The average price of a gallon of gasoline is now about $3.88, according to AAA. In eight states, it’s over $4/gallon. Happy Thursday.
What Nobody’s Telling Trump
by William Kristol
I doubt anyone on the inside is willing to tell President Trump the truth about how the war is going. But if some courageous truth-teller were to enter the Oval Office this morning and speak, he’d say this: It ain’t going great, sir. In fact, sir, it’s going pretty badly.
And if the president didn’t have this intrepid soul removed from his presence, and would listen for a minute or two, this is what more he would hear:
The Iranian regime is surviving.
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed—except to those ships the Iranians want to allow to go through, delivering Iranian oil to their allies.
Global energy prices continue to rise and stock markets continue to fall. Inflation is ticking up and the Fed looks more likely to raise than cut interest rates in the near future.
Iran’s military capabilities aren’t as degraded as we thought. In fact, Iran’s missile and drone launches, which had been declining in number over the first two weeks, have increased this week.
Some of those missiles and drones are hitting their targets: After Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field yesterday in a strike you pretended we didn’t know about ahead of time, Iran retaliated by hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan terminal, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility.
As the Economist put it yesterday, “Although President Donald Trump says he has ‘destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability’, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy.”
We’re facing a decision about deploying thousands of ground troops to try either to secure the Strait of Hormuz or to seize Kharg Island—and neither operation is assured of success.
The Defense Department says we need to go to Congress for a supplemental appropriation—as much as $200 billion—to pay for the war and replenishing stocks, and it’s not clear the votes are there to approve the funds.
Meanwhile, our allies abroad aren’t rallying to us.
And there’s no sign that the American public is rallying to the administration either.
That’s what an honest analyst would tell the president of the United States.
But that’s surely not happening.
Instead of receiving intelligence briefings, President Trump is watching Fox. And what he heard last night was his most influential aide, Stephen Miller, telling Laura Ingraham that “President Trump has calculated through every permutation and every degree of strategy,” and that we are en route to “an overwhelming victory.”
And so, as we find ourselves in an increasingly dangerous hole of our own making, we will keep on digging.
Is there any way to get the truth in front of a president who doesn’t want to hear it? Share your ideas in the comments.
The Remaining Threats from Iran
by Mark Hertling
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus believed the greatest danger to powerful nations was not external enemies but hubris—the arrogance that comes from believing success makes one invulnerable. That hubris always summoned Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, who then punished arrogant heroes and leaders.
That warning is worth remembering as the United States continues its war with Iran.
Iranian military planners have long understood that they cannot defeat Western militaries in a conventional fight, tank against tank, airplane against airplane, rocket against missile. As a result, Iran has invested heavily in asymmetric warfare—methods designed not to win battles but to impose strategic pain: cyber-attacks, killer drones, proxy militias and terrorism, economic disruption, and covert influence operations. American soldiers in Iraq got a taste of Iranian-made explosively formed penetrators—the hand-tooled, conical improvised explosives that could disable an Abrams tank and cause devastating casualties. I estimate about a quarter of the soldiers killed and wounded in my organization in 2007–2008 were victims of Iranian-supplied EFPs.
Right now, the facets of the U.S. government designed to protect the country and its people against exactly the myriad types of unconventional attacks used by Iran are largely distracted, gutted, unfunded, reassigned, or otherwise below capacity. Despite the U.S. military’s overwhelming success against the Iranian armed forces over the last three weeks, the United States is still vulnerable to Iranian retribution.
Tehran has spent years building a cyber capability designed to exploit poorly defended networks—banks, utilities, transportation systems, hospitals, and communications networks—to disrupt civilian infrastructure during a crisis. This makes the administration’s early dismantling of one of America’s most important cyber defenses troubling.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was created in 2018, during the first Trump administration. Congress elevated that office into a standalone operational agency for the purpose of strengthening our government’s ability to defend against cyber threats. Yet beginning in 2025, when DOGE was in full swing, the agency lost personnel, saw programs curtailed, and had its partnerships with state governments and private industry disrupted. Now, when cyber retaliation from Iran seems most likely, our nation’s central cyber defense coordination has been weakened.
The resignation of Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, raised another warning flag. The NCTC sits at the center of the intelligence architecture created after September 11th, integrating terrorism intelligence across agencies so that fragments of warning do not fall through bureaucratic cracks. Kent stepped down amid disagreements about how the Iranian threat was being characterized. No matter the reason for his resignation or the president’s comments about his competence, the departure of this top counterterrorism official during an expanding conflict against the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism is not comforting. It suggests tension between policy and intelligence at the very moment when alignment between the two matters most.
That tension appears elsewhere, too. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified last year that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, an assessment the president publicly dismissed. This week, Gabbard disclaimed all responsibility—not just for herself but by extension for the whole American intelligence community—for determining whether Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the United States before the start of the war. “The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president,” she told Congress yesterday. As the conflict with Tehran intensified, the intelligence community’s voice has been subdued and political rhetoric has been amplified.
While the intelligence community is sidelined, the Transportation Security Agency isn’t being paid. Roughly 50,000 TSA officers have been working without pay due to a government funding standoff, and absentee rates have spiked at several airports. Travelers tend to view TSA as an inconvenience—the lines, the bins, the removal of shoes and laptops—but terrorists see something different: a critical barrier that prevents their freedom of action. Not paying those who stand on that front line during a period of heightened threat is not fiscal discipline; it’s strategic negligence.
The state of the FBI’s counterterrorism and counterintelligence posture raises additional concerns. The bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces in all 56 field offices across the country remain a central pillar of the post–September 11th homeland defense system. But the reporting over the past year is alarming: staff cuts, reassignments, reduced domestic-terror tracking, large diversions of FBI personnel toward immigration enforcement, and an increasing distrust in the FBI’s leadership. Just days before the United States attacked Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly fired many of the special agents responsible for Iranian threats.
When the vigilance and capabilities of multiple agencies weaken, especially during a time of increased threats, risk grows exponentially.
The security architecture the United States built after 9/11—fusion centers, joint task forces, aviation screening, cyber defense coordination, and integrated intelligence analysis—was designed around lessons learned through tragedy. Preventing attacks requires constant vigilance and disciplined coordination across agencies.
None of the singular developments unfolding today suggests that the United States will suffer a terrorist attack. But taken together—the weakening of cyber defenses against Iranian retaliation, the resignation of the nation’s top counterterrorism integrator, intelligence–policy friction during wartime, underpaid airport security personnel, and counterterror investigators redirected to other missions—show a troubling erosion of institutions designed to keep Americans safe.
The Trump administration is gloating about the destruction of the Iranian military. I worry that Nemesis is waiting.
AROUND THE BULWARK
How to Counter the GOP’s AI Psyops… Leaning into authenticity is key, argues MAX FLUGRATH.
Tulsi Gabbard: Director of National Ignorance… Slapped down by Trump, she says it’s not her job to assess threats to the United States, writes WILL SALETAN.
About Those Women Fleeing the Misogynistic Right… And the story of CATHY YOUNG’s own wakeup call.
Quick Hits
A STAR IS BORN: The intra-GOP rupture over the resignation of counterterrorism official Joe Kent is growing. Semafor reports that the FBI has opened a leak investigation into Kent, with administration sources saying that the investigation predates Kent’s departure. (Could be!) Despite the White House’s attempt to unperson him, Kent has quickly become a folk hero in alt-MAGA media—he went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast last night, and will be interviewed tonight by Candace Owens at an event hosted by the group Catholics for Catholics. “You wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms?” Megyn Kelly tweeted last night. “Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson. See how that works out.”
The resignation has cranked up the heat on other war-averse members of the administration, who are responding in their own ways. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—a peacenik former Democrat whose entire connection to Trump hinges on his supposed anti-war bona fides, and who brought Kent into the administration—poker-faced her way through a Senate hearing yesterday, insisting the only person who could determine whether Iran had posed an “imminent threat” to America before the war was the president. And JD Vance tried to write Kent’s resignation off as a “difference of opinion,” saying at a Michigan event that he knew and liked Kent but that “if you are on the team and you can’t help implement the decisions of [Trump’s] administration . . . then it’s a good thing for you to resign.” No word on how JD feels about the FBI investigation.
CARR ALARM: Last week, we mentioned FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s habit of popping up every few months, issuing a few threats against TV stations’ broadcast licenses because they’re too woke or whatever, then vanishing from the headlines again. But as a sharp new Politico story suggests, the more important story may be the quiet influence Carr is wielding in the meantime, as sweaty, skittish TV lawyers move to comply with his threats in advance:
Consequences for violating the [equal time] rule would likely be minimal under the law, which would penalize only broadcasters showing patterns of willful violation, Schwartzman said. “Everybody knows this is all bluster,” he said.
Carr, though, has phrased some of his warnings as cautions to TV stations whose broadcasting licenses come up for renewal: “The law is clear,” he wrote in his complaint last weekend about allegedly skewed news coverage. “Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
It’s ultimately impossible to know how many interviews may never happen as a result of the guidance, or how many more TV hosts will just host candidates on platforms like YouTube to avoid triggering the equal time requirement.
Carr’s partisan deployment of the FCC’s powers are a headache now, but they may come back to bite the GOP later: Some Democrats are already threatening to use Carr’s precedent to go after conservative talk radio. Read the whole thing.
FIRST THING WE DO, LET’S KILL ALL THE WIND FARMS: One of the biggest structural failings of the Trump administration has always been its bizarre unwillingness—or inability—to consider even the most predictable policy tradeoffs. The administration wants to isolate China economically, but it also wants to pick constant trade fights with everybody else as well. Trump can’t or won’t see that these two purposes are in tension, which might make him decide it’s worth swallowing his small-bore grievances toward Europe, Canada, and Japan to keep everybody focused on China. So he tries to do both, and fails.
The same goes for energy. Trump has always made low energy costs a central part of his political pitch. But he also nurses a giant grudge—part political, part personal—against all forms of green energy, and has therefore pursued a Jekyll-and-Hyde energy policy of wheedling the fossil-fuel industry to ramp up production while trying to strangle renewables projects across the board.
Before the Iran war, this campaign already looked misguided in a long-term environment of constant upward pressure on energy prices due to factors like data-center construction. It looks insane today, with fossil-fuel prices raging out of control due to the war. And yet the administration is still going at it as hard as ever. Take offshore wind. After trying and failing (and failing and failing and failing) to simply vaporize a number of planned large wind projects off the East Coast, the White House is now pivoting to a new tack: If we can’t block the firms from constructing, maybe we can just buy them out?
“Senior administration officials are drafting settlement agreements that would pay nearly $1 billion to TotalEnergies, the French energy company behind two wind farms off New York State and North Carolina” the New York Times reported this week. “In exchange, TotalEnergies would abandon its plans to begin building the wind farms. It would also commit to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas, as the Trump administration prioritizes the production of fossil fuels over renewables like wind and solar power.”
IT’S MARKWAYNE: Barring some crazy new development, it looks like Sen. Markwayne Mullin is going to sail through the confirmation process to replace Secretary Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security. His hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee had some fireworks—most notably, he refused to apologize to the committee chair, Sen. Rand Paul, for saying this year he “understood” why Paul’s neighbor had physically attacked him over a personal dispute in 2017. But while Paul said he intends to vote against Mullin’s confirmation, reliable pinch-hitter Sen. John Fetterman plans to support Mullin in Paul’s place, so that appears to be that.
What’s more interesting is what comes next. We reported weeks ago that Republicans were vaguely hoping that swapping Noem for Mullin would help them peel away enough moderate Senate Democrats to vote to re-fund DHS again. Yesterday, NOTUS confirmed that remains the plan, with a couple of handshake-style concessions thrown on top: The White House is telling senators that, under Mullin, ICE agents will wear visible ID and body cameras, and they won’t enter homes without judicial warrants—all concessions to explicit Democratic demands.
To which Democrats are responding: Call us when you’re ready to talk about our whole list. “It’s one of the reforms that we’re seeking, but by no means all of the basic changes in policy and practices that are necessary for this agency to be lawful,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told NOTUS yesterday. And they don’t just want promises from the White House; they want these concessions codified in law.
Cheap Shots
“President Trump has calculated through every permutation and every degree of strategy,” and that we are en route to “an overwhelming victory.”
Apparently not a parody.
The WSJ proclaims that Hegseth sets no time on ending the war -- only when Trump decides. Tell me this is not autocracy. Who stops this juggernaut of psychosis?