A Mad King Who Enjoys Watching Things Go Boom

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Going … Going … Almost Gone

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Dumb and Illegal

The scale of damage that President Trump could wreak in a second term was always greatest in foreign affairs, where the president’s powers are, generally, most robust and least subject to judicial oversight.

The misadventures on the high seas of the Western Hemisphere, in Venezuela, and now in Iran are just the beginning of what is likely to be more cowboying abroad, as his lame duck status becomes increasingly obvious and his political power at home begins to wane.

The conundrum for Americans opposed to Trump is that while foreign affairs may be the realm in which he sows the most long-term chaos, the best way to rein him in remains in the domestic arena: defending democracy at home in order to preserve the capacity for legitimate regime change here via free and fair elections; defending the rule of the law and the independence of the judiciary; and protecting blue states and marginalized peoples from a weaponized federal government.

With docile GOP majorities controlling both chambers, Congress is willingly surrendering its constitutional and political powers in foreign affairs to a mad king who enjoys pressing buttons and watching things go boom.

Trump’s ever-shifting rationales for the attack neither establish a legal predicate for the U.S.-Israel strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor suggest a coherent strategic vision for relations with Iran, the U.S. role in the region, or the projection of U.S. power in the world. To the extent there was a Trump strategy for regime change, it appears to have overshot its objectives, as it were:

Pres Trump told me tonight the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack.

"The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates," Trump told me. "It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because…

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) March 2, 2026

Despite the administration’s effort to construct an ex post facto rationale that a preemptive strike from Iran was imminent, officials told congressional staff that U.S. intelligence did not corroborate that claim and the Pentagon was slow to offer evidence to back up the claim.

The Latest on Iran …

• Kuwait shot down three U.S. fighter jets in a friendly fire incident. All six crew members survived the incident.
• The known death toll among U.S. service members rose to four. While the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed the circumstances, all four deaths appear to have come from an Iranian missile attack on a U.S. facility in Kuwait.
• The death toll in Iran as the U.S. air assault entered its third day reached 555, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. The worst single incident appeared to be a strike on a girl’s elementary school in the southern Iran town of Minab that killed at least 175 people.
• The WSJ charts the effect of the decapitation strike on senior figures in the Iranian government.

The Regional Conflagration

The NYT and WaPo have scrambled their respective visual teams to map Iran’s retaliatory strikes in the region.

Pentagon IG Freezes Boat Strikes Review

Faced with a proposed review of military targeting used in the U.S. campaign against suspected drug-smuggling boats on the high seas, Platte B. Moring III, the new Trump-appointed Pentagon inspector general, told staff in a Feb. 11 meeting that he was concerned about the political implications of the review and wanted to consult with Defense Department leadership first, the NYT reports. Since then, Moring hasn’t rejected or approved the proposal, leaving it in limbo.

Pentagon Cuts Ties with Top-Tier Schools

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is cutting academic ties between the Pentagon and 13 leading universities in a performative campaign against “wokeness” and alleged anti-Americanism. The disfavored schools, according to a Feb. 27 memo from Hegseth’s office, currently educating are:

• Harvard University
• Saint Louis University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Tufts University
• Georgetown University
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Brown University
• Columbia University
• Yale University
• Middlebury College
• Princeton University
• The George Washington University
• College of William and Mary

The memo also includes a list of favored schools, which it describes as follows: “These institutions meet the following criteria: intellectual freedom, minimal relationships with adversaries, minimal public expressions in opposition of the Department, and Graduate-level National Security, International Affairs, and/or Public Policy Programs.”

The favored schools include:

• Liberty University
• George Mason University
• Pepperdine University
• The University of Tennessee
• University of Michigan
• University of Nebraska
• Iowa State University
• University of North Carolina
• Clemson University
• Arizona State University
• Baylor University
• University of Florida
• Regent University
• Auburn University
• Hillsdale College

The two-tiered higher-ed system was unveiled the same day Hegseth claimed he’d pressured Scouting America into banning transgender children from participating, a claim the group denied.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Babson College freshman Any Lucia López Belloza — detained en route home to Texas for Thanksgiving and deported to Honduras, where she hadn’t lived since she was a young child — declined to board a government flight to the United States on Friday after ICE threatened in a court filing to deport her again if she returned.
• Four federal judges in the Southern District of West Virginia have suddenly become a firewall against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Kyle Cheney reports.
• The Trump DOJ is charging 30 more people in connection with the Jan. 18 protest at a St. Paul church that already led to charges against CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was covering the protest.

The Retribution: ICYMI Edition

The mother of all investigations of the investigators — Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones’ wide-ranging probe of a supposed “grand conspiracy” against Trump — has broadened to include investigating the FBI’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, the NYT reports.

Elections Are Existential Threat To Trump

Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer, on “the serious possibility that, when the courts are called on—and they will be—to remedy administration actions to interfere with the election, the Trump administration may respond with defiance.”

Judges Under Siege

60 Minutes interviewed 26 federal judges — nine Democratic appointees, 17 Republican, both sitting and retired — about the unprecedented barrage of threats they’ve faced under Trump II:

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