First Draft: The ‘Peace President’ Threatens an Apocalypse on Iran. AGAIN
Another day, another set of gleeful promises of war crimes from the White House. Plus, Donald Trump's approval rating hits a new low while an AIPAC-backed Democrat is greeted by boos in Michigan.
On this day in 1979, President Jimmy Carter was photographed fending off an angry rabbit while fishing from a boat on a Georgia pond. The story was widely seen to have contributed to Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.
Hello, readers – it’s Swin again. Some of you have no doubt grown accustomed to my incessant ‘Simpsons’ references in this newsletter, seeing as how quoting clips from that show is one of the few ways I know how to adequately convey the sheer stupidity of the Trump-Vance era. This morning, I have another for you: President Donald Trump’s negotiation skills during this phase of his illegal war with Iran have been on par with the pre-hockey game deal Chief Wiggum strikes with the criminals at Springfield’s jail. But as this past weekend showed, on top of the self-defeating tactics and bumbling own goals, you also get this president’s mentally desiccated eruptions of insatiable bloodlust.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump issues more genocidal threats while oil prices rise and his approval rating craters, and, in Michigan, a centrist Democrat backed by AIPAC and eyeing a seat in the US Senate finds support in short supply.
Worst. Run. War. Ever.
Nearly two weeks ago, Mehdi and I were on a Zeteo livestream, offering our live reactions to Donald Trump’s just announced decision to back off from his own deadline for his own war, for which the self-professed “PEACE PRESIDENT” had vowed an explicitly genocidal, “civilization”-destroying blitz of war crimes on the Iranian people, if they didn’t give what he demanded. Trump, thankfully, blinked.
A hyper-tenuous two-week ceasefire (if you can call it that while keeping a straight face) would emerge. Still, on that livestream, I issued a warning to our viewers: That same night, Trump administration officials, citing recent conversations with the president, were stressing to us in real time that the chances that Trump would escalate the war anyways were still extremely high. At the end of the stream, Mehdi asked the panel if we’d be back in two weeks, talking about how everything went to shit. I wagered less than two weeks, hoping I’d be wrong.
It’s been less than two weeks, and we’re coming off of a weekend where the former host of NBC’s ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ somehow turned president of the United States is not only back to his schtick of casually threatening an apocalyptic barrage of infrastructure-destroying attacks and mass murder, but he’s once again sharply escalating his war of aggression in the Middle East.
“My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan – They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations … We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY,” Trump posted Sunday morning.
Later, he announced that US armed forces had, in yet another dramatic escalation, attacked and seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship near the Strait of Hormuz, as the Americans and Iranians continued their dueling blockades. Iran’s government has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the war, choking off the flow of oil and sending energy prices soaring, throttling the global economy.
Two senior US officials and two Trump advisers I spoke to this weekend all expected the war to significantly intensify very soon.