This is week two of this year’s Annual TPM Membership Drive. We started to get traction at the end of last week. Today we really need to keep that going. If you’re not a member, please consider joining today. This is our lifeblood. It’s what we need to keep doing this work and, if possible, expand our reach going forward. If you’re a new reader or maybe your membership lapsed, we need you back. Just click right here. If you’re on the fence, we’re even offering a 25% discount.
This week I’m going to be telling you some of our plans for the coming year and how you and our growing community figure into those plans.
Yesterday, I wrote that President Trump was moonwalking out of his war in Iran. Then later that afternoon and last night he made a series of highly bellicose and bombastic statements that the war is only getting started, and he may destroy Iran altogether as a people, as a nation.
Today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth I think told us the story because now he’s bringing his daily briefing in line with Trump‘s idea that this war is pretty much over. A couple more hard-core days and it’s gonna be done. So which is happening here? I think we can really see by the oil futures. Oil went up dramatically over the weekend. I believe it briefly got up to over $110 a barrel and then it fell yesterday when Trump made these statements that the war is pretty much over we’re gonna be wrapping it up, and in anticipation of G7 nations releasing oil reserves. Now today it’s continuing that and it’s fallen significantly below $80, so investors think that Trump is going full taco here i.e. Trump always chickens out.
The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga heads to Austin, Texas to check in with our friends at Texas Observer. Tickets are on sale now!
There’s so much going on in Texas right now that the TPM team decided to come down to sort through it all.
Can James Talarico become the first Democratic senator to represent the state in more than 30 years? What’s the latest political fallout from the Tony Gonzales affair scandal? How will Republicans’ messy redistricting scheme impact the midterms?
Come hang out with us on Wednesday, April 8 at the Alamo Drafthouse as we dig into some of these questions. If you are an Prime Member or an Inside Member, you get discounted tickets. If you missed the email with the access code, feel free to email me directly at Joe at talkingpointsmemo dot comand I’ll help you out. (If you’re not a member, well, now is the time, friend. Now is the time.)
The night will begin with a conversation between TPM founder and editor-in-chief Josh Marshall and the Observer’s politics editor, Justin Miller. Then, D.C. reporter Kate Riga and Josh will record a live episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga.
After the pod, there will be an audience Q&A and then we’ll wrap up the night in the bar.
(And don’t worry, the evening doesn’t have to be all politics. You can ask Josh about his favorite kind of wood or if Kate thinks her Washington Mystics will ever be good.)
Yesterday UN Ambassador Mike Waltz announced that the US was moving ahead rapidly to achieve all its war objectives which he listed as 1) destroying Iran’s missiles, 2) eliminating its nuclear program and 3) ending its ability to do terrorism. So much for regime change, it seems and also unconditional surrender, both of which don’t seem remotely in the ballpark any time soon. That was the trial balloon. Then today President Trump followed up on this by declaring that the war is actually pretty much over already.
He told CBS News’s Weijia Jiang that “the war is very complete, pretty much” and that the US is “very far” ahead of the initial 4 to 5 week timeline. “The war is very complete,” he said in case there was any ambiguity about his words. Indeed, in his vaguely genocidal way Trump seemed to implicitly take regime change off the table by threatening either regime change or perhaps genocide if Iran got “cute.”
“They better not try anything cute,” he told Jiang, “or it’s going to be the end of that country.”
Sometimes I write a post where I don’t know the topic well enough to discuss it expertly but I understand it enough to point to the outlines of the debate and where to find more information. This is one of those posts. Here, I want to discuss drones and missiles deployed by Iran and the expensive, high-tech weapons the U.S. and its allies use to shoot them down. This applies right now in the Persian Gulf where Iran is using a strategy of “asymmetric attrition.” But it would apply in even more complicated and hard-to-address ways if and when the U.S. got into a major conflict with, say, China over Taiwan. It’s that basic challenge of asymmetric warfare for a Great Power like the United States: the U.S. relies on often quite effective but very expensive and hard to replace weaponry. Iran’s clunky but effective drones cost in the low five-figures to produce, while U.S. missile defense tech can costs millions for a single shot.
