💣 Iran Humiliates Trump Again as His Imperial Bloodlust Surges
After exchanging strikes with Tehran, and after two wild NATO days in Turkey, the president flew home. In Maine, Graham Platner bowed to massive pressure and suspended his Democratic Senate campaign.
On this day in 1850, President Zachary Taylor, 65, died after only 16 months in office, of cholera, four days after consuming large quantities of cherries, iced milk, and water in an attempt to cope with summer in DC. (It’s 84 degrees in the capital today.)
Happy Thursday – it’s Swin. I’ve written before about how President Donald Trump’s war on Iran is not only the worst-run war in U.S. history, it’s clearly also the most Orwellian. And this week is sadly no exception. To the Trump-Vance administration, war is peace, bloodletting and bombings are ceasefires and deal-making, and a ceasefire can be declared “over” even if it never really began.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we delve into how the Trump White House is revving the boneheaded-imperialism machine back up – and getting embarrassed every step of the way. Plus, Graham Platner suspends his Senate campaign but takes a swing at Democratic elites on the way out. Let’s dive in.
‘Nobody’s Afraid of Him’
This was supposed to be over. But Donald Trump has a problem. Basically, nobody takes him seriously anymore. Not in his own government, not in Iran or elsewhere – at least when it comes to his most malevolent threats against the Islamic Republic.
“Nobody’s afraid of him right now,” one senior U.S. official tells Zeteo, as the U.S. and Iran exchange fire and accuse each other of collapsing a ceasefire that was never actually a ceasefire.
Sure, President Trump can reboot his bombing campaign, as he already did late last month and is huffily doing this week, all while claiming that maybe he doesn’t even want to cut a peace deal with the Iranians anymore. (He does… but more on that in a moment.) Trump can name-call the Iranian leadership, and he can re-threaten the grand-scale war crimes and ground invasions he and his administration actively planned for but haven’t carried out. And he can keep lying to the world that time is on his side and that he’s in no rush to end the bloodbath that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started back in February.
But ever since last month, the Iranian government has continued its campaign of humiliation against the Trump administration by refusing to bend to the U.S. president’s renewed threats of mass murder and his resumed bombing sprees. All of Trump’s violence and bluster clearly are not imposing an effective deterrence to aggressive Iranian activity, including in the key global economic leverage point of the Strait of Hormuz. There’s a good reason for that.