Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bookend incompetents. They launched an illegal expensive war in Iran and lost.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War
The two men might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the war has shown that this isn’t true. Published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

There is no good way to call off a war that you started but which hasn’t achieved what you’d hoped. 

On Wednesday night, (April 1st- but no joke❗💢) Donald Trump, in his address to the nation on the Iran war, sought to counter reality with hyperbole. “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran,” 🤥 Donald Trump said. “Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.” Of course, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard retains control not just of the country but of the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore of an alarmingly constricted global oil supply. A month of air strikes had killed many leaders but had not changed the regime. Even so, Trump suggested that the mission was “nearing completion,” and that the U.S. military would soon be pulling back. But if Tehran did not accept a deal, he added, “we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

Big talk. But the announcement also sounded like a concession, since two to three weeks probably isn’t enough time for Trump to follow through on some of his prior threats: an armed invasion of the oil ports of Kharg Island, or an even more ambitious raid to extract uranium likely stored in tunnels near nuclear facilities. The morning of Trump’s address, media reports had suggested that he was considering withdrawing the United States from NATO. Instead, the President taunted America’s allies, some of whom had been pleading for a settlement over Hormuz. “Build up some delayed courage,” he told them. If they want the oil to flow again, they should “go to the strait and just take it.”

It has been a central conviction of Trump’s second term that the nations of the world now operate on self-interest and brute force, rather than on principle or alliance, and the White House has been eager to spread the news. The mockery that the Administration directed at its own, less warlike allies this week (“Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy,” the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said on Tuesday) recalled its jeering of Volodymyr Zelensky in February, 2025. “You’re buried there,” Trump told the Ukrainian President about his nation’s battlefield prospects.

This penchant for what Saul Bellow called reality instruction—the cynical delight taken in explaining to idealists how the rough-and-tumble world really works—extends from Trump throughout the Administration. 

But, perhaps the most eager reality instructor has been Hegseth, one of the Administration’s more politically fragile figures, who, when he’d been picked to join Trump’s Cabinet, was a co-host of “(Fake❗ Fox & Friends Weekend.” Hegseth is so committed to a vision of the world defined by winners and losers that he once wrote that Joan of Arc was a “loser” because her last battle “ended disastrously and eventually with her execution.”

Hegseth came out of his own service, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the seeming conviction that what had stood in the way of a fuller victory in those wars had been the restraints supposedly placed on how soldiers could kill. (In 2019, he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon two soldiers charged with or convicted of alleged war crimes.) “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth told a large gathering of senior military officials, whom he had summoned to Quantico, in September. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement . . . just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters,” he said. “You kill people and break things for a living.”

On Iran, Hegseth has led the Administration’s periodic press briefings, at which he has called on Americans to pray to Jesus Christ for the military’s success; his slogan has been “maximum lethality.” But, even in the first hours of the war it was clear that this approach could backfire. The initial strikes, which began on February 28th, killed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but were so indiscriminate that, as President Trump noted, they also killed many of the political figures who the White House had hoped would form a new, more amenable cadre of leaders. 

“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said a few days later. The ones remaining, even if Trump didn’t want to acknowledge it, were generally described as more hard-line. One of the President’s stated aims has been to inspire a popular uprising among those Iranian citizens sick of the repression and the autocracy enforced by the Revolutionary Guard. Yet, that requires taking care to distinguish between the regime and its civilians, and to avoid collateral damage. But, according to a preliminary investigation, on the same day that U.S. forces assassinated Khamenei, they also dropped a bomb in the wrong place, inadvertently killing nearly two hundred people in an elementary school.😢

Trump and Hegseth might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. 

But, the Iran war has shown that this isn’t true. The old liberal institutions may be teetering, but that doesn’t mean that all that’s left is the law of the jungle. The fact that Donald Trump is now signaling a messy retreat has nothing to do with insufficient lethality and everything to do with politics—in particular, the alarm in the global oil markets and the American public’s widespread opposition to the war. One tragedy of Trump’s war is that, in January, the Iranian regime was under extreme pressure from protests, which it quelled by murdering thousands. The right kind of coördinated push might have toppled it. Instead, the White House offered frequently shifting rationales for its war and little outreach to the Iranian resistance. It treated the military operation as something to brag about to its political base—a way to show exactly how unrestrained it was willing to be.

The day before Donald Trump gave his chaotic speech, Hegseth gave a press conference in which he recounted a recent visit he’d made to bases in the region. “It was the American warrior, unleashed,” he said. He seemed to view the trip as a parable. “As the sun was going down and a chill was setting on the tarmac,” he encountered an airwoman and asked her what the troops needed: “She simply looked at me with a sly smile on her face and said, ‘More bombs, sir. And bigger bombs.’ ” That might have been what the airwoman asked for. But what Trump and Hegseth really owed her, the nation they lead, and the Iranians whose country they bombed was a plan—a real solution to the disaster that they have created. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 13, 2026, issue, with the headline “Warpaths.”

Donald Trump could not create enough evil to satisfy the cult base insatiable appetite for diabolicle Epstein evilism

Behind Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein Problem published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Donald Trump tried to blame Democrats, and, more unexpectedly, he has called those in his base who have asked for a fuller accounting about Jeffrey Epstein, “weaklings” and “stupid.”

Donald Trump’s cult political allies have long insisted, with more than a little condescension, that the press should take the President seriously, but not literally. Yet the people who take Trump most literally are among his own supporters, who over the years have absorbed his most hyperbolic claims as if they were settled truth: that Hillary Clinton and various Bidens were guilty of high crimes, that the 2020, election was stolen, that the circumstances surrounding the death of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein warranted “a full investigation” and might have involved Bill Clinton. Rarely do the diehards demand proof. So earlier this month, when the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. issued a statement asserting that there was, in fact, no deeper mystery behind Epstein’s death—which occurred in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, as he was facing trial for sex trafficking, and was determined to be suicide by hanging—the White House likely assumed that the magaverse would simply move on, as it had so many times before. The surprise—one that, two weeks in, Trump has still not been able to quell—is that it didn’t.

Squirming, the President has tried to dismiss the uproar (“Are people still talking about this guy?”) and to blame it, somehow, on Barack Obama and Joe Biden (the Democrats’ “new SCAM”). More unexpectedly, he has called those in his own base who have asked for a fuller accounting “weaklings” and “stupid,” lamenting that “my PAST SUPPORTERS have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.” But that has been just blood in the water, both to the Democrats who are now calling for the full release of the Epstein files and to the anonymous Republican strategists who have begun to warn of a drop in turnout in the midterms.

Among Trump’s aides, one theory was that his team had erred in promising not just vibes and insinuation, as he normally does, but something to which he is generally allergic: hard evidence. The details of Epstein’s life—the formidable connections he cultivated among political, financial, and academic élites; his conviction in Florida in 2008 for solicitation of prostitution; the way he avoided more serious punishment—have been exhaustively documented. But the maga fixation was that the government had participated in a coverup and had in its possession a list of Epstein’s clients, which could, the theory went, implicate scores of the powerful in heinous crimes. Last October, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list.”

Then in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi responded to a question about whether the Justice Department would soon make public the “list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients” by saying it was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Fifteen right-wing influencers had gone to the White House and were given binders titled “Epstein Files: Phase One. But, those “files” offered nothing new.

To Trump’s allies in the right-wing media, many of whom had been predicting spectacular revelations about Epstein for years, this seemed like a dodge. “The fact that the U.S. government, the one I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said, ‘Case closed, shut up, conspiracy theorist,’ was too much for me,” Tucker Carlson said. Megyn Kelly posted on X that there were only two possibilities: that there was no client list and Bondi had misled the public or that “there is a scandal that’s being covered up & it’s at his”—Trump’s—“direction.” Steve Bannon estimated that the backlash would cost Republicans forty seats in the House of Representatives next year. That last prediction is probably worth taking seriously, but not literally.

More interesting was the reaction among Trump’s most recent allies: the Silicon Valley billionaires and the podcast bros who were key to his win in 2024. Elon Musk has been making gleeful accusations against Trump for weeks. The comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz complained, “He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for.” Joe Rogan, among the most important of Trump’s allies in November, now sounded betrayed: “Why’d they say there was thousands of hours of tape of people doing horrible shit? Why’d they say that?”

Trump is vulnerable to the Epstein case, and not only because the two men were photographed partying together, or because Trump praised Epstein in a quote that was widely circulated, or because Epstein had told the reporter Michael Wolff that, for ten years, he had been the President’s “closest friend.” (Trump eventually said that they had had a “falling out.”) On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that, for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, Trump, among others, sent him a “bawdy” birthday letter, which Trump denied, saying that he would sue the Journal, “just like I sued everyone else.” Liberals, taking all this in, might suspect that it’s a simple comeuppance for Trump’s political choices: if you build a following on the internet fringe, you can become beholden to its obsessions. But the uproar also has to do with the ways in which the Trump movement has evolved.

In the post-pandemic atmosphere of fury and distrust, Trump moved much more nimbly than the Democrats to expand his support among people who are only irregularly interested in politics, and he has reached a group that is young, nonwhite, male, and less likely to have a college degree. That group, and the podcasters whom they supply with an audience, has seemed drawn to Trump’s persona as an outsider, an inveigher against the establishment. And yet, in the six months since the Inauguration, what Trump, despite adopting a cruel and autocratic style, has given them are Republican establishment policies: a budget that cuts Medicaid, stripping seventeen million people of health insurance, and gives huge tax breaks to the rich; a military intervention in the Middle East. A CNN poll released on Wednesday suggests that the number of Americans who “approve strongly” of Trump’s Presidency—one measure of his base—is now at its lowest of any point in his first and second terms.

No wonder Trump sounds so exasperated. (On Thursday, he said that Bondi would produce “any and all” grand-jury testimony from Epstein’s case, though this seems unlikely to satisfy anyone.) The central illusion of his political career has been that, despite his wealth and evident clout, he remains an outsider. But that was always a fiction, and now—with the G.O.P. leadership unified behind him and the Supreme Court mostly backing him—he may feel strong enough to leave some of his movement’s weirdness behind. Second-term Trump is no longer acting as a populist, and the Epstein case is unfolding as a test of how maga responds to this news. ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 28, 2025, issue, with the headline “The Epstein Problem.”

Donald Trump cruelty campaign includes ending birthright citizenship but every child born in the USA is NOT an immigrant WWWTP?

The Stakes of the Birthright-Citizenship Case: The Trump Administration is trying to use the case to stop lower-court judges from issuing “nationwide injunctions"  against its unconstitutional executive orders. By Ruth Marcus published in The New Yorker magazine.

An hour into the oral arguments in the birthright-citizenship case at the Supreme Court last Thursday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a tart summary of the Trump Administration’s playbook in what will surely be its losing bid to end the constitutional guarantee. “Your argument,” Jackson told D. John Sauer, the Solicitor General, would “turn our justice system” into a “ ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime,” in which “everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.” Jackson kept going: “I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

Nationwide injunctions have been around for years but didn’t become a regular occurrence until 2015. Back then, they were a thorn in the side of a Democratic Administration, as Texas challenged Barack Obama’s executive order granting legal protections to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children. A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush issued an injunction against the program—not just in Texas but nationwide. That ruling opened the spigots: twelve such injunctions were issued during the Obama Administration, sixty-four during the first Trump Administration, and fourteen during the first three years of the Biden Administration, according to a 2024 Harvard Law Review study. But the first months of the second Trump Administration have made that pace look leisurely: Sauer told the Justices that the Administration has been hit with forty nationwide orders.

Her diagnosis applies beyond the birthright-citizenship case. The Trump Administration has unleashed a torrent of unconstitutional executive orders and other questionable legal actions; with many of them, its goal seems less to win in the end than to inflict as much damage as possible along the way. That is why it is so determined to use the birthright-citizenship case to stop lower-court judges from issuing “nationwide injunctions”—orders that block Administration policies from taking effect across the country while their legality is hashed out in court. Lower courts, Sauer argued to the Justices, must limit their rulings to the individual parties in the case before them. Others who are harmed by the policies need to find ways to bring their own suits—unless and until the Supreme Court steps in with a definitive ruling. In other words, “catch me if you can.”

On Inauguration Day, shortly after taking an oath to defend the Constitution, Donald Trump sought to rewrite the document by executive fiat. He signed an order that purported to eliminate birthright citizenship for children without a parent who is a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. (The order applies to children born in the United States more than thirty days after its issuance.) His action violated the clear language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It contravened a 1940 federal law codifying that protection. It ignored a hundred-and-twenty-seven-year-old Supreme Court precedent making clear that the guarantee applies to the children of noncitizens, and also subsequent rulings reaffirming and expanding that view. “So, as far as I see it, this order violates four Supreme Court precedents,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Sauer.

But, Thursday’s arguments, in cases that were brought by blue states, by immigrants’-rights groups, and by individual pregnant women, weren’t really about birthright citizenship; the Trump Administration could have pressed the Justices to tackle that issue, but it chose not to. Instead, the unusual mid-May session, after regular oral arguments had finished for the term, focussed on the technical matter of injunctions. That is an issue on which the Administration has a far stronger argument, although, for the reasons Jackson outlined, an unconvincing one, at least when it comes to birthright citizenship.

Nationwide injunctions have been around for years but didn’t become a regular occurrence until 2015. Back then, they were a thorn in the side of a Democratic Administration, as Texas challenged Barack Obama’s executive order granting legal protections to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children. 

A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush issued an injunction against the program—not just in Texas but nationwide. That ruling opened the spigots: twelve such injunctions were issued during the Obama Administration, sixty-four during the first Trump Administration, and fourteen during the first three years of the Biden Administration, according to a 2024, Harvard Law Review study. But the first months of the second Trump Administration have made that pace look leisurely: Sauer told the Justices that the Administration has been hit with forty nationwide orders.

Questions about the practice were exacerbated by litigants’ blatant forum shopping, filing lawsuits in liberal areas when seeking to block Republican Presidents and in conservative jurisdictions to challenge the policies of Democratic Presidents. 

According to the Harvard study, fifty-nine of the sixty-four injunctions against Trump during his first term were issued by judges appointed by Democrats; all fourteen against Biden came from Republican-nominated judges. This is not a good look for the judiciary, and it is a problem for Administrations of both parties. Among those who have criticized the use of such orders are Trump’s Attorney General William Barr and Biden’s Solicitor General, Elizabeth Prelogar.

But although there are legitimate questions about whether lower-court judges have overstepped, there are also, as Thursday’s arguments illustrated, situations in which broad injunctions may be necessary. And birthright citizenship is particularly ill-suited as a vehicle for curbing them. Citizenship is, by definition, a national issue. It makes little sense to have a patchwork nation in which, while the question wends its way through the courts, children born in one state are citizens and those born in another are not.

“Look, there are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions,” Justice Elena Kagan told Sauer. But, she added, “let’s just assume you’re dead wrong” about ending birthright citizenship. “Does every single person that is affected by this [executive order] have to bring their own suit? Are there alternatives? How long does it take?” Kagan warned that the Administration could game the system by simply not appealing to the high court. Sauer suggested that plaintiffs could try bringing class-action suits—which the government would probably oppose. He also said that there should be “appropriate percolation” through the federal courts. His argument wasn’t helped by his unsettling assertion that the government might not even consider itself bound to follow rulings issued against it within the same appellate circuit. Sounding incredulous, Amy Coney Barrett asked, “Are you really going to answer Justice Kagan by saying there’s no way to do this expeditiously?”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has been one of the sharpest critics of nationwide injunctions, seemed similarly eager to move quickly to the business of birthright citizenship. No Justice, not even the most conservative, expressed a hint of sympathy for eliminating it. And, by the end of the two-hour-and-sixteen-minute session, it seemed as though the Justices might be thinking that they had blundered by getting sucked into the injunction debate. They had substituted a hard question for an easy call: that, Trump notwithstanding, birthright citizenship is the law of the land. 

Donald Trump is on trial again is delusional and now owes E Jean carrol $83.3 million for defamation

Trump on the Trail and on Trial- (can we spell 💲83.3 million 💲💲❓ 😅)  Echo opinion article published in The New Yorker, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. 

Is it clever, or deluded, for Trump—who complained last week that he has been indicted more times than Al Capone—to see his trials as a political opportunity?

Trump is delusional about his mounting & growing & expensive legal problems.

By January 21, 2024, as a way of launching the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, the Iowa and New Hampshire contests offer a neat thematic juxtaposition: in the Midwest, candidates fight for the social-conservative vote; in New England, for the support of small-business owners. Last week, after winning the Iowa caucus by thirty points, Donald Trump complicated the story by ping-ponging between New Hampshire and a Manhattan courtroom, where a jury is considering the amount of damages he now owes E. Jean Carroll for defaming her by saying that she lied when she accused him of rape. 

“Here’s my schedule for the next four or five days,” Trump told a crowd in Atkinson, New Hampshire, on Tuesday evening. “I come here, I meet with great groups in New Hampshire. I then get on the plane late at night when it’s snowing and freezing out—wonderful. And the pilot says, ‘Sir, it’s gonna be tough.’ And I get there early in the morning, I go to a Biden witch hunt, then I come here in the afternoon.” Trump’s trials, in which he faces ninety-one felony counts, have often been described as a potential distraction for the candidate. But Trump, who complained in Atkinson that he has been indicted more times than Al Capone, did not sound distracted or gloomy about the prospect of spending that time in court. Quite the opposite.

Trump wasn’t required to appear at the Carroll trial at all. But he found it politically advantageous to be there, not so much menacing the courtroom as Dennis-the-Menacing it. On Tuesday, when potential jurors were asked whether they believed that the 2020 election had been stolen, three raised their hands (none was selected), and Trump raised his hand, too. On Wednesday, Carroll’s lawyer said that Trump was disrupting the proceedings by “muttering” loudly enough for jurors to hear him say that the trial was a “con job” and a “witch hunt.” The judge threatened to throw him out. “I’d love that,” Trump replied. But, as he has been pointing out on the campaign trail, the indictments and trials have had a way of strengthening his support among Republicans. Trump’s first Presidential campaign, in 2016, was launched in an atmosphere of displacement and rage. This one is being conducted in a posture of relentless victimhood.

Maybe that’s a more effective position than at first it sounds. One way to interpret it is that the trials have imposed a deadline and he is in a race to beat it: to consolidate the support of the Party before his most serious cases get under way, so that he can campaign against the charges as partisan fictions. This may explain his curiously subdued performance after his win in Iowa, which derailed the campaign of Ron DeSantis, his only real challenger on the right. Speaking at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, Trump praised both DeSantis and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly urged the Party to “come together.” In recent campaign appearances, Trump tended to stand alone on the stage and deliver a harangue, but in Des Moines he was flanked by his sons Eric and Don, Jr., and devoted part of his meandering victory speech to the sports preferences and tall height of his youngest son, Barron. 

Donald Trump, political conciliator and family man❓ 😳😨😣😬

Hello❓It would be a real turn. But organizing his campaign around the idea that the trials are a Democratic setup means that Trump has to get the whole Party behind him, even those members who have long found him immoral, vindictive, or extreme.

Trump isn’t really running as a populist insurgent this time. Rather, he’s acting like something closer to a conventional leader of the Republican Party—though it’s a party, of course, that he has completely remade. 

Trump's evil reëmergence as the right wing front-runner in this 2024, election, after he tried to overturn the results of the last one, has required both capitulations within the Party (from Mitch McConnell’s failure to push G.O.P. senators to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial to Marco Rubio’s and Ted Cruz’s endorsements, last week, of the candidate they once denounced) and mistakes made outside it. The Biden Justice Department’s yearlong slow roll of its January 6th investigation, out of a “wariness to appear partisan,” as the Washington Post put it, now looks a little naïve. The trouble for Biden isn’t just that Trump remains the central figure in U.S. politics. It’s also that, to some voters, Biden’s inability to move his predecessor offstage just demonstrates the ineffectualness of his Administration. 😞

Trump’s unity stance may be superficial—not even a full day after his Iowa win, he was back to mocking DeSantis and Haley—but it seems that it can still have an effect. The religious conservatives who helped defeat him in Iowa in 2016, largely supported him this time; at Davos, mainstream business leaders including Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, found ways to praise him. 

On Friday, (Uncle Tom❗) Senator Tim Scott, who is viewed as an approachable moderate, endorsed Trump over Haley, his fellow South Carolinian. 

Chris Christie was the last Republican contender to criticize Trump over January 6th, and the former President probably expects that, if he keeps attacking judges and prosecutors, and pushing grandiose claims of immunity (such as that, absent an impeachment conviction, he wouldn’t be criminally liable even if, as President, he had ordered seal Team Six to assassinate a rival), most of the remaining holdouts in the Party will, if not support him, shuffle their feet and look the other way.

Is it clever, or deluded, for Trump to see his trials as a political opportunity? He has already been found liable for sexual abuse, in the Carroll case, and he still faces charges of financial fraud, taking documents marked classified from the White House and refusing to give them back, and conspiring to overturn a federal election—not exactly a winning roster. 

On the icy campaign trail this month, Trump’s presence has been something short of overwhelming. His events are held mostly in hotel ballrooms and country clubs, rather than the arenas of yore; he says little that is new; the crowds tend to thin noticeably as he rambles on. They chuckle when he says “crooked Joe Biden,” but there is nothing like the cascading chants of “Lock her up!” directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even Trump’s Iowa “landslide” consisted of just fifty-six thousand votes, and half of Republicans wanted someone else. Lately, Trump has been working into his stump speech an attack on Fani Willis, the Fulton County D.A., who indicted him for conspiring to pressure Georgia officials to invalidate his loss in the state in 2020—and whom one of his co-defendants has accused of an alleged conflict of interest. For Trump, the attraction of the trials, in an election characterized so far by general indifference, may be quite basic. They give him something to talk about. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 29, 2024, issue, with the headline “Trials and the Trail.”