Category Archives: Republican Party

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‘Funny how that works’: Nobel-winner warns Trump’s allies won’t help him out of ‘trap’

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‘Funny how that works’: Nobel-winner warns Trump’s allies won’t help him out of ‘trap.’

Ewan Gleadow
March 17, 2026, 2:30PM ET (RAWSTORY)

A new brief of tariffs from the Trump administration could be the worst yet, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

Krugman warned that new tariffs set to be introduced by the president’s team will affect not just U.S. citizens but the world as he lashes out at NATO for not helping with the war in Iran. The economist believes a proposed tariff on 60 countries, including members of the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom, will cruelly hinder economies across the world during a time of domestic crisis.

Krugman wrote, “Trump imposed tariffs on almost every other nation, including islands inhabited only by penguins, by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.” This use of IEEPA was blatantly illegal, and after dragging its heels for many months, the Supreme Court finally agreed with lower courts that the tariffs were, in fact, illegal.

“One important point that isn’t emphasized enough is that in addition to being illegal under U.S. law, the IEEPA tariffs were a gross breach of contract. Most U.S. tariff rates were set in 1995, as part of the negotiations that, among other things, created the World Trade Organization.

“These tariffs were ‘bound’ by international agreements, which have almost as much force as treaties. But the U.S. just ripped those agreements up without even trying to make a case for its actions.

“Now the IEEPA tariffs are gone, but Trump isn’t giving up. On Sunday night he posted a long, falsehood-filled rant about the court, beginning with a condemnation of its tariff ruling. And while he can’t simply defy Supreme Court rulings—not yet, anyway—his officials have been scrambling for legal strategies to reimpose high tariffs.”

Krugman has warned that, despite the Supreme Court intervening in Trump’s tariff powers, the worst is yet to come as the administration looks to hinder its allies, enemies, and trading partners with a new round of economic changes.

“Under U.S. law the executive branch has the authority to impose tariffs without new legislation in certain specified circumstances,” Krugman wrote. These include Section 232 tariffs to protect national security, the (spurious) basis for most of the tariffs that survived the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Trump officials are planning to impose another major round of tariffs using Section 301, designed to cope with unfair foreign trading practices. In particular, they’re proposing tariffs on 60 (!) countries, including Canada, the UK, and the European Union, that they accuse of violating rules against international trade in goods produced with forced labor.

“The current U.S. government has, as Trump would say, treated our erstwhile allies very, very badly in multiple ways, with the arbitrary, illegal imposition of tariffs the most consequential. And now those erstwhile allies have no inclination to help Trump out of the Iran trap he created for himself. Funny how that works.”

Democrats, International, Middle East, News, Oil, Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

‘Never heard him so angry’: MAGA senator posts – then deletes – story of furious Trump

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‘Never heard him so angry’: MAGA senator posts – then deletes – story of furious Trump

Alexander Willis
March 17, 2026 11:12AM ET (RAWSTORY)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) published—and immediately deleted—a post on social media Tuesday sharing details of a conversation he had moments earlier with President Donald Trump, who, according to Graham, was absolutely furious over his pleas for other countries to aid his Iran war effort being largely ignored.

“Just spoke to President Trump about our European allies’ unwillingness to provide assets to keep the Strait of Hormuz functioning, which benefits Europe far more than America,” Graham wrote in a social media post on X Tuesday, a post that was deleted within minutes.

“I have never heard him so angry in my life. I share that anger given what’s at stake.”

Not long after Trump first authorized strikes on Iran, the Middle East nation vowed to attack any sea vessels aligned with the United States and its allies attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route through which 20% of the world’s oil trade flows. Oil prices have skyrocketed as a result, reportedly sparking panic within the Trump administration and prompting Trump to call on other nations to support its war effort.

Those calls have mostly landed on deaf ears, however, and were met with “little in the way of immediate commitments,” The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Trump’s apparent fury was shared by Graham, who wrote in his now-deleted social media post that the perceived snub from European nations made him “second guess the value” of U.S. alliances.

“The arrogance of our allies to suggest that Iran with a nuclear weapon is of little concern and that military action to stop the ayatollah from acquiring a nuclear bomb is our problem, not theirs, is beyond offensive,” Graham wrote.

“I consider myself very forward-leaning on supporting alliances; however, at a time of real testing like this, it makes me second-guess the value of these alliances. I am certain I am not the only senator who feels this way.”

Despite deleting the post, Graham republished a revised version about 40 minutes later, and with minimal and inconsequential changes.

News, Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

Trump and his ‘goons’ sent a ‘desperate’ message to base as big MAGA names turn: analyst

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Trump and his ‘goons’ sent a ‘desperate’ message to base as big MAGA names turn: analyst

Ewan Gleadow
March 17, 2026, 3:38 PM ET (RAWSTORY)

President Donald Trump is pressuring journalists to rile up the MAGA base, but that has its problems, according to a political analyst.

The president’s war with Iran has affected even the most ardent supporters of the Republican Party, and it appears Trump is now pulling out all the stops to try to convince the influential core of his voter base to take action. Amanda Marcotte believes the ploy from Trump will not work, as prominent figures in the MAGA sphere, such as Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, turn their back on the president and the party.

Fuentes, a far-right white nationalist, called on his followers, predominantly Trump supporters, to vote Democrat at the next election. Carlson, too, says he personally met with the president a number of times to persuade him not to strike Iran.

Marcotte wrote, “Mostly, what we’re seeing right now is desperation. As Jamelle Bouie writes at the New York Times, Trump is surrounded by sycophants and ‘has filtered out information that might challenge’ him. Also, he’s almost certainly surprised that things are going so poorly and, in his childish fashion, is lashing out at the messengers.

“But if there is an actual strategy at work here, it’s mostly about base management. Right now, a number of major MAGA influencers are expressing skepticism—or even outright opposition—to the Iran war.

“By invoking a longstanding grievance on the right about the mainstream media, Trump and his goons are sending a message: Republican voters who believe facts are being disloyal. Might that work? Maybe! Trump convinced the base to reject scientific facts during the pandemic, even though that wound up killing many of them.

“The difference here is that many right-wing demagogues who’ve been fervent MAGA supporters, such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, aren’t on board with this war.”

But the fact that Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes are not on board with the war in Iran does not mean they cannot be swayed back into Trump’s favor, Marcotte warned.

“People like them have no loyalty to truth, of course, since they’re hardcore conspiracy theorists,” she wrote. “But that just makes things worse for Trump, because what folks like Carlson and Owens are telling the GOP base has nothing to do with facts.

“They’re saying this war will eventually be lost, which is depressing and emasculating. That’s about the only kind of message that can cut through to the base and cause them to question their loyalties.”

News, Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

White House melts down with vulgar response after being called out on stunning reversal

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White House melts down with vulgar response after being called out on stunning reversal

Nicole Charky-Chami
March 17, 2026 3:51PM ET (RAWSTORY)

The Trump administration was raging on Tuesday, dropping a bizarre comeback after it was called out over previous claims involving the Iran war.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reversed her comments from last week, when she was critical of an ABC News report and blamed the outlet in a post on X for “providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people.”

“TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did,” Leavitt wrote.

But the White House was furious after people started noting the apparent change in tune from the Trump administration and clapped back with a surprising response on X.

“No such threat to our homeland of Iran launching a drone offensive on our West Coast, dumbass. The nuclear threat of the psychotic, murderous Iranian regime is very real, however. Thank God we finally have a president who’s doing something about it,” the White House Rapid Response account on X wrote.

Leavitt, earlier Tuesday, had responded on X with a lengthy post pointing to a public statement from U.S. intelligence official Joe Kent. Kent had resigned publicly via X and, in his letter to President Donald Trump, cited his reasons for leaving his position that Trump appointed him to, insisting that Iran had not posed an imminent threat.

“There are many false claims in this letter, but let me address one specifically: that ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,'” Leavitt wrote in rebuttal to Kent’s resignation letter. “This is the same false claim that Democrats and some in the liberal media have been repeating over and over.”

Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

‘Blindsided’ judge hurls Trump DOJ prosecutor out of court in mid-hearing blow-up

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‘Blindsided’ judge hurls Trump DOJ prosecutor out of court in mid-hearing blowup.

Daniel Hampton
March 17, 2026 2:20PM ET (RAWSTORY)

A dramatic courtroom confrontation erupted this week when Judge Zahid N. Quraishi threw top prosecutor Mark Coyne out of his New Jersey courtroom and demanded answers about who’s really running the U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to a new report.

The scene unfolded during a child pornography sentencing hearing Monday, adding to deepening tensions between the Trump administration’s Justice Department and federal judges. The judge grew increasingly frustrated with Coyne’s presence and fired pointed questions at junior prosecutor Daniel Rosenblum about whether former interim U.S. attorney Alina Habba maintained hidden control over office operations, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

When Coyne repeatedly interjected, the judge’s patience evaporated, and he ordered him to sit.

“You don’t get to blindside the court and do whatever it is you guys want to do,” Quraishi warned. “So if you continue to speak, you can leave.”

The confrontation escalated when Quraishi grilled Rosenblum over a botched plea deal executed without complete evidence.

“How did the screw-up happen?” Quraishi asked. “Was it your office, the U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI, or both? How did you execute a plea agreement without knowing all the evidence?”

Habba, now a senior Justice Department adviser, denied any operational role.

“I’m not the U.S. attorney anymore,” she said. “I left my post.”

She praised Coyne as talented and deserving respect.

The three-person leadership team of Philip Lamparello, Jordan Fox, and Ari Fontecchio faces mandatory testimony next month after a federal judge last week ruled their appointments unlawful. Another judge warned that illegal leadership could result in dangerous criminals having convictions reversed.

Quraishi added a parting shot at the prosecutors.

“You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court. You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.”

International, International, Middle East, Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

Revealed: Trump Likely to Send Ground Troops to Iran

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Trump knew Americans would die and went to war anyway; former presidents say Trump lying about phone call, CBS journalists walk off the job

Raw America
Mar 17

Three weeks into a war that nobody voted for, the stories breaking this morning are not about battlefield victories. They are about a president who knew exactly what was coming, lied to your face about it, invented a former president who never called him and whose own allies are now privately warning that ground troops in Iran may be inevitable. And through all of it, CBS News is bleeding journalists and replacing them with Bari Weiss, while the FCC chairman rattles sabers at any broadcaster who covers the war honestly.

Trump Knew. His Own Intelligence, Officials Say So.
Donald Trump stood before reporters and said nobody, not one expert, not one intelligence official, could have predicted that Iran would retaliate against U.S. allies across the Gulf. “We were shocked!” he said.

Sources with direct knowledge of the pre-war intelligence assessments told journalists Monday that is flatly untrue. Iranian retaliation against military assets and allied targets across the region was not guaranteed, but it was, in the words of one source, firmly “on the list of potential outcomes.” Two additional sources confirmed that Trump was also specifically warned Iran might attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz. His own press secretary has since confirmed he received those briefings and chose to proceed anyway.

Iran was not exactly secretive about its intentions either. Less than ten days before the U.S. launched strikes on February 28th, Iranian officials sent a letter to the United Nations stating explicitly that all bases and assets of any hostile force in the region would constitute legitimate targets in the event of a military attack. That letter is a public document.

More than 1,400 Iranians have been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes, including dozens of children killed when a U.S. missile struck a girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab on the first day of the war. Thirteen American service members are dead. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Gas is near four dollars a gallon with midterms approaching. And the president is telling the American public he had no idea any of this could happen. His own intelligence community is telling you otherwise.

When a president can lie about what he knew before sending Americans to die and face no immediate consequence for it, we’re not just talking about one bad actor. We’re watching what happens when the guardrails of democratic accountability have been quietly dismantled, one norm at a time. That’s the thing about lies in wartime. They don’t just mislead. They kill.

Every Living Former President Says Trump Lied About That Phone Call
On Monday, Donald Trump claimed not once but twice that he had spoken with a former U.S. president who told him he wished he had attacked Iran himself. He refused to say who it was, adding that revealing the name would be bad for the person’s “career, even though they have no career left.” Later in the day, he hinted strongly it was Bill Clinton, describing the mystery caller as a member of the opposing party who happens to like him.

Within hours, aides to all four living former presidents, Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, told multiple news organizations that their bosses had not spoken with Trump about Iran. Not one of them. The call did not happen.

This matters beyond the embarrassment of it. Trump used this fabricated endorsement to defend a war that has killed 13 Americans and more than 1,400 Iranians. He also repeated his long-debunked claim that Iran was two to three years away from a nuclear weapon it would have used against Israel and then the United States, a claim contradicted by his own intelligence agencies. The president is constructing a fictional justification for a real war, and when pressed on the details, every piece of it falls apart.

We’ve seen this before. Presidents who need a war to stay popular have always needed a story to go with it. From the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction, the pattern is the same. What’s different now is that the lie got fact-checked within hours by the offices of four former presidents, and it still didn’t matter to a significant chunk of the country. That’s not a Trump problem. That’s an information-ecosystem problem, and it’s one of the deepest threats to self-governance this country has ever faced.

Trump’s Own Allies Are Warning This Could Mean Boots on the Ground
The most alarming story of the morning comes from inside the White House itself. Sources close to the administration are now privately warning that Trump has lost control of this conflict’s trajectory and that the only remaining path to saving face may involve deploying American ground troops inside Iran.

The core problem is the Strait of Hormuz. Keeping oil shipments moving through the strait against sustained Iranian attacks almost certainly requires seizing Iranian territory on the ground. One White House insider put it plainly: “They decide how long we’re involved, and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.”

A second source said the situation has fundamentally changed. “The terms have changed. The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

Some of this is a direct consequence of Trump’s own choices on the first day of the war. By assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei along with senior commanders and family members, the administration may have made Iranian capitulation politically impossible. The new Supreme Leader is Khamenei’s son. His father was killed in a U.S. strike. His mother was killed in a U.S. strike. One White House source asked the obvious question out loud: “Do you think he’s going to be more or less reasonable?”

The “America First” coalition that cheered this war three weeks ago is now quietly panicking. Republicans heading into midterms are watching gas prices climb and a war with no exit. This is what happens when you launch a military campaign without a plan.

This is the oldest and most tragic story in American foreign policy. Young men and women end up dying not because a strategy succeeded, but because a president can’t figure out how to stop without losing face. And the people who’ll pay the price for that pride are not sitting in the White House. They’re sitting in forward operating bases and in families across this country, waiting for a phone call they don’t want to get.

CBS News Is Walking Off the Job, and Bari Weiss Is the Reason
Dozens of CBS News 24/7 staffers are expected to walk out today in the first labor action of Bari Weiss’s tenure running CBS News. The streaming unit’s workers have been negotiating with management since February over wages, overtime protections, and severance. After letting their three-year contract expire without a deal, and after management proposed annual raises of just 1.75 percent in a period of significant inflation, the 60-person unit delivered a strike pledge.

This is the same CBS that has lost anchor John Dickerson, correspondent Scott MacFarlane, CBS Mornings boss Shawna Thomas, and others who quietly exited rather than work under Weiss’s direction. Weiss told staff at a January town hall that CBS has been too focused on its current audience and needs to shift toward, in her words, “the center, the center-right, and the center-left.” Staff say the real message was simpler: get on board or get out.

The striking workers are fighting for basics. Overtime pay for twelve-hour weekend shifts. Severance protections ahead of a pending $110 billion merger between CBS’s parent company and Warner Bros. Discovery could mean another wave of layoffs. Union representatives say editorial interference, political pressure, and layoff threats have all become existential concerns since the Paramount Skydance merger closed. The workers walking out Tuesday are not making a political statement. They are trying to protect their jobs and their profession. The fact that they have to fight Bari Weiss to do it tells you everything about what CBS News is becoming.

A free press isn’t just a nice thing to have in a democracy. It’s the mechanism by which citizens hold power accountable. When billionaires buy the newsrooms and install editors whose job is to sand off the edges, they aren’t just changing the product. They’re dismantling the early warning system. These CBS workers walking off the job today aren’t just fighting for a paycheck. They’re fighting for the idea that journalism is still supposed to serve the public, not the people who own it.

Assholes are everywhere, International, Middle East, Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

Is JD Vance Rooting for the Iran War to Fail?

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Recent reporting leaves little doubt: Trump’s vice president thinks that if the war goes badly, it will help him secure the 2028 Republican nomination for president.

By Alex Shephard (TNR)

The Opportunist
Is JD Vance rooting for the Iran War to fail?
Recent reporting leaves little doubt: Trump’s vice president thinks that if the war goes badly, it will help him secure the 2028 Republican nomination for president.

If you want to understand how Donald Trump is managing the Iran war, a glimpse at the president’s recent public statements tells you all you need to know. On Thursday alone, he boasted that the United States and Israel are “totally destroying” Iran, ominously warned the country’s soccer team to stay away from the U.S.-co-hosted 2026 World Cup “for their own life and safety,” and posted a 60-year-old photo of himself in military school uniform—the phony implication being that the president, who infamously avoided the Vietnam draft thanks to “bone spurs,” is deep down a troop.

This is Trump’s take on the “wartime president” trope: self-aggrandizing, a little scary, and utterly embarrassing. He’s the architect of this already disastrous conflict, but he isn’t alone in owning it. Justifying his fake new title as “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth has tried to outdo his boss with bloodthirsty, sociopathic, and downright stupid public statements. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been more dignified—it would be hard to be less dignified than Hegseth—which has caused his profile to skyrocket: He is now the clear front-runner to succeed Trump with both MAGA powerbrokers and the Republican base.

One person, however, is conspicuously absent from this cheerleading squad: Vice President JD Vance. But he hasn’t been silent, exactly. Instead, as the war has dragged on, he has carefully seeded a message to the press that has steadily grown more aggressive: he’s not a fan of Trump’s war.

Publicly, of course, Vance is doing his best to tow the line. He has attempted to square his long-standing opposition to prolonged conflict in the Middle East by insisting this war is different from the ones waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen,” Vance told The Washington Post two days before an Israeli airstrike killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the intervening days, he has repeated that claim, made a few tepid statements in support of the war, and attended the dignified transfer of the remains of a U.S. service member who died as a result of it.

The real story, however, is what’s playing out behind the scenes. A March 3 New York Times piece about the lead-up to the war captured the vice president trying to have it both ways. Vance, the Times reported, “appeared to personally lean against military attacks” but also “argued that a limited strike was a mistake. If the United States was going to hit Iran, he told the group, it should ‘go big and go fast.’”

It’s not a particularly coherent position—Vance appears to have simultaneously opposed the war and advocated on behalf of waging it aggressively—but it is a revealing one. There is a palpable sense that he wanted to come out against the war but couldn’t because doing so would risk his standing with the president and his base. Instead, Vance staked out a position that he wouldn’t have to shed if he were to come out more strongly against the war later: that it should be big and fast, which is a clever way of saying the U.S. should end it quickly by winning.

One could argue that the U.S. did go big and fast when it hit Iran—and that it didn’t work. After two weeks of devastating airstrikes and targeted assassination, there is no sign that the regime is crumbling, let alone that it is on the brink of granting the “unconditional surrender” Trump has demanded. Instead, there are strong signs that the war will go on for at least a month and perhaps much longer. It is already massively unpopular—though Republican voters back it almost unanimously—and if it continues, it will likely be economically ruinous, especially if the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping channel for much of the global oil supply, remains partially or completely closed.

The war is going badly, in other words—which is exactly what Vance planned for. And so, this week, he started to tweak his story. Citing two senior Trump officials, Politico reported on Friday that Vance wasn’t actually torn about striking Iran. He was “skeptical.” Two weeks in, he is not only worried about success but also opposes the war, according to one of those officials. The message couldn’t be clearer: None of this is JD’s fault.

Vance’s opposition may be sincere—ever since his belated conversion to the MAGA cause, he has been one of the loudest anti-intervention voices in the Republican Party—but this is a Machiavellian and astonishingly self-serving manoeuvre for a sitting vice president to take during wartime. An inveterate striver, Vance clearly thinks that coming out against the war early is a savvy long-term bet. So he is doing everything he can, short of saying it himself, to make it clear he opposes the war in Iran, while ostensibly standing behind the president who is overseeing it. And he is doing so in large part to damage the standing of that president’s secretary of state, his principal rival for the party’s 2028 nomination, who would be severely damaged if Iran turns into a Iraq-like quagmire.

The war may be popular among the Republican faithful now, but Vance is gambling that support for it will crumble. His stance, moreover, helps him stake out a position that could prove powerful come the 2028 primaries: that the war was ultimately a costly distraction that prevented the Trump administration from fulfilling its core promises, particularly on immigration and trade. Vance would essentially be arguing that real MAGA policy has never been tried and that his election was necessary to ultimately fulfill the promises that Trump thrice campaigned on.

This move is also completely in character for Vance, whose political ambition, opportunism, and outright contortionism have proved boundless since his emergence as a public figure a decade ago. He made a bad bet against Trump in 2016, assuming Trump would quickly crash and burn. But he rebounded quickly after Trump won. In less than four years, he had remade himself as not only a MAGA disciple but also a thought leader who would fill the considerable intellectual vacuum at the centre of the president’s movement. No longer the neo-Reaganite of his Hillbilly Elegy days, when he called for slashing welfare spending in the name of “personal responsibility,” Vance now is an anti-corporate, anti-intervention crusader—credentials that led to his selection as Trump’s running mate in 2024.
But Vance didn’t do all of that just to be vice president. So now he’s making another bet—a bolder, riskier one. He thinks he can not just evade responsibility for the war in Iran but stick it on his rivals without jeopardizing his standing with Trump or his base. The unfolding disaster in Iran—the horrific bombing of an elementary school, 13 dead U.S. service members, the disruption of global maritime trade, and so much more—is just another opportunity for JD Vance to climb further up the ladder of power in America.

https://newrepublic.com/article/207770/jd-vance-iran-war-disaster-2028-rubio?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily

Assholes are everywhere, International, News, Of Interest, Republican Party, Social, Trump, US

‘Wow’: Observers horrified by ‘scary’ Trump brag showing he’s following ‘Putin’s playbook’

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David McAfee
March 15, 2026 7:28AM ET (RAWSTORY)

Donald Trump over the weekend posted a graphic that alarmed numerous political observers.

Trump took to his own social media site, Truth Social, to post the graphic, which is called “President Trump is reshaping the media.” “The image celebrates that NPR, Stephen Colbert, Jim Acosta, and others in the media are “gone,” while noting that CNN and the FCC have both been “reformed” by the president.

That graphic sent shivers down the spines of some onlookers, who took to X to express their concern.

Republicans against Trump noted, “Trump posted an image claiming he is ‘reshaping the media,'” to which political science professor Michael McFaul replied, “Wow.” Scary. Reminds me of Putin’s early years of reshaping Russian media.”

WaPo media reporter Scott Nover chimed in, “latest Truth Social posts includes a series of boasts about how he’s ‘reshaping the media.'”

Garry Kasparov, founder of Renew Democracy, also added, “Fascism doesn’t sneak up on you. It boasts in your face about war, attacks ‘internal enemies’ and the free press, takes total power, and tells you that you must embrace it, not fight it. Consolidating and purging media into loyal hands is Putin’s playbook.”

One popular news curator, @SkylineReport, also noted that “Trump just posted a graphic bragging that he’s ‘reshaping the media.'”

They added, “It literally lists journalists pushed out, public broadcasters ‘defunded,’ layoffs at major outlets, and regulatory pressure as ‘wins.’ Read that again. A president openly celebrating the use of political power to punish critics and pressure the press. That’s not media criticism. That’s media capture—the playbook authoritarian leaders use to bend the information system toward themselves. And the most dangerous part? He’s not hiding it anymore.”

 

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-media-2676119670/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mar.15.2026_1.01pm

Assholes are everywhere, Of Interest, Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

This barbaric idea has got to be too depraved even for Trump — right?

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This barbaric idea has got to be too depraved even for Trump — right?

Sabrina Haake
March 15, 2026 6:00AM ET (RAWSTORY)

Trump’s aggression in Iran keeps triggering feelings I’d rather not have. They’re complicated, overwhelming, and, at times, conflicting.

I don’t disagree with disarming a terrorist state on the cusp of nuclear arms; that seems like a common-sense, preserve-the-planet objective. I also don’t mind spending tax dollars to help desperate Iranians cast off religious rule; their brutal oppression has caught in my throat for years. When that 22-year-old was beaten to death for not covering her hair a while back, I thought, Wow, this is it. Finally. She will be the catalyst, the inflection point where Iranians rise up and smack down roving bands of morality police who enjoy punching girls. I mean, the centre can’t hold where a bunch of religious men get to kill women for their lack of religiosity or personal choices. Right?

Wrong. Iranians didn’t revolt. But neither did we. The Dobbs decision is over four years old, and now pregnant women in red states are dying at twice the rate as women in blue states. What’s a little femicide among friends, amirite?

Same as it ever was

Those not-entirely-false equivalencies aside, Trump’s rotating justifications on Iran and his obvious lack of concern for what comes next cause high blood pressure. His side-ape’s messaging on “death and destruction” doesn’t impress either; it just confirms that humans haven’t really evolved since Homo erectus. Stone clubs or tomahawks, what’s the difference when it comes to brute force meted out by morons?

Please, if there is a god, can I just sleep for the next 5,000 years and come back when people know how to live in peace and preserve their only home?

Anguish over Gaza feels much the same. Who benefits from reducing an already poor nation to rubble, other than munitions dealers and developers? When Gazans’ plight—starving, thirsty—is in the news, I can’t take a drink of water in the night without internalizing their depth of thirst. If I were dehydrated, sleeping under a tarp, and my children and mule were also parched, how would I split a cup of water between them? Would I give it all to one child in hopes one of us would survive? Or would I divide it among all of us, two tablespoons each, just to share the life-affirming, if fleeting, joy of wetness on our tongues?

Are we back to an eye for an eye?

Hamas terrorists are inhuman. Who or what made them that way is a question for another day, but what they did to innocent Israelis dancing under the stars in 2023 justifies their erasure from the planet—no further questions.

But who thinks a thousand eyes for an eye is morally just? Who, other than an unpopular criminal politician using war as a deflection, offers up 70,000 lives as sacrificial lambs just to keep himself in power? Don’t answer that. I’m aware that we have our own psychopath in charge. So it’s not moral superiority I feel; it’s grief for the human condition. Grief and more than a little disgust.

Bibi, with Trump’s help, reduced Gaza to a dystopian nightmare, an uninhabitable hellhole where 2 million people used to live. Now they have nowhere else to go and what, we just move over a thousand miles to Iran and do it again?

I feel guilty for looking away to write this self-indulgent essay, but when I opened today’s NYT video of parents sobbing outside the school we bombed, killing over 150 children, I broke down. I mean, I lost it. Those could be my parents crying for their dead children. That could be my little boy buried in mortar, crying for me as he takes his last breath. Mostly, I’m choked with shame. This is my country doing this horrible thing to Iranian people who have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to harm me.

Don’t blame Iranians for their leaders unless you want to be blamed for Trump

I keep reminding myself that Iranians are no more responsible for their leaders than I am responsible for Trump, but in truth, compared to Americans, Iranians are far less responsible for their leaders than we are.

Iranians have been ruled by armed religious freaks since the Islamic Revolution, which we caused by imposing the last shah, whom everyone hated. American hubris and oil greed led to Iran’s theocratic regime 47 years ago, and Iranians have been brutalized under Sharia law ever since. When I hear Christian Nationalists promote theocracy in the U.S. I want to slap them; they have no clue what the Establishment Clause has done for our country, or for them.

Thanks to theocracy, Iranians now live under roving patrols of armed thugs. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commands terrorist cells on every block of every city of every district in Iran. Expecting unarmed citizens to challenge them is worse than ignorant; it’s ghoulish.

We are no better

Compared to what Iranians have had shoved down their throats, Americans look like idiots for electing an imbecile criminal. Any American with a TV saw what happened on J6, confirming that Trump will do anything for power, and we still re-elected him. Now we, too, have roving bands of armed paramilitary creeps driving around with guns. What does that say about us??

I’ve read political essays and credible analysts who say Trump’s plan in Iran is to provoke another 9-11 so he can expand presidential powers in the name of national security to stay in power. That’s more than my head can take today, so I’ll conclude with one certainty: Iranians’ culpability for their horrid rulers is not equal to Americans’ culpability for Trump. It’s not fair to blame them, even though Death to America jihadists will blame all Americans for Trump’s barbarism. The world is unfair like that.

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-iran-9-11/?u=119b60d179004daa4a11f0327e221740d541b54821cf8fbaf39e7e57f8b9f336&utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mar.15.2026_1.01pm

Constitution, Politics, Republican Party, US, World

Raging at Media, Pete Hegseth Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

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He wants “patriotic” coverage of the Iran war. He doesn’t understand: In a democracy, coverage that asks difficult questions of the government is itself “patriotic.”

By Greg Sargent (TNR)

Pete Hegseth wants to live in a world in which the American military can drop bombs on scores of schoolchildren and not face serious media scrutiny over it. And he just might get that world soon enough.

That’s the only way to understand the defense secretary’s extraordinary outburst on Friday morning. He lashed out at news organizations, criticizing headlines that aren’t sufficiently laudatory of American military successes in the Iran War.

“I know that everything is written intentionally,” Hegseth said of the media, referring to his own previous stint as a Fox News contributor, thus seemingly admitting that Fox, at least, does deliberately skew coverage. He faulted numerous headlines, insisting that rather than report things like “Mideast War Intensifies,” the press should instead be “patriotic” and write headlines like “Iran Increasingly Desperate.”

The visibly angry Hegseth also ridiculed a CNN story reporting that Trump’s war planners “underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz.” He added: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

That’s a direct reference to Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is acquiring CNN after taking over and creating a more Trump-friendly CBS. In short, Hegseth openly relishes future oligarchical control of the media to ensure more dutiful amplification of his propaganda.

Where to begin? First, Hegseth is playing games around that CNN story. He claimed it’s “patently ridiculous” because Iran “always” threatens to choke off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. He fumed: “CNN doesn’t think we thought of that.”

But much of the CNN report details how officials underestimated Iran’s willingness to act on the threat of closure. It also details how Trump officials failed to sufficiently plan for the consequences of closing it, and why that insufficient planning took place. It’s obviously true that this happened. Media scrutiny of those failings is what Hegseth actually objects to.

Then there’s Hegseth’s claim that a “patriotic” press should primarily pump up American battlefield wins. This essentially demands that the media dispense with its adversarial role toward power. We don’t have to look far to see how malicious this demand truly is.

Take the reporting on the bombing of an Iranian elementary school with scores of children inside who have reportedly been killed—a central event in this conflict and potentially one of the worst atrocities in modern memory. On February 28, the day the war started, The New York Times painstakingly laid out evidence suggesting the United States was likely responsible. It followed up with more. Reuters disclosed that American investigators also concluded the U.S. role was likely. The Associated Press revealed that the bombing might have reflected faulty intelligence. All this reporting was careful and nuanced.

Hegseth is irritated with that scrutiny too. On Friday, he confirmed that an investigation of the bombing is underway but added this absurdity: “We’re not going to let reporting lead us or force our hand into indicating what happened.”

So let’s state this clearly: A key reason we want media scrutiny and fact-finding is precisely that it will, in fact, put pressure on official inquiries like this one. Hegseth suggested the military can do this itself. But remember, Trump blithely declared early on that Iran had bombed its own school. Then he admitted to reporters that he’d said this without knowing the facts. As Jennifer Rubin notes, it’s ironic that this admission too was shaken loose by more of the skillful media questioning that Hegseth disdains.

At the best of times, we can’t depend on government officials to hold themselves accountable. That’s the reason for innovations like independent inspectors general. Under Trump, there is even less reason to trust the government to do a good-faith accounting, given his boundless contempt for the truth.

But Hegseth wants a world in which a horror like this can unfold, and rather than the media digging in hard to ferret out known facts on a moment-to-moment basis, we all just sit back and let his handpicked investigator tell us what happened—at some point down the road.

The biggest scandals in U.S. history, such as Watergate, have played out in a cat-and-mouse way, with the press corps’ digging putting pressure on other institutional actors to do their part in ensuring that the truth wins out. During wars especially, we want to know if officials and combatants are adhering to rules, laws, and codes of conduct, given the awesome power of the U.S. military—and the tendency of war to produce unspeakable horrors.

Which brings us to the ultimate point here: Hegseth himself has declared open contempt for “rules of engagement.” Compounding the hall-of-mirrors effect, we don’t know what this has even meant in practice. As the Times’ Charlie Savage notes, there are many unanswered questions about the role Hegseth’s laxness played in the school. bombing:

What standards of certainty were imposed on planners for the strikes for vetting and validating potential targets? Does Mr. Hegseth’s repeated statement that he gave the military “maximum authority on the battlefield,” compared with the practice in past wars, mean the standards were formally lowered? Whatever the rules were on paper, did such comments contribute to a culture of moving faster and with less care—of “no hesitation,” in his words—among the planners, resulting in negligence or recklessness?

You can draw a direct line from Hegseth’s disdain for rules of engagement right to his contempt for the role of an adversarial press. He apparently doesn’t want those questions answered, either: Once CNN is taken over by Ellison (whose CBS is a network that Hegseth happens to like), there will be less scrutiny and more hagiography—by Hegseth’s own telling.

Hegseth is not disguising any of this. He wants the press to elevate American battlefield triumphs, something he chooses to call “patriotic.” But real patriotism requires demanding that the country live up to higher ideals. Hegseth’s conduct reveals exactly why we don’t want networks like CNN to fall into the hands of his preferred media masters, not why we do.

https://newrepublic.com/article/207760/pete-hegseth-iran-war-patriotic-media-coverage?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=critical_mass

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Arlington, Virginia, on March 2