At 12:30pm, EST, President Barack Obama will deliver a statement from the White House on the crisis in Iraq. The president’s remarks will follow a meeting with his national security team, in which he is expected to review American military options in the war-torn country.
Live video of President Obama’s speech will be available below:
Update: President Obama is now expected to take the podium at 1:15pm.
AFP Photo/Nicholas Kamm
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Gov. Chris Sununu
Namby, meet pamby. I’m talking, naturally, of Chris Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, who slithered into a Zoom call on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday to explain why he will be voting for Donald Trump for president come November. Not because Trump doesn’t have any responsibility for the attempted coup and attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He does. Sununu thinks that all the insurrectionists “must be held accountable and prosecuted.” Except one: the man he’s voting for in November.
Watching him answering the questions of Stephanopoulos was like watching something with more legs than two crawl out from beneath a wet rock on a rainy day. Sununu, who supported Nikki Haley in the primary until she dropped out, doesn’t see anything wrong with now supporting Donald Trump for president. To explain why, he attacked the “wokeness, the fact that folks in Washington, liberal elites in Washington, want to stand on the shoulders of hard-working American families that built this country, that defended this country, and tell them how to live their lives.” Apparently, Sununu has recognized that sounding exactly like Marjorie Taylor Greene will help you as a Republican in America, even up there in the Granite State.
Stephanopoulos should have asked Sununu just what he meant by that statement. Telling people how to live their lives isn’t “woke,” it is part of the business of government. If you earn money, you pay taxes. If you form a company and the company earns money, you pay corporate taxes. If your company is publicly traded, so individual American citizens can invest in it, can give you money so that you can spend it to help your company earn more money, you must register that company with the SEC, you cannot spend your investors’ money on yourself and your own lifestyle, and you must return some of the profits you earn to your investors. If you drive on Interstate highways, you must follow the speed limit. If you manufacture cars, you must install seat belts and airbags in those cars to keep safe the people who drive them. If you buy a firearm at a firearms store, you must pass a background check to make sure that you are not a felon with no right to buy or own a firearm.
Sununu has learned the lesson all Republicans have learned, that it is not necessary to make sense and to tell the truth. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he indeed believed “that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again,” Sununu was ready with a lie: “As does 51 percent of America, George. I mean, really.”
Trump lost the election of 2020, 51.3 percent of the vote for Biden, 46.9 percent for Trump. He lost the electoral college by 74 electoral votes. Here is how Sununu explained what happened in the last election: “I hate the election denialism of 2020. Nobody wants to be talking about that in 2024. I think all of that was absolutely terrible, but what people are going to be voting for, what I -- what -- the reason I’m supporting not just the president, but the Republican administration. That's what this is.”
Stephanopoulos didn’t ask him how it is that the “nobody” Sununu identifies as not wanting to talk about election denialism does not include the man he says he’s voting for, Donald Trump, who has made denying the truth of the 2020 election the centerpiece of his campaign.
Listen to Sununu, until now considered one of the so-called reasonable Republicans, as he summed up why he’s voting for Trump: “States rights come first, individual rights come first, parents rights come first.” That’s the Trumpian Republican Kool-Aid right there in a single sentence. That is the reasoning behind the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe and created the nightmare women are facing in states exercising their “states rights” around the country. That is the rhetorical sewer from which the book bans and Black history denialism has emerged over the last several years.
And it’s coming out of the mouth of Chris Sununu. Sununu said previously that Trump should drop out of the race if he is convicted of a crime. Does he think that now? “No, no, no, of course not. That is not to be expected at all. There is clearly politics to bear in some of these cases, that is undeniable. The average American just says it’s more of reality TV in prosecution of him at this point. He plays that victim card very, very well. His poll numbers only go up with this stuff. So, to think of this as some kind of deal breaker, again, I’ll go back to where I started, that people are saying, yep, if he’s convicted, I’m walking away. That’s just not going to happen. If he’s going to be the standard bearer of it, we’ll take it if we have to. That’s how badly Americans want a culture change.”
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence are the only two prominent Republicans who are not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger who have announced they will not vote for Donald Trump, and only Kinzinger has said he will instead vote for Joe Biden.
And to think that these are the reasonable Republicans among us.
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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
Anti-missile system operating against Iranian drones,seen near Ashkelon, Israel on April 13, 2024
Iran has launched a swarm of missile and drone strikes on Israel from Iranian territory, marking a significant military escalation between the two nations. Israel and Iran have been engaged in a so-called shadow war for decades, with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah rocketing Israel from Lebanon and Syria, and Israel retaliating by launching air strikes on Hezbollah missile sites. Israel has also launched strikes on Iranian targets in other countries, most recently an airstrike on part of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, which killed several top Iranian “advisers” to its military, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior officer in Iran’s Quds Force, an espionage and paramilitary arm of Iran’s army.
After the strike on part of its embassy in Damascus on April 2, Iran announced that it would retaliate against Israel. Tonight, that retaliation began at just before 2 a.m. Israeli time, as Iran launched what appears to be a sustained missile attack on Jerusalem. CNN and MSNBC are showing images of multiple explosions in the skies over Jerusalem. It’s hard to make out what’s happening, but it looks like Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system is hitting multiple Iranian missiles, causing showers of missile shrapnel, some of it on fire, to cascade down on Jerusalem and the surrounding area.
Israel has scrambled its fighter jets, which are circling above Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and some of the fighters appear to be engaging Iranian targets, which could include Iranian cruise missiles flying at relatively low altitude and Iranian ballistic missiles arcing down from high altitudes. Air raid sirens have sounded all over the Jerusalem area sending Israelis into air raid shelters.
Iran announced earlier that they have also launched a drone attack on Israel. Drones fly much slower than cruise and ballistic missiles, so they are not expected to reach Israeli airspace until later. The United States has announced that our military forces have shot down some of the Iranian drones, probably from U.S. military sites in northern Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. It is about 1,000 miles from the areas of western Iran where its missile bases may be located to eastern Israel, such as Jerusalem.
Israel just announced that Iran launched more than 200 missiles of various kinds at Israel. Iran has apparently launched its missiles in a coordinated fashion, so that they arrived in Israel airspace in a swarm. It takes about two hours for a cruise missile to travel from Iran to Israel, but only 12 minutes for a ballistic missile to fly the same distance. From what I could see on CNN, it appeared that Iran had succeeded in achieving its aims of swarming Israel’s Iron Dome air defense. Israel has not announced how many Iranian missiles got through its defenses, but an IDF spokesman said Israel intercepted “the vast majority” of Iran’s missiles.
There have been no reports of Hezbollah launching its missiles on targets in Israel in coordination with the Iranian attack. However, Hezbollah announced earlier this evening that its forces had launched missiles at an Israeli barracks in the Golan Heights at about midnight Israel time. Hezbollah is known to have thousands of ground-to-ground missiles along the border with Israel. Their missiles can reach Haifa and other cities in northern Israel. Israel has part of its Iron Dome missile defense system defending northern Israel, but Hezbollah has enough ground-to-ground missiles that it, too, could launch a swarm attack on Israel.
Israel has closed its Ben Gurion Airport and other airports in the country and banned gatherings of more than 1,000 citizens. Israel put a deadline of 48 hours on the closures, but that could change. Airspace in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq is closed, according to Flightradar24, a website that tracks flights of aircraft around the world in real time.
President Biden met tonight with his national security team in the White House Situation Room. Biden put out a statement that U.S. support for Israel is “ironclad.”
The danger of an attack of this size anywhere in the Middle East, but especially by Iran on Israel, is that hostilities could spread rapidly around the region. There is a possibility that Israel will launch a missile or air attack on targets in Iran, including its missile launch sites and command and control centers. That has not happened yet, however.
Air raid sirens have gone silent in Israel at this hour, according to the New York Times.
At a rally in Pennsylvania tonight, Donald Trump announced his support for Israel, claiming it was under attack “because we show great weakness.”
Trump provided no explanation how “weakness” in the United States could affect the actions of the Iranian regime in Tehran, 6,300 miles away, or what that “weakness” might consist of. House Republicans have held up for months the passage of a bill that would fund support for our ally, Ukraine, which is running out of ammunition and other supplies in its war against Russian aggression. The bill is being held up in part on the orders of Trump himself, who has told aides he does not want President Biden to have a legislative victory during the campaign for president.
There’s showing some weakness for you.
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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
