First Draft: 🇨🇺 Is Cuba Next?
Trump’s administration is discussing plans to attack and kidnap Cuban leaders, while also turning down an offer from Iran to end the war. Plus: Republicans debate whether to hate... the pope.
On this day in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Three more presidents – James A Garfield, William McKinley, and John F Kennedy – have been assassinated. Donald Trump is one of 13 presidents who have survived assassination attempts.
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.
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.