A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Faulty Assumptions and Hubris
The only thing more dangerous than an unbound strongman launching elective wars is when those wars begin to go badly.
There’s no telling what President Trump will resort to doing to save face, create the mirage of victory, and extricate himself from the box canyon into which he so triumphantly galloped.
This is old-style mission creep on steroids.
As Yonatan Touval eloquently writes in a NYT op-ed, the presumptions that undergirded Trump’s lurch into the Iran war have already proven to be incorrect:
The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.
Now what? When a mission’s presumptions collapse under the weight of their own overoptimism and the original strategic objectives are no longer attainable, a different kind of self-delusion sets in: that the only way forward is to keep going forward.
To listen to Trump’s increasingly shrill threats, you’d think he was about to go Curtis LeMay on Iran. And he may. But threats like this are also a transparent negotiating tactic, which is to say it’s both announcing a planned war crime and issuing a cry for help.
A back-to-the-Stone-Age bombing campaign is but one example of what is likely to come next: an inexorable slide towards replacing already-abandoned strategic objectives with feel-good tactical wins. What’s always a danger for a bogged-down empire is a heightened risk for a superpower led by a man with a short attention span who is enthralled by military spectacle.
Without re-setting strategic objectives in light of the reality that the old ones are lost, Trump has left Iran holding the better hand, as TPM’s Josh Marshall observes:
The problem is that … the U.S. is escalating with nothing it can call a “win” that isn’t 100% at the discretion of Iran. … Military planners and heads of state who are smart really want goals they can at least realistically try to achieve entirely on their own terms. … But if your goal is entirely at the other guy’s discretion, you’ve got a big problem. And that really seems like what the U.S. is getting into now.
Whatever Trump lurches towards next, his stupidity, racism, hubris, and provincialism will — as it has for past U.S. administrations far less burdened by those weaknesses than he is — prevent him from seeing his avowed enemy clearly or on its own terms.
“[W]ar is never merely a technical contest,” Touval reminds us. “It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.”
Playing Word Games Out Loud
The Latest From the Middle East …
- NYT: Strike on U.S. Base in Saudi Arabia Injures 12 American Troops, 2 Seriously
- Reuters: Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis launched their first attacks on Israel on Saturday, raising the prospect that they could bottleneck a second key shipping route: the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
- WaPo: Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations in Iran
- NYT: U.S. Special Operations Forces Sent to Mideast
- WSJ: Trump Weighs Military Operation to Extract Iran’s Uranium
Pete Hegseth Watch
- Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s intervention to block the promotion of two Black men and two women to be one-star Army generals was “not only outrageous, it would be illegal.”
- In addition to his interference with Army promotions, Hegseth also intervened to remove a Black colonel and a female colonel from the promotions list in another unspecific branch of the armed services, NPR reports.
- Greg Sargent on the Christian Reconstructionist roots of Hegseth’s bloodlust, featuring some of TPM’s own reporting.
The Retribution: Anthropic Edition
Benjamin Wittes aptly describes the real point of the Pentagon’s attack on the AI company Anthropic:
The underlying issue is simply the lack of submission. And the point is not to win. The point is to emphasize to the next recalcitrant entity, person, company, or institution that it will have to defend itself if it asserts its rights—because the government will relentlessly come at those who don’t submit. … And if you’re a frontier AI company with the temerity not to submit, they will use the opportunity of destroying you to create opportunities for businesses associated with friendlier billionaires who know to stay on side.
Mass Deportation Watch
- A new “facilitate” case: U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of Houston has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a man deported to Mexico and at risk of being sent on to Guatemala, where he fears persecution.
- Stressed the fuck out: Acting ICE chief Todd Lyons has been hospitalized twice for stress-related issues during Trump’s mass deportation push, Politico reports.
- Great read: In the first installment of a series about how brazenly DHS lies about its conduct, Radley Balko examines the January raid on the St. Paul home of 57-year-old Laotian immigrant ChongLy Scott Thao.
House GOP Revolts Over Senate DHS Bill
The House rejected the bipartisan Senate bill to partially fund DHS and put an end to the TSA nightmare at the nation’s airports, instead passing its own funding bill late Friday before recessing for Easter. The Senate had already left town for its two-week recess. In a new executive order, President Trump purported to have the authority to pay TSA workers, and the government appeared to be taking steps to issue paychecks even without congressional authorization.
The Corruption: DHS Edition
The DHS inspector general has searched and seized records and a computer in the office of Kara Voorhies, a FEMA contractor, as part of an investigation into a network of aides to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and adviser Corey Lewandowski, the WSJ reports:
Another prong of the probe into Voorhies: her compensation. FEMA officials have been unable to locate her contract and investigators are still seeking it, according to people familiar with the matter. Senior FEMA officials were told that Voorhies was getting paid as much as $19,000 a week, some of the people said, which would amount to roughly $1 million a year.
Voorhies was brought into DHS by Lewandowski, who has told people close to him that “he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case stemming from the inspector general’s probe,” according to the WSJ.
Patel Phished
FBI Director Kash Patel personal Gmail account was hacked by a group linked to Iranian intelligence, Reuters reports. Patel emails from across a dozen years were posted on a website hosted by a computer server in Russia, the NYT reports.
The Retribution: Eric Swalwell Edition
The congressionally mandated release of the DOJ’s Jeffrey Epstein files has created a dangerous precedent that FBI Director Kash Patel is pressing to use as a political weapon against President Trump’s political foes.
Patel recently directed FBI agents in the San Francisco office to redact for potential public release the decade-old investigative files involving Trump nemesis Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and suspected Chinese intelligence operative Christine Fang (a.k.a. Fang Fang), even though the investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, the WaPo reports. Swalwell is currently running for governor of California.
In a followup report, the NYT adds that the FBI is moving swiftly and that law enforcement officials fear the files full of personal and classified information could be released: “In recent days, scores of F.B.I. agents and other personnel in California were instructed to gather the documents on Mr. Swalwell and Ms. Fang, with the goal of working through the weekend to finish a review by early next week, the people said. Supervisors advised the agents to lightly redact the records to obscure some sensitive information and told them the files would be shared with senior administration officials in Washington.”
Jan. 6 Never Ends
- A federal judge in Georgia heard arguments and testimony Friday in Fulton County’s challenge of the FBI’s recent seizure of ballots and other materials from the 2020 election.
- Jan. 6 defendants have filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government in the Middle District of Florida for “indiscriminately” using force against a “peaceful crowd.”
Quote of the Day
“President Trump took on the fake news media and President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough CNN is going to have new ownership as well.”—FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, bragging at CPAC about Republicans doing to corporate media what they have long falsely accused Democrats of doing
What a Personalist Regime Looks Like
- A rundown of everything that Trump has slapped his name on so far in his second term.
- Graphic of the day:
No Kings
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Good morning
Even Thomas and Alito are saying, dude, just give us something to work with - anything - and we’ll do the rest. But WTF are you doing?
…so I call it a military operation.
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Iran might be the “good war” of our generation. It could collapse and then rebuilt the American republic in a much better and robust way. Of course, no war is good. But let’s be aspirational. Visualize the whole administration, enablers, and family in the docket. Visualize gas so expensive Americans embrace not just energy security but economic security. Visualize them recognizing that means things like accessible health care, day care, and education. Visualize them fed up with impunity.
Not vengeance, but justice. Accountability. Democracy. Economic and environmental and national security. No guillotines but prison and confiscation. Visualize them saying, “Let’s not elect fascists and kill children anymore who happen to have noses a little flatter and skin a little browner and pronounce the name of God differently.”
None of this is fantasy, but necessity. We do this or die together. Not hard.