On this day in 1973, Richard Nixon agreed to turn over White House tapes to Judge John Sirica – a key step on the road to the threat of impeachment and removal that persuaded a Republican president to resign in disgrace.
Happy Friday… Swin here. We’re in the closing days of the extraordinarily high-stakes 2026 midterms, and if Donald Trump and the Republican Party lose control of the U.S. House and Senate in an electoral “bloodbath,” they will largely have Trump and his illegal war on Iran to thank.
So what does our genius president do next? He’s busy preparing to make the Iran war somehow even shittier and more painful for us all.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get right into the self-proclaimed “peace president’s” renewed foray into Forever War. Plus, Trump jumped into the storm over GOP Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s despicable attack ad against Democrat Amy Acton, and guess what – the president didn’t calm things down. There was also news of a startling new book about Jared Kushner. And we have an exclusive political cartoon from acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro. Let’s dig in.
Dr. Strangeloathe
It’s warmongering season in a very warmonger-y year at the White House. Or, as one Trump adviser who deplores the “Fox News retards” – their ‘r’ word, not ours – for helping drag this president into the war, puts it: “It’s moron time, again.”
President Trump’s so-called “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth recently huddled with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who started the Iran war with Trump in February. The New York Times reported that “U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections,” and that “targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal.” U.S. government officials with knowledge of the situation tell me preparations have indeed ramped up significantly, and that the menus of possible targets once again include civilian infrastructure.
Several senior officials I spoke to are (to put it mildly) massively skeptical that revving Trump’s war machine back up will bring about the (supposedly) intended result of forcing the Iranian government to make significant concessions and end the war in Trump’s favor. These officials also fear a further cratering of the U.S. and global economies, which have already suffered significantly during the oil crisis and other shockwaves caused by Trump’s war and Iran’s shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz. (This is to say nothing of the likelihood of a growing death toll in multiple nations, the danger to U.S. troops, and other inevitabilities if Trump keeps at it.)
As far as many U.S. officials are concerned, Trump, Hegseth, and the rest lost the war long ago – the president just won’t admit it. So here we are.
As for the blowback, The Guardian noted on Thursday: “Iran will strike oil facilities, undersea cables, datacentres and AI facilities across as many as seven countries in the Gulf in the event of a fresh U.S.-Israeli attack, Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, has said.”