Good morning, Mehdi here. I have some good news: The kids are alright. I just finished a visiting fellowship at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics, where I held multiple discussion groups with undergraduate and postgraduate students, and I was delighted to discover a young generation that is politically engaged, morally conscious, and super smart. It’s the old folks in this country we should probably be more worried about…

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ why is an isolated, feckless, pro-Israel Chuck Schumer still in charge of the Senate Dems? Can the new ceasefire in Lebanon hold? And how on Earth did Pete Hegseth confuse Quentin Tarantino with… God?

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The Case For Chucking Out Chuck

“I have many jobs as leader... and one is to fight for aid to Israel – all the aid that Israel needs. I will continue to fight for it,” Chuck Schumer told a gathering of Jewish groups at the Park East Synagogue in New York in February.

Schumer’s statement, delivered as Senate minority leader, managed to contain both a glaring falsehood and an uncomfortable truth.

Let’s start with the lie: It is plainly not the job of a Senate party leader to “fight for aid” to a foreign nation. One could even argue that framing one of the responsibilities of the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America as securing funding for the Jewish state veers into the territory of antisemitic tropes.

And yet, the truth is harder to dismiss.

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Good morning! It’s Swin again. In a classic 1994 episode of ‘The Simpsons’ (the TV series that nearly three decades ago “predicted” a disastrous Donald Trump presidency), Homer Simpson seizes on a crime panic and crumbling trust in institutions, and forms a neighborhood watch to patrol Springfield’s streets and enforce vigilante justice. When the local TV newsman asks Homer about the “accusation that your group has been causing more crimes than it’s been preventing,” Homer responds: “I’d be lying if I said my men weren’t committing crimes.”

That was fiction – but it also sums up Donald Trump’s entire second term, thus far. As Trump and his gang break so many laws and commit so many (war) crimes, do they feel invincible? We can answer that for you…

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Team Trump worries that preemptive pardons won’t be enough to get away with all their crimes; 40 Senate Democrats just voted to block arms sales to Israel; and Abdul El-Sayed picks up a key endorsement in Michigan’s Democratic primary for US Senate.

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Fearing Accountability

They can read a poll. They won’t admit it publicly, but much of President Donald Trump’s inner circle sees Democrats retaking the House in the 2026 midterms as a foregone conclusion. They also know, at some point in the near future, their liberal enemies will control the White House, again.

And Team Trump takes it for granted that there will be an intense appetite among progressive voters for their politicians to go on their own “retribution” tour and seek accountability for all of this administration’s extrajudicial killings and crime-doing.

As Zeteo reported in December, the president has already privately discussed preemptive mass federal pardons before this term ends, to gift an extra layer of impunity to his rogues’ gallery of staff and hatchetmen. Last week, the Wall Street Journal followed up on Trump’s “promise” to do this.

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Last year, various Trump administration officials made sure to purchase new legal insurance and professional-liability plans, sources familiar with the matter tell me, in anticipation of future investigations or subpoenas from prosecutors and Democrats. (It’s a smart move: Staffers on the House committee investigating Jan. 6 did the same thing before the 2022 elections, anticipating a Republican-run Congress around the corner.)

But in the past few months (including during Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, which has turbo-charged the levels of leaking, backbiting, blame-shifting, and paranoia within Team Trump’s own ranks), I’ve noticed something.

In my conversations with several senior administration officials, as well as other Trump advisers and elite Republicans close to the White House, their anxiety – over what Democrats might do to them after the midterms, or once Trump is out of power – has kicked up a conspicuous notch. Some of them have told me they’ve noticed a growing trend of Democratic politicians making public calls for aggressive prosecutions of Trumplanders in the future – a trend one Trump aide privately lamented as “kind of worrisome.”

And a significant number of senior appointees working in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, in Stephen Miller’s White House, and in so many other departments and crime-laboratories of the Trump-Vance administration do not think that federal pardons will be enough.

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Vote here!

Good morning! Andrew here to break down the results of a poll of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary conducted exclusively for Zeteo and Drop Site News. What’s the upshot? Well, for one thing, voters care a lot less about Hasan Piker’s political influence than that of AIPAC, America’s foremost genocide lobby. Who would have guessed?

There’s no paywall in this edition of ‘First Draft,’ thanks to our sponsor Ground News.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we dive into the Michigan primary, a shocking fifth accuser precedes Eric Swalwell’s resignation from Congress, and Donald Trump’s war in Iran bites deep on the home front.

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Tied Up in Michigan

Michigan’s Democratic primary for US Senate is a three-way dead heat, according to a new poll conducted for Zeteo and Drop Site News.

The survey additionally found that likely Democratic primary voters are far more concerned about the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s influence on candidates than the influence of Hasan Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer who campaigned with candidate Abdul El-Sayed at two Michigan universities last week.

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The poll from Data for Progress found that 22% of likely Democratic primary voters support El-Sayed, endorsed by Bernie Sanders and a vocal critic of Israel; 23% support Haley Stevens, a conservative, pro-Israel Democrat backed by party leaders in Washington, DC; and 22% support Mallory McMorrow, the J Street-endorsed candidate positioning herself in between Stevens and El-Sayed.

Notably, a third of voters were undecided.

The poll also tested what would happen in a two-way race, and found that McMorrow would benefit more from El-Sayed dropping out than vice versa: His voters are more likely to consider McMorrow their second choice, whereas McMorrow’s are more likely to call Stevens their second choice, suggesting that McMorrow is not simply splitting the progressive vote.

However, in all of the scenarios that were polled, a plurality of likely Democratic primary voters remained unsure as to whom they would support – suggesting, again, that the race remains fully up for grabs with three-and-a-half months left before the Aug. 4 primary election.

Meanwhile, voters are not overly concerned about El-Sayed’s decision to hold rallies with Piker – despite the aggressive anti-Piker cancellation campaign led by the centrist think tank Third Way, egged on by both McMorrow and Stevens.

Per the poll, 13% of likely Democratic primary voters in Michigan view Piker favorably, while 7% view him negatively. The vast majority of them say they don’t know enough about Piker to have an opinion about him.

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The poll gave voters more context about the controversy to assess whether it would influence their vote. They were told that El-Sayed’s opponents had criticized him for planning rallies with Piker, accusing Piker of antisemitism and highlighting past controversial remarks, and that El-Sayed has argued that criticism of Israel should not be confused with antisemitism.

Asked then whether they approved or disapproved of El-Sayed inviting Piker to join his rallies on college campuses, 40% said they approved, 30% said they disapproved, and 30% said they weren’t sure.

Michigan primary voters appear significantly more concerned about the influence of AIPAC, America’s top pro-Israel lobby, with far less prodding: 64% said they are less likely to support a Senate candidate who receives donations from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, while 10% said they are more likely.

The poll found 62% of Michigan Democratic primary voters agreed that they are less likely to trust that a candidate would stand up for Michiganders in general if they won’t stand up to AIPAC; 13% disagreed with this sentiment.

Data for Progress polled 515 likely Democratic primary voters in Michigan, from April 2-8.

Stevens has long been an AIPAC favorite. AIPAC’s political action committee raised over $340,000 worth of direct campaign donations for Stevens in early 2025, just before she announced her bid for Senate, though it has not raised money directly for her Senate campaign. Last month, Stevens taped a promotional video for AIPAC, which in 2022 helped her oust former Michigan Democratic Rep. Andy Levin, a progressive Zionist who argued for Palestinian rights.

El-Sayed and McMorrow have both been critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, though McMorrow has been reluctant to describe it this way – and has instead complained that the word “genocide” has become some kind of “political purity test.”

As Drop Site News previously reported, McMorrow privately drafted a position paper for AIPAC, according to one of her supporters, before publicly demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and saying that “this violence needs to stop.”

McMorrow has been endorsed by the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street.

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🇮🇷 Iran War Updates

Death tolls:

• Iran: Iran’s Human Rights Activists News Agency said last week the death toll from US-Israeli strikes stands at more than 3,000, including 1,700 civilians.

• Lebanon: Israel has killed more than 2,124 people, including at least 168 children, in Lebanon, according to figures from the country’s Health Ministry.

• US troops: At least 13 US troops have died in incidents related to the war.

• Israel: At least 34 people, including 12 Israeli soldiers, have been killed and thousands injured in Iranian and Hezbollah attacks.

• Elsewhere in the region: Dozens of others have been killed across the region, including four Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank.

And in more Iran war news…

• Talks hint: Donald Trump hinted that new talks with Iran may happen “over the next two days” in Pakistan. He previously said the US would not return for more talks in the country, after the first failed round.

• Strait open: The first day of Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports made little difference to traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reported, saying shipping data showed at least three Iran-linked tankers crossed the waterway.

• Over/under: Emerging from the White House, Fox host Maria Bartiromo said Trump told her the war with Iran was “over.” The full interview will run on Wednesday.

• Home front: Republican Senator Roger Marshall had an odd message for Americans opposed to Trump’s war: “I’m sorry that gas prices are going up, but… your national security is even more important than your pocketbook.”

• Farm crisis: According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, 70% of US farmers cannot afford enough fertilizer to get them through the year. Fertilizer is just one commodity hit by conditions in the Strait of Hormuz.

• Lebanon latest: Israeli and Lebanese officials held their first direct talks in more than 30 years in Washington, despite Benjamin Netanyahu initially opposing the move. Both countries said talks were productive and were expected to continue. Meanwhile, Israel issued new forced evacuation orders to residents in the southern part of the country.

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Swalwell Quits After New Accuser Speaks Out

After Lonna Drewes became the fifth woman to accuse Eric Swalwell of sexual misconduct, the California Democrat formally resigned from the US House. Appearing before reporters in Beverly Hills, Drewes, a model who works in fashion technology, said the former gubernatorial candidate drugged, choked, and raped her in 2018.

“My delay in taking action against Eric was driven by fear, not doubt,” Drewes said. “Fear of his political power, his background as an attorney, and his family law enforcement ties.”

A lawyer for Swalwell said he “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation,” but he quit Congress all the same. So did Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican who admitted to an affair with an aide who died by suicide.

🗞️ What You Need to Know

• Pro-sedition president: Trump’s DOJ wants to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers Jan. 6 leaders, whose sentences were commuted.

• Speak now: House Speaker Mike Johnson, a devout Christian, said he asked Trump to take down an AI image depicting himself as Jesus, which Trump claimed to think showed him as a doctor.

• Court move: Trump refused to concede defeat in his suit against the Wall Street Journal, seeking to find if the paper acted with actual malice in reporting on his lewd birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein.

• Amend to that: Rep. Jamie Raskin introduced a bill to form a commission to study whether Trump should be removed under the 25th Amendment.

• Repay day: A refund process for payments made before Trump’s tariffs were made illegal begins April 20, officials said. Actual repayments may take longer.

• Sparse crowd: JD Vance spoke at a Turning Point event in Athens, Georgia. Not many people turned up to listen.

• Spy play: Republicans continued to tie themselves in knots over whether to reauthorize surveillance powers that allow warrantless wiretaps of US citizens.

• Trump turns again: Trump lashed out at Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, one of his closest European allies, after she called his attacks on the pope “unacceptable,” and after her government suspended a defense agreement with Israel. “Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to help us in the war,” Trump told an Italian newspaper. “I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong.”

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🧠 Pop Quiz!

Presidents have used the 25th Amendment to temporarily transfer power four times. In 1985, Ronald Reagan empowered George H.W. Bush for eight hours while he had cancer surgery. What procedure necessitated two transfers under George W Bush and one under Joe Biden?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

🌏 Anywhere But America

• 🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: Hamas reiterated its opposition to the disarmament plan put forth by the so-called “Board of Peace,” citing Israeli ceasefire violations. Israel conducted targeted airstrikes throughout Gaza, killing at least 11 Palestinians, including two children.

• 🇰🇼 Unjust detainment: Human rights advocates called for the release of journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, held in Kuwait for six weeks after publishing photos and videos of a fighter jet crash, as Gulf countries crack down on coverage of the war with Iran.

• 🇸🇴 Deadly tensions: Somalia’s army carried out a military operation, with assistance from international partners, in the autonomous state of Jubbaland, killing 27 al-Shabab fighters and seizing weapons and equipment.

• 🇮🇪 Price outrage: After Irish haulers, farmers, and agricultural workers blocked oil infrastructure in response to rising fuel prices, two lawmakers withdrew from the parliamentary coalition in power.

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🙄 WTF?!

Tim: For the record, gas prices are higher now than they were when Joe Biden left office. But of course, you and the rest of the GOP will recycle that line all the way to November, cause you have no excuse for Donald Trump hurting folks at the pump.

🧠 Trivia answer: Colonoscopies.

ICYMI From Zeteo

Zeteo’s Martin Pengelly and Akshay Gokul contributed to this newsletter.

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Still want to get Zeteo content, but not this newsletter? You can unsubscribe directly from ‘First Draft’ by going to ‘manage subscription’ in Substack, scrolling down, and toggling the button for ‘First Draft’ off.

Good morning. It’s Swin and Andrew here. In the second Trump era, we realize how difficult it can be – even for avid, astute news consumers – to keep track of all the madness. For instance, the president invaded Venezuela this year, then immediately pivoted to threatening an invasion of Greenland, only to move on to further invading parts of his own country, right before starting a new, illegal bloodbath in the Middle East.

Donald Trump isn’t even done with his failing war on Iran yet – but he could soon add another country to the list.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the president has his team planning another act of war elsewhere, two accused creeps in Congress are calling it quits, and the Republican Party is a big tent when it comes to whether its politicians believe the US president should proclaim himself Jesus and scream at the pope.

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Kidnapper Plots

History’s cattiest warmonger, Donald Trump, continues to publicly dangle a US invasion of Cuba, the island nation that his administration has been strangling to death with a brutal, months-long energy blockade.

“We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” Trump said Monday – meaning once his disastrous war in Iran actually ends.

It was an insane moment, as Trump stood next to a woman wearing a “DoorDash grandma” shirt for a corporate White House photo-op. (At the same event, Trump claimed he had only mistakenly committed blasphemy when he posted an image depicting himself as Jesus, because he thought it was “me as a doctor.”)

This isn’t the first time the president has threatened to invade Cuba. It’s not even the first time he’s made this threat during the US-Israeli war in Iran, which is throttling the global economy. “Cuba is going to be next,” Trump said two weeks ago.

It would be one thing if President Trump were only mouthing off for the cameras. He’s not.

In recent days, according to two sources familiar with the situation and another person briefed on it, officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US government were quietly given a new directive that came straight from the Trump White House. The message: ramp up your preparations for possible military operations against Cuba.

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Hi, all, it’s Swin here. Last week, on the same night President Donald Trump announced he would deign not to commit genocide just yet against Iran, I was on Zeteo’s livestream relaying a warning we were receiving in real time from sources inside the Trump-Vance administration: This isn’t over – not by a long shot. Trump’s supposed ceasefire was built on sand, if that, and the chances of the war escalating soon anyways were still high. It’s been less than a week since that night… and it looks like we are starting this week in the shadow of the weekend’s failed peace negotiations.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump screws over JD Vance; disgraced California congressman Eric Swalwell ends his gubernatorial campaign; AOC is “hustling,” and Graham Platner thinks Chuck Schumer will come around. Plus, we have the latest from the Middle East.

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‘Imploding’ Trump Screws Over Vance

In late 2024, in the weeks directly following Donald Trump’s reelection, I had numerous conversations with incoming Trump administration officials and political operatives close to JD Vance, during which I used the same two-word phrase over and over: “Boy Kamala.”

My point (or, prediction, in some cases) was simple: There was little reason to believe Team Trump actually had a credible plan to bring down prices or inflation by any meaningful degree. Americans would continue to feel, and vote, like the US economy is a disaster, and they’d predictably go from blaming Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Democrats to punishing Trump, Vance, and the conservative ruling party. Vance’s future political, or presidential, aspirations were tied inextricably to how voters were going to feel about Trump, and Trumpism, by 2027.

There were multiple Vance compatriots who got weirdly mad or snitty at me for saying what I thought was a commonsensical point. Biden’s presidency sank Harris 2024. Unless Trump had an economic miracle shoved in his back pocket, it stood to reason that a similar fate would befall MAGA’s crown prince.

That was almost a year and a half ago… and even I could not have predicted then how utterly catastrophic things would get for Vance before 2026 was even half over.

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To get the standard throat-clearing out of the way: Anything could happen between now and 2028. Nobody should count Vance out of any possible presidential contest. But as things currently stand, it is hard to imagine things going worse for the man President Trump has called his “handsome son of a bitch.” And it’s almost entirely because Trump forced Vance into this position.

“Trump is imploding, and he’s probably going to take JD down with him unless there’s a course correction,” one source close to Trump told me.

This weekend, the vice president and Trump-hater-turned-MAGA-diehard returned to Washington from Islamabad empty-handed. Trump sent Vance on a mission to secure a deal that would end Trump’s disastrous, illegal war in Iran – a war that Vance was reportedly squeamish about from the jump and that numerous members of Team Trump believe is tearing apart the administration in harrowing fashion.

The Iranians sent him packing.

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Good morning! Andrew and Swin here. Our president continues to be racist, ICE keeps shooting people, and the war in Iran could restart at any moment. But this morning, our lede is about Melania Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Don’t blame us. It was her idea.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the first lady volunteers that she “was never involved” in Epstein’s crimes, Democrats can’t pass a symbolic resolution calling out AIPAC, and Donald Trump doesn’t seem happy with his ceasefire deal, even after he decided Israel could keep massacring people in Lebanon.

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‘What the Fuck Is She Doing?’

Polls show a majority of Americans believe that Donald Trump launched his illegal and reckless war in Iran to distract from his Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

But on Thursday, first lady Melania Trump made the bizarre decision to hold a surprise press event, so she could draw attention away from the worst-run war in US history and bring the president’s ties to the world’s most famous pedophile right back into the national news cycle.

“I’m not a witness or a named witness in connection with any of Epstein’s crimes,” Melania Trump declared. “My name has never appeared in court documents, depositions, victim statements, or FBI interviews surrounding the Epstein matter. I have never had any knowledge of Epstein’s abuse of his victims. I was never involved in any capacity.”

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She continued: “I was not a participant, was never on Epstein’s plane, and never visited his private island. I have never been legally accused or convinced [sic] of a crime in connection with Epstein’s sex trafficking, abuse of minors, and other repulsive behavior.”

Melania Trump’s comments reminded Swin of this clip of Frank from ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.’ It reminded Andrew just slightly more of this classic meme.

“What the fuck is she doing right now?” one close Trump adviser asked us shortly after Melania Trump stopped speaking.

“I’ve never been friends with Epstein,” Melania Trump said. “Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach. To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, [Ghislaine] Maxwell.”

This was a televised performance that no one was asking for, and which few could immediately explain.

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Hi! It’s Swin again.

The Donald Trump-shaped apocalypse has been postponed, even if his war goes on. With it comes new horrors each day, at home and abroad. Amid it all, the president of the United States is falling back on a familiar habit: huffily ordering aides to bring him the heads (figuratively speaking… we hope) of the people who’ve been snitching on him. So let’s get into that.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump demands action as a new book looms, JD Vance tries to explain away the ceasefire that wasn’t, amid Israeli savagery in Lebanon, and Pam Bondi tries to bail on a date to discuss Jeffrey Epstein before the House Oversight Committee.

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The President Smells a Rat

Donald Trump is a Mad King president, perpetually pissed off about seemingly everything. That is always what you like to hear about someone running a major new war that’s killing thousands and affecting millions across multiple continents. But there’s something new that is uniquely enraging him, those who’ve spoken to him recently tell me. In conversations with close aides and advisers, President Trump has loudly demanded to know who in his Cabinet or his team blabbed to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their forthcoming book, Regime Change – including over his reckless decision to launch an illegal war against Iran.

In response to the president’s demands, Trump officials have launched a massive leak hunt within Trumpland and the federal government, multiple Trump advisers say.

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Good morning! Andrew, Swin, and Prem here, with some decent news. Donald Trump opted not to try to slaughter Iran’s “whole civilization” Tuesday evening, as he had threatened. In Trump’s disturbing second term, we must take wins where we can. Who knows how long the “ceasefire” will last, but we, of course, welcome it: No more civilians should have to die just because our president is a raging idiot, sociopath, and pawn of Benjamin Netanyahu.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the ceasefire framework appears to be “a strategic win” for Iran, and a major loss for Trump and Netanyahu; liberals expand their majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court; and Janet Mills goes dark on the air with two months left in Maine’s Senate primary.

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Don Backs Down

Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” unless its leaders agreed to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

By Tuesday evening – instead of trying to kill the 90 million people living in Iran, or bombing Iran’s power plants and bridges as he had promised – Trump announced “a double sided CEASEFIRE!” for two weeks. In doing so, Trump all but admitted the reality that his illegal war is going terribly – and Iran is winning.

“We received a 10-point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate,” the president announced on Truth Social – apparently referring to the 10-point plan that Iran had presented to the US before he threatened to murder its entire population.

Using this 10-point plan as a framework for a deal, rather than the previous American 15-point plan, is obviously a major win for Iran – which is, indeed, declaring victory. Experts and commentators see it that way, too.

“If Iran did in fact secure guarantees based on the ‘10 principles’ Trump referenced, that is not a marginal outcome, it is a strategic win for Tehran, reinforcing its narrative and positioning,” wrote Danny Citrinowicz, a former top Israeli intelligence officer who focused on Iran. As former US State Department official and veteran Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller put it, “Iran has won another round.”

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Political scientist Robert A. Pape writes: “Huge strategic defeat for the US, biggest loss since Vietnam.”

The 10-point plan would allow Iran to continue its control over the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway that Iran has closed since the start of the war, stopping the flow of oil and throttling the global economy.

Just a day earlier, Trump was fantasizing about the US “charging tolls” for ships to transit the strait. Now, it looks much more likely that Iran will keep doing this instead, and that it will get to charge “a $2M fee per ship.” In another win for Iran, the plan would involve lifting “all US sanctions on Iran.”

Under Iran’s proposed framework, the US would allow Iran to continue its uranium enrichment program – which would mean folding on the entire supposed basis for Trump’s illegal war. This point was included in the Farsi version of the plan, but reportedly omitted from English versions shared by Iranian diplomats.

Some liberals will invariably revel in “TACO Trump” memes about how Trump always chickens out. But, as we reported at Zeteo on Tuesday, none of this is over. The ceasefire, as of now, is only temporary. As Trump advisers and others in the upper tiers of Trumplandia warned us, there’s still a decent chance that he escalates the war again soon.

Here’s why.

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Hi everyone! Prem here : )

Hope you had a nice holiday weekend, if you and yours celebrate. Wherever you are, I hope you are having the opportunity to enjoy simple pleasures. I've been enjoying the beautiful cherry blossoms of Washington, DC, and getting to watch ‘Project Hail Mary’ in a movie theater. (Amaze, amaze, amaze!)

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ a detailed walkthrough of Donald Trump's genuinely insane public appearances on the eve of his deadline for returning Iran to the "stone ages"; the Washington press corps offers an embarrassing display of supposed First Amendment "solidarity"; and how Trump's dream Pentagon budget would make the US military one of the biggest polluters in the world.

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OK, Grandpa, Let’s Get You to Bed

Between standing alongside his wife and a staffer in a bunny costume for the White House Easter Egg Roll, and standing alongside fellow alleged sexual abuser and war criminal Pete Hegseth for a press conference, Donald Trump had a busy Monday. And at each stop, he delivered remarks that contributed to one of his most bizarre, dangerous, and outright vicious days as president yet.

*Inhale* … and here we go:

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Happy Monday, all. It’s Swin and Andrew again. Our president celebrated Easter by threatening some “fuckin’” war crimes on Sunday morning, and then seemingly trolled Muslims in the Middle East by praising “Allah” while issuing a threat to kill a ton of Iranian civilians. We sincerely hope you found a better, more humane way to mark the holiday, if you observe it. But with each passing week of this war, Donald Trump reveals himself to be a real-life President Greg Stillson, but with less dignity, somehow. Now, speaking of those potential cataclysmic war crimes…

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump is history’s dumbest madman, Governor Janet Mills is skipping the first Maine Democratic Senate debate against Graham Platner, and NBC is the latest news organization to ask a Democrat if they will dare go on… Hasan Piker’s show.

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‘I Am Blowing Up Everything’

The nominal leader of the free world – already a month into an illegal war of aggression that he started – keeps making terrorist threats against the Iranian people. This isn’t empty, lefty rhetoric hyperbole about an out-of-control madman.

Even a brief analysis of Donald Trump’s intimidation tactics these past few days would show that what he’s threatening is not the kind of war that vaguely adheres to any rules or laws. He’s making openly terroristic threats: I will do whatever it takes, however lawless, to achieve my mission; do as I say, or the moms and dads and kids who have nothing to do with this will die horribly.

If this weren’t the American commander-in-chief, almost everyone would be able to see this for what it is. For decades, US politicians and media lost their collective minds over somebody in Iran saying, “Death to America.” What President Trump is doing and propagandizing now makes that three-word catchphrase sound like a schoolyard taunt.

Trump is threatening to commit heinous war crimes if Iran doesn’t open up the Strait of Hormuz – the crucial waterway that Iran has closed since the start of the war, blocking the flow of oil and throttling the global economy. In his primetime address to the nation last Wednesday, Trump argued that other countries should go deal with it, telling them: “Go to the strait and just take it.” By Sunday, he was back to begging Iran to reopen it by threatening to bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure.

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“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” After that, Trump spoke with a bunch of reporters to expand his threats.

“If they don’t make a deal and fast, I’m considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil,” Trump told Fox. He told Axios, “If they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there.” Speaking with ABC, Trump said, “If it happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, we’re blowing up the whole country. We’re blowing up, as I said, it’s going to be bridge day, and it’s going to be power plant day in the country of Iran.”

Over the weekend, several administration officials and close Trump advisers told us that it may not matter if Trump actually is doing his apocalyptic saber-rattling as a negotiating or pressure tactic. Several of these advisers said their fear is that no matter what his intentions are, he could easily end up pushing himself into a bigger, longer war and ground invasion of Iran.

“Escalating to deescalate only works as a strategy if you stop escalating,” one senior Trump appointee bemoans.

If anything, legacy media in this country have dramatically undersold the titanic depravity of what President Trump is doing. The media is covering his social media threats as if he is simply moving a perfunctory deadline back 24 hours, from Monday to Tuesday, but what Trump is discussing is his own pledge to pointlessly commit war crimes against Iran’s civilians – who knows how many? Millions? Tens of millions? – by a certain time. That the American commander-in-chief is doing this in broad daylight is a scandal of monumental proportions.

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Good morning, Mehdi here. Thank goodness it’s Friday? Normally, yes. Normally, you can relax a bit at the end of the week. But during this war, Fridays bring an ominous feeling to all of us here at Team Zeteo. Because the weekends, with markets closed, are when Trump likes to escalate. Will this be the weekend, the long weekend, that Trump decides to send ground forces into what could become a “bloodbath” for US troops? We’ll be watching.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ warmonger Trump picks the military-industrial complex over his own working-class base; women don’t seem to last long in the Trump administration; Tiger Woods calls Trump from the scene of his DUI car crash; and Hamas refuses to disarm until Israel withdraws its forces from Gaza.

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Warfare Not Day Care, Says Donald

Do you remember when private citizen Donald Trump and then 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump pretended to be anti-war? When he said US wars in the Middle East had “bled our country dry,” and railed against “wasting lives and money” overseas? When he repeatedly insisted that those billions should be used at home to “rebuild the USA”?

Today, President Donald Trump is spending billions of dollars every single day on his own illegal and catastrophic war of choice in the Middle East. One online tracker puts the direct cost of his Iran war at almost $40 billion in less than 40 days. The Trump administration is already seeking more than $200 billion in additional funding from Congress for the Department of Defense, to pay for the war and to restock munitions.

But that’s not all. Later today, the president of the United States will unveil his 2027 White House budget, which is expected to feature a massive and unprecedented escalation in defense spending across the board.

The expected 50% jump in Department of Defense spending, from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, would mean the US would be spending roughly three times as much on defense as all of the European members of NATO combined. It would be the biggest increase in US defense spending since the Korean War and would exceed the biggest year-on-year increases in Pentagon expenditures under Republican hawks like Ronald Reagan (around 20% in 1983) and George W Bush (around 15% in 2003).

But wait… there’s more.

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Good morning! Swin and Andrew here. Moments before President Donald Trump went live last night, Swin predicted that his Wednesday night address on the Iran war would sound eerily similar to that scene from ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ in which the Kevin Kline character, gun drawn, angrily insists that America did not lose the Vietnam War. Well, Swin was wrong… Trump’s so-called speech was much, much worse than that.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we review that sleepy, bumbling, bloodthirsty primetime address, the wider Iran war news produces more nasty polling for the president, and even Trump’s pet Supreme Court justices seem skeptical about his bid to end birthright citizenship.

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Like ‘Listening to Joe Biden’

As we reported in yesterday morning’s ‘First Draft,’ very few people – including in Trump’s own administration – are actually buying his effort to declare victory in Iran and move on. “However poorly you think the war is going, it is worse,” one senior administration official said in recent days. A different senior US official bluntly stated: “Iran can declare victory, too,” adding that “nobody will buy our attempt to sell this as a big win.”

Still, if you are the US commander in chief, and you’re one month into a major war that you launched, the one communications job you have is to be able to go on live TV and project calm, confidence, and reasonably high energy to the American people, when you’re telling them how well the war is going.

On Wednesday night – April Fools’ Day, funnily enough – President Trump couldn’t even be bothered to do that. (He’s a former reality TV star; he is supposed to be good at doing TV.) Setting aside for a moment the typically incoherent jumble that pervaded his televised address, the American president delivered a jarringly listless, elderly-seeming speech that did little to inspire confidence – including in his own ranks.

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During and after his address, an array of Trump advisers, administration officials, allies on Capitol Hill, and rich Mar-a-Lago buddies gave Zeteo their snap reviews of Trump’s message and delivery. (Yes, they asked for the cloak of anonymity, so as to not piss off God King Donald.) Virtually across the board, the president was panned by his own people, with some denigrating the speech as pointless, and others reiterating how much senior members of the administration never wanted this to happen in the first place.

One Trump administration official said the following on Wednesday night: “It reminded me of listening to Joe Biden speak.”

In Trumplandia, that is perhaps the worst possible thing you could say about anyone, much less the sitting president and leader of the GOP.

But Wednesday night’s speech revealed the extent to which Trump’s reckless and illegal war is breaking him down – in ways that numerous other massive crises, criminal investigations, and scandals simply could not. For once, his bullshitting, bullying, and bravado aren’t working – and he cannot take it. Plus, he’s sounding notably old and drained as he tries to pretend, to a late-night audience of millions, that he can.

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Good morning! Andrew here. It’s April 1! No pranks from us today. We will, however, watch Donald Trump’s primetime address tonight so you don’t have to.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we ponder what “important update” the president will have for us about his war, which is going even worse than you think; Americans don’t approve of Trump’s fascist paramilitary; and AOC clarifies her stance on aid for Israel.

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Fool to Address the Nation

When Donald Trump launched his dangerous and very illegal war against Iran, he broke with modern presidential tradition. Rather than give a live primetime address, as is customary, he posted a prerecorded video from Mar-a-Lago. Tonight, he will finally give his first live primetime address about the war… on April Fool’s Day…. begging the question: Is he messing with us?

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeted Tuesday that “President Trump will give an Address to the Nation to provide an important update on Iran.”

What should you, dear Zeteo reader, expect to hear from America’s first Mad King on Wednesday at 9pm ET? Let’s break down the various options:

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Good morning friends! It’s Prem. Wishing a happy April Fool’s Eve to all who celebrate – and a happy Farmworkers Day to all the hardworking people who give us the gift of sustenance. May we repay the favor.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ messages leaked to Zeteo give a better picture of the man accused of seeking to kill a Palestinian-American activist; three United Nations peacekeepers were killed in Lebanon as Benjamin Netanyahu expands Israel’s illegal invasion; and the White House openly boasts about killing Iranian leaders for the crime of… disagreeing with them during nuclear negotiations.

Let’s get into it.

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Caught Slacking

The man accused of plotting to assassinate Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian-American activist in New York, concerned colleagues at a previous job with provocative internal communications, according to sources and messages seen by Zeteo.

Alexander Heifler, 26, was arrested last week for an alleged plot to firebomb the home of Kiswani, who lives in Brooklyn with her infant son and husband.

Heifler reportedly identified as a member of the JDL 613 Brotherhood – a New York and New Jersey-based group that has taken inspiration from the Jewish Defense League, a violent extremist organization that was listed on the FBI terrorist list.

Leaked messages obtained by Zeteo show Heifler justifying genocidal language used by Israeli government officials and feeling paranoid about his safety amid Israel’s war on Gaza.

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Good morning! Andrew here. Two days after 8 million people took to the streets to reject Donald Trump as part of the nationwide “No Kings” protests, a new poll shared exclusively with Zeteo finds Trump with what may be his worst approval rating of his political career.

Today’s newsletter is paywall-free, thanks to our sponsor, Ground News.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ only 33% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, not even MAGA voters want their Mad King to put boots on the ground in Iran, AOC is tired of being hit from the left, and the US will allow Cuba to receive one oil tanker.

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Everybody Hates Don

Donald Trump keeps musing about his desire to serve an unconstitutional third term. Last week, he shared a post on Truth Social about how he deserves a third term “as a reward” for the 2020 election being stolen from him – which is, of course, a complete lie.

New polling shared exclusively with Zeteo demonstrates just how delusional our president really is: Only 33% of Americans approve of the job he is doing, and 62% disapprove, according to the UMass Amherst national poll. This figure may well represent the worst approval rating of Trump’s political career.

The UMass poll finds broad opposition to Trump’s illegal and dangerous war in Iran: 29% say they approve of Trump’s military actions against Iran, while 54% disapprove.

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The war has more support among MAGA fans. “With the war entering its second month, our findings suggest that the Trump administration has withstood the criticism coming from within its own base,” Tatishe Nteta, director of the poll and political science professor at UMass Amherst, tells Zeteo.

But that could change if Trump decides to put boots on the ground in Iran. Only 8% of Americans believe the US should send ground troops, and 67% disagree with the idea, per the UMass poll. Among people who “very much” identify with MAGA, 30% say the US should put boots on the ground in Iran, while 36% of MAGA devotees disagree.

As Zeteo has reported, Trump has for weeks been weighing a ground invasion of Iran – despite obvious logistical problems with the idea – and senior administration officials have been briefed that efforts to seize Kharg Island, a decades-long goal for Trump, would result in “considerable” American casualties.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Department of Defense “is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran,” citing US officials, “as thousands of American soldiers and Marines arrive in the Middle East for what could become a dangerous new phase of the war should President Donald Trump choose to escalate.”

Trump spoke with the Financial Times on Sunday about his desire to “take the oil in Iran” by occupying Kharg Island, from where most of Iran’s oil is exported. Trump complained that “stupid people back in the US say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”

Americans, by and large, understand the US-Israeli war in Iran is causing energy prices to spike: 79% say invading Iran will increase oil prices, while only 7% disagree.

“The American public does not seem to be buying what President Donald Trump is selling when it comes to the war with Iran,” Nteta says.

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Outside of the war, which could get much worse at any moment, Trump’s approval on key issues ranges from bad to catastrophic: 24% say Trump has handled inflation well, 28% say he’s handled tariffs well, and 22% believe the president has done a good job handling the release of information concerning his former friend Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most famous pedophile.

According to the UMass poll, 59% of Americans agree with the following statement: “The Trump administration is hiding important information about the Epstein case.” And 50% of Americans believe Trump’s attacks on Iran are meant to distract from the Epstein files, while 30% disagree. Those figures mirror the findings of a recent Data for Progress poll conducted on behalf of Drop Site News and Zeteo.

Nteta notes that immigration – Trump’s signature issue – has “quickly become one of the president’s most pressing vulnerabilities.” Only 35% say he’s handled immigration well, and 60% say he hasn’t.

The UMass poll is one of many showing Americans are turning on Trump. The president’s response, beyond urging his party to pass a sweeping voter-suppression bill, is to publicly pretend it isn’t happening.

“Right now my polls are better than they’ve ever been before,” he lied on Friday.

🇮🇷 Iran War Updates

Death tolls:

• Iran: Iran’s deputy health minister told Al Jazeera that at least 1,937 people had been killed in US-Israeli attacks. Iranian officials said earlier this month that nearly 20,000 people had been injured.

• Lebanon: Israel has killed at least 1,238 people, including more than 120 children, in Lebanon, according to yesterday’s figures from the country’s Health Ministry.

• US troops: At least 13 US troops have died in incidents related to the war.

• Israel: At least 25, including six Israeli soldiers, have been killed and thousands injured in Iranian and Hezbollah attacks in Israel.

• Elsewhere in the region: Dozens of others have been killed across the region, including four Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank.

And in more Iran war news…

• Oil and uranium: Trump may want Iran’s oil, but according to the Wall Street Journal, he’s also considering an operation to “extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium.” Such a mission would be extremely risky and dangerous for US troops, experts noted.

• Spain closes airspace to US military: Spain has closed its airspace to US aircraft involved in strikes on Iran, further cementing its opposition to the war after already saying the US cannot use joint military bases inside the country to launch attacks.

• War widens: Iranian-backed Houthis claimed responsibility for missiles fired at Israel from Yemen, the first since the war began.

• Israel kills reporters: An Israeli strike killed three Lebanese journalists, including Al-Mayadeen’s Fatima Ftouni, her brother, Mohammed, and Al-Manar’s Ali Shuaib. Their car was reportedly clearly marked “press.” Israel admitted to targeting Shuaib, whom it accused without evidence of being part of Hezbollah’s intelligence unit – an allegation the group, which controls Al-Manar, denied. Israel also admitted that it photoshopped an image of Shuaib in a Hezbollah uniform.

• ‘Buffer zone’: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would “further expand” operations in southern Lebanon, though it was not clear if he was referring to territory beyond the Litani River. More than a million people have already been displaced.

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A recent report shows that more than 11,000 US citizen children have had their parents detained by ICE. Of these arrests, nearly 60% have resulted in deportations. The impacts of such enforcement are undeniable – the Trump administration is leaving many children without their parents, resulting in devastating trauma and family separation.

What’s also troubling is the limited coverage that this story is receiving. Despite the urgency of the situation, only 10 outlets have covered the latest reports, and none of them were right-leaning news sources. This means that regardless of your political views, you may never see this story.

In a time this turbulent, don’t miss out on the facts. Ground News is a news app and website that scans 50,000+ articles while offering built-in bias comparisons, factuality checks, and funding transparency for every source. The Blindspot feature also highlights stories like this one that you might miss in your daily reading.

With Ground News’ sVantage Plan, information becomes your superpower. Learn more at ground.news/zeteox and get 40% off the Vantage Plan for just $5 a month.

(This portion of the post was sponsored content)

AOC Hits Back

Last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rankled the left by voting against an amendment from conservative Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to block $500 million for Israel’s Iron Dome and missile defense programs.

Ocasio-Cortez argued at the time that the measure would do “nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel,” and would only target defensive aid “while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue.” She ended up voting against the overall military funding bill and, to be clear, even Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot agrees that she has never actually “voted to approve weapons sales or major military aid packages to Israel.”

Nevertheless, eight months later, AOC is still catching heat from some on the left for her vote on the Iron Dome amendment – and now she’s hitting back.

Political commentator Ana Kasparian, from The Young Turks, tweeted at Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday, “You should vote to send Israel more money for weapons!”

AOC replied with a burn: “I never have. Feel free to continue lying publicly, though. Those checks don’t cash themselves and you aren’t talented enough to be relevant with the truth.”

🗞️ What You Need to Know

• DHS chaos: With the partial shutdown dragging on and airport misery ongoing, Republicans who failed to pass funding tried to pass the buck. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said senators had “buyer’s remorse” after voting to fund DHS but not ICE or part of Customs and Border Protection, but didn’t name any.

• House of Mouse: Lindsey Graham didn’t let the DHS mess stop him from flying to Disney World. TMZ published snaps of the senator breakfasting at Chef Mickey’s. Graham said he flew to Orlando to meet Trump envoy Steve Witkoff.

• Endorsement watch: Justice Democrats, backer of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Summer Lee, and other progressives, announced new endorsements: Saikat Chakrabarti in California’s 11th district and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey’s 12th.

• DNC vs. AIPAC?: The Democratic National Committee will next month consider a resolution criticizing the pro-Israel lobby group by name, Semafor reported. The measure also “condemns the growing influence of dark money and corporate-backed independent expenditures in Democratic elections."

• Piker likers: Three possible Democratic presidential hopefuls – Gavin Newsom, Ro Khanna, and Rahm Emanuel – told Politico they would speak to left-wing influencer Hasan Piker. Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, and Elissa Slotkin said no – even though they’re all happy to go on Islamphobe Bill Maher’s HBO show!

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🧠 Pop Quiz!

As a child, Senator Lindsey Graham earned a distinctive nickname from the patrons of the Sanitary Café, the bar his father owned in Central, South Carolina. What was it?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

🚨 Don’t Miss It!

Will Trump carry out a ground operation in Iran? Join Mehdi and Prem TODAY at 11am ET, 8am PT, or 4pm GMT, for Zeteo’s ‘Ask the Editor.”

TUNE IN HERE

Anywhere But America

• 🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: An Israeli airstrike today killed at least three Palestinians in Gaza City. Over the weekend, Israel killed at least 10, including a 15-year-old boy as he was returning home after collecting aid at a UN food distribution point.

• 🇵🇸 More press attacks: Israeli soldiers detained CNN journalists in the occupied West Bank, after putting the crew’s photojournalist in a chokehold. In a rare condemnation, Israel said the soldiers’ actions represented a “serious ethical incident” and that the battalion would be suspended from operations in the West Bank, though as Al Jazeera noted, soldiers often face no significant consequences for wrongdoing.

• 🇷🇺 🇨🇺 Oil in: The US will allow a Russian tanker to reach Cuba, after a months-long blockade that has caused blackouts and amid dire threats from Donald Trump.

• 🇳🇵 Oli out: Nepal’s former prime minister Khadga Prasad Oli and former home minister Ramesh Lekhak were arrested over the deaths of protesters in September, shortly after ex-rapper Balendra Shah was elected prime minister.

• 🇸🇩 Sudan death toll climbs: At least 14 people were killed, and 23 others injured, in the central region of Kordofan of Sudan after the Rapid Support Forces and their allies carried out a targeted attack on residential areas in the city of Dilling.

• 🇨🇦 Canada’s NDP looks for comeback: Canada’s primary progressive party, the New Democrats (NDP), elected Avi Lewis, the husband of Zeteo contributor Naomi Klein, as its new leader in a decisive first ballot vote.

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📊 Chart of the Day

With the SAVE Act, Republicans are proposing that over 5 million voting-age Americans have to drive at least an hour just to register to vote.

🧠 Trivia answer: “Stinkball.”

📺 Sunday Show Roundup

• On CBS’s ‘Face the Nation,’ Border Czar Tom Homan said that the agency is planning to “continue an ICE presence” at airports until they feel that airports are fully staffed.

• Meanwhile, on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ GOP Senator James Lankford called Democrats’ demand for ICE to be kept away from polling places “absolutely absurd” – because obeying the law that bans federal officers from the polls is crazy, right?

• “They trained activists to obstruct justice, encouraged them to put themselves in harm’s way, knowing they could get harmed. They got two martyrs, then they used their martyrs as their excuse to try to defund law enforcement.” That’s Senator Ron Johnson’s outlandish explanation on Fox for why Democrats are to blame for the partial DHS shutdown.

• The GOP controls the House, Senate, and White House, but has failed to control the DHS funding battle. When Fox’s Maria Bartiromo called this out, GOP Rep. Lisa McClain had no good response – chalking up the fight to “radical Democrats” wanting open borders.

• Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said Trump lied about being in talks with Iran. “He just made it up that they’re in negotiations with the Iranians,” he told Margaret Brennan of CBS News.

🗓️ Mark Your Calendars

• Monday, March 30: A federal court is scheduled to hold a hearing in the New York Times’s case accusing the Pentagon of violating a court order blocking its restrictive press access policy.

• Tuesday, March 31: The Endangered Species Committee, aka the “God Squad” to environmental groups, is set to meet to consider exempting oil and gas drillers in the Gulf of Mexico from a mandate aimed at protecting endangered species.

• Wednesday, April 1: The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over Trump’s bid to restrict birthright citizenship – one of the most high-profile cases this term. Plus, the launch window for NASA’s Artemis II mission, set to be the first crewed flight around the moon in more than half a century, will open.

• Thursday, April 2: A US District Court will hold a hearing on a proposed $72.5 million settlement in a lawsuit from victims of Jeffrey Epstein, alleging Bank of America aided in their abuse.

ICYMI From Zeteo

Zeteo’s Martin Pengelly, Akshay Gokul, and Ninar Taha contributed to this newsletter.

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Still want to get Zeteo content, but not this newsletter? You can unsubscribe directly from ‘First Draft’ by going to ‘manage subscription’ in Substack, scrolling down, and toggling the button for ‘First Draft’ off.

Good morning! Swin and Andrew here, with a story of war, intrigue, and psychological warfare in the Trump-Vance era, one that “a lot of people” are talking about, as Donald Trump likes to say.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we peel back the onion on the “gayatollah” story put out about Mojtaba Khamenei, Trump will be the first president to put his signature on US dollars, and does it feel like the US president always escalates his war on the weekends?

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Inside the ‘Gayatollah’ MAGA Group Chat

In recent weeks, following the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, several Trump administration officials and some of their close outside allies cooked up a plan to run a psyop against their Iranian enemies and the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, four sources tell us.

The idea was to plant a public narrative about how US intelligence agencies had classified information strongly indicating that Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is gay and closeted. Under the regime in Tehran, LGBTQ Iranians are, of course, persecuted – and during Trump’s war on Iran, his administration has sought to sow discord, chaos, and division among the Iranian people and their government.

There is one issue, though: There is no intel, certainly no credible intel, indicating he’s gay – the idea was fabricated and pushed behind the scenes in the past several weeks by a cohort of Trump advisers, US government personnel, and MAGAworld associates, two people with knowledge of the matter and another two sources briefed on it tell us.

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Some of them have been having a good laugh about it ever since. “We wanted to mindfuck [the Iranians] with gay shit,” one of the knowledgeable sources says. Another source – a Trump administration official familiar with how this all went down – adds that one of their MAGA group chats is titled, simply: “gayatollah.”

By late Thursday night, the White House had not responded to our request for comment. However, not long after we emailed our comment request, Trump suddenly appeared on TV blabbing about the topic.

The president was asked by Fox’s Jesse Watters if the CIA had told him that the new supreme leader is gay. “Well, they did say that, but I don’t know if it was only them,” Trump replied. “I think a lot of people are saying that, which puts him off to a bad start in that particular country.”

As you would expect, Trump went on to claim he “did very well with the gay vote” (he did not) and that “no Republican’s ever gotten the gay vote like I did.”

The “gayatollah” tale burst into the public domain earlier this month – in spectacular, tabloid-y fashion.

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Hi, all. It’s Swin and Andrew, again. Swin is heading to Minnesota at the end of this week to cover, among other things, what is expected to be a huge “No Kings” rally in St. Paul. Bruce Springsteen says he will be there too, because he wants “to meet the moment.” Good for him. If you’re in the Twin Cities area this week, feel free to drop him a line at asawin@zeteonews.com. 🙂

Now let’s get started… In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Pete Hegseth has a new nickname inside the Pentagon, ICE misled about immigration court arrests, and Antony Blinken admitted he “could have done better,” even as he defended giving Israel weapons to carry out its genocide.

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‘Dumb McNamara’

Donald Trump’s so-called “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has earned himself a new nickname, current and former US officials tell us. Among various staffers and officials working within the august confines of the Pentagon and Department of Defense, the former ‘Fox & Friends’ co-host and “death and destruction”-obsessed Trump acolyte is known as “Dumb McNamara.”

This is, of course, a reference to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, an architect of American military escalation in Vietnam who, despite his disastrous record, maintained a reputation as a brilliant, shrewd thinker. It is exceedingly hard to find anyone in the corridors of Washington power – or anywhere on the planet – who would label Hegseth a brilliant mind.

However, the nickname “Dumb McNamara” has spread within the US government due to Hegseth’s cheerleading of the war and bombing blitzes – overzealous bloodlust and enthusiasm for military fiasco that reminds American officials of, well, a very stupid version of Robert McNamara. “We negotiate with bombs,” Hegseth said Tuesday. “You have a choice, as we loiter over the top of Tehran.”

Oh, it was over the top, alright…

Trump has seemed eager to shift some credit (or blame, depending on who you ask) for his disastrous war in Iran to Hegseth. Earlier this week, the president said, “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

It’s Trump’s war, to be sure, but as things continue to go south, it’s easy to see the president’s Iran bloodbath getting framed as “Hegseth’s war,” in the way Vietnam famously became “McNamara’s war.”

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Good Morning! Andrew here. What happens when a Mad King gains total control over a government built for dysfunction? Today’s answer: US air travelers have a very bad time.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we review one of the many ways Donald Trump and MAGA are breaking America, likely Democratic presidential candidate Gavin Newsom has changed his mind about Israel being an “apartheid state,” and the Supreme Court could help Trump mistreat more immigrants.

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Has Trump Made the US a ‘Shithole Country’?

Donald Trump likes to make racist complaints about immigrants from “shithole countries.” He recently described Somalia as a “fourth-world” nation, claiming: “They don’t have government … They shoot each other all over the place.”

The United States, the exceptional nation that it is, has a higher gun mortality rate than Somalia. And in Trump’s second term, our already dysfunctional government is operating according to the whims, edicts, and tantrums of America’s first Mad King. It is absolutely breaking our country.

Take a look at US airports, where travelers have been waiting in three- and four-hour TSA security lines, with many missing their flights, because of a partial government shutdown. At several major airports, security lines have stretched to parking garages outside.

Republicans have repeatedly rejected offers from Democrats to end the partial shutdown. Democrats have refused to provide new money to ICE without reforms, after Trump turned the agency into a masked secret-police force that racially profiles and kidnaps people off the streets, kills US citizens on camera, and acts as his personal militia.

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Now consider this: When an Air Canada jet collided with a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night, killing two pilots and injuring dozens of people, federal safety investigators were significantly delayed in responding to the accident due to the excessively long security lines.

National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy said Monday that an “air traffic control specialist” had been stuck in a TSA line in Houston for three hours until her team called “to beg, to see if we can get her through.”

Insane, right? The incident occurred after the president forbade Republicans from reaching a deal with Democrats to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and start paying TSA workers again. Trump has demanded Republicans pass his sprawling, dangerous voter-suppression bill as part of a shutdown deal.

Instead of accepting a bipartisan deal on Sunday, Trump made the personal, political, partisan decision to send ICE agents to major airports – underscoring just one reason why Democrats aren’t comfortable giving ICE more money without reforms.

On Tuesday, Trump said Republicans and Democrats may be “fairly close” to a funding deal – but added that he is “not happy” about it. He said Democrats had “hurt our country” by refusing to fund ICE, and had done so “at a very difficult time because, we are at, they would say, a war.”

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Good morning! Prem here. Thinking about contingency. Would the Iraq War have unfolded how it did if the chads weren’t hanging in Florida in 2000? Where would we be if Kamala Harris had said literally anything other than “not a thing comes to mind” when asked if she’d do anything differently than Joe Biden? What would the world look like if someone had given Donald Trump a reality show he stuck with, instead of a political Napoleon complex? And what coin-flips will we look back on with horror, if we don’t see them now?

In today’s ‘First Draft’, I pose to you: are Israeli and US forces using human shields? Plus, Trump is sending ICE agents to airports to “help” the TSA agents he is refusing to pay (a dry run of sending them to the polls in seven months) – and speaking of, the Supreme Court is considering a decision that would stop certain mail-in ballots from being counted.

Here we go…

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Human Shield of Lies

For two and a half years, the US and Israeli governments and their media allies all justified the Israeli military’s horrific bombing of hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza on the grounds that Hamas was hiding its fighters and military infrastructure in civilian areas and, therefore, using Palestinians as “human shields.”

Now, as the US and Israel continue their illegal war on Iran, one could question who is actually using “human shields.”

Months before the war, the US evacuated hundreds of troops from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, moving some to hotels in the region. A US official and another source familiar told NBC News this was in order to keep them out of harm’s way. If Palestinian fighters or Iranian soldiers had been moved in such a fashion, you could imagine the US or Israel contending that civilians had actually been put in harm’s way.

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In the days leading up to the war, the US was placing refueling tanker airplanes at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport – the country’s busiest, serving thousands of civilians every day. During the war, it has been used for refueling.

Iranian airstrikes have killed US service members in a “makeshift operations center” at a civilian port in Kuwait and injured US personnel at a hotel in Bahrain. Inside Israel, apartment buildings were destroyed when Iran targeted an Israeli nuclear research center in retaliation for Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear sites.

It’s unclear why Israeli officials placed nuclear infrastructure near residential homes, or why US officials have positioned US military assets in and around civilian infrastructure.

“We started by attacking their military bases. They have evacuated their military bases and gone to the hotels and made human shields for themselves,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi said, shortly after the US and Israel began the war.

In Israel’s case, it’s structural. As CNN’s Jim Sciutto described two years ago, the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s international intelligence agency, is in “a densely-populated area” within Tel Aviv, “with civilians around it.”

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Good morning! Swin and Andrew here, with an update on Donald Trump’s illegal, pointless, disastrous, and expanding war in Iran. Our idiot president has, for decades, wanted to “go in and take” Kharg Island and seize Iran’s oil infrastructure – and because he’s surrounded himself with cultists and sycophants in his second term, he’ll get to carry out his fantasy, if that’s what he chooses.

The only problem? Well, many Americans would likely die pointlessly.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the Trump administration knows many Americans will die if he invades Kharg Island, Trump and Iran exchange dire threats to life-sustaining infrastructure, and ICE is heading to America’s airports.

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A ‘Considerable’ Body Count

Senior Trump administration officials have been briefed on US casualty estimates – prepared by military and intelligence personnel – for a variety of possible ground invasion scenarios in their illegal Iran war, two sources familiar with the situation and another person briefed on it tell us.

In multiple scenarios, if Donald Trump were to invade and try to occupy Kharg Island for an extended period of time, American casualties would very likely be “considerable,” one of the people familiar with the matter says. Some estimates, the first two sources tell us, are easily in the dozens for an initial phase of occupation, with numbers likely to rise sharply if President Trump wished to hold the island for an extended duration.

Some of the internal Kharg analysis has been shared directly with Trump in recent weeks, sources stress.

Trump has long been fascinated with Kharg Island, which holds the bulk of Iran’s oil exports. During his Art of the Deal book tour in 1988, Trump said he would “go in and take it.”

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Harrison Mann, a former US intelligence analyst, has written for Zeteo about why a Kharg Island invasion is a bad idea. He writes further for the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft blog: “For the troops unlucky enough to receive orders to take Kharg, the operation would land somewhere between a suicide mission and a self-imposed hostage crisis.”

As he explains, it’s not clear what the point of the Kharg mission would be, because securing Iran’s oil infrastructure might not necessarily create much leverage for Trump. “The opportunity to inflict a mass casualty event that could sap limited US public support for the war, or to hold entire battalions as de facto hostages, may well appear more valuable to Tehran than oil revenue,” Mann adds.

Joe Kent, Trump’s former director of counterterrorism, who just resigned over Trump’s Iran war, told the Washington Post that a Kharg invasion “would be a disaster.”

“It would essentially be giving Iran a bunch of hostages on an island that they could barrage with drones and missiles,” he said.

One thing was obvious to us lately: A good number of Zeteo’s well-placed sources, in and close to the US government, are leaking things like this to us (and, we’re sure, others in the media and elsewhere) because they do not want the president to pull the trigger on this. They say they think a ground invasion, whether protracted or not, would be an inevitable bloodbath and political disaster for the American side.

We will be straight with you: We do not think their efforts to spook President Trump out of this are going to work. We really hope we are wrong.

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