Donald Trump used to say he wanted to be a “peace president” who specifically would not engage in “regime change” and had ambitions of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Forget all that. With Israel, he’s just launched his eighth military campaign—a huge bombing attack on Iran that killed the country’s brutal Supreme Leader and an undetermined number of his top aides.
Ridding the world of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a virtuous act—he just massacred thousands of his own people opposing his regime and previously had killed hundreds of thousands of people, including American troops—directly or via terrorist organizations he supported. And, though weakened, Iran had not given up on its ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
But the question is: what now? Has the Iranian regime truly been toppled—especially the 190,000-member the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the 90,000 member Basij paramilitary force and the 400,000 members of the regular armed forces, plus the theocratic hierarchy and civilian government?
Trump has called on the Iranian people to take control of their country and they likely would do so if they could, but they have no weapons or organization. He also hopes the armed forces will split, with some opposing the regime, but will that happen? Will the US have to reorganize Iran? Can it? How long will we have to continue attacking Iranian forces? How much mayhem will Iran wreak on the Arab nations who opposed the US attack, but were targeted by Iran anyway?
Democrats and some Republicans legitimately complain that Trump launched this war without Congressional consultation or assent, as he has also not done for his actions in Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Nigeria and the Eastern Pacific. It’s another example of his disrespect for Constitutional requirements.
The war follows on the heels of Trump’s long, ugly State of the Union address and the Washington Post’s disclosure that he was preparing to declare an emergency to give him power to control US elections, which the Constitution vests in the states. If he issues the emergency, it would be his latest effort to steal the 2026 elections.
The justification for the move would be that China interfered in the 2020 election, though a 2021 Intelligence Community review concluded that China considered interfering with the election, but did not do so.
Sen. Mark Warner, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared there is no national emergency justifying the Trump move.
He said, “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in elections.”
The proposals in the executive order are similar to those in a 2025 executive order struck down by a federal judge: no mail-in voting, no counting of ballots postmarked before but arriving after Election Day and a requirement of documentary proof of US citizenship to register to vote. Trump has appealed but the Appellate Court has not yet ruled. The Supreme Court should declare it unconstitutional, but if the court backs Trump, American democracy will be all but lost. We will have an emperor deciding who gets to run and who gets to vote.
Meantime, the State of the Union address was classic Trump—extravagantly self-congratulatory, persistently misleading or downright false, bitterly partisan, Biden-blaming and occasionally positive.
But what Trump left out of the speech tells us more about his activities in the first year of his second term than what was in it—his multi-billion-dollar personal corruption; the brutality practiced by ICE, his masked personal army; his granting clemency to (and glorifying as “patriots”) those convicted of participating in the lethal Jan. 6 riot he incited at the US Capitol in a last-ditch effort to undo Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 election; the cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein files; and the Justice Department’s failure to even talk to victims of Epstein’s depravity or investigate those suspected of participating in it; also the bias shown by Trump toward Russian dictator and war criminal Vladimir Putin and against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose valiant people have been trying to maintain their independence in the face of an unprovoked four-year assault by Russia.
The truth behind his “Big Beautiful Bill” that he touted is that the tax cuts will benefit the richest 1% of Americans by an average of $50,000 to $65,000, and middle-income earners just $393. The lowest 15% of earners will lose $1,200 a year, mostly due to cuts in Medicaid and SNAP. Cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare will cause 13.7 million people to lose insurance coverage and roughly 5 million poor people will lose SNAP food assistance. The bill will increase the national debt by $4 trillion over 10 years. And Trump neglected his repeated violations of the Constitution and the rule of law, leading to two impeachments, four criminal indictments on 90 separate counts and one conviction on 34 counts.
Among the speech’s positives were the stories of many of the too-many guests Trump called out in the House Gallery that were so touching as to make it seem that Trump is empathetic, which we know he is not. His handing out medals—including two Congressional Medals of Honor—was at least original.
Then there were a few positive new government programs he announced: AI firms would have to create their own energy plants, reducing electricity costs for consumers. A new retirement savings plan for workers making less than $25,000 a year, with the government matching employer or worker contributions up to $1,000 a year. Also, a drug price reduction plan to lower costs for 43 brand-name drugs. Of course he falsely claimed that drugs in general would be the lowest-priced in the world.
Democrats in the House chamber sat silent (and a few shouted protests) as he spoke. But they allowed Trump to bait them into sitting and not applauding when he said that the job of government was to protect Americans, not illegal immigrants. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he shouted, adding “these people are crazy.” That may have swayed a few voters to support Republicans in November.
On the other hand, the official Democratic responder to Trump, newly elected Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivered an effective rebuttal with the refrain “Is the president working for you? We all know the answer is no.”
Fact-checkers have had a field day with the speech, especially FactCheck.org, CNN and NPR. For instance, Trump claimed he inherited “a nation in crisis, with a stagnant economy and inflation at record levels” and that under his management “the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” He boasted “what a difference a president makes” and claimed that America was now in a “golden age.”
Actually, according to FactCheck.org, Trump inherited a growth rate of 2.9% and an inflation rate of 3%, down from 9.1% immediately after the COVID pandemic. And the unemployment rate averaged 4.1%
Under Trump, the growth rate fell to 2.2% and unemployment rose to 4.3%. Trump blamed Democrats for high prices and said that prices now were “plummeting downward.”
Some prices are falling under Trump—gasoline by 6% (but not “$2.30 in most states,” as Trump claimed); eggs by 34%, also bacon and bread. But ground beef is up 17.5%, coffee 18.3%, electricity 6% and airline fares 6.5%. Inflation averages 2.7%.
Also, Trump claimed that “cheating is rampant in our elections” and said Democrats foster illegal immigration to let aliens vote for them. The claims have been debunked repeatedly. The right-wing Heritage Foundation found only 77 cases from 1999 to 2023–a period in which hundreds of millions of votes were cast. Still Trump and Republicans hope to pass the SAVE America Act, billed as a simple requirement that voters show an ID card before voting, which has 70% public support.
Actually, the practical effect of the bill is to disenfranchise millions of Democratic-leaning voters (especially low-income groups, the aged, younger voters) who don’t have the documents necessary to prove their citizenship (e.g. birth certificates, REAL ID cards stipulating citizenship). With Senate Democrats in solid opposition to the bill, it will not get 60 votes and will fail to pass. But it indicates Trump’s and Republican efforts to suppress Democratic turnout despite the fact that non-citizen voting is practically non-existent. His newest idea—the emergency seizure of US elections—would be a backup plan when SAVE fails.
Despite polls showing that Trump is historically unpopular (with approval ratings in the high 30s to low 40s) and that almost all of his polls on issues are deeply underwater, and with history showing that a president’s party often loses seats in his first midterm election, Republicans could expect to lose control of the House and possibly the Senate, exposing Trump to rigorous investigation, possible impeachment and defeat for his programs. If the Iran war proves a success, it may improve his standing, but he has a long way to go to restore confidence in his management. Only 35 percent of Americans approve of his handling of foreign policy.
Trump said in his address on Tuesday that “the only way Democrats can win is to cheat.” Among other possible methods to steal the election could well be surrounding polling places with ICE agents.
Also left out of the speech were elimination of most laws, programs and agencies designed to combat climate change, scientific research cuts to punish universities for failure to combat antisemitism or eliminate DEI programs, and the firing of FBI agents assigned to investigate various criminal charges against Trump.
Trump accused Democrats of “destroying the country,” but though it remains to be seen whether he will do so, for sure he has destroyed the respect that other countries have had for the US—by dismantling the US Agency for International Development, likely consigning to death millions of the world’s poorest citizens and by treating longstanding allies with contempt, threatening for a time seizure of Greenland by force, deeply offending Canada and creating doubts whether the US would honor the NATO charter and come to Europeans’ defense if attacked by Russia. (To his credit, though, his threats have caused NATO allies to increase their defense budgets from below 2 percent of GDP to 5%.)
Then there are his tariffs. Their imposition as an “economic emergency” was clearly a violation of the US Constitution’s investing the power to tax exclusively in Congress. Or so the US Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 vote—one of the first instances in which the Court decided against Trump, upholding the most important power that the Republican Congress slavishly yielded to him.
The tariffs, while they lasted, brought in $160 billion and were projected to bring in $1.4 trillion over a decade. But every study on the question asserts that US GDP would suffer and US businesses and consumers would pay far more than that. And the same applies to the two Congressionally authorized tariff systems Trump is planning to employ in lieu of the struck-down system, Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
As usual, US businesses will be able to recover their losses under Trump’s former tariff system—and they are beginning to sue to do so—but consumers will not be reimbursed for the higher prices they paid for imported goods. Or, as Gov. Spanberger put it, “Is (Trump) working for you? We all know the answer is no.”
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