First Draft: Trump’s Omnishambles Deepens With Dire Strait News
The Pentagon reportedly told Congress that clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz could take six months. Plus: Trump is ranting at Supreme Court justices and being racist again.
On this day in 1937, eager law student Richard Milhous Nixon applied to be a special agent for the FBI. The application was unsuccessful. Years later, FBI director J Edgar Hoover would call the FBI’s loss “ultimately … the country’s gain” – a judgment historians of the 37th president might be reluctant to accept.
Greetings, Martin here, honored to be your ‘First Draft’ author for the very first time. Before the main event, I want to point you to Mehdi’s monologue on Pete Hegseth’s Christian Crusade, aka the secretary of defense’s justifications of war against a religious fundamentalist threat to world peace, expressed in the language of a religious fundamentalist threat to world peace. There is a terrifying Christian bigot in the Pentagon, and we’d all be better off if there weren’t.
Now to today’s ‘First Draft,’ in which the Pentagon gives Congress some very bad news indeed, a racist Supreme Court rant shows even Trump knows his own hand-picked justices are about to hand him his hat, and Trump’s Navy secretary and media CEO are out.
Mine, All Mine
On Wednesday, the Washington Post published a short report that highlighted a very big problem for Donald Trump as he tries to end his catastrophic war and arrest plummeting polling.
According to the Post, the Pentagon on Tuesday told Congress that clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian mines could take six months – and efforts to do so cannot start until the war is over.
The Strait is a key waterway for trade, particularly in oil, fertilizer, and other commodities. The Post is one of the mainstream outlets Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has tried to stop reporting on the Pentagon. Hasn’t worked. Citing three sources, the paper said the timeline for clearing the Strait was “met with frustration by Democrats and Republicans alike,” as “perhaps the clearest sign that gasoline and oil prices could remain elevated long after any peace deal is reached.”
Impervious to reality as ever, Trump insists Tehran will soon “cry uncle.” But yesterday, as Iran attacked two cargo vessels in the Strait, a Nephew had ominous words for the White House.