Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s own senior advisers have admitted publicly that nobody, including themselves, knows what the president actually intends to do in Iran. Trump showed up at the Supreme Court this morning to personally stare down nine justices during oral arguments on birthright citizenship, a move legal scholars are calling unprecedented intimidation of the judiciary. Trump is simultaneously claiming Iran’s new president asked for a ceasefire while threatening to blast the country “back to the Stone Ages.” And Trump told a British newspaper he is “beyond reconsidering” whether the United States should stay in NATO.
This is not a series of unrelated stories. This is what the systematic dismantling of institutions that constrain power looks like in real time. The free press threatened. The courts intimidated. Our allies abandoned. And the oligarchs buying up the media that is supposed to hold them accountable.
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Nobody in the White House Knows What Trump Is Doing in Iran. That May Be the Plan.
Trump’s own senior advisers have told reporters they genuinely do not know what the president intends next. “Nobody knows in the end what he’s really thinking,” one said. Others have tried to reframe the chaos as strategy. One official claimed it is deliberate: “He contradicts himself regularly, so nobody knows what he’s thinking. It’s on purpose.”
That argument would be more convincing if the contradictions weren’t accumulating by the hour. Tuesday night Trump said the U.S. was preparing to leave Iran “very soon.” Oil fell 3 percent. Wednesday morning he was threatening to blast Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” Oil climbed back. Three vessels in the Persian Gulf were hit in a single 24-hour period, throwing any near-term reopening of the Strait into serious doubt.
Secretary of State Rubio has described one set of war objectives while other officials discuss entirely different ones. White House Press Secretary Leavitt said what was being discussed publicly was “much different” from what officials were being told privately. After a classified briefing, Senator Ruben Gallego said there was no plan to exit and no clear concept of victory.
The lives of 13 dead American service members and the financial reality of every American paying nearly $4 a gallon are not a chess game. Corporate media is treating this as normal. We are not.
What we’re watching isn’t just policy confusion. It’s what happens when a government decides that accountability itself is the enemy. Democracies don’t go to war without a plan because they’re incompetent. They do it when the people in charge have decided that consequences are for other people, and that the fog of war is a tool for staying in power.
Trump Showed Up at the Supreme Court to Watch His Own Case. Legal Scholars Call It Intimidation.
Trump attended Supreme Court oral arguments Wednesday morning in the birthright citizenship case, the first known instance of a sitting president personally observing proceedings. The move was immediately condemned as an attempt to intimidate the nine justices, three of whom he appointed.
The case stems from his 2025 executive order directing agencies to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. unless at least one parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. The 14th Amendment has been understood for more than a century to grant citizenship to nearly all people born on U.S. soil. Every court that has considered the order has struck it down. A ruling for Trump could affect as many as 250,000 children born each year and create a class of U.S.-born individuals without legal status.
The legal theory behind the administration’s case was developed by John Eastman, who was disbarred for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has simultaneously promoted a “gold card” visa allowing wealthy foreigners to effectively purchase residency. The message is clear: citizenship should be purchasable by the rich and denied to the poor.
Trump’s presence in the courtroom this morning fits the pattern precisely. The same president running a war with no stated plan showed up to personally watch the court that is supposed to check his power. That is not coincidence. It is pressure.
The 14th Amendment was written in the blood of the Civil War precisely to make sure that no future government could decide who counts as a full human being based on where their parents came from. The moment a president can walk into the Supreme Court to remind justices of his power over them, we’ve crossed a line that every authoritarian in history has crossed before the real damage begins.
Trump Claims Iran Asked for a Ceasefire. Iran Has the Same President It Did Before the War.
Wednesday morning, Trump posted that Iran’s new leader was “much less Radicalized” and had “just asked the United States of America for a CEASEFIRE,” before threatening to blast Iran “back to the Stone Ages” until the Strait reopens.
There is a significant factual problem. Iran has the same president it had before the war began. Masoud Pezeshkian remains in office. It is not clear who Trump believes he is describing.
This is the pattern Raw America has documented for weeks. Trump announces productive talks. Iran denies any talks are happening. Trump extends his own deadline. Markets move. Oil falls, then rises. The cycle repeats. The people absorbing the real cost are working Americans at the pump and the families of 13 service members who came home in flag-draped caskets.
When a president can invent facts about a war in real time and face no consequence for it, something fundamental has broken. We’ve always had politicians who stretched the truth. But there’s a difference between spin and just making things up about an active military conflict while the stock market responds to your tweets. That’s not leadership. That’s using a war as a financial instrument.
Trump Says He Is “Beyond Reconsidering” NATO. Rubio Says the Alliance Has Failed.
In an interview with a British newspaper, Trump said his break with NATO is permanent. “I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too.” Secretary of State Rubio called NATO’s refusal to back the Iran war “very disappointing” and said the administration would “reexamine all of this after this operation is over.”
NATO is the alliance through which the United States maintained its global position for eight decades. Abandoning it would leave democratic allies exposed to Russian aggression at the exact moment Russia is feeding Iran targeting intelligence on U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf.
The pattern is not random. The same administration threatening the Supreme Court, defunding public media, letting billionaires buy up the press, and running a war with no exit strategy has never had use for institutions that constrain power. NATO is another one being dismantled. An independent press is the last institution that can document what is being lost and why.
NATO wasn’t just a military alliance. It was the architecture that made it possible for democracies to survive in a world that keeps producing strongmen who want to tear them down. When we walk away from it, we’re not just leaving our allies exposed. We’re telling every authoritarian on the planet that America’s word means nothing and that democratic solidarity is up for sale.
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