This story was originally published by ProPublica.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
President Trump has been flooding Truth Social in recent days with a series of indecipherable posts that appear to outline his interest in stuffing two anti-trans provisions into the SAVE America Act, a disastrous voter suppression bill that passed the House earlier this year and is currently languishing in the Senate due to filibuster rules.
For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.
A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.
As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.
Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.
With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.
No anti-Iran narrative
Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?
A U.S. Army carry team in Dover, Del., moves a coffin on March 7, 2026, containing the remains of a U.S. soldier killed in the retaliatory Iranian strike on Kuwait’s Port of Shuaiba. Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images
Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.
Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.
By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.
In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim – during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.
As the polls show, none of that has sparked a grand-purpose narrative.
Missing a good story
The second missing factor for narrative formation today is any strong messaging from the White House.
In the months prior to World War II, Roosevelt used his position of authority as president to give speech after speech, setting the context of the traumatic events of the 1930s, explaining the dangers at hand and outlining a course going forward. Though less truthful in its content, Bush did the same for nearly two years before the Iraq War.
Trump did almost none of this storytelling leading up to the Iran war. Five days before the war started, the president devoted three minutes to Iran in a nearly two-hour State of the Union Address.
Prior to that, he made a comment here and there to the press about Iran, but no storytelling preparing the nation for war. Likewise, since the war began, the administration’s stated reasons for military action keep shifting.
By comparison, Americans approved of Bush’s handling of foreign policy by 63% in early 2003.
Absent a cohesive, unifying story, it’s also no surprise there is lots of political fracturing today.
Partisan divides run deep – Democrats and independent voters strongly oppose the war. But Trump’s MAGA coalition is cracking too, with people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene sharply criticizing the war.
The way out
If he opts for it, there is an off-ramp for Trump from the Iran war. It’s one he knows well.
When U.S. leaders get caught up in costly regime change wars that outrun national support, they tend to back down, often with far fewer political costs than if they’d continued their unpopular war.
When the disaster referred to as Black Hawk Down hit in Somalia in 1993, killing 18 U.S. Marines, President Bill Clinton opted to end the mission to topple the warlords that ruled the country. Troops came home six months later.
Likewise, after the Benghazi attack killed four Americans in Libya in 2012, Obama pulled out all U.S. personnel working in Libya on nation-building operations.
And just last year, when Trump realized that U.S. ground troops would be necessary to topple the Houthi militant group in Yemen, he negotiated a ceasefire and ended his air war in that country with no significant political fallout.
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.)
In a searing ruling, a federal judge has rejected Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ham-handed workaround to the disqualification of Alina Habba as U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
The same outside judge who disqualified Habba, U.S. District Judge William Brann of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, ruled that Bondi’s appointment of a trio of DOJ attorneys to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office violates the Constitution and federal statute.
The triumvirate approach was yet another backdoor way of bypassing the Senate confirmation process for a permanent U.S. attorney and denying district judges the chance to exercise their statutory power to name interim U.S. attorneys.
“One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution,” Brann wrote. “To avoid these roadblocks, this administration frequently purports to have discovered enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”
What’s critical to understanding how these cases are playing out, not just in New Jersey but in other jurisdictions where Bondi is doing President Trump’s bidding on U.S. attorneys, is that the challenges are being brought in run-of-the-mill criminal cases. Defense attorneys are challenging the lawfulness and legitimacy of actions taken by federal prosecutors in leaderless U.S. attorney’s offices.
The unlawful workaround has created “a chaos that pervades criminal prosecutions” in New Jersey, Brann wrote, explicitly framed his ruling around the risk to public safety of invalidating criminal prosecutions en masse: “[W]hy does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this District potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure? The President doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”
Jan. 6 Never Ends
In an expansion of the Trump DOJ’s unprecedented use of a criminal investigation to boost 2020 right-wing election conspiracy theories, the FBI served a federal grand jury subpoena last week on the Arizona state Senate for records relating to its “audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County. While the Cyber Ninjas audit was bogus, it still found that Biden had won the state’s largest county.
“Because of that review, the state Senate retained election records that ordinarily would have been disposed of by now, according to a former staff member familiar with the matter,” the WaPo reports. “The person said those records include images of ballots and absentee envelopes, the tally of cast votes, and the server software.”
Adds ‘Insult to Injury’
Law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 are dismayed that, while the long-delayed plaque honoring them has finally been put on display, it is in a part of the building that is not accessible to the public. The plaque, which is mandated by law, was stymied by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and now hangs on the Senate side of the Capitol basically until the House GOP gets its senses back, whenever that may be, and a decision can be made on a more prominent place to hang it.
Immigration Appeals Gambit Blocked
Over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss of Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s unilateral effort to summarily dispense with thousands of immigration appeals.
“Under the new policy, all appeals would be automatically dismissed unless a majority of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the body that reviews decisions by immigration judges, voted to reconsider the case within 10 days,” the NYT reports.
How Many AEA Detainees Were There?
In a new status report in the original Alien Enemies Act case, the ACLU has alerted U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., that nearly one year since two flights of Venezuelan nationals took off for El Salvador’s CECOT prison, the Trump administration continues to give incomplete or conflicting data on how many AEA detainee there were:
Plaintiffs’ counsel received a class list of 137 class members from the Government …. Plaintiffs have some reason to believe the 137 is not exhaustive. Specifically, counsel notes that there are two individuals … who are not on the Government’s class list.
The new filing, which came the same day that the Trump administration asked Boasberg to stay his latest ruling in the case while it appeals that decision, also provided update figures on what the detainees wish to do to vindicate the due process rights they were initially denied. According to the filing, of the 91 former detainees who have shared their preferences with the ACLU :
22 want to return to U.S. to pursue their claims, knowing they’ll likely be detained once they arrive; and
68 want to pursue their claims through court filings remotely.
The ACLU continues to try to reach the approximately 50 other former detainees.
More Evidence U.S. Struck Iranian School
Markings on purported fragments of a missile that struck an elementary school in southern Iraq last week indicated it was a U.S.-made weapon, according to a NYT analysis.
Meanwhile, President Trump continued his one-man disinformation campaign to blame Iran for the incident, preposterously claiming that the Islamic republic has its own U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles.
Narrator, with a heavy sigh: Iran does not possess Tomahawks.
A Chilling Read
The WSJ has an in-depth report on the last days of the Iranian missile frigate that became the first combat kill by a U.S. submarine since World War II.
U.S. Confirms Military Ops in Ecuador
Last week’s reporting that the Trump administration had expanded its lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats to include land-based operations in Ecuador was murky about the level of direct U.S. involvement against drug traffickers. But now the Trump administration has sent a notice of the Ecuador operation to Congress under the War Powers Act.
The operations against drug traffickers, rebranded by the Trump administration as narco-terrorists, were reportedly advised and supported by U.S. Special Forces. But the War Powers Act notice would seem to confirm a more direct, if still unspecified, level of U.S. involvement, which would be consistent with President Trump’s repeated promises that the U.S. would be taking it to the drug cartels on land not just at sea.
LOL … Sob
News that President Trump is withholding his expected endorsement of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) over state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the GOP primary runoff for Senate in Texas as a way of leveraging Senate Republicans into passing the SAVE Act is on the hand a comical conundrum. Sit back and pass the popcorn.
On the other hand, the ridiculousness of the situation highlights the extent to which nothing matters to Trump as much as prevailing in the midterms, by hook or by crook. “It will guarantee the midterms,” Trump told House Republicans, who have already passed two versions of the SAVE Act. “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”
For what it’s worth, Paxton — on the verge of losing Trump’s endorsement last week after he finished second to Cornyn in Tuesday’s election — engineered this conundrum for the GOP by promising to drop out of the race if the Senate passed the SAVE Act.
Senate GOP leaders have been unsuccessful in puncturing the right-wing myth that they can overcome a Democrat filibuster through clever parliamentary maneuvering and pass the bill. In short, it’s a self-made clusterfuck that epitomizes the fever dreams and magical thinking of the Trump II presidency.
Be the Next Alexander Butterfield
(Original Caption) Alexander P. Butterfield, a former White House deputy assistant, told the Senate Watergate Committee 7/16 that voice-activated, automatic tape recorders record President Nixon’s conversations and telephone calls triggered by a “presidential locator box” which can find him if he is in his White House Oval Office, a Cabinet meeting or the barbershop. Butterfield, now Federal Aviation Adminstration chief, said the devices were installed in the summer of 1970.
More than half a century later, Alexander Butterfield, who died yesterday at 99, still stands as an exemplar of honesty and candor against one’s own interest for revealing in the summer of 1973 the existence of a taping system in the Nixon White House. Butterfield’s revelation blew open the slow-rolling Watergate scandal, which had commenced the previous summer with the break-in at DNC headquarters and would culminate the following summer with Nixon’s resignation.
Butterfield’s role has always been a little more complicated than that though. He wasn’t exactly a whistleblower in the classic sense: someone who comes forward to volunteer previously unknown information, often at great personal risk. Rather, he was the Federal Aviation Administration chief who, by virtue of being a former Nixon White House aide, was a Watergate witness. What set Butterfield apart was that when he asked about the taping system, he told the truth, at some personal and political risk. He didn’t participate in the coverup.
In some ways, that’s a low bar. If you’re looking for more inspiration, I have often found it in the person of Donald G. Sanders, the Republican staff attorney who first sussed out from Butterfield the existence of the taping system, in a closed-door interview three days before his public testimony to the Senate Watergate committee.
Both figures stand in sharp contrast to the current political moment.
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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Last week, Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor appeared before two federal district court judges and asked them to not hold the Trump administration in contempt for violating court orders. The judges, Biden appointee Jeffrey Bryan and Clinton appointee John Tunheim, had both directed the government to release dozens of unlawfully detained people and return their personal belongings. After learning that the administration released 28 detainees but kept their cash, phones, driver’s licenses, passports, work permits, and more, Bryan held a hearing on March 3 to give U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen a chance to explain himself. Tunheim similarly held a hearing on March 5 after finding that the government retained the possessions of at least six other detainees without any lawful basis.
During the hearing, Bryan said that ordering Rosen’s imprisonment “would be a historical low point for the office of the United States Attorney and for this District,” and that it was “very, very unlikely.” But Bryan was angry enough to tell Rosen that he hadn’t “ruled [it] out,” either.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, courts have been reluctant to impose consequences on the administration for its myriad violations of court orders. In recent weeks, however, some judges have started to recognize their power to compel compliance with their directives. A New York Timesanalysis published last month shows that since August, federal judges have issued at least 35 orders requiring the administration to explain why it shouldn’t be held in contempt. Twice since February, federal judges in Minnesota actually followed through, and briefly held the administration in civil contempt. And twice more in the past two weeks, federal judges in Minnesota and New Jersey threatened the administration with criminal contempt, too.
This story is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
In late February, the Wyoming House of Representatives passed a bill that would significantly change how schools, health departments and child welfare agencies interact with families. The measure would allow parents to sue municipalities and state agencies for financial damages if they believe officials have violated their parental rights. On the surface, this change may sound reasonable, but in practice, it could make public institutions far more cautious about supporting vulnerable children — especially LGBTQ+ students or children in unsafe homes — for fear of triggering costly lawsuits.
Wyoming already has a broad parental rights law, and conservative activists have used similar statutes across red states to challenge LGBTQ+ inclusion, racial equity initiatives, and policies that give minors some measure of privacy in schools or medical settings. Although framed as protections for families, these laws often end up shielding physical and emotional abuse from scrutiny and impeding efforts to address medical and educational neglect. Crucially, in Wyoming the statute requires that any government action seen as intruding into the parent-child relationship must satisfy strict scrutiny, the most demanding legal standard that courts apply. Under that test, the government must show that its action serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that goal. In practice, that can make it very difficult for public officials to intervene in family matters, even when they believe a child needs support or protection.
Until now, however, the main legal remedy available under Wyoming’s parental rights law has been an injunction — a court order directing a government agency to stop unlawful actions. An injunction can halt a policy or practice, but it does not require the government to pay damages.
What makes Wyoming’s new move so consequential is that it would allow parents to sue for financial damages and attorney’s fees, adding significant financial stakes to every action that teachers, healthcare workers, and others take with children — not only to prevent harm to children but to avoid offending their parents’ political sensibilities.
The FBI has expanded its investigation into President Trump’s delusion that the 2020 election was stolen from him, with reports that it issued a grand jury subpoena for documents about the election results in Maricopa County, Arizona, a key battleground in a swing state that has become a hotbed for conspiracy theorists’ fever dreams about the 2020 election.
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.”
