On this day in 1868, the US Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began. Must be nice to have only been impeached once.

Good morning, it’s Swin again. Lately, I’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s version of “War” a lot – a cover he performed in the 1980s to protest the agenda of another Republican president who ran on “Making America Great Again.” I suggest you do so too, given how badly the current MAGA president wants to criminally investigate Springsteen for engaging in free speech. (Also, it’s a banger rendition of the Edwin Starr / Temptations song.)

Speaking of WAR, in today’s ‘First Draft,’ President Donald Trump starts to sweat the growing American body count, barely anyone in the Pentagon has any clue what’s going on, a Republican senator pulls the old switcheroo, and a displacement crisis in Afghanistan deepens.

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This Is No Way to Run a Bloodbath!

*Trump at the White House on March 4, 2026, in Washington, DC. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.*

Donald Trump’s ongoing, deeply unpopular Iran war isn’t just illegal. It isn’t merely a moral and policy abomination. It’s not just a self-inflicted political catastrophe for the GOP, whose senators are still covering Trump’s ass and just blocked a war powers resolution to stop his illegal military actions. And it isn’t just a problem for the Trump-Vance administration and a president whose tanking approval numbers are dragging down his party during a critical election year. It is already the worst-run war in the history of the United States, and the war isn’t even a week old yet.

After months of classified briefings on how US casualties were all but a given if he picked this fight, the self-styled “Peace President” got American troops killed in a completely unnecessary war with all the prudence that you or I would devote to a decision to renew or cancel an HBO Max subscription.

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When his administration isn’t lying through its teeth about the justifications for war, it’s busy being publicly confused about what its own mission is… or engaging in rapid-fire self-contradictions… or simply making it up as it goes along. Several close Trump allies tell me that even they are shocked by how vanishingly little this PR-and-polls-obsessed president bothered to sell the case for war to the public.

When the mics are hot, Trump has glossed over the rising number of US military deaths, stressed that more are likely to die, and claimed he’s willing to stay in it for the long haul, “whatever it takes.” But privately, Trump has voiced extreme unease about how the rising American body count “looks,” and few officials close to him believe he has tolerance for a protracted quagmire, sources with knowledge of the matter tell me.

First Draft: 🤬 Is This the Worst-Run War in…

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