Trump’s Dangerous Escalation in a Losing War
Plus: Todd Blanche, Epstein coverup coordinator.
There are certain moments in sports when, right after the game ends, you instantly know it has a place in history. Last night was one of those moments. The Knicks came back from 29 points down to defeat the Spurs in the final seconds and take a 3–1 series lead. It was the greatest comeback in NBA playoff history. And even in the groggy early-morning scroll through the social media algorithms, the highlights didn’t feel quite real. How did they do it? A mix of grit, a streak of insanely good shooting, a heap of boneheaded plays from the Spurs, and a dollop of the divine from one OG Anunoby. It certainly didn’t hurt that the president—having messed with the juju in game three—wasn’t in the building for game four. As the saying goes:
Their mayor is Muslim. Their bagels Jewish. Without Trump they thrive. Knicks in Five. Happy Thursday.
The War Gets Worse
by William Kristol
Just over three months ago, acting alone, lacking authorization from Congress, and having made no case for the war to the public, President Trump chose to attack Iran. His choice was unwise and his action was unlawful. And his war has clearly been unsuccessful.
The terrible Iranian regime remains in place. In fact, having survived a massive assault from the United States and Israel and having damaged both U.S. forces and its Gulf neighbors, and having also succeeded in harming the global economy by successfully closing the Strait of Hormuz, that dangerous and deplorable regime is now more powerful than it was before.
Meanwhile the Iranian people, who had bravely risen up against that regime, have been utterly betrayed.
And for our part, we’ve suffered casualties and spent billions and drawn down munitions. Our government has made unjustified claims of success and has concealed losses and setbacks. Our president has demonstrated even worse leadership than one might have expected, with shifting and untenable justifications for the war, threats of war crimes, generally incompetent leadership, and truly unhinged behavior. The American public justifiably has no confidence in this administration’s conduct of the war, and nor do our allies in the Gulf, in Europe, or in Asia.
It’s all very bad, and now Trump is making it worse. Frustrated and angry at the failure of his vanity war, prevented by his narcissism from coming to grips with the situation he now faces, Trump has been resisting putting the country first and extricating us without too much further damage.
And now, over the last couple of days, he has been getting us in deeper rather than getting us out.
A U.S. Army helicopter, flying to enforce what is at this point a pointless blockade or counter-blockade of the strait, crashed Monday after a collision with an Iranian drone. The U.S. military launched a new round of “self-defense” strikes on Iran in “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”
These strikes led in turn to relatively uneventful retaliatory attacks by Iran against its neighbors, and it seemed for a few hours that the tit-for-tat might have been completed. Perhaps Trump could now focus on extracting us from the mess into which he’d gotten us? But his vanity and narcissism prevailed. And so, when Iran didn’t immediately accept his latest stipulations for an acceptable deal, last night he ordered a second wave of air strikes, described by CENTCOM as “additional self-defense strikes . . . in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression” against Iranian targets that “posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”
These vague rationales or excuses for continued strikes are justifications for endless attacks on Iran. These rationales are a justification for endless war.
But Trump himself promptly undercut even the pretense that these strikes were about self-defense or dealing with threats. As the attacks were underway, he acknowledged both on social media and in interviews with reporters that the point of the strikes is to coerce Iran to sign the peace agreement that he wants, one that he presumably hopes will make it less obvious that his war has been a failure.
In a call with Fox News’s Trey Yingst from the Situation Room (!) as the strikes were ongoing, Trump forgot that he was supposed to talk about proportional responses and self-defense.
He warned that if Iran doesn’t sign the agreement, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” He then boasted that the strikes were “vicious” and “violent,” and “they didn’t know what the hell hit them.”
This morning, he threatened further escalation: “At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island.”
We will see if this is real or Trumpian bluster. But either way, it’s unseemly braggadocio and dangerous fantasy. As the military historian Phillips O’Brien explained, our latest attacks
will almost certainly not get Iran to bend the knee. Trump can boast all he wants, as he did above, about the Iranian military being destroyed, but the reality is that he is still very worried about Iranian capacity. How do we know that? Well many of the US strikes against Iran were done on June 9 and then again last night with (fast depleting) stocks of Tomahawk missiles or by aircraft that can fire at safe distances.
We can fire more missiles and drop more bombs. But at this point, we are waging war, and putting our own service members at risk, for no justifiable reason. And we are simply compounding the considerable damage Trump has already done first by launching, and then by continuing with, this foolish and reckless adventure.
Trump is now digging the hole he has gotten us into even deeper. Responsible members of Congress should redouble their efforts to force an end to this unauthorized, unwise, and unsuccessful war.
Trump Found His Roy Cohn
by Andrew Egger
Here are four things we already know. Donald Trump’s top criterion for his attorney general is someone who will act as his personal attorney. He tapped Todd Blanche as deputy AG last year because Blanche had been his personal attorney and would see the job as a continuation of that work. Blanche has now gotten the nod for the top job because Trump thinks he’s done a good job in this respect so far. And a big part of that, as Bill wrote the other day, has been Blanche’s work as “prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.”
But it’s one thing to know all this as a factual matter, and another thing to see it play out in practice—as we did yesterday in the New York Times’s big new piece of behind-the-scenes narrative reporting of the White House’s struggle to contain the Epstein crisis last year.
Last year, the administration’s shambolic rollout of the files seemed to turn primarily on the work of three officials: then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and then-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Patel and Bongino were the administration émigrés from the right-wing fever swamps, where they had spent years podcasting about the giant trove of incriminating documents about Epstein’s associates they insisted the FBI was sitting on. And Bondi was the clownish figure whose failure to grasp the seriousness of MAGA’s belief in the files had done much to multiply the story’s political damage. The three of them spent months fighting over who was to blame for the crisis.
Blanche, by contrast, was the cleanup man. When the top members of the president’s personal-defense team gathered in the White House Situation Room last July to figure out how to contain the spiraling story, it was Blanche who suggested both major planks of what would come to be the White House’s response. Blanche raised the possibility of publicly calling for the unsealing of the grand jury testimonies in past Epstein-related criminal cases. “If the courts refused to unseal them—as Blanche predicted—they could shift the blame for withholding the Epstein material away from the Trump administration and onto the judges,” the Times reports. “Blanche’s suggestion would make it appear that the White House wanted the materials released, when it was almost certain not to happen.” Trump would go on to do exactly this in a Truth Social post.
At the same meeting, Blanche sanded the rough edges off a lunatic idea proposed by Vice President JD Vance: What if we tapped Tucker Carlson to go interview Ghislaine Maxwell? It would be better, Blanche suggested, to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and release the transcript—and, he said, he was willing to do it himself. The only snag, he suggested, was that “Maxwell’s lawyers might expect something in return for her candor.” It fell to others—White House Communications Director Steven Cheung and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair—to make the argument that pardoning or reducing Maxwell’s sentence would be a colossal PR mistake.
It’s worth dwelling on how far through the looking glass this moment was. By all rights, it was insane for Blanche—the second-in-command at the Justice Department, the man most responsible for its day-to-day operations—to be attending this meeting at all. It was still more insane for him to be taking the point position in laying out a strategy for how to protect the president from a political crisis, and how to tap the resources and respectability of the Justice Department in order to do so. And perhaps most insane of all—for anybody to suggest, let alone a person in Blanche’s position—was the suggestion he let twist in the air that perhaps a convicted sex trafficker could be recruited as a key part of their self-defense effort, provided they were willing to scratch her back too. While others in the room shot down suggestions of a pardon or commutation, there was one other, smaller thing they could offer Maxwell: Shortly after speaking to Blanche, she was transferred to a far more comfortable prison.
Again: None of this really changes anything we knew about Blanche. It was always in keeping with what we know of his character and how he sees his role that he would do any of these things. But we now know from the Times not just that he would do them, but that he has done them: Blanche in fact was the mastermind behind nearly all of the political effort to shield Trump from any political fallout over the Epstein files. When he goes before the Senate for his confirmation to the top job, they should tear him apart for it.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Meet the Millennial Pastor at the Vanguard of the MAGA Culture War… Pastor/influencer Russell Johnson is the media-savvy new face of growing, Trumpified churches. DOMINICK BONNY takes you on a deep dive.
Damn the Risks, Pour Me Another Glass… Why MONA CHAREN on why she doesn’t plan to stop drinking alcohol.
No Guns, No Drugs—Why Did We Blow Up These Boats? Shocking new facts are still emerging about the campaign against ‘drug boats,’ AMANDA KLASING writes.
Fight for Your Democracy… On the flagship pod, SEN. RAPHAEL WARNOCK joins TIM MILLER to discuss why Trump & co. are pushing the South to gerrymander back to the dark days of Jim Crow: They’re gonna lose the midterms bigly.
The third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference, hosted by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism—publisher of the UnPopulist—comes to the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. on July 16–17. This year’s theme is an important one: the Reconstruction Agenda, or how to create a post-Trump future that is a genuinely and securely post-authoritarian one. In addition to our own Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell, and Cathy Young, you can catch speakers like Anne Applebaum, Ezra Klein, Adam Serwer, and Jan-Werner Müller. Check out the full program and register here. And use BULWARK-26 for a 10 percent discount.
Quick Hits
RUMBLE WITH THE DEVIL: Yesterday, we published a profile of millennial political operative-turned-pastor/influencer Russel B. Johnson. He’s a case study of a growing trend of overt politicization among some evangelical churches, and things got testy in his exchanges with reporter Dominick Bonny. The independent minister’s aggression toward the press is part of a deliberate strategy that he has used to grow his profile online:
The hope of prosperity in this life is both part of the American dream and a quieter theme of Johnson’s preaching, although he has expressly rejected belief in what critics call the “prosperity gospel,” which associates material wealth and success with faithfulness to God. But asked in an email how he reconciles his luxury lifestyle with Christ’s teachings about the spiritual hazards of wealth, he rejected the question as an example of journalists “cosplaying as theologians.” The Bible, he wrote in an email, “doesn’t teach that holiness requires performative poverty, nor does it require pastors to live according to the aesthetic preferences of hostile journalists.” Whether a person is wealthy doesn’t matter, morally or spiritually; their personal attitude toward their wealth—“whether wealth owns the person,” as Johnson puts it—is what’s important.
“I make no apology for enjoying life,” he continued.
Johnson was similarly exercised about other questions I emailed him about his ministry and politics, including some that touched on recent political stories. For instance, asked how he squares a Christian ethic with Trump’s mass deportations–focused immigration policy, which has broken up families across the country and caused untold harms to communities targeted for enforcement, Johnson claimed the question was “morally unserious.” “Scripture commands compassion for the stranger. It doesn’t command national suicide or the erasure of borders,” he wrote.
Does he differ with President Trump on any significant political matters? The former Republican campaign operative insisted on his ideological independence. “There are always policies, appointments, rhetoric, and other decisions I would evaluate critically. I am a pastor, not a campaign surrogate,” he wrote. He did not provide specific examples.
“If any of my answers come across as dismissive or dripping with disdain, that is intentional. I have deep contempt for what your profession has become,” he added before ending on a version of a classic Trump line: “The media truly has become the enemy of the American people.” Johnson then posted the full set of questions and his responses (with hostile commentary about The Bulwark) to his Instagram story.
There’s a lot more to the story than that. Read the whole thing.
NO BOTTOM: Here’s a simply amazing report from Politico: “A top Justice Department staffer responsible for liaising with Congress planned to make a claim with President Donald Trump’s ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ and asked to recuse himself from any work related to it—a move that alarmed colleagues at the DOJ.”
The official, Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Patrick Davis, is a former top aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Davis told the department he intended to apply for money from the proposed fund—now on indefinite hiatus, if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is to be believed—because his phone and emails had been subpoenaed while he was involved in investigating the origins of the “Russiagate” investigation while on the hill.
Where to begin on this one? For starters, the story highlights once again how unbelievably incestuous the fund was from the jump: Not only was the fund itself negotiated incestuously by Trump’s current personal lawyers and his former personal lawyers who now run the Justice Department, but at least one Justice Department staffer heavily involved in trying to sell the thing to senators on the Hill was planning to try to benefit from it personally. (And that wouldn’t have been the half of it: Recall that the Justice Department tried to win over hostile senators to support the fund by reminding them they could apply for money as well!)
The second is that the “weaponization” Davis would have been seeking restitution for hadn’t taken place under Biden at all, but under the first Trump administration, when his records were pulled as part of a leak investigation. And the third is this bleak joke: We only know about this at all because Davis asked to recuse himself from official work on the anti-weaponization fund in light of his application—which means, relatively speaking, he’s one of the ethical ones. Read the whole thing.
STRAITBREAK: As his war with Iran has staggered on, Donald Trump has been able to thank his stars for one small economic saving grace: While oil prices remain elevated, they haven’t yet come close to the nightmare scenarios of $150 or even $200 a barrel that many forecasters feared because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Just the opposite, in fact: After peaking just north of $110 a barrel in early April, oil prices have settled between $80 and $100 a barrel since early May.
Much of this price relief has come thanks to massive releases from the strategic oil reserves of the United States, China, and other countries—a short-term solution at best, and one that will come with further costs on the back end to replenish depleted stocks. But another factor, as CNN reported this week, is that more oil may be quietly escaping the strait than forecasters had expected.
Yesterday, President Trump claimed credit. “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote on Truth Social. During that time, “more than 100 MILLION Barrels” and “200 Commercial Ships” had traveled through the strait. “This wildly successful effort,” he added, “is because the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTROLS the Strait of Hormuz—NOT Iran.”
The braggadocio here was amusing: Trump has repeatedly announced his intent to escort ships through the strait since the very first days of the war, and efforts to do so have periodically stopped and started. Meanwhile, 100 million barrels of oil and 200 ships in a month remains dramatically below the pre-war status quo, when more than 100 ships and 20 million barrels of oil would pass through the strait every day.
CNBC made this useful graph of how many ships are going through the strait each day. If the United States wants lots of purple on the graph and Iran wants barely any, you tell me who controls the strait:
Still, while a porous strait is economically far worse than an open one, it’s better than one with an oil-tight seal. The more ships the administration can spirit past the Iranian blockade, the better for the global economy—and for their negotiating position to finally bring this conflict to an end.
FISA ON LIFE SUPPORT: Senate Democrats have been sticking to their guns: No removal of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, no renewed spying powers for him to abuse while he’s there. But that hasn’t stopped Donald Trump and Senate Republicans from trying to wheedle them down.
In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump made clear he was forging ahead with Pulte, who he said will take the reins June 19. (Previously, Tulsi Gabbard’s term as DNI was slated to end June 30.) Meanwhile, he suggested that Congress pass only a “short-term extension” of the FISA 702 authorities, “to provide time for the selection and confirmation of a permanent Head of the Agency.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson were quick to describe this as a magnanimous olive branch—a “good faith gesture,” as Johnson put it to reporters.1 Thune said lawmakers were discussing the possibility of a three-week FISA extension.
You know what would be an actual “good faith gesture”? Swapping Pulte out for a qualified person with an actual national-security background and no history of pursuing naked, shameless vendettas against the president’s political opponents. Until Trump does that, Republicans who want to paint Democrats as obstructionists here don’t have a leg to stand on.
Cheap Shots
This was a funny way to describe a post that began like this: “Just like they did on Border Funding, the Radical Left Dumocrats are trying to take our National Security hostage because of unrelated issues.”
“I love the inflation.”
That phrase coming out of his mouth with his asinine grin on his face like he had with the Infant Johnny giving him the first FIFA Peace Prize, should be on a thousand billboards in every Red State (blue, too but 100 would do) continually from now until November. DNC WHERE ARE YOU?
"By all rights, it was insane for Blanche—the second-in-command at the Justice Department, the man most responsible for its day-to-day operations—to be attending this meeting at all."
But it would be perfectly rational for Trump's criminal defense attorney to attend the meeting.