Today, the president tells us, is judgment day in Iran. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump posted this morning. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” If his threats are to be believed, Iran must agree to open the Strait of Hormuz tonight or face—it feels strange to type it, but it’s right there in plain English—genocide. Talk about the art of the deal.
Bill and Andrew will be going live at 10 a.m. EDT for Morning Chaser today, with plenty to talk about. Tune in on Substack or YouTube. See you there. Happy Tuesday.
Trump’s Election Obsession
by Andrew Egger
If Iran caves or if it doesn’t, if Trump follows through on his threats or if he doesn’t, there will be lots to talk about tomorrow. For today, though, I wanted to turn briefly to another presidential obsession that’s gone under the radar lately: Trump’s ongoing attacks on American elections infrastructure.
So far this year, the president has failed to convince Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which among other things would require voters nationwide to show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote or vote by mail. But last week, he tried to scratch his election-meddling itch in another way: a one-weird-trick-style executive order trying to seize federal control of mail voting by creating new lists of whose ballots the Postal Service can and can’t mail.
“The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,” Trump, who himself cast a mail-in ballot to vote in Florida days before, said at the signing ceremony. “It’s horrible, what’s gone on . . . I think this will help a lot with elections.”
In all likelihood, what the order will actually do, at least as a legal matter, is nothing. Its strategy—which involves ordering the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of “approved” absentee voters, and ordering the USPS not to mail requested ballots to anybody else—is legally hilarious, a slapped-together usurpation of states’ election authorities without the slightest basis in federal law. The order has already drawn a plethora of major lawsuits, which are all but guaranteed swift success.
And yet pro-democracy advocates who are focused on the president’s election predations remain wary. Not because they think the order has a prayer in court, but because they see it as part of a larger, ongoing presidential strategy to sow doubt about future American elections, or even to attempt to meddle with their outcomes after the fact. It remains gospel in MAGA circles that Democrats fiendishly stole the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden. And Trump keeps testing the waters of how much bullying of election officials he can get away with, most notably with the FBI’s January raid on the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.
In this context, even a legal win against the order isn’t a total win. Trump still muddies the waters, still intimidates anyone connected with elections who might need the courage to stand up to him, still confuses voters about what is and isn’t allowed, and still gets another point of “rogue judges” grievance to parade before his followers as the justification for his next move.
“He can’t lose with this,” Alexandra Chandler of Protect Democracy told The Bulwark. “Because basically, if there is the faintest vanishing chance the courts didn’t stop him, then he gets a win there. If he doesn’t, he gets a win in a narrative sense, and it just is the pretext for the next round, for the next action and the next, and then the eventual denial of the [election] results.”
There’s a perverse attention trap at play here. The more insane, ludicrous stuff Trump does around the country and around the world—the war in Iran being the most obvious example—the more he hemorrhages his domestic political support. But at the same time, these controversies threaten to take our attention away from his insidious work to meddle in elections right in plain sight—efforts which, if successful, would make such trivialities as “maintaining domestic political support” pointless. Why bother with holding an electoral coalition together if you think this time around you’ll just be able to steal the whole game?
We should take heed of all this. Trump really is losing support at a remarkable rate; all the old received wisdom about the impregnability of Teflon Don really does seem to have fallen apart. But Trump still has his hands around the neck of American democracy with a much surer grip than he had in 2020. And too much of the country seems strangely confident—just as in 2020, and with even less justification now than then—that he’ll simply choose not to squeeze.
AROUND THE BULWARK
POTUS, the Macho Madman… BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break down Trump’s Iran war—driven by grievance and bravado—its potential war crimes implications, impeachment talk, and new Supreme Court retirement rumors.
The Pentagon Purge and the Moral High Ground… MARK HERTLING writes that one of the most troubling victims of the spate of dismissals at the Pentagon was Maj. Gen. William Green, the Army’s top chaplain.
SAVE THE DATE… Southern California, we’re coming to you next month—May 20–21! Tickets will be on sale soon for Bulwark Live with TIM MILLER, SARAH LONGWELL, and SAM STEIN starting in San Diego and winding up in Los Angeles. Watch your inbox and keep an eye on TheBulwark.com/events.
Quick Hits
PAIN AT THE PUMP: Think gas prices are bad now? You haven’t seen anything yet. Financial analysts at JP Morgan are warning that if Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues for another couple weeks, it may lead to nationwide gas prices above $5 a gallon. Prices have already risen nearly a dollar a gallon over the past month, sitting today at a national average of $4.14.
Trump has vacillated wildly in his public statements on the question of the strait, ping-ponging between shrugging statements that America doesn’t need it to reopen and ferocious demands that Iran reopen it immediately or face dire retribution. At his press conference yesterday, and in his post this morning, he threatened to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran unless the Iranian government agrees by tonight to remove its choke on the strait.
MORE THREATS AGAINST THE PRESS: Donald Trump has long believed that journalists who protect their government sources should face jail time. Yesterday, he issued his latest threat in this department—pledging to unmask “that leaker” who had tipped the press off about the rescue of an American pilot in Iran Friday, while efforts to find and rescue the second American shot down were still ongoing.
“We’re going to go to the media company that released it,” Trump said during his long, rambling afternoon press conference, although many outlets reported on the rescue efforts. “And we’re going to say, ‘national security, give it up or go to jail.’ And we know who, and you know who we’re talking about.”
The evidence of the American search-and-rescue effort was also available on social media, where Iranians were posting videos of specialized aircraft and sharp-eyed observers were able to determine quickly what was going on.
DATA VIOLENCE: We’ve talked before about the growing populist backlash against AI in general and data center construction in particular, and yesterday we got a particularly alarming story in that vein out of Indianapolis. Last week, Councilman Ron Gibson voted in favor of a zoning measure he had championed to allow the construction of a data center in his district. The measure passed. Then, yesterday morning, someone shot up his home. Widely reported photos of the scene showed shattered glass and a front door riddled with holes; according to Gibson, thirteen shots were fired in all. And under his doormat, someone had placed a handwritten note: “NO DATA CENTERS.” The New York Times has more:
Gunfire at his home crosses a line, Mr. Gibson wrote in an emailed statement: “I understand that public service can bring strong opinions and disagreement, but violence is never the answer, especially when it puts families at risk.”
Mr. Gibson wrote that he and his 8-year-old son were awakened by the gunshots between 12:45 and 12:50 a.m. Monday, and he rushed to reassure his son that he was safe. He said 13 rounds were fired at his home, with bullets striking “just steps” from the dining room table where his son had played with Legos the day before.
Cheap Shots
So, tonight we figure out if we're in the darkest timeline or not ...
Universe #1) Full TACO -
Hard to see how Trump left room for himself to chicken out, but shamelessness is his game. He seems incapable of the sort of embarrassment you or I might feel from inconsistency, so as long as he thinks he can spin it, he will TACO. He only doesn't TACO if he himself thinks he has backed himself into a corner, which Trump always has an eye on the exit door.
I don't want to sound blasé. The TACO universe is like one of those carnival rides where the only safety restraint is a lap bar, but the thing clearly goes upside down. It isn't a safe universe.
Universe #2) Iran Accedes Enough to Give Trump the "Win" He Needs -
Will this happen? Iran seems ten toes down, and we know they're willing to let their people die to maintain their regime. They also might have clocked that Trump's own base of support will collapse if he carries out his threat, the American lead world order might collapse, there might be a global pivot to China, and Iran gets along better with China anyway. Iran understands the TACO trade, to boot.
I kind of think if their memes are to be believed they will give nothing to Trump.
Universe #3) War Crimes -
If Trump carries out his threat and we do something genuinely horrifying with either conventional or even nuclear weapons, it is our Suez Canal Crisis. It will be the end of American hegemony, if it hasn't already ended.
Xi Jianping is so excited right now. He's on the edge of his seat, watching as the energy crisis speeds up electrification and the adoption of electrical cars, solar, batteries, all of which China is leading on. The people of Iran obviously suffer greatly, and we are the cause of it; even if we (the Bulwark) didn't vote for Trump, in the eyes of the international community we (as Americans) failed to prevent this.
The problem we're facing now is that the only external signal Trump responds to, the one that makes him chicken out, is a stock market freakout. But now that the markets are pricing in the TACO he's not getting that signal. And without that signal he will carry out the attacks. And Iran will launch counterstrikes.
*Then* the markets will, too late, freak out.