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Fake Man Starts Fake War And Makes Fake Peace

Leave it to Donald J. Trump to come up with a purely performative war, and folks, he’s done it. His big air assault on Iran Saturday night accomplished exactly nothing. The New York Times reported on its front page yesterday that a secret report from the Defense Intelligence Agency has found that the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities at three sites around the country set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. Additionally, the vaunted bunker buster bombs, 30,000-pound projectiles designed to penetrate the surface of the earth before detonating far underground, failed to destroy the underground nuclear facilities at Fordo.

The report contained some new information as well. Israeli sources said that Iran has built smaller nuclear plants in secret locations “so the Iranian government could continue its nuclear program in the event of an attack on the larger facilities,” according to the Times. This information had not been made public previously. The report confirmed that Iran moved “almost all of its nuclear material” before the U.S. bombed its nuclear facilities on Saturday night, the Times reported on Tuesday afternoon.

Hegseth’s breathless announcement on Sunday morning --- 125 combat aircraft! 14 bunker busters! 75 other bombs and cruise missiles launched from submarines! – was all for show. The administration is so far back on its heels that a Congressional briefing on the attack scheduled for Tuesday has been pushed back until Thursday.

Iran responded Monday night by firing 14 missiles at the U.S. base in Doha, Qatar…after warning the Pentagon the attack was coming so the missiles could be easily shot down. The number of missiles was said to be calculated to match the number of U.S. bunker busters so that Iran’s retaliatory strike would not be seen as an escalation. The U.S. dutifully hit 13 of the Iranian missiles with anti-missile fire. One Iranian missile was said to have hit an unoccupied small building on the American base. There were no American casualties.

Trump went on Truth Social to announce that he had engineered “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE… when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!” He then mumbled something about 12 hours for this and 12 hours for that, until the “end, what should be called, “THE 12 DAY WAR.”

On Tuesday morning at 10:50 a.m., Representative Earl A. “Buddy” Carter, Republican of Georgia, formally nominated Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his extraordinary and historic role in brokering an end to the armed conflict between Israel and Iran.” Buddy didn’t mention that Trump was himself a participant in the “war” he ended.

As he departed the White House this morning for the NATO summit, Trump bragged that he was able to get the two nations to stop fighting despite the fact that “We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Every television network, broadcast and cable alike, shifted immediately into Full Tape Vault mode looking for another instance that an American president had dropped “the F-bomb” on camera live, and finding none, announced that Trump was first to achieve this momentous accomplishment.

From Air Force One on his way to Europe, Trump continued to brag, “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR! Both Nations will see tremendous LOVE, PEACE, AND PROSPERITY in their futures. They have so much to gain, and yet, so much to lose if they stray from the road of RIGHTEOUSNESS & TRUTH.”

Trump ordered a major attack on Iran. The bombs dropped. The cruise missiles flew. The satellite photos were published. Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that, “Iran retains control of almost all of its nuclear material, meaning if it decides to make a nuclear weapon it might still be able to do so relatively quickly.”

Trump’s fake war produced fake peace. Everything is the same as it was before. Israel still has its nukes. Iran is still a few months away from a developing its own nuclear weapon.

Relax. Trump is going for his Nobel. All is well.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

As Houthi Attacks Persist, Hegseth's Main 'Signalgate' Defense Fails

In their quest to undermine the scandal about key Trump administration national security officials discussing detailed military attack plans on a commercial messaging app, President Donald Trump and his media propagandists repeatedly claimed that the uproar was a minor sideshow that paled in comparison to the fact that the mission had been a resounding military victory.

“The mission in Yemen was operationally a complete success,” Fox News host and sometime Trump adviser Sean Hannity proclaimed on his show. “Why focus on the successful military operation when you can trash Donald Trump and people that work for him?”

But that defense of the administration has withered under scrutiny in the intervening weeks. Any tactical victory achieved during the initial March 15 attack has not fulfilled the intended U.S. goal of curbing Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, a major international trade route.

When The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat where Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and other senior officials discussed a planned attack on the Houthis, the MAGA commentariat scrambled to respond.

Trump’s media allies lashed out at Goldberg and sought to downplay the importance of his reporting, even as stunned experts pointed out that Hegseth’s sharing the exact strike times and the weapons packages to be used hours before their deployment over an insecure channel put U.S. forces at risk.

As part of their PR strategy, Trump’s Fox News propagandists instead touted the effectiveness of the strike on the Houthis — then stopped talking about the campaign. But two weeks after Goldberg published the administration’s messages, and nearly a month after the first bombs fell, U.S. forces are still embroiled in an open-ended air war in Yemen that has reportedly cost nearly $1 billion, with no conclusion in sight.

Trump, Fox hosts declare U.S. strikes on Houthis “successful”

Trump sought to downplay the scandal, in part by driving attention toward the purportedly effective strikes he claimed had received insufficient coverage.

“The main thing was nothing happened, the attack was totally successful,” the president told reporters on the afternoon of March 25. He said during a media availability the next day the press coverage of the Signal saga was “a witch hunt,” adding that “the attacks were unbelievably successful, and that’s ultimately what you should be talking about."

Hannity, the Fox star and Trump political operative, apparently heard his music. He lashed out at “the state-run legacy media mob” on his March 25 broadcast, claiming that “perhaps most importantly, something they'll never think about, the military mission thankfully was a complete success.”

Hannity added that “the outrage from the left over a reporter accidentally being added — a one-off, one-time, minor accident that did not impact the operation — to a White House group chat about a successful strike on Yemen is just a political show” by people who “want to smear Donald Trump and the White House” and claim “any political scalp they can get.”

“The mission in Yemen was operationally a complete success,” the Fox host said the next night. “It can’t get any more successful.”

After airing footage of Trump saying that “the result” of the strikes “is unbelievable” because the Houthis now “want to negotiate peace,” Hannity asked viewers, “Why focus on the successful military operation when you can trash Donald Trump and people that work for him?”

Several of Hannity’s colleagues followed suit over the same two-day period.

“What the media will not and cannot address is that the mission to destroy key Houthi targets was itself a huge success,” claimed Fox host Laura Ingraham. “So I think we should judge a policy by its outcome, not by an unintended error in transmission.”

“The strikes were successful,” according to Fox host Jeanine Pirro.

“The mission was a success,” said Fox host Jesse Watters.

“Nothing happened other than a successful military operation was executed,” offered Fox host Will Cain, adding that those who argue otherwise are “playing politics, not principles.”

And with that, they declared the Signalgate story was over — and stopped discussing the U.S. military strikes in Yemen on their shows.

None of the hosts mentioned the conflict between March 27 and April 2, when Hannity asserted that “just recently, when European trade routes were blocked off by the Houthi rebels, well, we were the ones that delivered a massive blow to Iran's proxy. Looks like we might be giving another one.”

None of them have mentioned it since.*

In Yemen, an open-ended U.S. air war without a plan for victory

Recent reporting contradicts Trump’s Fox-echoed claims of success in Yemen, finding instead that the U.S. is engaged in a costly fight that has had little impact on Houthi attacks and with little apparent strategy for victory. “In closed briefings in recent days, Pentagon officials have acknowledged that there has been only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers, according to congressional aides and allies,” The New York Times reported on April 4.

The officials briefed on confidential damage assessments say the bombing is consistently heavier than strikes conducted by the Biden administration, and much bigger than what the Defense Department has publicly described.

But Houthi fighters, known for their resiliency, have reinforced many of their bunkers and other targeted sites, frustrating the Americans’ ability to disrupt the militia’s missile attacks against commercial ships in the Red Sea, according to three congressional and allied officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

According to the Times’ sources, the “total cost could be well over $1 billion by next week,” and the military is going through munitions so quickly that “some Pentagon contingency planners are growing concerned about overall Navy stocks.” CNN likewise reported on April 7 that “the senior echelon” of the Houthis’ “military and political leadership appears intact,” and the group continues to fire ballistic missiles at U.S. targets in the region.

“The Houthis have been bombed tens of thousands of times over the past decade and remain undeterred,” Yemen expert Elisabeth Kendall told CNN. “So one is left thinking that the bombing is largely performative: let’s show the world - we’ll do it because we can.”

*Based on a Media Matters review of Fox transcripts in the Nexis database for references to “Yemen” or “Houthi.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump Claims Polls Show He's 'Leading Very Big' -- A Very Big Lie

An angry, rambling, and defensive Donald Trump finally emerged from hiding on Thursday to give his stump speech to a bunch of reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The GOP’s presidential nominee insisted he had the biggest rally crowds ever and attempted to make news by finally agreeing to debate Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. But all reporters wanted to talk about was his floundering campaign.

One reporter mentioned that Trump has just one public event scheduled this week.

“Some of your allies have expressed concern that you’re not taking this race seriously,” the reporter said, which set Trump off on one of several tirades about recent polls.

“I’m leading by a lot,” Trump claimed, after calling it a “stupid question.”

He returned to that topic in this riff about his “good polls” where he’s “substantially leading.”

“Fortunately, we’ve had some very good polls over the last fairly short period of time,” Trump said. “Rasmussen came out today with substantially leading,” he continued.

That’s true: Rasmussen Reports does have a new poll giving Trump a 5-point lead. But Rasmussen Reports is the notoriously conservative and inaccurate pollster that 538 dropped from its polling averages and forecasts earlier this year. Meanwhile, the separate and more credible RMG Research, run by Scott Rasmussen, had Harris leading by five points as recently as six days ago.

But Trump was on a roll.

“Others came out today that we’re leading and in some cases substantially,” he boasted. “CNBC came out also with a poll that has us leading, and leading fairly big in swing states.”

Trump’s lead in the head-to-head with Harris in the CNBC poll is 2 points. It is a national poll and does not provide data from swing states. Never mind—in his head, it’s true.

“Some polls I’m leading very big in swing states,” Trump insisted.

In reality, no, he is not. On Thursday, the Cook Political Report shifted its ratings for three swing states, changing them from "Lean Republican" to "Toss Up":

According to 538’s poll aggregates, Harris has an edge over Trump in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and she’s running neck and neck with Trump in North Carolina.

At the end of last week, Harris had the lead in a dozen separate national polls.

The surge Harris experienced after President Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed her as the Democratic candidate wasn’t a blip or a bounce, either. It’s sustained, and it has changed this race.

And Trump can’t take it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Biden Tax Proposal Provokes Right-Wing Defense Of 'Trickle-Down Economics'

After President Joe Biden called for an end to “trickle-down economics” and promoted a vision of the U.S. in which the wealthy “pay their fair share” of taxes during his March 7 State of the Union address, conservative media figures defended the discredited economic model and decried the president's call to tax the rich.

But experts reacting to Biden's speech noted that the president was correct when he argued that tax cuts for the rich have been a policy failure. Multiple studies examining decades of “trickle-down economics” show that such policies have overwhelmingly benefited the rich.

Biden called for the end of “trickle-down economics” policies that don't help the middle class

During his State of the Union address, Biden laid out a vision of the future in which corporations and wealthy individuals pay “their fair share” of taxes and the U.S. abandons the myth of “trickle-down economics.”

“I want to talk about the future of possibilities that we can build together. A future where the days of trickle-down economics are over, and the wealthy and the biggest corporations no longer get all the tax breaks.”

Biden added: “I grew up in a home where trickle-down economics didn’t put much on my dad’s kitchen table. That’s why I determined to turn things around, so the middle class does well. When they do well, the poor have a way up, and the wealthy still do very well. We all do well.”

Later in the speech, Biden called on Congress to “make the tax code fair” by making “big corporations, the very wealthy, finally begin to pay their fair share.” Biden emphasized that making the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share of taxes is vital to “the question of fundamental fairness for all Americans.”

He called out the Trump administration, which “enacted a $2 trillion tax cut, overwhelmingly benefit[ing] the top 1% — the very wealthy and the biggest corporations — and exploded the federal deficit.”

Biden also called for raising the corporate minimum tax rate “to at least 21%” and for a “minimum tax for billionaires at 25%.”

Economic research backs up Biden's criticism of failed “trickle-down” policies

Experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities validated the president’s critique of tax breaks for the wealthy — especially those created by Trump’s unpopular 2017 legislation, officially known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Chuck Marr, CBPP's vice president of federal tax policy, noted: “As President Biden is highlighting, the Trump tax law was skewed to the rich, was extremely expensive, and failed to trickle-down.”

Marr added: “The corporate tax rate cut is Exhibit A: the benefits went to executives, not workers.”

CBPP President Sharon Parrott posted: “The President is right. We need to raise revenues on high income households and corporations to make high-value investments in people, communities, and the economy and to improve our fiscal outlook.”

Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker noted during the speech that “Republicans are upset that Biden has made taxes mandatory for the rich, not just ordinary people.”

The official CEPR account on X also explained that the wealthiest Americans have already stopped paying taxes into Social Security for this year, because the payroll tax does not apply on income above $168,600.

“Millionaires stopped paying into #SocialSecurity 5 days ago,” the post read. “We’re glad @POTUS called out the rigged tax system, which puts the burden of paying for #SocialSecurity on working-class people. #ScrapTheCap so the rich pay their fair share.”

Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care at the National Women’s Law Center, posted that Biden was “hitting it out of the park on tax fairness. Policies to #taxtherich are fundamental to investing in our families and are HUGELY popular across” political parties.

“Trickle-down economics” has further enriched the wealthy and increased national debt

A 2012 Congressional Research Service report, which analyzed tax cuts for the rich since 1945, concluded that tax cuts for the wealthy don’t stimulate economic growth. A September 2012 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service determined that “changes over the past 65 years to the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth,” adding, “The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.” The report further concluded that these tax cuts served to exacerbate economic inequality, stating that ”top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with increasing concentrations of income at the top of the income distribution." The CRS report dealt such a heavy blow to trickle-down economic orthodoxy that Senate Republicans fought to suppress the report's findings. The report was eventually revised and re-released months later and featured most of the same conclusions. [Congressional Research Service, 9/14/12, 12/12/12; The New York Times, 11/1/12; NBC News, 12/13/12]
A 2020 study analyzed the effects of tax cuts for the rich spanning “five decades in 18 wealthy nations” and found that “the rich got richer and there was no meaningful effect on unemployment or economic growth.” Researchers at The London School of Economics and Political Science published a working paper in 2020 analyzing the tax regimes of 18 major developed economies that concluded that “major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income.” In a later interview with LSE’s economics blog, one of the researchers who conducted the study added: “Our results align pretty closely with some work from Thomas Piketty, that would suggest that what happens if you cut taxes on the rich is that they then bargain more aggressively for their own compensation at the direct expense of workers lower down the income distribution.” [LSE International Inequalities Institute, December 2020; The London School of Economics, 1/24/23]

A new study of Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the rich found it produced wage gains far below what was promised and that, instead of paying for itself as Republicans promised, it added “more than $100 billion a year” to the national debt. The New York Times reported that the study “found the cuts delivered wage gains that were ‘an order of magnitude below’ what Trump officials predicted: about $750 per worker per year on average over the long run, compared to promises of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker.” [The New York Times, 3/4/24; National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2024]
Economists predicted in 2016 that Trump's “nonsense … supply-side, trickle-down economics” would do nothing to help the economy. After Trump unveiled his tax and economic policy proposals in August 2016, economists and tax policy experts from across the political spectrum slammed his plan. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich dismissed Trump's plan as the “normal nonsense of supply-side, trickle-down economics” characteristic of Republican politicians. Conservative tax analyst Ryan Ellis noted that Trump’s proposed deduction for child-care expenses “would provide no benefit to low income workers and single parents who are unlikely to have any tax liability to begin with.” University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson posted that “Trump's economic plan focuses in on those he thinks need the most help: the 540 billionaires in the U.S.” [Media Matters, 8/9/16]

Right-wing media responded by defending failed tax cut policies and rejecting Biden’s take

Fox & Friends First co-host Todd Piro: “The dirty little secret” is “if you tax corporations more, jobs will go away.” Pirro continued: “At the end of the day, corporations are going to hit that number … whether it comes through increased output or at the sake of you and our jobs.” Pirro also dismissed “the typical tropes of tax the rich, who, in reality, pay most if not close to all of the taxes in this country.” Fox financial contributor Cheryl Casone interjected, “50%.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends First, 3/8/24]
National Review senior writer Noah Rothman defended “trickle-down economics” from Biden’s critique. National Review posted on X (formerly known as Twitter): “@NoahCRothman: Biden indicts ‘trickle-down economics’ because it did little to help his family when he was growing up. But Biden grew up in the 1950s and early 60s, when the top marginal tax rates approached 50%. Which is to say that Joe Biden did not, in fact, grow up during a period typified by ‘trickle-down economics.’” [Twitter/X, 3/7/24]
National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin: “Biden’s rants against ‘trickle down economics’ have not changed a whit since he was singing this tune throughout the Reagan years, railing against growth and prosperity.” [Twitter/X, 3/7/24]
Fox Business host Charles Payne: “The top 1.0% pay almost 50% of income taxes...what is fair? What is punitive? It’s all deflection from runaway spending.” [Twitter/X, 3/7/24]
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade: “Love the class warfare…let’s simplify the tax code to make Americans hate rich people …what a unifier!!…lets make rich people pay more to taxes so they can stop hiring people and buying buildings, cars, planes and give to charities.” [Twitter/X, 3/7/24]
Committee to Unleash Prosperity President Phil Kerpen: “The tax share of the rich is by far the highest it has ever been under the Trump tax cuts. Biden's tax hikes will harm the economy and reduce the share paid by the rich. It happens every time.” [Twitter/X, 3/7/24]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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