Ukraine, not Russia ❓, tried to influence the 2016, election. Patel has labeled the FBI “a threat to the American people.”

Because the Senate’s 47 Democrats will likely line up against most of Trump’s most questionable nominees, it will take at least four Republicans to defeat them. These confirmation votes will test how seriously the Senate plans to maintain its constitutional role in the Trump years.

Senate rejection would actually do the president-elect a favor. Some of the nominees would only cause Trump (what goes around comes around) grief, if they’re confirmed.

Republicans have a responsibility to nominate a qualified candiate #neverTrump

The Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson challenges Republicans to rise above the presumptive #neverTrump.


"How do I know this? It doesn’t require fortune-telling."- Michael Gerson

Michael Gerson- The Washington Post

For those of us with a certain political bent and background, this is the most depressing moment of all.

The best of the GOP — Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, the intellectually serious reformicons who have called attention to issues of poverty and the need for Republican outreach — are bending their knee to the worst nominee in their party’s history. Ryan drags himself slowly. Rubio eventually went with a quick Band-Aid pull. But the largest political choice each man has made this year will be one of the worst mistakes of their careers. 

How do I know this? It doesn’t require fortune-telling.

Just days before Rubio offered to speak on Trump’s behalf at the Republican convention, the presumptive nominee declared the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster to be “very fishy,” especially given Foster’s “intimate knowledge of what was going on” with the Clintons. And Trump attacked the Republican governor of New Mexico, Susana Martinez, for allowing Syrian refugees to be “relocated in large numbers” to her state. “If I was governor,” he said, “that wouldn’t be happening.”

This is Trump on his best behavior, trying (once again) to act “presidential.”

A previous column I wrote — examining Trump’s penchant for conspiracy thinking on issues from vaccination to the death of Antonin Scalia — appeared on the same day as Trump’s implication of Hillary Clinton in Foster’s death. One challenge of detailing Trump’s lunacy is the need for hourly updates. His allegation in the Foster case involved the exploitation of a personal tragedy, amounting to the mockery of a family’s loss. It revealed a wide streak of cruelty.

The attack on Martinez demonstrated another less-than-desirable leadership quality. Trump’s charge against her had nothing to do with refugee policy. During her time as governor, just 10 Syrian refugees have been relocated to New Mexico. Trump was attempting to punish Martinez because she has been noncommittal about endorsing him. In making judgments about people, Trump’s primary measure is not ideological or even political. He likes people who support him and disdains people who don’t.

So Martinez and liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) are lumped in the same category of lèse-majesté. It doesn’t matter that Martinez is known as an effective Republican governor. Trump demands the unity of adulation. He is incapable of magnanimity.

And this meanness of spirit is also applied to some of the most vulnerable people in the world. Trump’s mention of refugees was a subterfuge, but still a damaging one. To score his political point, Trump chose to heap disdain on a few people — vetted for years before arrival — who seek the protection of the United States after a terrible ordeal.

Can you imagine, say, Ronald Reagan attacking women and children fleeing violence and oppression? They would more likely be used as an inspiring speech illustration.

For Trump, the bully, a trickle of refugees is another chance to kick the weak.

Jobs report explains Republican rancor about hands, ears and even yoga

If the comedian Groucho Marx were alive, he'd be asking Republicans if anybody knew their "secret word". Obviously, the Republicans aren't using "jobs" as their secret word. They're ignoring the near zero US unemployment rate.

What messages are Republicans telling voters, to help build their presidential campaigns?

Comedian Groucho Marx made jokes with contenstants on "You Bet Your Life"  about saying the "secret word".  Do the 2016 Republicans have a secret word for planning America's future?

Sadly, the Republican party has tanked into a tub of degrading pollutant narratives because, frankly, none of the "unpresidential" candidates have anything else to talk about. Consider the February jobs report, for example. Where is the Republican response to the the brisk February jobs report? Certainly, February's jobs report deserves more than the Republican's perverse narratives about the size of Donald Trump's hands, a description of Marco Rubio's ears, the reference to "Yoga", rather discuss substanative issues, as have erupted in the candidate's debates (as well as other irrelevance).

US unemployment is declining to nearly full employment 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy added 242,000 jobs in February (2016), with the unemployment rate flat at 4.9%. A survey ahead of the report showed economists had been expecting to add 200,000 jobs.

Overall, the jobs report showed that the labor market remained resilient, while strong employment gains were recorded in healthcare, retail trade, and restaurants.

In fact, Republicans have no coherent message to give to Americans. It seems the presidential candidates - "Trump-Drumpf", "Cruz to loose" and "Blinkie Bottle Rubio", are running entirely on their fantasy inflated egoes. If Republicans happen to have a message they want to give the American voters, they should reveal their plans. 

Rather than building their "stupid party" labels by trading barbs about the size of their hands, sexual inuendos, ear shapes and talking about Yoga, we need to know their "secret words". 

For Democrats, the secret word is justifiably a boastful four letter word. J-O-B-S! 

Republicans need Yoga class to learn civility

At least, practicing Yoga has some purposeful outcomes. Republicans have yet to find a purpose in this 2016 presidential election year.

Yoga is preferable to the political street fights witnessed in the Republican implosions

In Thursday night's Republican debate "slug fest", comic relief broke the rising tensions between candidates Senator Ted Cruz and the street fighter Donald Trump.  At one point, Senator Rubio asked if he could interrupt the "yoga class" when the Evangelical's darling Cruz and the anti-establishment GOP candidate Trump were advising each other about anger control."When they're done with yoga, can I answer a question?", Rubio quipped. Indeed, this light moment might have been the only substance in the political street fight. In fact, the entire Republican party might consider hosting a weekend yoga retreat!

In fact, Politico reports how the Grumpy Obstructionist Party (GOP) is now engaged in political civil war.

With Donald Trump barreling toward the 2016 nomination, despite an establishment desperate to stop him, the Republican Party is now in open conflict, reports Glenn Thrush and Alex Isenstadt.

On Super Tuesday primary day, a cocky Donald Trump vanquished the Republican establishment by winning the Southern states where the idea had been to lock up the nomination and laser beam focus on winning against the Democrats.  Well, a Yoga excercise would've been a better strategy because instead of creating calm, focus, purpose and resolve in the election, the Super Tuesday primaries have, instead, fractured the Republican party.

Therefore, on "Payback Thursday", two days after the implosion of Super Tuesday, the Republican establishment mounted a serious counterattack that undercut Trump’s chances in November and pushed the party into open civil war.

Politico continues:  Telling his fans “We’ll have so much winning, you’ll get bored with winning” is a bombastic staple of Trump’s stump speech – he repeated it during a rally in Maine on Thursday – but his historic winning streak has created an intense and increasingly coordinated backlash against his candidacy, one aimed at undoing what the GOP’s fed-up voters have done in recent primaries.

“The party will not fracture but will likely splinter,” says former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, a senior party strategist. “The question is: How big will the piece that splinters off actually be?”

Matt Dowd, George W. Bush’s chief strategist in 2004, cast the day’s events in equally dramatic terms. “I think the GOP as a national party will have to be reconstituted,” he said. “There doesn't seem a good way to put this all together. If Trump is the nominee, there will be a third-party establishment conservative running. If he gets taken out, he will run.”

A winner like Trump who enjoys a commanding lead this late in the nominating process should be transitioning to a general-election strategy against his likely opponent Hillary Clinton. Trump wants to, but he can’t. He tried to make that pivot this week, releasing his health care plan and defending Planned Parenthood, but was forced to battle a growing insurrection in his own ranks – led by the party’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who labeled him “a fraud” and “a phony” who represented “a brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”Obviously, Donald Trump is a genious at capturing every news cycle, so in a rambling, often hilarious, often savage, often defensive 50-minute speech carried live by the cable networks, Trump dismissed Romney as a “failed candidate” who “was begging for my endorsement” in 2012.

“I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees,’” added Trump in a crass wisecrack that had his audience hooting in Portland, Maine.
(Unfortunately, Donald Trump was introduced in Portland by the state's equally divisive Governor Paul LePage.)

Still, his signature smirk masked a front-runner at an inflection point: Trump has already shown an ability to rhetorically dismantle any single politician who opposes him – including Romney, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. But those individual rivals, like insurgents liberated from the constraints of conventional warfare by defeat, are aligning en masse to oppose his candidacy, less constrained by any one candidate’s desire to win than by a common goal of disposing of a man they deem unfit to lead their party.

Several senior GOP operatives who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity believe that the remaining non-Trump candidates – Cruz, Rubio and John Kasich – are even coordinating their anti-Trump attacks ....beginning with the Detroit street fight debate, in hopes of denying the 1,237 delegates Trump needs to secure the nomination. From there, they say, it would be every man for himself at a contested convention.

“I think camps are coming to the realization that if no one is going to drop, at least let’s not hurt each other and keep him under the 1,237,” said one veteran Republican strategist.

On Thursday cracks were appearing up and down the party’s embattled superstructure. Next month, the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group of powerful GOP donors, will gather at the Venetian Hotel and Resort, which is owned by Republican benefactor and RJC board member Sheldon Adelson, for their annual spring meeting. Attendees are likely to vent their disgust with Trump, who has been slow to disavow support by white supremacist groups. And at the meeting, according to two sources familiar with its planning, the RJC is expected to take up a pressing question: whether to even support Trump if he’s the GOP nominee.

Other strategists tasked with running congressional and gubernatorial races are deep into discussion about what impact a Trump nomination would have on contests up and down the ballot. Some outside groups have already begun polling the question.


Several senior Republicans told POLITICO that many Republican candidates would be forced to run against Trump, especially those running for non-federal offices such as governor. For House and Senate candidates, however, the task will be far more difficult, a problem Speaker Paul Ryan – Romney’s 2012 running mate – and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are known to be grappling with.

GOP legislative candidates would have to walk a shaky tightrope – embracing some of the populist positions that have made Trump popular, while distancing themselves from his flip-flops and most outrageous pronouncements. Trying to run away from Trump entirely, some top party strategists argue, won’t work. They compare a Trump autumn to the no-win situation Democrats faced in 2010 and 2014, when House and Senate candidates – like Arkansas’ doomed duo Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor – tried to run away from Obama, only to lose support from the party’s base of progressives and African Americans.

Within the GOP, there are two emerging Hail-Mary theories about how to deprive Trump of the delegates he needs to seal the deal, according to senior Republicans interviewed by POLITICO.

Theory No. 1 is that two of the three remaining Trump rivals drop out and unite behind the lone surviving contender, allowing that person take on the New York businessman, mano à mano. Proponents of this theory note that Trump has yet to win an outright majority of the vote in any of the states that have held nominating contests so far – suggesting that the anti-Trump vote may be larger.

Theory No. 2 is that the three Trump rivals should stay in the race to collectively rob him of delegates in upcoming primary states, while attacking him as a group.

Proponents of this theory – which Romney hinted at in his speech today – argue that it can work if Kasich wins Ohio, Rubio wins Florida, and Cruz wins some upcoming Southern states and Midwestern caucuses. The key to this strategy is halting Trump in Florida, a winner-take-all delegate honey-pot where polls show the businessman leading Rubio. Three anti-Trump groups – Club for Growth, Our Principles PAC, and American Future Fund – have laid down TV buys in the state over the last few days. The three groups have begun back-channel conversations – coordinating their plans and messages.

All this scheming comes against a backdrop of accelerating criticism of Trump from all quarters of the party. The GOP’s 2008 nominee John McCain – another Trump target – stepped up his criticisms of the front-runner, endorsing Romney’s view that Trump’s inexperience and shoot-from-the-hip style could endanger the country’s already-perilous national security situation. The Arizona Republican endorsed a Wednesday letter, co-signed by former GOP defense officials, warning against Trump’s “vision of American influence and power in the world,” which they said “swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.” Referring to the missive, McCain dinged Trump for making “uninformed and indeed dangerous statements.”

A growing number of prominent leaders – including Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse – are emerging to say they will not support Trump under any circumstances. They are joined by an increasingly agitated of group conservative intellectuals who have taken to the pages of National Review and, more recently, Twitter, to form a “Never Trump” movement.

No matter what happens, a number of senior party strategists are convinced that there will be a fight of some kind at the convention. With so much resistance to him from the establishment, a confrontation of some kind is inevitable – and there are several hypothetical scenarios, including 11th-hour rules changes, that insurgents could use to delay Trump’s nomination.

Others don’t buy it. For all the fretting now, they argue, the GOP has too much at stake – and predict that most of the party will ultimately unite against their common enemy, the hated Hillary Clinton.

“In the end, it pulls itself together to win, and that’s what’s going to happen in the convention and after,” said New York GOP Chairman Ed Cox.

And some senior former Romney aides questioned their old boss’s call to arms. “This is a process that is going to have to work itself out,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior campaign adviser four years ago. “For all his faults, Trump is conservative in many of his positions – in his tax policy, his desire for a strong military and his plans to secure the border. Most importantly, Trump has promised to appoint a Supreme Court justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia to fill the current vacancy on the court.”

“I don’t know of any conservative who wants to hand the White House to Hillary Clinton so that she can remake the court in her own image.”

Scott Reed, chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – a bastion of the GOP establishment – says Trump’s fate is in his hands, noting the developer’s conciliatory speech after the polls closed on Tuesday.

“Trump needs to continue his election-night message of unity,” Reed said.

But anger at the anger-impelled front-runner seems to be intensifying – and Trump on Thursday reiterated his intention mot to “back down” from any fight.

Romney’s speech – unprecedented in recent Republican history – came in the context of a general establishment backlash but it reflected his personal feelings about the man who seems likely to succeed him as the Republican nominee. He spent months stewing in anger over Trump. He’s been calling top aides, sounding them out on his ideas and telling them he’s been anxious about the businessman’s rise.

In the weeks leading up to the address, Romney’s anger hardened as he watched Trump rack up primary wins across the country – and his disappointment at Rubio’s inability to close the sale with voters grew.

Asked on the morning after Super Tuesday how Romney was feeling about Trump’s big night, one of the governor’s top associates responded: “Not happy.”

(No kidding? Oh well......try yoga.....)

At the end of every Morning Joe segment on MSNBC, the pundits ask, "What have we learned today?"  Perhaps, post Detroit, the Republicans learned about the potential advantages of practicing yoga, rather than political professional wrestling. Otherwise, there has been no identifiable purpose to the GOP presidential primary.

Republicans ignore issues put on Curly Moe Larry re-run

How much candidate debate screaming can American voters endure before realizing how the Republicans have no ideas, no vision and no plan to make America great again. Instead, Republicans have created a re-run of the Three Stooges as their 2016 platforms!
Do these faces look familiar!
Curly - Moe - Larry



".. the lie that Republicans are the party of big business. Big business does great with big government. Big business is very happy to climb in bed with big government. Republicans are and should be the party of small business and of entrepreneurs."- Ted Cruz  (This quote makes no sense)

Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/ted_cruz.html
"

The American Dream is a term that is often used but also often misunderstood. It isn't really about becoming rich or famous. It is about things much simpler and more fundamental than that. Marco-Rubio (This quote is hypocritical- Rubio has lived the American Dream!)
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marco_rubio.html

"....the wall just became taller...." (Donald Trump's epitaph...)

None of the above quotes makes any sense.

Let's vote all Republicans out of office in 2016!

Go Hillary2016!