LEAKERS: "IT WASN'T ME"

Yesterday I told you about an NBC report that President Trump's primary source of information about the war in Iran is a daily good-news-only highlight reel that's prepared for him by CENTCOM.

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

... the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

Emily Horne, a former National Security Council and State Department official told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that she has a theory about this leak:

I’m going to tell you my little conspiracy theory about this story. I think this story is a White House plant....

You’ve got multiple sources, both current and former, who are all singing from the same sheet of music—which says to me, again, this is coordinated. This is a plan. So what does that tell us? That tells us that even though this is a story that on a casual read looks kind of embarrassing for the president—and is, I think, being treated as such on social media, like the president of the United States needs a greatest-hits compilation of CENTCOM strikes in order to understand how the war is going—I understand that reaction.

But to be clear, there’s a deeper message that I think they want planted in people’s minds, which is that this White House is now creating excuses for why the war is not going well and why the American people do not approve of this war. And one of the excuses that they are creating is, well, the president of the United States is not being fed good information by his military.

That is what they are trying to plant with this story, if—as I suspect—this is a planted story. They’re trying to create a paper trail and a narrative that says this is going badly not because Donald Trump made terrible decisions, but because his military leadership is not being honest with him about what is happening.

I think it's an attempt to shift blame, but I don't think it's necessarily President Trump and his inner circle trying to shift blame to the Pentagon. The leakers are likely to understand that while this might make the Pentagon look bad, it absolutely makes Trump look bad. Anyone who's paid attention to Trump's presidencies knows that he likes to be fed good news and he likes briefings that don't require him to read a lot of words. Here's an Atlantic story from January 2018:

Before [his first] inauguration, Trump told Axios, “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” In February, The New York Times reported that National Security Council members had been instructed to keep policy papers to a single page and include lots of graphics and maps....

In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention.

I think the leakers are people who expect this story to make Trump and the Pentagon -- or at least the current Pentagon leadership -- look bad. Their purpose is to say, Don't blame us. Who might want to send that message? I'm not sure. Maybe Vice President Vance, who formerly positioned himself as an opponent of miltary adventurism? Maybe Marco Rubio, who's frustrated that the Iran war has postponed the overthrow of the Cuban government he longs for? Maybe Pentagon careerists who don't like Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense?

*****

I don't think Trump himself is setting Hegseth up as the fall guy. Zeteo's Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez write:

Trump has seemed eager to shift some credit (or blame, depending on who you ask) for his disastrous war in Iran to Hegseth. Earlier this week, the president said, “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Trump blames Hegseth for the war: "Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, 'Let's do it.'" pic.twitter.com/QBGeFuhM1M

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

But Trump's remark, in a Memphis speech on Monday, doesn't seem like blame to me. In fact, he portrays himself as the person who wanted to do something about Iran:

You know, our economy was fantastic. We had a Dow at 50,000. They say it couldn't happen in four years, it wouldn't happen during my term, but if I got anywhere close, it would be a great success. Well, in my first year, we hit 50,000. And with the S&P, they said -- even more difficult. They said it would be impossible to hit 7,000 on the S&P, and we hit that in our first term.

And then, unfortunately, I came -- I called Pete, I called General Caine, I called a lot of our great people. We have great people. And I said, let's talk. We got a problem in the Middle East. We have a country known as Iran that for 47 years has been just a purveyor of terror, and they're very close to having a nuclear weapon.

We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55,000 and 60,000. There's no end. Or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem. And, uh, Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up and you said, let's do it, because you can't let them have a nuclear weapon.

To me that's Trump saying, I, in my infinite wisdom, astutely recognized the threat from Iran, and Pete agreed that we needed to act.

Then I look at that Zeteo story, and I see this:

Donald Trump’s so-called “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has earned himself a new nickname, current and former US officials tell us. Among various staffers and officials working within the august confines of the Pentagon and Department of Defense, the former ‘Fox & Friends’ co-host and “death and destruction”-obsessed Trump acolyte is known as “Dumb McNamara.”

This is, of course, a reference to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, an architect of American military escalation in Vietnam who, despite his disastrous record, maintained a reputation as a brilliant, shrewd thinker. It is exceedingly hard to find anyone in the corridors of Washington power – or anywhere on the planet – who would label Hegseth a brilliant mind.

However, the nickname “Dumb McNamara” has spread within the US government due to Hegseth’s cheerleading of the war and bombing blitzes – overzealous bloodlust and enthusiasm for military fiasco that reminds American officials of, well, a very stupid version of Robert McNamara.

I suspect that there might be overlap between the "current and former US officials" who are leaking the words of "various staffers and officials" in the Pentagon and Defense Department to Zeteo and the "three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official" who are leaking to NBC. I think Defense careerists and/or disgruntled civilians in the White House are doing the leaking, not Trump loyalists.

DOES TRUMP REALIZE THAT OTHER PEOPLE EXIST?

Jamelle Bouie is trying to understand why President Trump doesn't prepare for easily imagined outcomes.

Neither Trump nor his aides, according to recent reporting, planned for Iran to target shipping and close the Strait of Hormuz. They also do not seem to have planned for serious and sustained retaliation against America’s Gulf state allies. They did not plan for an energy crisis and the potential disruption to the global economy, and they did not plan for America’s European allies to, by and large, reject their call for support....

What’s striking is how familiar this pattern feels. The administration did not expect the public to be repelled by DOGE. It did not expect outrage over the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It did not expect Democrats to respond to threats of partisan gerrymandering with their own push to wring as many Democratic seats as possible out of so-called blue states. The administration certainly did not expect the mass mobilizations against the deployment of National Guard troops and the use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving paramilitary force.

Bouie thinks this is an extreme form of narcissism.

Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. He is a consummate narcissist, and he is, without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds....

And so, whenever other people do act of their own accord, both the president and his administration find themselves flat-footed.

Is that it? Yes, more or less -- but consider this NBC story, which is getting a lot of attention:

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

... the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

We know that Trump has a seemingly limitless need for narcissistic supply -- he needs people around him to proclaim that he's great and brilliant. These videos of "stuff blowing up" in Trump's glorious war obviously serve the same purpose as the elaborate statements of praise Trump receives from Cabinet members and others on a regular basis.

But while I believe these nothing-but-good-news sizzle reels distort Trump's view of the war, I believe what the NBC story also tells us:

The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said.

He must know that some things aren't going splendidly. He clearly understands that the war has upset global markets, otherwise he wouldn't be talking so much about negotiating a possible peace deal, even if Iran says that those negotiations aren't taking place. On immigration, he can obviously see that his crackdown isn't playing well, otherwise he wouldn't have fired Kristi Noem and relieved Greg Bovino of his duties.

Trump -- a lifelong believer in Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking -- grasps that other people exist, but he believes that they should ingest the news Trump-style, with a strong emphasis on his successes. In reference to Trump's Iran news digests, NBC tells us:

... the videos are ... driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing....

Trump isn't completely oblivious to the existence of other people. He needs to spend time in his bubble of narcissism, but one of his other primal needs is the need to hate everyone who disagrees with him.

Of course, that resolves to narcissism, too. Trump believes that if the media covered the war the way his video briefings do, everyone would love what he's doing. Therefore, his struggles in the polls are the media's fault. Similarly, he's angry at Congress for not passing a version of the SAVE Act with anti-trans provisions attached; he's convinced that passing the bill in this form will guarantee Republican victories in every future election, which means that if the bill doesn't pass, or doesn't pass exactly the way he wants it, then he's not responsible for Republican election losses in the midterms.

Yes, Trump understands that other people exist, and he knows that some of them don't think the way he does. But he regards that as a mistake that needs to be corrected for his benefit.

COULD SENDING ICE TO THE POLLS BE AS MUCH OF A FLOP FOR TRUMP AS SENDING ICE TO THE AIRPORTS?

Yes, this is worrisome:

During a conversation with conservative lawyer Mike Davis on his “War Room” program, [Steve] Bannon asked, “We can use what’s happening with these ICE [officers] helping out at the airports, we can use this as a test run, as a test case to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections, sir?”

Davis responded, “Yeah, I think we should have ICE agents at the polling places, because if you’re an illegal alien you can’t vote, right? It’s against the law, it’s a federal crime for you to vote in federal elections.”

“And so, if you’re an American citizen, you should be happy that ICE is there, because you’re not going to have illegal aliens canceling out your vote,” he added.

“Exactly,” Bannon replied. “Pick ‘em out of line starting today, and maybe the lines will get shorter.”

The New York Times tells us:

When President Trump wanted to do something about the long lines at U.S. airports on Monday, he turned to one of his favorite tools: Immigration and Customs Enforcement....

Mr. Trump has increasingly used ICE to try to achieve personal and political objectives, deploying a force with a quasi-military bearing around the country with a message that he intends to not just carry out his anti-immigration agenda but to also enforce his views on constituencies and states that have opposed him.

But is it working? It is in the right's fantasy world. Here's a response to the airport deployment from a prominent right-wing cartoonist:

But here's the reality:

ICE agents at JFK doing...nothing

[image or embed]

— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) March 23, 2026 at 4:22 PM

ICE agents deployed to nation's swamped airports to stand around and do nothing: defector.com/ice-agents-d...

[image or embed]

— Defector (@defector.com) March 23, 2026 at 2:10 PM

While security waiting lines get longer and longer.

Incredible scene: Travelers wait on hours-long security line at George Bush International Airport in Houston while Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” blasts through the speakers. (video shared directly with me)

[image or embed]

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) March 23, 2026 at 1:01 PM

Sending ICE to the polls is obviously a very different matter. ICE agents can intimidate voters, including citizens who might be mistaken for non-citizen immigrants, or people who have protested the administration and might fear that they're in a database and thus could be subject to arrest.

But it's possible that a combination of legal pushback by Trump critics and strategic incompetence by the president himself will cause this effort to seem as sad and pointless as the airport deployment. First, please note that the number of agents deployed at airports yesterday was "between 100 and 150," according to the Times. That's not enough to cover all the key precincts in all the key races in November -- though, obviously, the fear of these agents might have a force-multiplying effect even where they're not deployed. There's also the fact that many people will vote early in person (unless the Supreme Court decides not merely to end the acceptance of late-arriving mail ballots but also ban early voting altogether), so the intimidation will have to go on for weeks.

And there'll be lawsuits.

It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place. In fact, it is a federal crime for anyone in the U.S. military to interfere in elections in any way. More specifically, it is a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to deploy federal “troops or armed men” to any location where voting is taking place or elections are being held, unless “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” ...

It is also a federal crime for anyone, including federal agents, to intimidate voters. Anyone who does so may be liable for a number of different federal criminal offenses.

We could have clueless ICE agents forced to stand well outside polling places, doing nothing the way they're now doing nothing at the airports, if at least some judges issue emergency rulings preventing ICE from operating at the polls.

And some state laws might apply.

Legislation to restrict immigration enforcement or the presence of federal forces near polling places and other election sites has been offered or announced in California, Connecticut, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington....

The New Mexico legislature in February passed a measure that largely mirrors restrictions in federal law against armed federal personnel at polling places....

The bill says officials generally cannot order or bring troops or other armed federal agents to polling places or parking areas for polling places beginning 28 days before Election Day, when early in-person voting begins. It also would prohibit officials from changing who is qualified to vote contrary to New Mexico law or from imposing election rules that conflict with state law. Violators would be guilty of a felony.

That New Mexico bill is now state law.

I don't want to downplay the dangers here, but I think it's possible that President Trump will mishandle this. He wins praise from his base no matter how poorly he executes his plans, so he's always at risk of failure. (See also: the war in Iran.) I'm worried about federal goons at the polls, but a poorly executed deployment is a real possibility.

THE BLACK-AND-WHITE SITCOM THAT EXPLAINS TRUMP

I know I'm supposed to believe that Donald Trump has dementia, but this is Trump being clear-headed and sane -- or as clear-headed and sane as he's capable of being:

After four weeks of useless threats, bombings, and death, President Trump is placing a five-day pause on his war on Iran after failing to attain the “unconditional surrender” that he claimed he would earlier this month.

“I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST,” Trump wrote Monday morning on Truth Social.

Trump sees himself as a world-bestriding dictator, but he fears the financial markets, and this was a precision-timed effort to appease them.

The announcement came just two hours before U.S. stock markets opened, and Trump noted the pause in strikes will last the duration of the trading week. The decision caused previously skyrocketing oil prices to dip significantly.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more than 650 points as I type this, so it's working.

Trump threatened Iran and Iran made Trump blink, as The Bulwark's Andrew Egger notes:

... Iran appears not to have taken Trump’s threats to target their domestic power generation very seriously. Taken on their merits, these threats were astonishing: a 48-hour deadline for Iran to surrender its primary point of geopolitical leverage, or suffer widespread strikes against civilian infrastructure. But while such strikes would have been catastrophic for Iran, they would have been terrible for America, too, sending the price of oil spiraling into the stratosphere for God knows how long....

How thin did Trump’s bluff turn out to be? The president didn’t even wait until his 48-hour deadline was expiring to call it off. He blinked with twelve hours to spare—ensuring that the entire threat period took place while markets were closed over the weekend....

All the madman posturing in the world can’t change this simple fact: Iran knows how badly Trump needs to get the oil-price situation under control. Again and again, Trump has signaled he will let other foreign-policy objectives fall by the wayside to address this major domestic concern.

To me, Trump's capitulation is a sign of sanity, or at least sanity Trump-style. I realize that his decision to create the crisis that this capitulation is intended to solve seems like evidence of delusional madness. It is -- but I don't think it's dementia madness.

Here's my view: Trump has a more or less healthy brain, but he can't stop trying to do things he can't pull off. He's essentially Ralph Kramden from the old sitcom The Honeymooners, except he's Ralph Kramden with obscene wealth, fame, and, now, the nuclear launch codes.

We always saw Ralph Kramden with his mind on fire, absolutely certain that his latest get-rich-quick scheme was foolproof. As president in his second term, Trump actually is getting rich corruptly -- but what makes the synapses in his brain fire excessively is the idea that he can transform America, the America, and the world, through cockamamie schemes that are either doomed to failure or likely to improve nothing. Tariffs! Regime change in Venezuela! Expelling every undocumented immigrant in America, starting with the most sympathetic ones! Fighting the war with Iran that every previous president understandably decided was too much trouble! All of these are guaranteed to make Trump not just the greatest president ever but the most consequential person in world history!

Ralph Kramden fell for American Dream sales pitches promising easy money. Trump falls for simple political ideas, often peddled on Fox News.

I hate it here.

[image or embed]

— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) March 23, 2026 at 8:43 AM

(Source: Ben Smith at Semafor.)

Even the Iran war, as I noted yesterday, was a crazy idea sold to Trump by Rupert Murdoch and Benjamin Netantyahu, who are both much less likely to suffer blowback from it than the United States.

Trump is a crazed believer in his own brilliance. If he hadn't been born wealthy, he would have been a serial failure who couldn't quit his day job. Instead, Ralph Kramden got to be the most powerful person in the world.

LET THEM EAT HATE

In a New York Times op-ed, Phil Klay, an Iraq War veteran and author of the National Book Award-winning short story collection Redeployment, notes that the Trump administration has never offered a clear justification for the war in Iran. However:

... as I watched a video posted by the White House in which a group of angry, rifle-wielding bowling pins labeled “Iranian Regime Officials” are struck by a Stars and Stripes bowling ball that turns into an airplane, followed by actual combat footage of U.S. airstrikes, I realized how one rationale for this war has remained clear and consistent: the administration’s delight in displays of violence and domination.

STRIKE. 💥🦅 pic.twitter.com/XMzNNtlT63

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 12, 2026

Many top administration officials do seem to regard the brutality as an end in itself:

The bowling video is one of many sizzle reels posted on White House social media accounts celebrating the war by mixing images of death and destruction with footage from video games or sports highlights. The president declared that military officials told him “it’s more fun to sink” ships than to capture them, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth exulted, “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” The Trump aide Stephen Miller proclaimed that the Iran war showcased a military “that isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”

At another news conference, Mr. Hegseth made the macho posturing even clearer: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

But this isn't just for their own enjoyment. They're doing it -- and proudly asserting that they're pitiless -- because they think the public will get off on the cruelty.

A portion of the public clearly is enjoying this content: the video above has 126,000 likes on X as I write this. It's all in keeping with the main message of the Republican Party for the past several decades: We are good and our enemies are pure evil. Watch us make those enemies howl in agony.

For the Republican voter base, the war doesn't need a purpose. Owning the enemy is purpose enough. The GOP will never make its voters safer, healthier, more economically secure, or more able to obtain employment, but it will talk about enemies incessantly, and let the base revel in how it's tormenting those enemies. And even when the enemies are overseas, all roads lead back to the ultimate enemy:

Enemy 1) Foreign autocracy Enemy 2) Domestic opposition party

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— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) March 22, 2026 at 8:36 AM

(The Truth Social post is here.)

On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump claimed that no foreign regime was a greater enemy than Democrats -- for instance, in a Fox News town hall less than a month before the election:

“I always say, we have two enemies,” Trump said, adding: “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”

Over several decades, the right-wing media has primed the GOP voter base to hate everyone who's not aligned with the Republican Party, whether it's truly bad actors like the Iranian regime or a high school teacher driving a used hybrid with a COEXIST bumper sticker. So this Bloomberg report comes as no surprise:

Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran was partly motivated by pressure from outside allies....

Those privately pressing Trump to strike Iran included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and some conservative commentators, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The News Corp. founder communicated with Trump several times as he urged the president to take on Tehran, according to one person briefed on their interactions.

We knew about Netanyahu and commentators such as Mark Levin. We didn't know about Murdoch -- but of course he'd be rooting for what a war he assumed would goose Fox's ratings, give Trump a boost in the polls, and rally voters around Republican candidates in the midterms, all while distracting voters from their own concerns, particularly the economy. It's not achieving most of those aims, but that's always been the Fox/GOP formula: reminding the rubes that the right will give them satisfying enemies to hate, and will show those enemies squealing whenever possible.

(Please note that the top administration cheerleaders for the war, Trump and Hegseth, are former Fox commentators, along with Miller, who got into politics as a regular talk radio caller while he was still in high school.)

Klay writes:

Our greatest wartime leaders thought we should wage war only when it was absolutely necessary, that we should articulate the clear moral and political objectives that we use to guide our strategy and that we should treat the shedding of blood with the seriousness it deserves.

Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.

Yeah, but it gives 40 percent of the electorate a lot of distracting dopamine hits, and that's worked out great for the GOP and the Murdoch press so far.

GENDER INSECURITIES BECOME POLICY

I think Jamelle Bouie is right to argue that Trumpism is very much about gender.

I've done a few videos at this point on a particular theme, and that theme is that everything is gender. What this means is that so much of what is driving our politics today is an acute form of gender anxiety, expressed by those who believe in a kind of hierarchical gender universe in which men are at the top, in which a particular kind an expression of masculinity is deemed to be dominant, in which femininity is disparaged, in which women are disparaged, in which anything that threatens this particular vision of domineering hierarchical masculinity is something to be undermined, if not destroyed outright.

Bouie sees this in the context of President Trump's mad plan to spend a billion dollars to bribe renewal energy companies so they won't build wind farms, at a time when the supply of fossil fuels is threatened by Trump's Iran war. Why the obsession with fossil fuels? Bouie says (at approximately 2:26 in the video):

... clean energy, renewable energy, energy that you produce not through extraction, right? Not through the violent extraction, through literally abusing the land, through literally penetrating the land, right? That's what an oil drill does: it penetrates the land....

For the people in this administration, I believe, I think that they view clean energy and renewable energy as a fundamental threat to their vision of a hierarchical world, to their vision of a hypermasculine, hierarchical world in which the only real law is the law of the strong dominating the weak, and they see renewables, green energy, as representing weakness, as representing femininity, which they equate with weakness.

I agree that masculinity is important to them -- but (and I think Bouie would agree) it's not just male vs. female. It's also macho male vs. non-macho male. I'm seeing this in right-wing memes, like these two:

Liberalism is embodied in a foul-smelling, pot-bellied brony who's clearly inferior to the ripped, iron-pumping Christian embodiment of the Trump zeitgeist. The message is not just that men are better than women, but that right-wing men are better than left-wing men, who are flabby pseudo-men.

But much of this posturing is right-wing men trying to persuade themselves that they're the guy on the right and not the guy on the left.

Here's a thread from Derek Guy. The first post features a clip of the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles talking to a manosphere influencer named Justin Waller (the clip appears in Louis Theroux's documentary Inside the Manosphere). The second post shows the Daily Wire's Matt Walsh:

It's interesting how The Daily Wire attacks the idea that gender is a performance when their sets are all about gender performance. Look at the aesthetics here — the cigars and crystal decanter with Japanese whiskey, the black dress shirt, the tight suit with two-toned double monks and tie bar ...

[image or embed]

— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

... the Arne Jacobsen egg chair teamed with leather couch and a studio backdrop feat. a Lambo inexplicably inside the room. And where Knowles's set is filled with masculine urban cliches, Walsh's set is the rustic counterpart: the fish, stone fireplace, and boat-shaped shelf with tiny old books.

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— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

Just feels like every material representation of masculinity for 12 year old boys, all crammed into a tiny digital space that will fit your screen. So farcical that I don't know how anyone working on or watching this production doesn't feel like their intelligence is being insulted.

— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

Guy says that what we're seeing "feels like every material representation of masculinity for 12 year old boys," but I don't think it's that. I think these are symbols associated with masculinity that allegedly elevate men above women (and above weak men) and allegedly make women flock to men, but they mostly appeal to other men. They're ways men tell one another that they're alpha males.

Waller makes a living selling this image to fans. He's buff and cocksure, so the act is convincing. Knowles and Walsh, on the other hand, don't come off as macho men at all. Nor does Trump, at the age of 79, especially carrying around a body that looks like the brony's body in the memes above.

I suspect that Trump's embrace of fossil fuels is, like so much else in his life, a form of self-soothing -- he embraces energy drilled from ground by burly men and he feels more manly, at a time when, I'm sure, his days as a headline-grabbing ladies' man are in the distant past. I also see self-soothing when Knowles puffs on that cigar and Walsh makes sure the camera angle includes that fish -- yeah, we're real men, and so are you guys if you're watching this.

This is what the dominant political party in America produces as "culture." And this is how policy gets made. It's tests of manhood that men impose on themselves to impress their fellow men. And I guess Trump thinks the war is the ultimate macho flex.

THEY'RE GETTING US READY FOR THE END OF BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Since the day after President Trump issued an executive order on birthright citizenship, I've argued that the Supreme Court will side with Trump, tossing out more than a century of precedent, which is the Federalist Society supermajority's favorite sport. I think I see signs that I'm right about this.

At the academic end of the spectrum, we have a law professor named Ilan Wurman who used to believe in birthright citizenship now arguing before Congress that not everyone born here should be citizen. Here's Wurman in 2018:

And here's Wurman now:

Should EVERYONE born in America be a citizen? Part I

Ilan Wurman testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 3/10 pic.twitter.com/S8jeQT1rLd

— rationally BASED podcast (@rationallypod) March 11, 2026

For the hoi polloi, we have the New York Post dusting off an old favorite booga-booga story:

Pregnant Chinese women have turned a tropical paradise into a maternity ward — pumping out babies who automatically become US citizens daily.

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US territory northeast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, has been flooded with so-called “birth tourists” since 2009 when then-president Barack Obama introduced a visa-waiver program for Chinese nationals.

China-watchers estimate about 1,000 companies offer birth tourism to the Northern Mariana Islands, other US overseas territories and even the US mainland. They claim a gob-smacking 1.5 million American babies are being raised in China by Chinese parents who’ve participated in birth tourism.

If this has been happening for seventeen years, why is it a story now?

It's part of what I expect to be a huge propaganda campaign to make opposition to birthright citizenship seem like the normie position. The right is very good at reducing every story to a set of purely evil villains deliberately trying to harm upstanding patriots. Your enemies are rich Chinese birth tourists is an argument they hope will work, as is Yeah, birthright citizenship might have been okay once, but not after that evil Joe Biden opened the borders, which is what another right-wing legal scholar, Adrian Vermeule, argues in this Substack post:

Nor does the putatively consistent practice of granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens provide a convincing rejoinder. What was done at a small scale in the past may have very different consequences for republican sovereignty when done at a massive scale, as has occurred in recent decades, reaching a wild crescendo in the previous administration. The change of scale itself changes the nature and import of the practice, or more accurately, different practices in different eras. Fundamental principles remain the same over time, but their application may change with circumstances.

Arguments the Supremes could use to gut birthright citizenship are being floated in right-wing academic circles, but whichever ones are used, I'm certain the fix is in and birthright citizenship is on its way out.

I suggested a couple of weeks ago that the Supremes might open the door to denaturalizations in time for the midterms. Maybe that won't happen -- but at the very least, I think the Republican partisans on the Court are assuming that Democrats on the campaign trail will declare themselves in favor of a legislative restoration of birthright citizenship, which Republicans assume will hurt Democrats with swing voters. I'm not sure how that would play. But I expect the Court to do the worst possible thing again.

A SHAMELESS WHITE HOUSE ATTEMPTS TO PROVE THAT EVERYTHING IS FINE

How do you know the White House is worried about defections from the Trump voter base? You know because stories like the two I'm about to quote are showing up in the press.

First, there's this from the New York Post:

Reports of Republican fractures over President Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran have been greatly exaggerated, according to a new poll shared exclusively with The Post Thursday.

The J.L. Partners survey showed that 83% of likely Republican voters “strongly” or “somewhat” support Operation Epic Fury, while just 9% say they “strongly” or “somewhat” oppose military action against Iran.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents say the US should continue its campaign until Iran’s military capabilities are destroyed, with 16% saying Trump should stop the war immediately.

Compared to prominent podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, both of whom have criticized the president over the Iran war, the poll found 83% of likely Republican voters trust Trump’s judgement, while just 6% place more confidence in the former Fox News hosts.

J.L. Partners is a British firm founded by two Tories. It polls Americans for the Daily Mail, where its surveys have, until recently, been more favorable to President Trump than most polls. Nate Silver, who gives J.L. Partners a B/C rating, adds four points to Trump's "disapprove" numbers to adjust for J.L.'s bias.

Nevertheless, I suspect that this poll largely reflects reality. Other pollsters, such as Quinnipiac, find that Republican voters are overwhelmingly on Trump's side -- though you'd think the numbers would be closer to 100% support in the first couple of weeks of a war started by a president of their own party.

I'd be curious to see the wording of the poll's questions in order to determine whether they skewed the results, but we can't see the survey itself because it was released exclusively to the Post, which isn't revealing many specifics.

The White House is clearly trying to manufacture consent for Trump's war on the right, out of fear that some of the base is defecting, particularly young men. And this Axios story seems like another attempt to suggest that Trump's dude-friendly administration is still very popular:

D.C.'s hottest ticket: Trump's UFC fight night

President Trump tells Axios it's the "hottest ticket that I've ever seen."

He's talking about UFC Freedom 250, the fight Trump is staging on the White House's South Lawn on June 14.

Why it matters: Donors, lobbyists, members of Congress and well-connected fans are clamoring for tickets.

Well, of course donors, lobbyists, and members of Congress are clamoring for tickets. They still need to curry favor with Trump. But Trump wants America, or at least right-wing America, or at least right-wing male America, to believe he's still "the hottest thing."

Of course, we have no idea how true any of this is -- the story, more than most Axios stories, is pure spin, and reads like spin directly from the boss himself.

Top lobbyists and White House-connected operatives are getting inundated with requests, sources said. One of them told us they're sick of being asked about the fight.

Republicans began flooding the White House with inquiries about VIP tickets almost immediately after the event was announced last summer.

One senator asked to attend with their family.

(Only one? Whoops -- this seems like a botched talking point.)

A GOP fundraiser close to the White House received dozens of direct messages on social media asking how they could get in.

Trump himself has been fielding ticket requests, a person familiar with the event prep said.

Is the "person familiar with the event prep" named John Barron?

Trump wants us to assure us that his 2024 voters, young men in particular, aren't rushing to the exits -- or maybe his aides feel the need to assure him. But he can sell the war (and the self-soothing sausagefest on his birthday) as hard as he wants. The latecomers in his coalition aren't buying.

THE SAVE ACT ISN'T JIM CROW -- IT'S MORE DELUSIONAL

In a column about the SAVE Act -- Donald Trump's top domestic priority -- Jamelle Bouie writes:

For reasons of both ego and ideology, Trump does not believe that he can legitimately lose an election. He is, to his mind, the living embodiment of the nation. If he doesn’t win, then the system must be broken. In that sense, the SAVE Act is far less about American elections as they exist than it is about the president’s vision of American society. The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump.

The SAVE Act is an attempt to make that distinction a political reality by removing as many mere Americans from the voting pool as possible and elevating the true people of the United States — who just so happen to support Trump and the Republican Party — as the only legitimate players in American political life. The goal, then, is to nationalize something akin to what many Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South: a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.

This isn't exactly right. The people who put Jim Crow voting laws in place knew that the Blacks they were disenfranchising were real people born in America who would be allowed to vote if the federal government were able and willing to force the issue. It's my belief that Donald Trump -- influenced by a couple of decades' worth of Republican propaganda -- believes that there simply aren't enough legitimate Democratic voters in America to make the Democratic Party a competitive party. When he says of Democrats, as he did in a speech earlier this month, "They're doing everything possible because they know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years and maybe longer," I think he legitimately believes that the large number of voters purged from the rolls by the SAVE Act will (a) be overwhelmingly Democratic and (b) be on the rolls fraudulently.

Trump believes this -- believes that all these voters are non-citizen immigrants or dead people or nonexistent people or people otherwise ineligible to vote, possibly because they live on dementia wards or in mental institutions and votes are cast for Democrats in their names -- because he's a Fox News grandpa who's been told over and over again that Democrats cheat in elections on a industrial scale. Millions of other Fox News grandpas and grandmas also believe this.

Here's a video from 2010.



It was produced by an organization called True the Vote, which I've written about many times. After the 2020 election, True the Vote was behind the Dinesh D'Souza "documentary" 2000 Mules, which is so rife with disinformation that even D'Souza himself has had to apologize for its dishonesty. Here's the first claim in the 2010 video, from the late right-wing propagandist David Horowitz:

The voting system is under attack now. Movements that are focused on voter fraud and the integrity of elections are crucial at this point. This is really -- I mean, this is a war! A Democratic Party consultant once told me that Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win any election.

The next speaker says:

There are people who are deceased who have shown up as voting. I've actually gone out and taken pictures of the tombstones.

The third speaker -- Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of True the Vote -- says:

One lady asked the presiding judge, she looked at him and she goes, "I forget who I'm supposed to vote for," and so he went over there and he actually turned the dial. She pressed Enter. He turned the dial. She pressed Enter.

Trump thinks this is routine. Your Fox-watching relatives think so too. They believe all this happens and they believe that millions of immigrants cross the border and are immediately signed up to vote (always Democratic) and they believe that Democrats slip fake ballots in among the real ones during vote counting and they believe Democrats tamper with voting machines so Republican votes flip to Democratic and...

Jim Crow vote suppressors knew that there were real Americans who would vote against them if they were allowed to. Millions of Republicans seem to believe that there are no legitimate Democratic votes, or very, very few.

They believe this even though they can never produce evidence of this fraud. They believe it the same way they believe that every anti-Trump protestor is a paid agent of the Soros family.

So Trump and his supporters don't exactly believe, as Bouie writes, that "the people of the United States are ... a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump," excluding Trump critics -- they believe there simply aren't very many sincere Trump critics, or very many Democrats at all, citizens who oppose Trump and his party sincerely and legitimately.

All this, of course, requires them to ignore large chunks of objective reality. But the propaganda they consume has taught them that what everyone outside their bubble portrays as reality must be a lie because people outside their bubble do nothing but lie. Everything they don't want to believe is "fake news." And everything they want to believe is the gospel truth.

I think Trump sincerely believes all this. I'm sure his most fervent fans do. They think the SAVE Act won't disenfranchise a single legitimate voter. It will only disenfranchise Democrats, who are illegitimate voters by definition.

ARE WE SEEING THE BEGINNINGS OF A "PURITY RIGHT"?

It's hard to say we're seeing a Republican crack-up when (per Quinnipiac) 85% of Republicans support the war in Iran, but some fissures are starting to appear:

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation on Tuesday, citing his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran and saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media, making claims President Donald Trump has denied.

Kent, a former political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed to his post last July on a 52-44 vote.

Here's a bit more on those connections to right-wing extremists:

Iran war was a bad idea from start. But Joe Kent is not the right messenger on this. See his alleged associations with Nick Fuentes and live streamer who said Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand” @splcenter.org @westernstatescenter.org 2025 letter:

[image or embed]

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 10:25 AM

Some of the war-related feuding on the right is laughable. Here's an exchange between Megyn Kelly (against the war) and Mark Levin (pro-war):

Busy Sunday morning for Megyn Kelly. She wakes up and has “micrope*is” on her mind. Suffice to say, if it talks like a harlot, and posts like a harlot, it’s … well, you know the rest.

Shalom! https://t.co/3jRmQS0zKp

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) March 15, 2026

President Trump and his Fox News Mini-Me, Sean Hannity, are siding with Levin, but Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon are criticizing the war.

So far, the GOP Establishment is holding the line, defending the war and declaring itself shocked, shocked at the increasing groyperization of GOP youth. We can read this as the work of the Republican Party in Ron DeSantis's Florida:

The University of Florida’s College Republicans chapter was disbanded after a finding that some of its members had violated a statewide organization’s rules, including making an antisemitic gesture.

A photo reportedly depicting two students giving a Nazi salute had been shared on social media.

The university said over the weekend that the Florida Federation of College Republicans had disbanded the chapter and asked school officials to deactivate it as a registered student organization while it seeks new leadership for the group.

This isn't good guys vs. bad guys -- it's bad guys vs. worse guys. As we've learned from recent stories about young-Republican chat groups in Florida and New York, the new GOP bigots openly describe Jews as categorically evil. The GOP Establishment talks about quite a few groups that way -- Muslims, trans people, non-Republican Blacks -- but not Jews. It's a rift.

I think the Establishment will retain control of the party for a while. Younger Baby Boomers and GenXers in the party will still hold sway for a few more election cycles. But I think the GOP might be on the verge of developing its own version of the "purity left" -- the young progressives who invariably find a reason not to vote Democratic (Gaza in 2024, forever wars in 2016, etc.).

Young right-wingers really might stay home in future elections if Republicans seem too fond of war, and if they seem too fond of Israel (a reasonable objection) or Jews (a not-reasonable objection). Will these voters abstain, or vote third party, or even vote Democratic, if a strong supporter of Israel -- or even a candidate who seems too comfortable with Jews -- wins the 2028 Republican nomination? They might. We might have young people at both ends of the political spectrum demanding that a major-party candidate earn their vote even though these voters claim to hate everything the other party stands for. That wouldn't be a complete party crack-up, but it could still be very damaging to the GOP. The difference is that in the GOP, hate would be the principal reason.

ARE THE ATTACKS ON GRAHAM PLATNER HELPING HIM?

I want to talk about Graham Platner -- but first I want to note that there have been a couple of recent stories about Zohnran Mamdani's wife, Rama Duwaji, that I expected to be very damaging to the mayor. The first was this:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, liked a celebratory Instagram post on the day of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack that shared images from the murderous assault on Israel, according to a report Friday.

The inflammatory social media posts by lefty groups included images allegedly taken from livestreamed footage of the attack, showing a gleeful group riding on what appeared to be a commandeered Israel Defense Forces vehicle with the words “resisting apartheid since 1948,” the report from Jewish Insider said.

“Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation. Oct. 7, 2023,” read another image on the same post, which the outlet reported showed a bulldozer used by terrorists to breach the barrier between Gaza and Israel that day.

The posts in question don't really celebrate violence against Israelis, but I expected Duwaji's social media activity to be a major scandal for Mamdani. It hasn't been.

This story doesn't seem to be breaking through, either:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, created artwork for an essay book compiled by an anti-Israel activist who has described Jewish people as “vampires,” “demons” and “ghouls” — and celebrated the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.

Duwaji, a Syrian-American artist and first lady of New York City, drew the lead graphic for “A Trail of Soap,” an essay published by Susan Abulhawa in the Slow Factory’s latest issue of Everything Is Political magazine, the Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.

The story Duwaji illustrated is introduced but not written by Abulhawa. The author, Diana Islayih, describes using a shared toilet at an encamment in Gaza where there's no available water, so she must rely on dish soap to keep her hands clean.

The mayor has distanced himself from Abulhawa.

A spokeswoman for Mamdani told the Washington Free Beacon that Duwaji does not have a relationship with Abulhawa.

“As is common for freelance illustrators, the First Lady was commissioned to illustrate an excerpt of Abulhawa’s book by an outside publisher,” the spokeswoman said. “She has never engaged with or met Susan Abulhawa, nor had she seen the tweets in question.”

And Mamdani has criticized the social media messages:

“And we stand in our administration, and I can tell you, our administration – which is separate from the first lady, she doesn’t have a role within it – is against bigotry of all forms … unflinchingly,” he told reporters.

“I think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible,” he added, in reference to Abulhawa’s posts.

This is a story in New York, but it's not a big story. It won't end Mamdani's political career. It doesn't seem to be damaging his standing with New Yorkers. And it's barely a story in the national press, despite the media's (and the right's) fascination with Mamdani.

I bring this up in the context of the latest news about Graham Platner:

Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner isn’t apologizing anymore for the Nazi-linked tattoo he was caught with last year, and he’s claiming Jewish leaders buy his excuse about it.

Platner, who is running for the Democratic nod for Senate and previously apologized for the offensive ink on his chest, argued that headlines have left voters with the impression that his tattoo had a more obvious link to Nazis.

“I had a meeting in New York not that long ago with a number of Jewish leaders, we started talking about it, and when we started, somebody was like, ‘Wait a second. We thought you had a swastika,'” Platner told Zeteo.

“When I explain the actual story, pretty much everybody’s like, again, ‘That seems like an eminently reasonable thing.’”

Zeteo's Platner interview appears under the headline "Graham Platner Was Left for Dead. So Why Is He Winning?" The progressive news outlet seems to find it baffling that Platner is still in the race:

Many people assumed Graham Platner’s Senate candidacy was dead in October. Instead, the oyster farmer and veteran kept campaigning, and continued drawing overflow crowds to town halls all over Maine.

His Democratic opponent, Janet Mills, Maine’s current two-term governor, has led a quieter campaign, and with three months left in the primary, polls suggest Platner is in the lead. Recent surveys, including a poll released Monday, suggest Platner would be a stronger candidate to face incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins, too.

It was, of course, fair to expect Platner wouldn’t get past the news that he, for years, had a chest tattoo – dating back to his time in the Marines – that resembled a skull-and-crossbones symbol used by the Nazis, even after he apologized and got the tattoo covered up.

Months later, it’s clear the conventional wisdom about Platner’s demise was wrong.

It isn't just the tattoo:

Last year, unearthed Reddit and other social media posts showed Platner vented that “Cops are bas—s. All of them, in fact,” and responding to a post that said, “White people aren’t as racist or stupid as Trump thinks,” writing “Living in white rural America, I’m afraid to tell you they actually are.”

Platner also pondered why black people “don’t tip.” He has since apologized for those past posts.

Also, Platner recently sat for an interview with a podcaster named Nate Cornacchia who has advanced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Platner has said he's "a longtime fan" of Cornacchia.

How is Platner getting away with this? Is the Maine Democratic electorate rife with Nazis?

Many politcal commentators argue that Platner is clearly a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi. Their politcal ideas are deep-seated and well thought out, so they assume everyone's politcal ideas are deep-seated and well thought out.

I think many of the people who support Platner aren't deeply political. Platner clearly wasn't deeply political until recently, and it's unclear how deep-rooted the ideas he now expresses are. Platner now seems to be a compelling, passionate advocate of progressive ideas. But he doesn't seem to have thought deeply about politics for most of his life, which led him to indulge some nasty prejudices, and left him unable to recognize the harm that offensive speech can do to real people.

Which makes him similar to a lot of normal people.

I think many people are open to liberal or progressive ideas and also not particularly vigilant about bigotry. They're not free of prejudice -- who is? -- and they want some leeway on their own speech and behavior. They've been encouraged to think that "political correctness" is a greater scourge than bigotry by both conservatives and anti-progressive moderates. They associate speech monitoring with authority, at a time when they hold authorities in extremely low esteem.

But their views are a muddle. Here's some data from a 2024 Pew poll:

About six-in-ten U.S. adults (62%) say that “people being too easily offended by things others say” is a major problem in the country today.

In a separate question, 47% say that “people saying things that are very offensive to others” is a major problem....

* Eight-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say people being too easily offended by what others say is a major problem. By comparison, 45% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say the same.

* In contrast, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say that people saying things that are very offensive is a major problem in the country today. A 59% majority of Democrats say this, compared with 34% of Republicans.

Looking at Americans’ views on these two questions together, about a third (32%) say that people being too easily offended by things others say and people saying very offensive things to others are both major problems.

(Emphasis in original.)

Nearly half the Democrats in this survey said that "people being too easily offended by what others say is a major problem," even though nearly 60% of Democrats agreed that "saying things that are very offensive is a major problem in the country today."

I think an unexpectedly large portion of the Democratic voter base is annoyed by speech monitoring and doesn't respond well to it. They've been encouraged to feel this way by a "PC"-hating culture. And so they're turning the Rana Duwaji stories into a non-scandal -- and possibly rallying around Graham Platner in part because he's being attacked for speech. It's possible he'll be able to survive all the attacks on him all the way to November -- and only after that will we learn who he really is now.

WHY ARE WE ATTACKING IRAN? SO TRUMP CAN BE JOHN BARRON AGAIN.

Here's an NBC News story from Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez:

President Donald Trump said Saturday that he’s not ready to make a deal to end the war with Iran despite the country’s willingness to do so “because the terms aren’t good enough yet,” but declined to say what those terms would be.

In a wide-ranging, nearly 30-minute telephone interview with NBC News, the president also said he is working with other countries on a plan to secure the Strait of Hormuz amid surges in global oil prices, and he dismissed Americans’ concerns about rising gas prices since the U.S. and Israel launched their joint military operation two weeks ago.

The president also questioned whether Iran’s new supreme leader is “even alive.”

Trump said he was “surprised” that Iran decided to attack other Middle Eastern countries in response to the U.S.-Israeli operation, and that U.S. strikes on Kharg Island on Saturday “totally demolished” most of the island but that “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”

NBC has another story, from Welker and Sahil Kapur, based on the same phone conversation:

President Donald Trump told NBC News on Saturday that he’s still mulling a potential endorsement in the competitive Republican primary for a Senate seat in Texas.

Sen. John Cornyn is facing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a May 26 runoff after a close contest on the first ballot.

“I’ll let you know that over the next week or so,” Trump said in a phone interview when asked if he’s going to endorse Cornyn. “I like him. I always liked him.”

We keep asking ourselves why Trump attacked Iran. What's the goal in this war? What's the purpose?

I think this is the purpose: Trump wants to be John Barron again.

In Trump's memory, there was a time when he was the most talked-about real estate developer (and sex god) in New York City. Gossip columnists were desperate for news about him. He was so important to the local media that it was sometimes appropriate for him to pose as his own publicist -- John Barron or John Miller or David Dennison -- so he could give reporters and columnists the inside skinny on what that fascinating Trump fellow was up to.

A war that's gone on for a couple of weeks is making him the object of fascination he thinks he was then. As I told you yesterday, The Atlantic has reported that Trump's personal phone number is in wide circulation. Now that we're in a state of war, D.C. reporters are desperate to talk to him -- and he loves it.

Sometimes in meetings, he will leave his phone face up, allowing staff to gawk at the flashing notifications of incoming or missed calls that pile up on his screen. Only some of them are from numbers that have been saved in the device. “It is literally call after reporter call,” the first official said. “It is just boom, boom, boom.”

This is heaven for Trump:

Since the United States first attacked Iran two weeks ago, Trump has answered more than three dozen phone calls from journalists representing at least a dozen outlets, including ABC News, Axios, CBS News, CNN, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, Israel’s Channel 14, Fox News, MS NOW, NBC News, The New York Times, the New York Post, Politico, The Times of Israel, The Washington Post, and, yes, The Atlantic. A journalist from The Washington Reporter, a small conservative outlet, has repeatedly called, and the administration officials say Substack authors have started to call, forcing White House staff to look up names they don’t recognize.

Most of these calls are quickies.

Brief seems to be the most frequent descriptor attached to these calls, most of which last just a few minutes, rarely more than 10.

The call with NBC (presumably with Welker) was unusual because it went on for a half hour, long enough to veer off into domestic issues (the Texas Senate race).

Why did a younger Donald Trump build, buy, and redesign builings? Why did he write books, own a football team, run casinos, and put his name on a range of mediocre products? For the money, yes, but mostly for the attention.

That's the main reason he's fighting this war. There's no reason to overthink it. His top strategic goal is to make reporters desperate to talk to him.

WHY DONALD TRUMP DOESN'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE WAR

In a New York Times roundtable discussion, pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson says that President Trump's Iran war is unpopular because he's unpopular.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Well, in the absence of a clear case for why we have entered into this conflict, people’s attitudes about it really are just reflective of, do you generally trust Donald Trump or not?

... And so, things like approval of the war tend to track pretty closely with things like Donald Trump’s overall job approval figures....

And I think that’s where the White House has sort of run into a challenge of its own making on this, in that there are some justifications for military engagement in Iran that do get better numbers than just, “How do you feel about Donald Trump today?” The American public is very eager that Iran not be able to have nuclear capabilities, and so on and so forth.

But in the absence of evidence, or a compelling case being made that this is the reason we’ve done this, people have sort of defaulted to, “Do I trust Donald Trump or not?” And, problematically for the White House right now, that means that you are starting with approval for this war that is lower than approval for almost any conflict that the United States has entered into in recent decades.

But it's not clear that the White House cares. In an Atlantic story about the large number of people -- including journalists -- who appear to have Trump's personal phone number, we're told:

The scrum for fleeting—and often conflicting—presidential utterances has made it difficult for the government to sell a clear story to the American people. Yet Trump’s advisers have no plans to intervene. “He enjoys it,” that official continued. “He knows how to handle the press.”

This suggests to me that most people in the Trump White House feel it's perfectly fine if Trump is the war's main salesman, even though he doesn't have a clear message. They're content if the war is no more popular than Trump is, for an obvious reason. The Wall Street Journal reports:

... Trump’s team is privately trying to reassure the president that conservatives aren’t abandoning him. They have provided him with polling data in recent days that they say shows the war is popular with his supporters, people familiar with the matter said.

That's clear from surveys like the most recent Quinnipiac poll:

Democrats (89 - 7 percent) and independents (60 - 31 percent) oppose the U.S. military action against Iran, while Republicans (85 - 11 percent) support it.

Optimists are expecting a bloodbath for the GOP in the midterms, but how bad can it really get? A party needs 218 seats to take control of the House. The Cook Political Report rates 185 seats as "solid Republican" and another 17 seats as "likely Republican." Beyond that, 4 seats "lean Republican." There are similar numbers on the Democratic side. Cook regards only 17 seats as true tossups. A wave election could change all this -- but Trumpian election interference might even prevent Democrats from winning the majority that now seems all but inevitable.

Trump won't be able to get legislation through a Democratic House, but he already bypasses Congress for nearly everything he wants to do. He can be investigated by House Democrats, but how often do congressional investigations change anything in America? He could be impeached by a Democratic House, but conviction and removal from office would require a large number of Republican votes -- 16 if the Democratic caucus holds 51 seats (or probably 17 because John Fetterman will vote to acquit).

I keep thinking about this map:

It's G. Elliott Morris's assessment of Trump's state-by-state popularity. (You can see the numbers for individual states by cursoring over the map here.)

Trump has positive ratings in 14 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Based on 2020 census numbers, these states have 12.57% of the U.S. population -- but 28% of the senators (28 out of 100).

Then we have Missouri, Montana, Indiana, and South Carolina, the four states where Trump is underwater by less than 3%. Morris's polls seem to lean somewhat Democratic, so these states may also be pro-Trump. Trump won them easily in all three of his elections. Now we're up to 18.29% of the population -- and 36% of the senators (36 out of 100), enough to block a vote to convict in any impeachment of Trump (or one of his subordinates).

So the Republicans have a built-in advantage in the Senate because the Framers gave two senators to each state, regardless of size. And the House is so gerrymandered that very few House members need to worry about appealing to swing voters.

No wonder Trump doesn't think he needs to care what Democrats or independents think. No wonder he's fine if support for the war equals personal loyalty to him -- most Republicans still love him, so they'll support the war.

Trump doesn't need to explain his motives to his base. All he needs to say is "I, Donald Trump, want to do this," and he can continue doing whatever he wants to do.

TRUMP TURNS A CELEBRATION OF WOMEN INTO A CELEBRATION OF HIMSELF

There's was an event at the White House yesterday that was advertised as a commemoration of Women's History Month -- but this is the administration of Donald Trump, the most narcissistic person who's ever lived, so the event was primarily about him.

A medal was presented -- not to a woman, but by a woman, to the president. The New York Post reports:

Olympic bobsled champion Kaillie Humphries surprised President Trump Thursday by awarding him the Order of Ikkos medal during White House women’s history month event with Melania Trump.

“Every Olympic medalist in the United States gets an Order of Ikkos that they get to hand to somebody in honor and recognition of somebody who’s made a meaningful contribution to their journey to the podium, because Olympic medals are never achieved alone,” Humphries explained.

“I’m so honored to present this, my Order of Ikkos medal, to you, Donald Trump,” she revealed.

The Order of Ikklos is a real thing, but despite the venerable-sounding name, it's of recent vintage. The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee established the Order in 2008. Each U.S. athlete who wins an Olympic medal is allowed to present the Order of Ikklos medal "to a coach, mentor or other individual who has been instrumental in their success. The Order of Ikkos is named after Ikkos of Tarentum, the first recorded Olympic coach in ancient Greece."

Humphreys is an avowed Trump supporter, and as the Post notes, she lavished praised on Trump yesterday, almost as if she were a Cabinet member at one of those cringe-inducing televised meetings in which heads of departments compete to see who can lavish the most praise on the president.

“I want to recognize the support and the impact you’ve had on women’s sports ... specifically standing up to keep biological women in women’s sports, to keep the field of play safe and allow for fair competition,” the three-time Olympic gold medalist said.

Humphries also praised Trump’s policies “creating greater access to IVF, so families like mine can continue to grow.”

I'm comparing this event to those Cabinet meetings because other attendees joined the praise competition.

Heather Kell, a waitress and single mom from Hendersonville, N.C., said she “had to do a double take” when she did her taxes this year, crediting the savings to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Nora Pruitt, a married mom of seven, suggested Trump’s efforts to revitalize domestic manufacturing landed her a “career job” at a steel factory in Baltimore, Md., which “totally changed our lives.”

Lexi Chambers, a second generation farmer from Virginia, lauded Trump’s “support of American agriculture,” declaring that it has provided “families like mine the opportunity to ensure that my daughters can farm one day.”

Clay County Sheriff Michelle Cook quipped that her Florida county is “the only place safer than Washington,” before touting the “additional dollars from their hard work” that law enforcement officers are realizing through Trump’s no tax on tipped wages policy.

This was clearly a requirement imposed by the White House if you wanted to be part of the proceedings.

The Independent concedes that in Trump's own remarks, he praised women -- in his fashion:

After declaring “women are the whole deal” and giving shout-outs to his wife Melania Trump and prominent female members of his cabinet, the president paid his own tribute to women in general.

“They are so powerful and so important and so beautiful,” he said. “I'm not allowed to use the word beautiful, but I'm using it anyway. Usually, it's the end of your political career. If you say a woman's a beautiful woman, they say that's the termination of his career.

“But somehow, it hasn't hurt too much. You are incredible women, and you're beautiful women.”

But after that, he talked about himself.

“The situation with Iran is moving along very rapidly. It's doing very well. Our military is unsurpassed,” he said. “There's never been anything like it… they really are a nation of terror and hate, and they're paying a big price right now.” ...

“And the $12 billion in farm relief we issued using tariff revenue, we get $12 billion, we took in tremendous amounts of money. We're taking in money because of the tariffs. And really, jobs are coming in through the roof.”

Also:

Trump is taking credit for the United States being 250 years old.

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— Mark Jacob (@markjacob.bsky.social) March 12, 2026 at 5:37 PM

Melania Trump introduced the president -- and, surprisingly, didn't praise him, apart from saying that "throughout his career [he] has demonstrated a strong commitment to promoting women in leadership roles." But that's because she devoted most of her remarks to praising herself, in words that seem as if they were lifted from her movie's publicity handouts, or maybe a scammy brochure from Trump University:

As a visionary, I know success is not borne over night, but rather, takes shape after a long, and sometimes challenging process. Often alone at the top, I follow my passion, listen to my instinct, and always maintain a laser focus. In solitude my creative mind dances—filling my imagination with originality.

Attention to detail, demanding schedules, and multi-tasking are everyday realities when building towards success. This principle resonates across all my roles: as a mother, humanitarian, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. As well as with my new film, where I shaped its creative direction, served as producer, managed post-production, and activated the marketing campaign.

Curiosity is a core value that keeps me ahead of the curve. Curiosity begets knowledge, opening doors to ideas and industries that I may have otherwise overlooked. This unrestricted mindset has led me to build across very different sectors: fashion, digital assets, publishing, accessories, skincare, commercial television, and of course, filmmaking.

The lessons I learned when launching my earliest ventures, such as how to build a brand, create superior product design, and activate an advertising campaign, remain just as relevant today. Markets evolve, technologies change, but the fundamentals of thoughtful leadership and continuous learning are everlasting.

Melania's introduction to her husband is 367 words in total, of which the majority -- 199 -- are about herself.

The Trumps celebrated women yesterday pretty much the same way they celebrate everything: by never taking their eyes off the mirror.