TRUMP'S BASE WANTS HATE, NOT POLICY

The media was surprised last night when President Trump delivered a State of the Union address of record length but highlighted very few policy proposals. Katie Rogers of The New York Times wrote:

In his State of the Union address, President Trump didn’t bother to introduce a raft of new policies — unusual in a midterm election year with control of Congress on the line.

NPR's Domenico Montanaro told us:

There was no legislative agenda.

State of the Union addresses can sometimes descend into laundry lists of things the president wants Congress to accomplish.

Not this speech.

There were only about half a dozen specific things Trump asked Congress to do....

Punchbowl News said:

... overall, Trump’s speech was notably devoid of policy heft. Compare this to a State of the Union from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, and you find a truly stunning difference.

But that's because the speech was aimed exclusively at the Trump/GOP voter base. That base -- the last people in America who still admire and respect Trump -- doesn't want the president and Congress to pass a bunch of laws. The people in the base want Trump to make them feel good, partly through simple-mided flag-waving patriotism, but mostly through endless Democrat-bashing. Like the rest of us, they've stopped expecting the political system to improve our lives. But they're content if Trump hurts the people they want to see hurt, demeans the people they want to see demeaned, and declares that America is strictly Republican.

That's why the same polling outfit that recently told us Trump has a 36% job approval rating and a 63% disapproval rating found that his speech went over well with the audience that watched it, which was disproportionately Republican:

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address drew largely positive marks from a heavily Republican audience, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS....

Nearly two-thirds of speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump’s speech, with a smaller 38% offering a very positive response....

Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately align with presidents’ own parties....

The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 13 percentage points more Republican than the general public.

Trump began the speech with Power of Positive Thinking wishcasting:

Our country is winning again. In fact, we're winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we're winning too much. We can't take it anymore. We're not used to winning in our country until you came along, we're just always losing. But now we're winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you're going to win again. You're going to win big. You're going to win bigger than ever.

This was addressed to Republican voters, the only people who actually find it plausible.

Trump segued to the awards-dinner part of the speech -- the U.S. Olympic men's hockey team, a couple of newly minted Medal of Honor recipients. And then the rest of the speech was Democrat-bashing interleaved with culture-war sob stories, which Trump recounted with lip-licking relish.

really remarkable how trump seems to relish sharing this lurid stories about the terrible pain people have experienced, and he does it exclusively to score some partisan points

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 24, 2026 at 10:21 PM

That's what Republican voters think his job is. That's what they think his job should be: inducing "liberal tears" while they and others are encouraged to hate Democrats even more. And that's what they'll expect J.D. Vance's job to be when they nominate him in 2028. (If he wins, he'll give them what they want. He likes hating and he likes stirring up hate. That's why he's leading in the GOP primary polls by nearly 30 points.)

Legislation? Who needs it? Republicans want a president who talks like this:

... these people are crazy. I'm telling them they're crazy.

Amazing. Boy oh boy.

We're lucky we have a country. With people like this - Democrats are destroying our country. But we've stopped it just in the nick of time, didn't we?

They want him to talk like that about Democrats and they want him to brutalize (or at least repress) people they associate with Democrats, particularly immigrants and people who protest on their behalf. They want his stories to make them even angrier at the people they hate, which is why they're not interested in anyone's fact-checks. They want Trump's stories to strain credulity, because their level of hatred requires enemies of superhuman monstrousness. Last night Trump said:

Under Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with the Green New Scam, open borders for everyone — they poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions, they were murderers — 11,888 murders — they came into our country, you allowed that to happen.

They don't want to be told that the truth about the 11,888 (or 13,000 or whichever number Trump is using on a given day):

... those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president [in his first term], because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

They want Trump to tell them that the brutality of the people they hate is unspeakable, just the way they want Kristi Noem to tell them the people they've detained include at least one cannibal:

Kristi Noem lied about an immigrant being a cannibal. Of course it was all made up nonsense. Normal people didn’t believe it, just like we didn’t believe Haitians were eating pets. This is part of dehumanization of immigrants playbook. Fear and hate is the point.

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— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) February 24, 2026 at 11:02 AM

This is what they want government to do. They want the sheer pleasure of hating and they want to believe that the people thay hate are being hurt. Affordability can wait. Anything that's not related to hate is of secondary importance.

JUST DO THINGS

I'm mildly annoyed by this Politico story:

Dems refuse to make 2024 mistakes in the wake of tariff ruling

What's the 2024 mistake Democrats aren't making, according to Politico?

The Supreme Court’s tariff decision left the door wide open for Democrats to hammer President Donald Trump for violating the law. This time, they’re not taking the bait.

Instead, Democratic campaigns are leaning into an argument they have been making for months: Trump’s tariffs are coming out of voters’ pockets. Some Democrats can’t help but hit the tariffs as “unlawful,” but they’re pivoting quickly back to affordability....

“People aren’t going to care whether that’s under an IEEPA regulation or Section 122,” said Gabe Horwitz, senior vice president at center-left group Third Way. “The fact is, the Trump administration continues to push tariffs that hurt consumers.”

There's a belief out there that it was a massive error to say Trump was a criminal in 2024. I agree that this might have been ineffective, especially a focus on January 6, which, to most voters, probably seemed like old news, an event remote from their lives, and one that ended with no real damage to democracy. But I see no evidence that talking about Trump's criminality was a major factor in Kamala Harris's loss.

Here's the Democrats' message now about the Supreme Court ruling, one we're supposed to believe is a vast improvement over 2024 messaging:

“The decision is a significant development, but prices are still high for folks across the country, and the administration is determined to keep them high,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.,) chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “We are laser focused on affordability and holding Republicans accountable for raising prices on families across the country.”

Okay, fine, but ... how? Being "laser focused on affordability" is awesome, but what does that mean Democrats are doing?

I worry that mainstream Democrats think this kind of verbal mush is actually effective. I don't think it is, and that might help explain why, in the recent Washington Post/ABC poll, President Trump gets bad marks (39% job approval, 60% disapproval), but Democrats in Congress don't look much better:

Asked whether they trust Trump or Democrats in Congress to handle major issues, 33 percent cite the president, 31 percent say Democrats, 4 percent say both equally and a crucial 31 percent say neither....

Asked whom they trust to deal with reducing the cost of living, for example, about one-third of Americans say Trump, one-third say Democrats and one-third say neither.

Democrats need to be more specific. They need to have ideas, and communicate those ideas to voters.

I'll acknowledge that many Democrats offer something more concrete than "We're laser focused!" when they're actually running. Mikie Sherrill, for instance, told New Jersey voters during her run for governor last year that she'd freeze utility rates. She won by double digits (and then did what she promised).

As the Politico story notes, several Democrats are demanding something specific: a tariff refund.

Reps. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) and Janelle Bynum (D-Ore.), who both represent battleground districts, introduced legislation Friday that would require Customs and Border Patrol to refund tariffs collected over the past year to small and independent businesses. A group of Democratic senators — led by Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire — introduced a similar bill Monday with the backing of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The legislation is likely a nonstarter in the GOP-controlled Congress, but gives Democrats a way to put pressure on Republicans....

Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois demanded the federal government refund families $1,700 per household. California Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters that Trump has an “obligation” to return the money to consumers who paid more for goods as a result of the tariffs....

At least one Democrat in a key Senate race is also embracing the demand for a tariff refund. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is trying to unseat Jon Husted, said on X that he wanted a refund for every Ohio household and that Husted supported the tariffs “at every turn.”

More of this, please. Every Democrat should be saying this. It won't solve the affordability crisis, but it's a concrete step. Voters will respond to concrete steps much more than to "laser focused."

But the Politico story ends the way so many of these stories end -- with a Democrat essentially telling the reporter that Democrats haven't done a very good job at messaging:

“We can’t communicate episodically. We need to be communicating constantly,” said Will Robinson, a Democratic consultant and ad-maker. “I think the theoretical thing about the Supreme Court and tariffs is less impactful than what’s actually going on in the grocery basket.”

Republicans don't do this! They don't say, Wow, we've sucked at messaging lately and we need to suck less. I know that it's always easy for mainstream reporters to get a Here's how Democrats are sucking now story published (or Here's how how Democrats are making a valiant effort not to suck), but if you're a Democrat, you don't have to give reporters quotes that reinforce the message of their stories. Just refuse to acknowledge the party's mistakes. The stories might still be written, but you don't need to make it easy.

MEN ARE FINALLY BACK (NOT IN A GOOD WAY)

Writing for Liberal Currents, Katherine Alejandra Cross offers an explanation for President Trump's enduring appeal to his fans:

There has never been a shortage of ... vile, open bigots among the ranks of conservatives and Republicans. What is Trump’s value-add? What is the true, necrotised heart of his appeal?

What he sells his legions of followers that no other Republican could was impunity.

Trump’s fans live vicariously through him, and it inspires imitation. They marvel at how he creates Content by never backing down, never apologising, always pushing the envelope with ever more offensive statements. He is the unbannable poster they aspire to be. For his wealthiest backers, the Epstein Class and lesser aspirants, he has been the surest guardian of the immunity they see as a birthright. In either case, Trump’s brand is impunity and the fans want some for themselves.

Some of this is gendered brutality. Cross cites the case of a pro-Trump Texas man who shot and killed his adult daughter during an argument about the president, as well as the murder of Renee Good:

Yes, he is indeed the Everything is Gender president, but that means nothing unless you can be a violent misogynist and also get away with it. One wonders if that thought lurked somewhere in Kris Harrison’s mind as he waved a gun at his mouthy daughter, or in the mind of Jonathan Ross as he fired four shots at a woman he called a “fucking bitch” as she lay dying. For them, Trumpism did not just put the gun in their hands: the promise of Trump’s immunity to accountability induced them to pull the trigger.

Trump and his underlings are also selling the fantasy that you can act like a young man with no responsibilities all the time and get away with it.

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) February 23, 2026 at 6:12 AM

(In addition to Robert Kennedy Jr. exercising with Kid Rock, Pete Hegseth letting out a war whoop in a gym, and Kash Patel partying with the gold-medal Olympic hockey team, we have Kristi Noem's totalitarian cosplay, which, on the surface, doesn't seem like a male fantasy. But she's trying to be the archetypal guy's girl, in the totalitarian version.)

Cross's essay made me think about a Peggy Noonan column published in 2001, a month after 9/11. Noonan wrote:

... men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.

I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen. They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever takes its place.

And their style is back in style. We are experiencing a new respect for their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.

I don't think that's what "we" were experiencing at that moment, but if it was, it didn't last. Life stateside went more or less back to a pre-9/11 normal. The wars President Bush started became quagmires. And dick-swinging dudes in the world of finance crashed the economy in 2008.

Noonan had a peculiar view of masculinity:

... you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If you’re a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League University you’ll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.

In fact, as we learned on January 24, a cop will respond to a woman who's criticizing him by shoving her into a snowbank. A skinny, left-leaning male nurse will reach out his hand to help her up, the cop will shoot him, and then not allow the woman -- an EMT -- to come to his aid even as he's dying.

That's the kind of manliness Americans wanted -- or at least the Americans who live in red states and districts, the ones who control our politics even though they're a minority of the population. They wanted men who are immature, brutal, and completely unaccountable. Trump gave them what they wanted.

INTERNET ARGUMENT MODE IS HURTING THE LEFT

A few days ago, The Bulwark published a piece by Nicholas Grossman titled "Trump Can't Steal the Midterms." The headline is a categorical dismissal of worriers like me; the subhead -- "The case for being vigilant without panicking" -- is more nuanced.

The piece itself begins with a categorical dismissal of doom:

DONALD TRUMP WILL NOT BE ABLE to steal this November’s midterm elections. He and his allies will keep trying to manipulate the midterms in their favor, which Democrats, pro-democracy activists, and all Americans who care about our constitutional system should keep working to counter. But he won’t succeed: No matter how much Team Trump disregards norms and laws, there’s no mechanism for taking over state elections, reversing losses, or preventing newly elected members of Congress from sitting, especially if Republicans lose by substantial margins. Vigilance is warranted, but excessive fear plays into the authoritarians’ hands.

And then Grossman says this in the second paragraph:

This is not a call for complacency. Backsliding from democracy into authoritarianism is greased by people saying Calm down, it’ll be fine, the institutions will handle it, he doesn’t mean it, someone will stop him. I’m not doing that.

But Calm down, it’ll be fine, the institutions will handle it ... someone will stop him appears to be precisely what Grossman's headline and first paragraph are saying. In the rest of the essay, Grossman stresses "Vigilance is warranted" rather than "Trump can't." But he begins with what reads to me like an absolutist dismissal of concern.

I think it's because he's arguing like a person of the internet. Most of us are these days. It's not helpful.

Pure doomers argue that the system now allows Trump to do anything he wants and won't stop him if he cancels the midterms altogether, sends thugs to polling places, or demands that ballots in Democratic strongholds be thrown out. Then anti-doomers say that pure doomers are helping Trump, as Grossman does:

Authoritarianism is partially in our heads. The Trump regime’s desire for domination is bottomless, but its capacity is not. They rely on bluster and fear to make up the difference, to get people to “obey in advance,” doing things the government cannot force them to do. The more the regime cultivates a vibe of strength and inevitability, the more room it has to operate. The more people think the regime is weak and failing, the more likely they are to say no, drag their feet, refuse demands, and resist.

But while the Trump regime is not all-powerful, neither is it "weak and failing." Why does that have to be the choice? Why can't we acknowledge that Trump is beatable -- a leader who has sometimes been rebuffed by the general public, the lower courts, and (on rare occasions) even Congress or the Supreme Court -- but is also a very powerful leader who has abused his power in ways that are unprecedented in U.S. history, and continues to do so? Why do we have to divide our side into the evil worriers and the virtuous believers in Trump's profound weakness? Why can't we say Trump has significant strengths and we need to continue fighting him?

The internet discourages nuance and rewards fist-pumping absolutism. I see this in other intramural battles on the left: for instance, between the people who are already angry about Gavin Newsom's likely 2028 presidential candidacy and those of us who are prepared to vote for him if he's the nominee. In this online battle, Newsom is already effectively the nominee, and everyone who would vote for him in the general election is evil -- and, on the other side, everyone who won't "vote blue no matter who" is evil. Can we just have the primaries, please? We can hash all this out. But we'd rather pre-divide ourselves -- which, to me, is doing the Republicans' work for them.

And I worry about mini-versions of this rift in the Maine, Texas, and Michigan Senate races this year. I hope supporters of the primary losers will unite around the winning candidates in these states. But I fear that so much animosity has been stirred up that they might not.

Let's stop fighting this way. It's not helpful.

I DON'T BELONG TO AN ORGANIZED RESISTANCE -- I'M A DEMOCRAT

President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address next week. As The New York Times reported a few days ago, the Democratic response a year ago was scattered and occasionally laughable:

Democrats knew in real time last year that they had bungled their response to President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, making themselves a distraction rather than offering a cohesive message of resistance to his policies.

Representative Al Green, a liberal septuagenarian from Texas, was ejected from the chamber (and later censured) after disrupting the speech with a cane-waving tirade.

Actually, Green's protest was one of the first signs of life from a Democratic member of Congress in the second Trump presidency, and a lot of us were happy to see it.

The paddles that some Democrats waved with short messages on them — “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” and one that just read “False” — were widely panned as a hokey and incoherent response.

Yes, that was just sad.

As Stephen Colbert said in response to the paddles:

“That is how you save democracy. By quietly dissenting — or bidding on an antique tea set, it was hard to tell what was going on.”

And some Democratic women protested by wearing pink. So it was kind of a mess -- a little rage, a lot of gentility. Surely Democrats will have a tighter, more coordinated response this year, right?

Nahhh. Last week, Axios reported:

In a meeting of House Democrats' whip team ... [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries said there were "two options" for how to approach the State of the Union....

The first option: Lawmakers can boycott the event....

The second: They can sit in "silent defiance," which was Democratic leadership's preferred tactic for last year's speech.

And Jeffries is such a strong, firm leader that everyone has agreed to this approach, right? Again, nahhh:

Some House Democrats say they plan to defy instructions from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) not to protest President Trump during his State of the Union address on Feb. 24....

[Some] said they may walk out mid-speech, with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) telling Axios: "The only question for me is which of his disgusting lines prompts me to get up and leave, because at some point I will."

Some of the boycotters will be attending a competing event:

A counterrally, dubbed the “People’s State of the Union,” will be held at 8:30 p.m. on the National Mall.... The rally, which will feature “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda,” is hosted by liberal group MoveOn Civic Action, progressive media company MeidasTouch and other coalition partners.

Speakers at the event include Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), as well as Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), according to a press release.

And there's an alternate alternate event as well:

Another counterprogramming event, billed as the “State of the Swamp,” is planned at the National Press Club. The event will be hosted by Defiance.org, a website launched by Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official and fervent Trump critic.

Among the attendees at that event will be Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Eric Swalwell, Jason Crow, Seth Moulton, and Dan Goldman.

So: not exactly cohesive.

Will the two rallies get lost because they're overlapping with the actual Trump speech, as well as each other? Or am I misunderstanding how the press and social media work now? Is the point that there'll be lots of clips for people to watch the next day, from multiple sources, and it doesn't matter what people see in real time? Or maybe people are expected to be watching multiple screens simultaneously?

In any case, it seems as if it will be just as messy and incoherent as last year, though it will be a lot angrier (which is good).

Oh, and:

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger will deliver the official Democratic response to President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Feb. 24.

And:

... Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., will be giving the Spanish-language response to Trump’s speech.

Spanberger -- a moderate, and not exactly a dynamic speaker -- was apparently chosen (by Jeffries and his nebbish counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer) because she won't rile anyone up:

In a statement Thursday, Jeffries said Spanberger "stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump, who will lie, deflect and blame everyone but himself for his failed presidency on Tuesday evening."

... A person familiar with the decision emphasized that Spanberger’s 2018 victory from red to blue in addition to her relentless focus on affordability in flipping the Virginia governor's mansion serve as a playbook to success that Democrats hope to emulate in 2026.

"Focus on affordability"! That sound you hear is me banging my head on my laptop repeatedly.

If Democrats wanted to put on a united front against Trump, they could have had Spanberger delivering her rebuttal at the rally on the National Mall immediately after Trump's speech ends. One of the reasons State of the Union rebuttals tend to get poor grades is that they're usually delivered in a silent room with no audience, following a speech delivered to an audience that's half full of pumped-up presidential loyalists. The president gets multiple standing ovations. The rebutter gets silence. Why not change it up?

Or, instead of having the traditional speech by a rising party star, why not announce that the rebuttal will be given by the “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda” who'll be speaking at the rally -- a group that, as the Times says, includes "people who have been negatively affected by Mr. Trump’s economic and health care policies, as well as federal workers who lost their jobs and immigrants who have been targeted by the Trump administration"?

A few weeks ago, I watched this clip of an interview with Kaden Rummler, a 21-year-old Californian who was permanently blinded in one eye by a "less lethal" ICE projectile during a protest following the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Rummler is interviewed by Chris Wolfe of KTLA.

The Trump-Vance administration just used your taxes to pay for an ICE agent to do this to a 21-year-old kid, who was only protesting because another ICE agent killed a mother of three, who was only there because ICE agents are kidnapping your neighbors

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— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) January 15, 2026 at 3:23 PM

WOLFE: What can you tell us about your injuries now and the prognosis? Will you be blind in that eye for life?

RUMMLER: From what I've heard the doctors say, and everyone else, yes, I will be blind for life. They said my globe[?] was ruptured. I had, like -- my lower lid was, like, cut up, and they had to take skin from my temple to fix it. Um, there's a lot to it. I don't remember all the things that they said. I have fractures in my skull that they can't fix, and I can't sneeze or cough 'cause it's dangerous, too. Um, I remember also when they shot, there was pepper in it, and I had pepper down my throat. It made it hard to breathe for a long time. They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye. They said I had shards of metal, glass, and plastic all throughout my eye, and behind my eye, and in my skull. They also said that I had a piece of shrapnel metal about -- a few millimeters away from my carotid artery, and they said it was a miracle I survived, 'cause if it got any closer, if it hit the-- I would have died that night.

WOLFE: So are we blind right now?

RUMMLER: Yeah.

WOLFE: You see nothing out the eye?

RUMMLER: Nothing out of this eye. It's, uh, it's black.

It occurred to me then that the best State of the Union rebuttal might be a series of clips like this, perhaps introduced by a Democratic elected official. But rebutting Trump with ordinary people's speeches at the Mall rally might have been even better.

ON WAR, TARIFFS, AND TRUMP'S BRAIN

It looks as if President Trump is about to start a war with Iran, or at least launch a limited strike accompanied by a threat of more if Iran doesn't bend the knee, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Trump is weighing an initial limited military strike on Iran to force it to meet his demands for a nuclear deal, a first step that would be designed to pressure Tehran into an agreement but fall short of a full-scale attack that could inspire a major retaliation.

The opening assault, which if authorized could come within days, would target a few military or government sites, people familiar with the matter said. If Iran still refused to comply with Trump’s directive to end its nuclear enrichment, the U.S. would respond with a broad campaign against regime facilities—potentially aimed at toppling the Tehran regime.

As the Financial Times notes, this might not motivate Iran to make a deal:

The litmus test for Tehran is that talks and any subsequent deal must guarantee Iran will not be attacked; that the US will abide by the deal and lift sanctions...

(Imagine being stupid enough to think that Trump will abide by any deal. The Iranians have to be smarter than that.)

... and that it will not insist that Iran give up the right to civilian uranium enrichment. Yet none of these compromises seem to have been on offer in the last two rounds of talks. Instead, the US is demanding that Iran surrender not only its nuclear programme but also its missiles and regional proxies.

... There is an emerging consensus in Tehran that Iran will not win anything at the negotiating table. It will instead have to accept war, prepare to manage it, and hope that conflict eventually leads to the change it is seeking — by exhausting the US to the point that it abandons the pursuit of future aggression and agrees to a more favourable nuclear deal.

... even if the US launches a massive strike and succeeds in impeding Iran’s ability to retaliate against US forces or Israel, Tehran may still retain the ability to use its regional proxies, and target oil facilities and energy supply routes. It could even decide to launch much of its arsenal against the US and its allies before the US is able to destroy it, thus quickly escalating the war.

So this could get ugly.

Nick Catoggio of The Dispatch can't understand why this is happening now:

And so here we are, on the precipice of the largest war that the United States will have waged in nearly 25 years without any clear objective for the mission. “President Trump hasn’t decided ... whether the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its missile force, or try to topple the regime,” the Journal noted surreally in its report on America’s military build-up. War as Mad Libs: We must attack Iran because [casus belli TBD].

Michelle Goldberg knows why:

... I assume Trump is driven by the same self-aggrandizing impulse that made him slap his name on the Kennedy Center. He wants to put his stamp on the world, to be the president who rid the globe of three regimes that bedeviled his predecessors: Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, which he’s subjecting to a devastating fuel blockade. “He is now enamored with the idea that he will be the president on whose watch a number of regimes that have been viscerally anti-American for a long time will no longer be,” said [Rob] Malley [President Biden’s special envoy for Iran].

That's an explanation for Trump's wars, his building spree, and even the tariffs -- which I don't believe are going away even though the Supreme Court struck them down today:

The Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump’s signature economic and foreign policy Friday morning in a fractured 6-3 split decision.

Trump cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to override Congress’s power of the purse, using the emergency declaration to levy widespread global tariffs, the majority held.

Trump believes he's right about tariffs and all sensible people are wrong. He wants to impose them as part of his legacy. They're the economic equivalent of his ballroom and his arch (and his wars).

That's why, as I've said many times, he'll just impose whatever tariffs he can through alternate pathways. As The New York Times notes today:

But even while battling in court, the president began to explore alternatives to the 1977 law. Mr. Trump’s top trade negotiator Jamieson Greer said last month that the administration would move quickly to replace any emergency tariffs invalidated by the court with other levies. The president has already used other statutes to set tariffs, including national security-related ones on some specific goods and industries.

In November, the Times listed a few of those statutes:

... the administration could use Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act to put in place a 15 percent global tariff for 150 days.... That law says a president can impose tariffs to deal with “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits....

In the meantime, the administration could start multiple trade investigations under a legal provision known as Section 301.... Section 301 allows the president to issue broad tariffs in response to unfair trading practices, after first conducting an investigation....

Another alternative is Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs on national security grounds.

On that last one, we're told:

Those levies typically require investigations that can take several months to carry out, a period that would prevent the president from arbitrarily raising and lowering tariffs, as he has done with IEEPA.

LOL -- imagine Trump refraining from using this authority because a painstaking investigation hasn't been carried out.

As I've said a few times, I think all of this is happening not just because Trump is a megalomaniac, but because he had a health scare last year that led him to believe he could die soon. I wrote this last month:

After all of Trump's talk about "heaven" in 2025, and his recent Wall Street Journal interview about his health, I assume he's afraid of death (though that doesn't mean he's actually dying) and is trying to go out with a bang -- he wants to die knowing he was the most consequential person on earth, if not the most consequential person of all time. Hence the renaming and building and redecorating. He's trying to preen and bomb his way to a legacy.

He also wants to make sure he doesn't die before punishing all his enemies and hoovering up all the cash he possibly can -- Whoever dies with the most toys wins, amirite? And that's how policy is decided when you elect an ignorant, corrupt narcissist to the presidency and the other two branches of government defer to him 99% of the time.

NO ELITE ACCOUNTABILITY = AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Here are some of today's headlines:

* Former Prince Andrew Arrested in Britain Over Epstein Ties

* Epstein files hand French prosecutors trove of new leads

* South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

* Epstein’s Files of ‘Shame’ Blast Through Europe and Beyond, Scorching Politicians, Royals and Other Elites

From that last story:

... former British Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson ... was fired last year after it came to light that he maintained a friendly relationship with Epstein for years after the financier’s 2008 prison term for sexual offenses involving a minor. Now, police are investigating whether he passed on sensitive government financial information – including some documents meant for the prime minister only – to Epstein during the financial crisis, while he was the UK’s Secretary of State for Business. If charged and found guilty, Mandelson could face a life sentence....

Across the English Channel, French officials have launched a tax fraud and money laundering investigation into Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, and his daughter, Caroline.

There are legal investigations in quite a few other countries. But in America? No one in Washington is stepping down. No one in politics is in legal jeopardy. Prominent figures in business, law, and academia have left positions in disgrace, but no one appears to be under criminal investigation.

(And, of course, our president was never held accountable for his attempt to subvert democracy in 2021, unlike the former presidents of South Korea and Brazil.)

I think it's only a matter of time before American pundits begin arguing that America's utter lack of legal accountability for elites is a good thing, actually.

They'll say that instead of succumbing to moral panics, "wokeness," and guilt by association, American law enforcement is right not to define dynamic, capable, accomplished people by their worst moments. We should be pleased! Societies with a culture of shame are weaker! We don't want to be like (insert retching sounds) Europe, do we? Stodgy, hidebound, politically correct, past-its-prime Europe? Who wants that?

Maybe we'll hear this from the Atlantic writer who told us that the recently releases Epstein files "bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with," or maybe we'll hear it from the folks, mostly on the right, who keep calling the Epstein matter a "moral panic." Right-wingers already believe that Donald Trump shouldn't have been held accountable for the attempted coup he inspired. Why wouldn't they say the failure to launch investigations of bigwigs in the Epstein files is a good thing, too?