TRUMP SHRUGS AND SAYS SHIT HAPPENS BECAUSE HE THINKS SHIT HAPPENING WOULD BE FINE FOR HIM

This passage from Time magazine's cover story on President Trump and the war in Iran is getting a lot of attention:

Asked whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home, Trump acknowledges the possibility. “I guess,” he says. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die."

First, I want to draw your attention to "But I think [Americans are] worried about that all the time." I live in Manhattan. I lived here on 9/11. The vast majority of my fellow New Yorkers aren't "worried about that all the time." We know the risks, and we know they haven't gone away. We know, for instance, that an ISIS-inspired terrorist drove a pickup truck into cylists and runners back in 2017, killing eight of them. Terrorism happens, and we know our city is a much more likely target than the outer-ring suburbs and rural communities where Trump supporters tend to live. But we get on with our lives. We're not perpetually fearful. It's Trumpers who are obsessed with terrorism fears and the fear of "sleeper cells."

🚨 THIS IS INSANE: Democrats have ONCE AGAIN voted to KEEP DHS CLOSED, despite the highly elevated terror threat by Iranian sleeper cells in the United States

Democrats DO NOT CARE about the safety of you and your family.

It’s ALL about political power.

STOP VOTING DEMOCRAT! pic.twitter.com/LFU5HrsSVy

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 5, 2026

🚨 BREAKING: US Senate REJECTS effort to reopen the Department of Homeland Security in a 51-45 vote, despite an ACTIVE threat of terrorist sleeper cells amid conflict with Iran

John Fetterman joined Republicans voting YEA

Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are TRAITORS and must… pic.twitter.com/g6lEnSyXeJ

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 5, 2026

Which gets us to the calculation Trump has made. We know he's a narcissist who doesn't care about other people's deaths unless he thinks he can leverage them for his own purposes. So his administration has waved Charlie Kirk's bloody shirt ever since the bigoted podcaster was killed -- but if you're a servicemember who's a casualty of this war, Trump doesn't want to talk about you.

I don't know whether he'll want to talk about any victims of terrorism on U.S. soil. Other Republicans obviously will -- they'll want to blame the casualties on Democrats, even if Homeland Security funding has been restored. But Trump might just want to shrug the deaths off the way he's shrugging them off here, and the way he's shrugging off the deaths of servicemembers now.

But in any case, he thinks he can avoid blame, either by persuading us (or at least the Republican voter base) that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, shit happens, or by leveraging the deaths to stir up outrage. It's certainly worked for Republican presidents in the past.

The Republican voter base will be enthusiastically on Trump's side if there's a terror attack here. I don't think he should assume that the rest of America will feel the same. Most Americans despise the war, according to nearly all polling on the subject.

Many politicians make cynical calculations about life-and-death issues, but I think Trump cares less than any other president we've had about the lives lost as the result of his actions. He's gambling that civilian deaths won't lower his poll numbers. That's pretty much all he cares about.

STOP CEDING "CULTURALLY NORMAL" TO THE PARTY OF NAZIS

The Wall Street Journal has just published the latest in a series of nearly identical mainstream-media puff pieces about Rahm Emanuel. These stories always focus on Emanuel's scolding remarks aimed at fellow Democrats, which are portrayed as exactly what the party needs:

Rahm Emanuel is delivering the Democratic Party a dose of tough medicine—in his usual blunt style—as the party enters a critical midterm primary season.

Asked at a recent fundraiser in this affluent Detroit suburb how Democrats might be able to win back the working-class voters who have defected to President Trump, Emanuel faulted his party in 2024 for being too focused on things such as transgender rights and not enough on pocketbook issues.
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“We weren’t very good in this last election at the kitchen table. We weren’t very good in the family room,” said the former congressman, mayor and U.S. ambassador to Japan. “The only room we occupied in the house was the bathroom—and it’s the smallest room in the house.”

Democrats weren't talking about transgender issues on the campaign trail in 2024, of course, and Emanuel knows this. Remarks from Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign were used against her in 2024, though it's doubtful that they were the reason she lost. Republicans tried playing the trans card in the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and had their heads handed to them.

The Journal story quotes other scoldy Democrats:

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear implores Democrats to talk more like “normal human beings” and avoid “advocacy speak” ...

Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom ... recently said Democrats need to be “culturally normal.”

If I were an undeclared Democratic candidate for president like these guys, you know who I'd be denouncing as not culturally normal? Republicans -- specifically, racist, misogynist, Nazi-loving anti-Semite Republicans like these folks:

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics....

The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair....

... William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the n-word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people....

The group chat members — which included some women — also frequently discussed sex, sometimes describing women as “whores” and at one point using the k-word, a slur for Jewish people, to describe women they avoid.

[Dariel] Gonzalez [the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time] said, “You can f–k all the [k-word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.”

If you think you've read this story before, you might be thinking of a story about a different racist, sexist young Republican chat group, from last fall:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

I know this is a wild, crazy, out-of-the-box idea, but maybe, instead of attacking his own party every time he talks to a journalist or makes a public appearance, Rahm Emanuel could try attacking the opposition party -- y'know, as a change of pace. Maybe he and Beshear and Newsom and Josh Shapiro and James Carville could portray Republicans as extremist freaks and weirdos once in a while. It's a crazy idea, but it might work!

The Florida bigots in this chat -- and, apparently, a lot of other young Republicans in the state -- appear to have a favorite politician: a young insurgent candidate who's challenging Byron Donalds, a Black congressman who's been endorsed by President Trump, in the Florida gubernatorial primary.

... James Fishback — a relative political unknown who has used racist and white nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaign — is highlighting the generational divide around extremism on the right in Florida.

Rhetoric such as ...?

“His undisguised racist comments describing a Black candidate’s vision as ‘Section 8 ghetto’ and referring to Byron Donalds as ‘By’rone’ and a ‘slave’ are deliberate, offensive, and beneath this state,” Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly said....

Also:

He says that the only “systemic racism” that exists in the United States is against white Christian men. He’s also proposed burning abortion clinics.

And:

At a recent campus campaign stop, Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback dropped some unusual verbiage while inveighing against junk food in school cafeterias.

“I’m not saying that the test scores are the result of the Pop-Tarts,” Fishback told a crowd at the University of Central Florida, in remarks boosting locally grown produce over convenience foods. “But if you wanted kids to fail, if you wanted to set our kids up for failure, you would feed them the absolute goyslop in our cafeterias.”

Goyslop?!

As an Instagram user explains:

In this context, it reflects an antisemitic concept suggesting that “goyim” (non‑Jewish people) are fed this “slop” by supposed Jewish elites to keep them unhealthy.

More:

The term is making the rounds among the largest white nationalist and antisemitic influencers. Clavicular, a popular manosphere influencer recently seen dancing and singing to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub, appeared on a recent livestream with white nationalist Nick Fuentes to lament how “the entire grocery store is filled with goyslop.”

This isn't doing much for Fishback's campaign -- except among young Republican voters:

According to a February poll from the University of North Florida, Florida Representative Byron Donalds leads in the general electorate at 31%, compared to Fishback’s 6%. Half of voters are still undecided.

But Donalds’ 5 to 1 lead completely flips among young voters, where Fishback leads 4 to 1. He is backed by 32% of 18-to-34-year-olds, while just 8% support Donalds.

Instead of incessantly accusing Democrats of being out of step with normal, decent people, why don't more Democrats talk about the edgelord bigotry of an increasing number of Republicans? Why not portray them as the party of abnormal freaks?

The Wall Street Journal might not breathlessly transcribe every word these Democrats say, but they'd at least be attacking their political opponents, which you'd think would be Politics 101.

THE NUTJOB WHO SUPPRESSED SOME DEMOCRATIC VOTES IN TEXAS, INCOMPETENTLY

There was chaos in Dallas County, Texas, in yesterday's primary, and it's understandable that many people think it was part of a targeted long-term effort to prevent Democratic victories in November. But I don't think that's what happened.

We know what happened. First,

Confusion over new voting rules in Texas’s Dallas and Williamson counties caused Democratic voters to be turned away from polling sites Tuesday as the state’s primary election unfolded.

The confusion prompted a judge in Dallas to extend poll hours for the Democratic primary — but that judge’s order was quickly put on hold by the Texas Supreme Court following a request from Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And we know why it happened:

According to Texas procedure, if a county’s primary is not held jointly — meaning, if Republicans and Democrats do not agree to hold the election together — then the county’s residents are required to vote in their assigned precincts. Last year, Republicans in Dallas County said they would not hold their primary jointly with Democrats. But many voters, accustomed to joint primaries, assumed they could vote at alternate voting sites and were turned away.

The standard procedure is that voters can vote in any precinct in their county. They could do this during early voting -- but not yesterday in those two counties.

Dallas County is a stronghold for Jasmine Crockett, who was trailing last night and said she wouldn't accept the results until provisional ballots cast in those counties were counted. She has since conceded the race because there don't appear to be enough outstanding ballots for her to make up James Talarico's statewide lead, which currently exceeds 150,000 votes.

One alarmed Substacker writes:

This Was the Point

I need you to think about why you’d do this in a Democratic primary.

You don’t suppress votes in a primary to win the primary. Republicans aren’t on the Democratic ballot....

But here’s what you do gain: you weaken whoever comes out of it. You damage the eventual nominee. You shape the field. You get a test run for your playbook.

But why would Republicans want to "shape the field" this way? The conventional wisdom is that Talarico -- white, religious, and genial -- is a stronger general election candidate than Crockett, a Black woman who's an outspoken progressive. Why would Republicans want to suppress her votes if they think he's a stronger candidate?

There's another explanation for what happened that makes more sense:

In Dallas County, propelled by election conspiracy theories about the security of ballot-counting machines, Republicans made the change in hope of hand-counting their ballots — a process that election experts want can lead to errors and delayed results. Dallas Republicans ultimately abandoned their plans to count ballots by hand because of the high costs. But the plan for people to vote at the precinct level went forward.

Maybe Republicans wanted to sow chaos, particularly among Black voters, in the hope that those voters would resent Talarico and refuse to rally around him in the general election. But that seems like a risky move when some polling suggested that Crockett might win the primary, and when the GOP assumed that she'd be easier to beat. Also, it was clear that this was done by Texas Republicans, not Talarico. (In his victory speech last night, Talarico called for all the votes to be counted and described what took place as "voter suppression.")

The person responsible for the decision to separate the primaries in Dallas County was the chair of the county Republican Party, Allen West. I used to write about him frequently. He's been a nutjob culture warrior longer than Donald Trump.

West had a checkered military career:

West served in the U.S. Army but was “stripped of his command” in 2003 after he pleaded “guilty to assaulting an Iraqi detainee during interrogation,” according to The Boston Globe. Gen. James Mattis, President Donald Trump’s former secretary of defense, reportedly criticized West as a “commander who has lost his moral balance or has watched too many Hollywood movies.”

West became a right-wing commentator, then won a House seat in Florida in 2010, as part of the Tea Party backlash to Barack Obama's presidency. He served one term. He became much better known for his rhetoric:

West ... became a YouTube sensation by criticizing “this tyrannical government” and crying out: “if you’re here to stand up to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks, you are my brother and sister in this fight.” He said that the country was engaging in “class warfare” between “a producing class and an entitlement class,” which is composed of Obama supporters....

West encouraged his supporters to use violence in suppressing the votes of opponents, saying, “You've got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house.”

He maintains that it is “unfortunate” that gays and lesbians are serving in the military, and compares homosexuality to adultery....

On immigration, he claims that ... Muslim terrorists are coming through the border with Mexico. West’s first decision as Representative-elect was to choose as his chief of staff right-wing radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman, who called for illegal immigrants to be “hung on the central square.”

KIaufman also said:

I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights was they gave me a Second Amendment.

And if ballots don't work, bullets will.

She stepped aside before West was sworn in.

More:

West ... called President Barack Obama an “Islamist” and “disgusting racist"; said the “Democrat Party is an anti-Semitic party”; and falsely accused dozens of congressional Democrats of being “members of the Communist Party.” He claimed that Islam “is not a religion” and “we need to have individuals stand up and say that,” and his Facebook page posted (and later removed) an image that claimed [President Donald] Trump had chosen [General James] Mattis as his defense secretary to “exterminate Muslims.” He also questioned the “loyalties” of Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), a Purple Heart recipient, and said feminists are “neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness.”

And there was this in 2013:

In a June 5 fundraising email, West claimed that Attorney General Holder was a “bigger threat to our Republic” than terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former deputy of Osama bin Laden, who took control of al Qaeda after bin Laden's death. West also used a quote from the ancient philosopher Cicero to imply that Holder was guilty of treason.

The June 7 edition of Fox & Friends gave West a platform to expand on his smear. West answered co-host Brian Kilmeade's question about why he claimed Holder was as dangerous as al-Zawahiri by pointing to Cicero's claim that a nation “cannot survive treason from within” and "[a] murderer is less to fear, the traitor is the plague." West charged Holder with having “the arrogance of officialdom,” and claimed that “When the rule makers are not adhering to the rule of law, then the very foundations of this great nation will start to crumble.”

So, yeah, that paranoid nutjob made the decision in Dallas County. It might have been a carefully designed ratfuck, but to me it just seems like chaos born of paranoia.

THE IRAN WAR IS A MONEY SUCK AND DEMOCRATS SHOULD NEVER STOP TALKING ABOUT THAT

Greg Sargent has a strong opinion about what Democrats should be doing right now:

While some Democrats have gotten this right, more of them need to say forthrightly that this war is patently illegal and that Trump’s chief stated rationale for it—that Iran posed “imminent threats” to the United States—is utter nonsense.

“Democrats need to strongly make the point that there was no imminent threat and that this war is a violation of the Constitution—and illegal,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me. “Absent congressional approval, this is an illegal war.”

I think it's worth saying that the war is illegal, but I don't think it changes very many minds. It's a message that reinforces the anger of educated liberals who understand how our government works and what a president can or can't lawfully do, but the vast majority of Americans don't understand the legal constraints on a president and don't care. When asked, they'll tell pollsters that, yes, Congress should be consulted on war, but a refusal to consult Congress won't become a top issue for most of them.

I think this is a stronger Democratic argument:

That's from iran-cost-ticker.com. I don't know who's behind it. I don't know if it's accurate. But it's an effort to provide a running total of the cost of the war, in the manner of the National Debt Clock. The dollar cost escalates rapidly.

Paul Krugman has more data:

On Sunday, according to the U.S. military, Kuwaiti forces shot down three U.S. F-15s in a “friendly fire” incident.

... A new F-15 costs U.S. taxpayers $97 million. So that’s almost $300 million lost in seconds. And we should think about what could have been done with that money other than launch a war without a clear plan or an exit strategy....

One of the reasons to be disturbed by this war is the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. government is either laying out now or will have to lay out in the future to replace the spent munitions....

Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimates that Trump’s largely unsuccessful bombing campaign last year against the Iran-backed Islamist Houthis in Yemen — a far softer target than Iran itself — cost between $2.76 billion and $4.95 billion. Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s one-day strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities, cost between $2.04 billion and $2.26 billion....

The current war is being waged not only with massive bombing but also with the use of large numbers of expensive interceptors to defend U.S. bases and U.S. allies against Iranian drones and missiles. So in just a few days we have surely incurred billions of dollars in cost. And if this war continues for an extended period, the costs could easily rise to the twenty to thirty billion dollar range.

... if we compare the cost of this war to what we spend to help needy Americans, then it’s clear that this war is extremely expensive compared with other ways we could have spent the funds. Put it this way: SNAP — the Supplemental Nutritional Food Assistance Program, formerly food stamps — spends an average of about $2,400 a year per recipient. CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program administered under Medicaid, provides comprehensive health care for about $3,000 per child.

So just replacing those three jets shot down over Kuwait — each of them, remember, with a price tag of $97 million — will cost about as much as providing 125,000 Americans with crucial food aid or providing healthcare to 100,000 American children. And the war might very well end up costing 100 times as much as the price of those jets.

I'm not sure Democrats should get into the weeds the way Krugman does. Reciting a string of numbers and per-capita costs isn't compelling rhetoric. If I were a Democratic officeholder or candidate, I'd just start with the topline number -- trhe cost of the war so far -- and say, "What are we getting for this? How does this help you in your day-to-day lives? What else could be done with this tax money taken from your pocket?"

Democrats have a rare opportunity. Ordinarily, it's easy to score political points by complaining about the high cost of whatever the government does, except in matters of defense and policing. As a rule, normies don't even bother comparing those huge costs to the often much lower costs of programs that serve other human needs, because they accept the premise that we need to spend whatever it takes to keep ourselves safe.

But this is an exception to the rule. It's a war that, unlike most U.S. wars, is unpopular at the outset. Apart from Republicans, no one wants this war. No one knows why it's being fought. Most Americans think it will make America less safe.

So Democrats should bring up the cost of this pointless war at every possible opportunity. Bring up the total cost. Bring up the daily cost. Ask how all that expense is making America safer. Ask how much we're all going to shell out before it's all over, if that day ever comes.

WHY LOOK AT REALITY WHEN YOU HAVE VIBES? (updated)

The New York Times has posted an unusually bad story under the headline "6 Voters React to Attacks on Iran Ahead of the Texas Primaries." Here's the subhead:

President Trump has said the attacks were necessary for the security of the United States and to free the Iranian people from oppression. Do voters agree?

But we don't learn whether voters agree with Trump, we learn whether six Texas voters agree with him -- and not one of them reports ever having voted for a Democrat.

I can understand focusing on Texas -- tomorrow is the state's primary election day, with early voting underway, and it's not clear who'll win Senate primaries in both major parties. But this is not a representative sample of Texas voters:

* "Nate McHale, 24, has voted for President Trump twice, a product of his conservative leanings. He supports the decision to strike Iran."

* "Craig Wallace is not a fan of President Trump’s style, but he supports his policies on the economy and immigration and has voted consistently for him since 2016. He supports the strikes in Iran as well...."

* "Tex Peterson has voted for President Trump in every presidential election. He supports the president’s policies generally, he said, and that goes for the strikes on Iran, too."

* "Matt Lutz is a libertarian and skeptical about foreign conflict. He voted for Gary Johnson, not President Trump, in 2016. But he said he supported the president’s approach to Iran, on balance...."

* "Angela Gschwend, a stalwart Trump supporter, ... said her Persian friends cried tears of joy upon learning of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran over the weekend....

"'I’m a Christian. I believe in peace and love,' Ms. Gschwend said. 'But sometimes you have to fight when you’re attacked. They want to kill because they hate, and that’s the opposite of my worldview.'"

There's one Iran-attack skeptic, and even he was a Trump voter:

* "Gael Ramirez, a student who describes himself as an independent, voted for President Trump for the first time in the 2024 election....

"He is skeptical that the nation will be helped by the strikes on Iran."

Six people, no Clinton, Biden, or Harris voters, five people on board with Trump's attacks.

You'll say that the Times loves Republicans and therefore we shouldn't be surprised at this. But the paper's editorial board called the attack on Iran "reckless," and the paper has published deeply skeptical columns by Nicholas Kristof, David French, Ben Rhodes, and others.

Previous roundups of ordinary voters' opinions haven't been quite so biased. A piece titled "11 Voters on Trump’s First Year," published on December 29, included four people identified as Harris voters and five identified as Trump voters. An October story called "7 Voters Weigh In on Trump’s New Ballroom" had a similar mix.

I think the Texas panel is skewed Republican because the Times has fallen for Texas vibes. It's true that Republicans win every statewide race there, and have throughout this century. But it's not a blood-red state like West Virginia or Idaho, where Democrats struggle to reach 30% of the vote.

Donald Trump won Texas comfortably in 2024, by a 56%-42% margin. But Trump's Texas victory margin in 2020 was 52%-46%. Biden won 5,259,126 votes in Texas in 2020; Harris won 4,835,250 in 2024. The Times couldn't find any of these people, or any of the 3,877,868 Texans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

Just as the myth of Trump's near-universal appeal in the heartland survives his abysmal polling, the myth of Texas as a state made up exclusively of pickup-driving Republican cowboys survives its actual recent voting history. So the Times prints the vibes.

*****

UPDATE: The headline has been changed to "6 Conservative Voters React to Attacks on Iran Ahead of the Texas Primaries." But you can see the original headline here.

TRUMP SHOULD HAVE GONE TO CONGRESS, FOR ALL THE GOOD THAT EVER DOES

We're at war with Iran, and all the right-thinking people in our political culture are saying the same thing: The president should have gone to Congress. Here's Hakeem Jeffries:

Overnight, Donald Trump announced the start of massive and ongoing military operations against Iran. The framers of the United States Constitution gave Congress the sole power to declare war as the branch of government closest to the American people.

Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region. However, absent exigent circumstances, the Trump administration must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.

That constitutional requirement has been degraded for decades. The Constitution says flatly, "The Congress shall have Power ... To declare War," but we haven't had a formal congressional declaration of war since World War II. What we've had are congressional authorizations of military force, or military actions authorized by the UN Security Council and funded by Congress.

I think presidents should go to Congress before taking America to war, though the process doesn't accomplish much. David French writes:

... the constitutional structure, when followed, ... helps provide accountability. To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.

But that always leads to the same outcome: the president gets to do what he wants. It's valuable because at least there's a public discussion of what we all know the president is going to do anyway. It's also valuable because we retain the notion that we have multiple branches of government and we aren't a dictatorship.

In effect, our Republican Congress actually has authorized this and other Trump acts of military adventurism, just as it has authorized the rest of his dictatorial moves -- it has authorized them by using silence as assent. The unstated but obvious message this Congress has sent since January of last year has been: Unless we say otherwise, you can do whatever the hell you want, Mr. President. You're our Daddy. Daddy can do as he pleases.

Without announcing it, campaigning on it, or consulting with the rest of us, congressional Republicans have replaced our system of government with Christian-right male "headship." Republicans already believed that Democrats have no legitimate place in government, and they've since decided that Republicanism is embodied in one man, so he gets to decide more or less everything, as they believe the man should in the family. It's a system that works out nicely for Republicans because the base loves Trump and agrees that he should be allowed to do whatever he pleases, and most Republican candidates don't need anything but a strong turnout from the base to win elections.

The public, when asked by pollsters, says Congress should be involved in decisions to go to war, but Americans have such a vague understanding of how our government is supposed to work that there isn't across-the-board outrage at Trump's unilateralism. So I imagine all future Republican presidents will operate this way if they have Republican congressional majorities.

WAR WITH IRAN: FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD BETTER

As Dave Weigel reminds us, this was the Donald Trump campaign's messaging on the subject of peace and war in 2024:

You may think the Trump base is against war with Iran -- polling earlier this year said that only a minority of Republicans wanted this war. In a Quinnipiac poll in January, 35% of Republicans wanted to go to war with Iran, while 53% opposed war. A University of Maryland poll early this month also said that war with Iran had 35% GOP support (but opposition was only 25%).

As Trump has made it clear that being a good Republican means being in favor of whatever cockamamie war he wants to fight, GOP support for war with Iran has risen -- it's 58% in YouGov polling earlier this week.

Republican support for this will only increase now that it's underway. But overall support in that YouGov poll was only 27% (with opposition at 49%).

Because gerrymandering, the rural skew of the Senate, and a 2024 vote against the status quo have given Republicans more power than their numbers in the population would justify, once again we're doing something that's supported by the pro-Trump minority of the country and only the pro-Trump minority. (This is why Republicans in Congress will stand aside, as usual, and let Trump usurp their powers.)

Pro-war propagandists have their memes lined up. On X, the usually pro-Trump Andrew Tate declared opposition to the war:

NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.

— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) February 28, 2026

In his replies, this meme shows up more than once:

pic.twitter.com/ABPbbKccK0

— ngn (@Neginkzn) February 28, 2026

Tate is told that Iranians are exultant:

Iranians sure seem happy about this. pic.twitter.com/mbS97xYOnt

— wanzie (@moistmeatlicker) February 28, 2026

And that this is a noble cause:

Yes we do 🙏🏽🇮🇷🇮🇱🇺🇸❤️🥳 pic.twitter.com/yLaY68MqLR

— DrNushin (@DrNushin77) February 28, 2026

And here come the Trump-is-a-badass memes:

X's algorithm places these comments near the top, right under British racist Tommy Robinson's take:

I want it . Fuck that Islamic regime G

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) February 28, 2026

You need to scroll down to see anti-war responses to Tate, and many of them are, unsurprisingly, anti-Semitic:

I know a few who might pic.twitter.com/cJXIl3Re87

— RightTakeHQ (@RightTakeHQ) February 28, 2026

If any minds are being changed right now, or vague leanings reinforced, it's probably happening on social media. Musk's site will sell you right-wing propaganda one way or another. But it seems to be telling us that pro-Trump = pro-war, and 2024's MAGA principles have been replaced by the exact opposite, which are the new MAGA principles.

None of this should be surprising. Here's a Trump campaign ad that was released in 2023:

New Trump 2024 ad pic.twitter.com/7eWlDMhZa1

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) April 27, 2023

When it appeared, I wrote:

Yes, it attacks "the global elitists" who "send your kids to war." But it also stirs up anger at perceived foreign enemies. Eight seconds in, we see Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, China's Xi Jinping, a Mao poster, and people we're expected to read as jihadists. The narrator says:

Enemies and tyrants on opposite sides of the globe laugh at us.

At 1:16, we see a clip of Trump from his presidency; he's walking with a military escort. At 1:24, we see him saluting against a blue sky while military helicopters hover in formation overhead. A caption reads: DON'T MESS WITH US.

This is not Ron Paul-style isolationism. Trump's ad-makers know that the base doesn't want that.

I added:

... GOP voters were extremely pro-adventurism twenty years ago and are ready to embrace adventurism again, if it's sold by a president they like and if the enemy is someone they hate (or are carefully trained to hate).

I don't know if a reelected Trump would really get us into a war -- but if he does, his "isolationist" fan base will be 100% behind him. Maybe Tucker Carlson will be critical of the war on his podcast. It won't matter. Right-wing voters hate non-white foreigners too much to completely abandon militarism, just the way they did when the Bushes fought wars they unquestioningly supported. They want to believe Trump can give them "peace through strength" -- an America so intimidating that no one challenges us. But if that fails and there's war, they'll be there for it.

And here we are.

*****

And no, I don't believe this is meant as a distraction from Epstein.

This is not a distraction. Trump wants to be the most consequential person who ever lived, and he thinks he's within reach of that status.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 7:24 AM

This is the foreign policy equivalent of the ballroom or the arch. So what if it destabilizes the world and gets a lot of innocent people killed? It makes Trump feel special.