Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a…
But this was a childish joke, the stuff of novelty songs. The United States had not, until Trump, bombed Iran. Nor had Iran directly attacked the United States. A close brush came in 1988, when, during some sea skirmishes between the two countries, a U.S. missile cruiser shot down an Iran Air flight carrying two…
For those in Donald Trump’s orbit, great power often comes with great dispensability. Take Kristi Noem, who, as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, was in charge of the President’s top domestic priority of carrying out mass deportations, until she wasn’t. She became the first Cabinet secretary to be fired in Trump’s second…