Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. A Republican senator from Louisiana just said what the president won’t: we killed those children, and we should admit it. Iran is trolling the United States with Lego propaganda. MAGA is fracturing over a war most Americans already oppose. And people are dying in ICE detention at a rate not seen in more than twenty years. Let’s get into it.
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A Republican Senator Said What Trump Won’t: We Killed Those Children
John Kennedy of Louisiana is not known for breaking with his party. But on Tuesday he broke, publicly and clearly, over the strike that killed at least 175 people at a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran.
“We’re investigating, but I’m not going to hide behind that,” Kennedy told CNN. “It was a terrible, terrible mistake. The investigation may prove me wrong. I hope so. The kids are still dead, but I think it was a horrible, horrible mistake. I wish it hadn’t happened. I’m sorry it happened. I can assure you it wasn’t intentional. That’s the sort of thing Russia does. We don’t do that. But I don’t see any other possible explanation. And when you make a mistake, you ought to admit it.”
Trump is still refusing to admit it. At his Doral press conference Monday he suggested Iran or “someone else” may have obtained a Tomahawk missile and struck their own school on the first day of the war. When pressed on why no one else in his administration supported that theory, he said: “I just don’t know enough about it.”
The countries believed to possess Tomahawk missiles are Britain, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands. None are involved in the conflict. Iran is not on the list. The president is alone in suggesting otherwise, and a senator from his own party just said so on national television.
When a president can’t look the country in the eye and say “we made a mistake and we’re sorry,” that’s not just a character failure. That’s the slow erosion of the moral authority that separates a democracy from a regime. Accountability isn’t weakness. It’s the whole point.
Iran Made a Lego Movie About This War. It’s Aimed Directly at Trump.
The Iranian state media propaganda machine has released a two-minute AI-animated video titled “Narrative of Victory,” and it opens with a Lego-style Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Satan reading through a folder marked “Jeffrey Epstein File.”
Trump becomes enraged and launches a missile at an Iranian classroom. The video doesn’t show the impact. Just a child’s backpack in the rubble. An Iranian soldier cradles it, weeping, before launching a retaliatory strike. The rest of the clip traces Iran’s missile campaign across the region, with coffins emerging from U.S. aircraft and a burning American aircraft carrier in the final frame. Stockbrokers and Saudi businessmen weep over oil prices. It ends with the soldier and the backpack.
It’s crude propaganda, but it’s not unsophisticated propaganda. The Epstein opener is deliberate. Critics have argued for weeks that Trump launched this war in part to bury the Epstein files the DOJ released late last year, which required his signature on the law mandating their publication and which mention him repeatedly. Iran is not a credible source on American politics. But they are clearly watching American politics closely enough to know which buttons to push.
This is the second Lego propaganda video Iran has released featuring Trump, Netanyahu, and Satan. Trump, for his part, has posted AI videos of himself dumping feces on protesters from a military jet and basking on a luxury resort built on the ruins of Gaza. The propaganda arms race is fully underway.
What’s dangerous here isn’t the cartoon. It’s that our enemies don’t have to invent a narrative about us anymore. They just have to point at what’s actually happening. When a president gives adversaries that much material to work with, he’s not projecting strength. He’s handing them a weapon.
MAGA Is Fracturing Over This War, and Republicans Are Starting to Worry
Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade are for the war. Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly are against it. Lindsey Graham is being attacked by people who used to worship him. And Republican members of Congress are quietly beginning to calculate what this does to their chances in November.
The Hill reported Tuesday that while Fox News’s war hawks are pushing hard-line positions, the populist right is breaking in the other direction. Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024, has called the war “nuts.” Carlson and Kelly have condemned the apparent U.S. involvement in bombing a girls’ school and are going after Graham and Hannity by name for cheering it on.
The polling is moving fast. An NPR/PBS/Marist survey released Friday found 56 percent of Americans oppose the military action and 44 percent support it. A CNN poll put disapproval at nearly 60 percent. With seven U.S. service members dead, 140 wounded, oil above $100 a barrel, and no exit strategy on offer, Republicans who voted against the war powers resolution are now watching those numbers and doing math.
“Republicans who have been supportive of the operation have expressed concerns that the conflict could become a political liability for the GOP heading into the midterms,” The Hill reported, with studied understatement. The party is already fighting to hold the House. This war is not helping.
Here’s what this fracture really tells us. The authoritarian coalition that’s been holding together since 2015 was always built on grievance, not principle. The moment the costs become real, whether it’s a dead soldier, a hundred-dollar tank of gas, or a child’s backpack in the rubble, the whole thing starts coming apart. That’s not good news for Trump. And it might be very good news for the rest of us.
People Are Dying in ICE Detention. More This Year Than in Over Two Decades.
Twenty-three people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since October. That’s more than died in all of last fiscal year, and it’s the deadliest pace in more than two decades. The most recent was a 56-year-old Haitian man held in Arizona who died after going into septic shock.
The death toll is rising as the detention population has hit nearly 70,000, its highest level in years. The surge in arrests has produced overcrowding, understaffing, unsanitary conditions, and breakdowns in medical care. In January alone, there were confirmed measles outbreaks at facilities in Arizona and Texas. One Texas facility, Camp East Montana, has had three deaths and its own outbreak. A man named Geraldo Lunas Campos died after a “struggle” with security staff at a Texas detention center. His death was classified a homicide.
The civil rights oversight office at DHS that investigates in-custody deaths was gutted by hundreds of staff cuts. The department’s Office of Detention Oversight was shut entirely during the 43-day government shutdown last fall. Five people died in ICE custody during that shutdown. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the oversight office is currently operating during the agency’s ongoing shutdown, now in its fourth week.
Secretary Kristi Noem told senators that detainees receive a medical examination within 12 hours. Medical professionals who actually worked inside those facilities told NPR they witnessed chaotic screenings and life-threatening delays in getting medication to people who needed it. A 2024 ACLU study found the vast majority of the 52 deaths in immigration detention between 2017 and 2021 were preventable with clinically appropriate care.
“As a country, we cannot accept that death in federal custody is an acceptable or inevitable outcome of American immigration policy,” said Jennifer Ibanez Whitlock of the National Immigration Law Center. The department did not respond to a request for comment on the death count.
This isn’t a border crisis. It’s a governance crisis. When you deliberately dismantle the oversight mechanisms, pack the facilities beyond capacity, and then stop responding to questions about who’s dying and why, you’re not enforcing the law. You’re running a system designed to avoid accountability for whatever happens inside it. We need to be better than this and there needs to be accountability.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. We’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
JD Vance Criticized for Silence on Iran War. Vice President JD Vance is being scrutinized by the anti-interventionist wing of the Republican Party over his relative silence regarding President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. In October of 2024, Vance pledged that the U.S. was “not going to war with Iran” if Trump was elected. Now, isolationist voices in the GOP are hesitant to support his presumed 2028 presidential candidacy given his abrupt one-eighty on Iran.
Democrat Leads in Race for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Old Seat. With nearly all ballots counted, Democrat Shawn Fuller is leading Trump-backed Republican Clayton Fuller in the race for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. The two will advance to a runoff election on April 7, as neither candidate got the required margin to win the election outright. Trump won the district in 2024 by nearly 37 points.
Leavitt Admits the SAVE Act Impacts Married Women. During a Tuesday press conference, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conceded that under the SAVE America Act — which would impose draconian new voting restrictions — married women who changed their last names would have to re-register to vote. Critics have accused the bill’s authors of aiming to lower voter turnout with bureaucratic hurdles under the guise of stopping voter fraud from noncitizens, which is effectively nonexistent.
Trump Appointee Withdraws Nomination Over Racist Remarks. Jeremy Carl — who Trump nominated to a high-ranking position in the State Department — has now withdrawn his name from consideration after failing to win over Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Carl was criticized in his confirmation hearing over comments he made about preserving “white culture,” his friendliness toward a podcast host who complained about Jewish people claiming “special victim status” after the Holocaust and for his past support of the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which alleges a plot to replace white U.S. citizens with Black and Brown immigrants. Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) stated he wouldn’t vote for Carl’s confirmation.
Federal Judges Reject Trump’s Wisconsin Prosecutor. Federal judges in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week rejected the appointment of Brad Schimel to be U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin after his 120-day interim appointment expired. Schimel was put in his role after Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) couldn’t agree on a federal prosecutor to be the district’s next U.S. attorney. Judges made clear in their ruling that the next U.S. attorney should be vetted and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, per the Constitution’s requirements.
