I had a moment of insight or perhaps revelation early in this war when the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz first became central in the news and President Trump was publicly debating whether he would use the U.S. Navy to escort ships through it. Would he, won’t he? Will it happen tomorrow? What will he decide. Then I was watching a YouTube show about maritime shipping. In passing the host, Sal Mercogliano, noted that, at that time at least, there weren’t any U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf at all. And the kind of ships you need, in the numbers you’d need, were hundreds of even thousands of miles away. That made perfect sense since for the kind of war the U.S. is currently fighting we don’t need naval vessels anywhere near that close to the combat zone, and when they are that close they become much more vulnerable to attack. But the point is that the whole debate about whether Trump was about to do that any time in the near future was entirely contained within Trump’s Truth Social world. It wasn’t connected to any of the hard realities of whether any of that was even possible.

Due to popular demand, we’ve increased our ticket allotment for the Austin event on April 8.

Remember: If you are a member, you get discounted tickets. If you missed the discount code, just shoot me an email at joe@talkingpointsmemo.com and I’ll get you the goods.

If we sell out, please add yourself to the waitlist. Sometimes people drop out.

You can find more info about the event and get your tickets here.

Kate and Josh talk airports in crisis, Trump’s bewildering political calculus and, believe it or not, an optimistic vision of what a post-Trump world could look like.

President Donald Trump is planning to bring the UFC into the White House later this year. But the brawl on the South Lawn is not the only way mixed martial arts has become a part of his administration.

Trump, like many other right-wing leaders before him, has a long history with combat sports.

Yesterday afternoon, John Light, Hunter Walker and Joe Ragazzo got on Substack Live to talk about how martial arts has become right coded. It’s a cultural phenomenon with troubling effects that stretch from D.C., to Saudi Arabia, and the white supremacist fringe.

Check out their full conversation below.

One of Layla A. Jones’ insights when she joined our team last year was that you could measure the destruction that DOGE wreaked on the federal workforce by looking at the D.C.-area economy, and, specifically, the housing market. Her first piece for us examined those indicators. Now, a year after Elon Musk and his youths began their slash-and-burn rampage through the executive branch, Layla finds the damage lingering — and, in some ways, worsening — with the middle class, once propped up by government workers and contractors, falling behind a growing wealthy elite. That story is here.

We’re starting to see House Republicans complain that, even as the administration prepares to ask for huge sums to keep the war in Iran funded, it’s leaving lawmakers in the dark about what, exactly, the money is for. “We want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) told reporters yesterday.  “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.”

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the vice ranking member on House Appropriations and a member of its Defense subcommittee, goes into great detail this morning with Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky about how bad it really is. “I don’t think the American public appreciates it, and it’s certainly not a way to conduct your conversations with Congress,” he says. “Even in classified briefings where we don’t talk about what we learn, there’s literally no actionable intelligence that you get from him.” 

Read that here.

Following up on the question we posed yesterday — will right-wingers actually buy an attempt to “pass” “the SAVE America Act” through budget reconciliation? — we are beginning to have some indications that, no, they will not.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has been on a tweeting spree, campaigning against the idea by, for example, comparing the voter suppression legislation to a fine cut of beef, urging his colleagues not to “settle for cheap imitations” of the sort necessitated by budget reconciliation. It is perhaps an imperfect metaphor.

This post follows up on the previous two posts about President Trump’s weak hand in trying to end his Iran War with something short of a humiliating climb-down from his demands for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender.” Trump’s claim yesterday of “very, very strong talks” with Tehran turn out, predictably, to be third-party talks aimed at coaxing Tehran into talking at all. As Reuters reports in this new (paywalled) story, Iran is actually dramatically upping its demands since the start of the war. Those include guarantees of no future attacks, reparations for war damage and formal control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Emine Yücel has a report up this morning on a new “deal” being kicked around the Senate that would attempt to fix the airport situation. This proposal would fund most of DHS — including the TSA — without funding ICE enforcement operations.

Republicans would then seek to fund those operations later this year, in a reconciliation bill, which, under Senate rules, can pass with only 51 votes. That means Republicans won’t need Democrats to get it through.

The deal is similar to how one might have predicted this would end for weeks. But it includes one weird, emerging point: Republicans might also try to pass the SAVE America Act through reconciliation.

Beyond the bluster and carnage let’s look at the current situation in the war between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. I wrote most of this post before the overnight news that Trump is essentially suing for peace. But all of it still applies. And it comes down to one remarkable dynamic.

Despite the U.S. dominating the skies and almost every other combat domain, Iran has seized and holds the initiative in the war itself, forcing the U.S. to react to it and, in Trump’s hands, do so erratically and helplessly. Iran has the strategic initiative, despite constant and incredibly damaging attacks by the United States and Israel. Indeed, getting Iran to stop its primary retaliatory measure — throttling the Strait of Hormuz — now appears to be the main U.S. war aim. In other words, the main goal of the U.S. now is to get Iran to cease its retaliation for the U.S. starting the war in the first place.

The U.S. was already trying to get Iran to the bargaining table, according to this report last night from Axios. The fact that the U.S. is, reportedly, considering how to “package” cash payments to Iran (i.e. release frozen assets) is a testament to just how far we are from “unconditional surrender.” Meanwhile, this morning’s news confirms that the U.S. is getting talks started, or at least hoping to do so. Of course the simplest way to get Iran to release the strait is to stop the war. But the U.S. can’t do that, at least not openly, since that would amount to a massive and humiliating defeat.