Category: 2026

curated news excerpts & citations

Matt Johnson @ Bulwark: Trump Is Repeating Putin’s Blunder

Both men thought they could start easy, quick regime-change wars at minimal cost.

THE IDEA THAT INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITIES are major drivers of world history is often dismissed as overly simplistic. …

In fact, without taking into account the particular personalities of two major world leaders, it’s hard to explain two of the most important international events of the last five years: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Donald Trump’s recent attacks against Iran.

The CIA doesn’t know exactly when Vladimir Putin decided to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but it was likely sometime in the first half of 2020. According to a recent Guardian report on how U.S. and British intelligence exposed Putin’s war plans, “During those months, Putin passed constitutional amendments to ensure he could stay in power beyond 2024. Then, locked away in isolation for months during Covid, he devoured books on Russian history and pondered his own place in it.” In the summer of 2021, Putin published a long essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which made the case that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia.

This partially explains why Putin thought the war in Ukraine would be easy—he believed many Ukrainians would accept Russian control of their country. …
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Lisa Needham: How Trump hacked the judiciary

His fake “emergencies” are pushing the country toward autocracy.

There’s no question that the Department of Justice is an absolute shambles under Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Trump, given that the latter basically dictates what the DOJ does now, and he’s a crumbling mess of capriciousness and id. However, whether by accident or design, the DOJ has hit on one strategy that works: exploiting little-known, sometimes even never-before-used laws as the basis for Trump’s constant states of emergency.
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Broadly speaking, Trump’s (mis)use of the law falls into four categories. Distressingly, at root, all of these excesses are about this administration’s abiding, unwarranted hatred for immigrants and for other countries, even when there are spillover effects for everyone else.

First, the administration has invoked a mishmash of domestic law to justify its international crimes in bombing boats in the Caribbean (and the country of Iran). Next, existing immigration laws have been cobbled together in a sort of unholy patchwork, an ever-shifting mess that allows the administration to pretend there’s some legal authority for what is nothing but xenophobia-fueled cruelty. Third, Trump relies on never- or seldom-used laws about presidential authority to deploy active-duty troops domestically, warping beyond reason any conception of state sovereignty. Finally, of course, there was the use of emergency powers to justify his sweeping, random, and retaliatory tariffs, which is where Trump received the biggest setback.
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Paul Krugman: The Billionaires’ War

The ultrawealthy put Trump in power but other people will pay the price

It becomes clearer with each passing day that the people who took us to war with Iran had and have no idea what they’re doing — that they’re adolescents who think they’re playing video games while thousands die and the world careens toward economic crisis. The New York Times reports that Trump officials dismissed warnings that attacking Iran could disrupt world oil supplies. Among other things, the Times reports that Mr. Trump, both publicly and privately, has been arguing that Venezuelan oil could help solve any shocks coming from the Iran war. In 2024 Venezuela produced 900,000 barrels of oil per day; normally 20 million barrels a day transit the Strait of Hormuz.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 11, 2026

In a brief call with Barak Ravid of Axios today, President Donald J. Trump said “The war is going great. …

In fact, according to Patrick Wintour of The Guardian, Iranian officials have rejected two messages from Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff calling for a ceasefire. Wintour writes that Iran’s leaders “sense it is not losing the war and the US president is at the minimum feeling the political pressure.” Iranian officials intend to make the economic, political, and military costs of the war so high that Trump will not attack Iran again.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Independent: Iran-US war latest: Multiple ships attacked in Strait of Hormuz as Tehran threatens to send price of oil soaring

Iran threatened to launch its most “intense strikes” of the conflict so far overnight, after the US promised the same on Tuesday
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Tehran’s feared Revolutionary Guards claimed responsibility for an attack on a Thai-flagged vessel, after unknown projectiles hit a Japan-flagged container ship and a Marshall Islands-flagged bulk carrier in the narrow channel early this morning.
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Judd Legum: Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor: what we know and what’s still being hidden

President Trump allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl who was trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein, according to documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) last Thursday. …
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Since the initial release of the documents, two important developments have bolstered the credibility of the alleged victim. This new information has received little national media attention.

First, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, the nation’s premier journalist on the Epstein scandal, has revealed new information about how the FBI assessed the victim. …

Second, the Post and Courier, a media outlet based in Charleston, South Carolina, verified key aspects of the victim’s story around the time of the alleged Trump assault. …

Smaller details also checked out. …

Three key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor were withheld
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Other key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor continue to be withheld
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Steven Beschloss: The Threat of Retaliation in America

The Trump regime’s actions are making America less safe. They are exploiting fear to seize more power. We should not be intimidated.

So many of the Trump regime’s actions can break your brain. Launch a war against Iran …

… this massive military assault comes in the wake of FBI Director Kash Patel firing a dozen counterintelligence agents and staff whose responsibilities included monitoring possible threats from Iran on American soil.

CNN reported that this gutting was motivated by “a simple reason”: Trump wanted the removal of agents investigating him for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the story by reporter Hannah Rabinowitz also noted that these firings “have added to concern inside the Justice Department and FBI that counterterrorism and intelligence investigations in the wake of the military operation in Iran could be hampered by a mass exodus of national security experts,” removing “decades of combined experience in identifying the types of threats that sources say could appear” because of the Iran attack.

How foolish is that? Well, extremely foolish if you think that the Trump regime should be committed to keeping America safe.

According to Miles Taylor, former counterterrorism operations lead at the Department of Homeland Security, his old department wasn’t in the room when the bombing started and doesn’t appear to have been involved in the defensive planning. Taylor, who now write the valuable Defiance newsletter, notes that “thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts and officials have been moved to ‘immigration’ enforcement.”
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I think it’s important to hear from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder, who just published a Substack piece entitled “The Desire for Terror.” He talks about “self-terrorism,” which involves “allowing things to fall apart, and then grabbing opportunely at a bit of the falling wreckage, which is something that Trump does well.” Snyder explicitly states:“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States.” …
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Joyce Vance: Bloody Sunday

Today marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. The Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, march for voting rights was halted by Alabama state troopers and sheriffs who tear-gassed and beat the marchers. A trooper beat Future Georgia Congressman John Lewis in the head with a nightstick.
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Brutality no longer outrages some Americans. They watch immigrants rounded up, zip-tied, frog marched into El Salvadoran prisons, and assaulted by federal agents in the process of detaining them. They read about people herded into facilities where there are bugs in the food and they sleep on concrete floors. They watch footage of American citizens being shot on the streets of Minneapolis and learn that an agency covered up the shooting death of a Texas man for a year. And they are unmoved.
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Earlier this week, we attacked a girls’ school. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “U.S. military investigators think American forces likely were responsible for a strike that killed dozens of children at a girls elementary school in Iran, a U.S. official said. …

Today, Trump was asked about the attack and who was responsible. He answered with a lie. He said Iran was responsible. Even Pete Hegseth couldn’t back that up. Standing next to the president, he said the attack was still “under investigation.”
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Root: Selma Was Not Just History, It Was a Warning

Opinion: Sixty-one years after “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, we are once again watching the machinery of state violence turn toward Black and Brown communities.

Sixty-one years ago, on March 7, 1965, 600 people stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. They marched for the simple promise of democracy: the right to vote. What met them was not dialogue but violence — billy clubs, tear gas, mounted troopers. “Bloody Sunday” forced the nation to confront two truths: the brutality of racial discrimination and the power of coordinated Black organizing.
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WSJ: U.S. Loses 92,000 Jobs in Widespread and Unexpected Downturn

The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a sign that the job market continues to struggle across a broad range of sectors.

The hiring numbers, reported Friday by the Labor Department, fell far short of January’s gain of 126,000 jobs. They were worse than the gain of 50,000 jobs that economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected to see.

The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4%.
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Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims: Hundreds of thousands of Americans stranded in a war zone

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Due to the intensity of combat in the Middle East, other countries not directly involved in the conflict quickly began evacuating their citizens from the region. The Italian government has facilitated the evacuation of 2,500 Italians on commercial flights. The Czech Republic sent multiple flights to evacuate people stranded in the area. Several other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Greece, had organized flights scheduled for Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Americans in the area are in danger of being targeted, but the State Department did not advise citizens to leave the region before the strikes began. Before the 2003 Iraq War, in contrast, the State Department advised citizens to prepare to evacuate weeks in advance and ordered a final evacuation days before fighting began.

This year, Americans in 14 countries were not advised to evacuate until three days after the Trump administration began major combat operations in Iran. By that time, much of the region’s airspace and most airports had closed.
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