Trump ‘Bored’ With Iran War? Yep, just like FDR was ‘bored’ with WW II:
Patience is not Trump’s strength. One outside adviser, who speaks with him regularly, told me the president is “bored” with the war. Others believe he is frustrated at Iran’s intransigence. And while Trump at times feels detached from the political concerns of his party, Republicans have been inundated with complaints about rising prices, particularly at the gas pump. Many in the GOP were already preparing themselves to lose the House; the longer the war goes on, they believe, the more likely it is that the Senate could flip too.
Despite the negotiating impasse, Trump is reluctant to resume hostilities, aides and advisers have told me. There is concern about the dwindling supply of American munitions, and Trump this week expressed reluctance about killing more people. Some U.S. allies in the region (including, at times, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) have voiced concern that the resumption of American attacks would make them, once more, targets of Iran’s retaliation. Yesterday, Iran opened fire on U.S. naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. retaliated by striking sites in Iran. But despite the spasm of violence, Trump insisted that the cease-fire was still in place and downplayed the strikes as “a love tap.” He also, advisers have indicated, wants to tamp down any military action ahead of his trip to Beijing next week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. China has broadcast its unhappiness with the war and the closing of the strait; Trump wants to be able to claim that the fighting is ending as he pursues new trade and business deals with Xi.
As a further complication, the U.S. has largely exhausted its list of significant military targets, advisers have said. To continue to escalate, which is Trump’s signature move, he’s had to threaten civilian targets such as power plants, bridges, and even desalination plants. At one point, he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” an overt threat to commit war crimes. Trump also has options for a limited ground invasion—seizing highly enriched uranium or attacking Kharg Island, a hub of Iran’s energy sector—but he is leery about risking the lives of American troops.
And so Trump keeps issuing deadlines to force Iran to cave, but Tehran keeps calling his bluff. For weeks now, Trump has blustered about resuming attacks but, each time, has found a way to back down. With the exception of a few hawkish voices, most in Trump’s orbit remain reluctant to restart the attack even as the stalemate continues. With the naval blockade in place to counter Iran’s closing of the strait, the administration on Monday unveiled Project Freedom, which deployed the U.S. Navy to help some ships escape the waterway. Although a few ships managed to cross the strait on the first day, Trump quickly abandoned the plan. Iranian forces fired on a South Korean cargo ship, there were clashes with U.S. warships, and the Pentagon said it destroyed seven small Iranian boats. But administration officials did not want to risk a major escalation of hostilities, particularly a possible attack on an American naval vessel. Some Gulf allies, fearing retaliation, moved to cut American access to their bases and airspace.
I, for one, don’t mind a war being halted due to Presidential boredom.
‘Alligator Albatross’. Sad:
Remember when Alligator Alcatraz, Florida’s massive immigrant detention center, opened? It was just last summer, and President Donald Trump toured the facility. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushed over how great it was that it was “isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife.” Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem declared that the federal government would fund it with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds and boasted about “our partnership with Florida.”
But the good times didn’t last, and now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems positively sweaty, desperate to get rid of the thing, saying it was always temporary and that there was always a plan to wind it down. And possibly very soon.
DeSantis is right to be worried. This expensive abomination hangs firmly around his neck and his neck alone. Florida fronted its cost, but the state was supposed to be reimbursed to the tune of more than $600 million from DHS.
But then came the lawsuit alleging that the federal government skipped the required environmental review, at which point both Florida and the administration said that the federal government had nothing to do with it at all, why would you possibly think that?
That argument won the day at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and that’s allowed the detention center to remain open, but now DeSantis is the dog who caught the car. He has permission to keep running his concentration camp, but he has to pay for it. If the federal government reimburses Florida or starts covering costs in other ways, the environmental review problem likely can’t be sidestepped.
Now, DeSantis is saddled with it, and the state is spending over $1 million per day to run the thing. DHS has apparently soured on it as well, though why they get to weigh in when we’re pretending they have nothing to do with it is a bit of a mystery. DeSantis is now saying that it would be “great” to unwind the entire thing and turn the space back into a training airport.
It would be great not to have prisons holding people who mostly are a threat to nobody.
Conservative County Battles ‘ICE Warehouse’. Doesn’t get much redder than rural western Maryland. However:
HAGERSTOWN, Md. — In January, the Department of Homeland Security bought an 825,620-square-foot vacant warehouse a few miles outside of this small Western Maryland city, hoping to turn it into a processing facility for immigrant detainees. As news spread in the coming days, stunned residents asked one another how they could stop the Trump administration’s plan. Many of them found their way to Patrick Dattilio.
Dattilio was running a new Signal group for locals inspired by the resistance in Minnesota who wanted to fight the president’s deportation campaign. At first, the group, Hagerstown Rapid Response, had only been picking up one new member every couple of days.
“You could maybe wave it away and say it wasn’t here for a while,” Dattilio, 38, said of the immigration crackdown. “But the warehouse changed everything.”
Suddenly, Dattilio could barely keep up with requests to join. For his day job, he works remotely as a software developer, so he was able to write a bot to help screen would-be members of the group. Membership quickly grew to 100. Then 500. Everyone wanted to know how they could pitch in.
People volunteered to research city and county codes, pull water and sewer documents and file public record requests. An Uber driver took routes near the warehouse to keep tabs on activity there. The group even attracted two drone operators to do surveillance from afar. In a city where the only regular protests used to take place outside the downtown abortion clinic, warehouse opponents were now descending on county board meetings while Rage Against the Machine blared outside.
The Western Maryland warehouse is part of a broader Trump administration plan to convert several industrial spaces around the country into detention centers. The purchases have drawn bipartisan pushback in many communities, with residents worried about effects on the local environment, infrastructure and tax base. But nowhere has the resistance been so fierce and organized as in Hagerstown and surrounding Washington County.
The most energized warehouse opponents have no background in activism or politics — just a shared sense of dread about where the country seems to be headed and how their community figures into the administration’s plans. Dattilio grew up in Hagerstown, earned a degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, and returned to marry his high school girlfriend. He has four children between the ages of 4 and 10. His family has been in the area for 120 years.
He can’t shake the idea of Hagerstown becoming shorthand for “concentration camp.”
The western Maryland warehouse is one of 11 across the country that DHS has acquired for a total of around $1 billion. Several other purchases have been scuttled, largely due to local pushback. Washington County residents couldn’t stop the warehouse sale there because Trump officials carried it out in secret.
They did so by using a government procurement process designed for military emergencies, sidestepping normal procedures and avoiding scrutiny. The administration not only bought the Hagerstown warehouse for $102 million but also awarded hundreds of millions in related contracts before anyone knew to call their senator.
Good article. I recommend that you check out the entire piece.
Benjamin Netanyahu interrupted an uncharacteristically long silence over the Iran conflict this week with a video commentary insisting he had “full coordination” with Donald Trump, with whom he spoke “almost daily”.
The insistence that all was rosy in the US-Israeli relationship followed weeks of reports in the domestic press that Israel was no longer being consulted over the Iran conflict, and even less over Pakistani-brokered peace talks. Such is the scepticism over Netanyahu’s trustworthiness among the general public and independent press that the immediate reaction among observers to his video statement was speculation that the reality could be even worse than they had imagined.
He is doing so much talking about how great the relationship is that it makes me rather concerned about how much tension there is,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-Israeli political consultant and pollster. “I wouldn’t be surprised, as the war is clearly going very poorly from all perspectives related to the original goals.”
The US president and the Israeli prime minister have long presented mirror images of each other. They have both pioneered populist methods to dominate domestic politics, cutting away at the constitutional underpinning of the very systems that brought them to power, with little regard for past norms or constraints.
Since 28 February, when they brought the Gulf to a standstill with a devastating US-Israeli assault on Iran, they have bound their fate together so tightly that it will be very hard for either of them to unstick themselves from its legacy.
Netanyahu spent decades trying to persuade a succession of US presidents to join Israel in a war against the Islamic Republic. He went to unprecedented lengths for a foreign leader wading into US domestic politics, in particular when it came to undermining the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran of 2015, which had been Barack Obama’s flagship foreign policy achievement.
Netanyahu helped coax Trump to walk out of that deal in 2018, which in turn led to a ramping up of Iran’s nuclear programme and accumulation of a stockpile of highly enriched uranium sufficient for a dozen nuclear warheads. And in February this year, according to extensive reporting in the US press, Netanyahu was instrumental in convincing Trump that war was the only solution to the threat, and one that would be easily won.
“Netanyahu, being the conman that he is, used Venezuela as an example,” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, said. “He said to him: ‘Look what you did in Venezuela. It was painless. It was effortless. It was beautiful. You changed the regime.’
“Then he begins bombarding Trump with intelligence data showing that Iran had expanded its missile production and its missile-launching capabilities, and still has 450kg of highly enriched uranium,” Pinkas said.
With the help of the Mossad director, David Barnea, Netanyahu portrayed the Tehran regime as an overripe fruit ready to drop from the branch.
“He told Trump: ‘The Iranian economy is in shambles. The people are on the precipice of revolt. The Revolutionary Guards are losing control. Life in Iran is intolerable. This is our time,’” Pinkas said. “‘What we could do together is bring down the regime … think that together, jointly, we can win the war in three, four days.’”
It takes a con to out-con a con. Trump never had a chance.
What do you want to talk about?