Whiplash 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀

Madman in Chief:  Former President Nixon, a believer of the Madman Theory of diplomacy, tried to convince Communist countries that he was so irrational and volatile that provoking him could lead to dire unpredictable responses. For all his many failings, Nixon wasn’t stupid, he opened diplomatic relations with China and established the EPA, but as evidenced by the outcome of the Viet Nam war, his Madman Theory didn’t work well in practice. Nevertheless Trump whose occasional bestie Roger Stone sports a Nixon tattoo isn’t much for learning from history so taking a page from Nixon’s Madman playbook or maybe because he’s just unhinged, he began Tuesday by doubling down on his threat to completely obliterate Iran, saying a “whole civilization will die tonight” beginning at 8 PM New York Time before ending the day agreeing to a two week ceasefire with the target of his threats.  The ceasefire agreement was mediated by Pakistan with the help of Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia with a lift from China and a final push from presidential wannabee VP Vance.  The deal lifts all sanctions against Iran, cedes control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, allows Iran to charge passing ships a $2 million toll, but does nothing about Iran’s uranium or its nuclear weapon plans. Imagine the reaction if Obama or Biden agreed to any of that?  To put it bluntly, Trump’s unhinged threats TACO’ed into bigly concessions. Iran’s unseen leader may or may not be comatose and incapacitated, but whatever group is leading the country has got to be taking victory laps. On the way to Trump’s TACO, the NY Times published a piece from the Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan tag team that shifted much of the blame for the decision to go to war with Iran from Trump on to Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu who, according to various “don’t blame me” sources convinced the naïve and malleable (as if) Trump that he could accomplish what no other president before him thought was possible even though they’d all received variations of the same pitch from Bibi during their terms. You can tell who the sources were, they’re the ones who the NY Times credited with questioning the wisdom of Trump’s attack plan while doing nothing to stop it. Chief among the doubters was Veep Vance but before we give him too much credit for his “concern” or for helping, with China’s urging, to get Trump to pull back from obliterating Iran’s civilization, consider that he agreed to support Trump’s decision to attack Iran even though he believed it was foolhardy and for much of yesterday he was in Budapest, campaigning for it’s autocratic leader Viktor Orbán who is widely expected to lose his upcoming election. Not only has Orbán run Hungary’s economy into the ground and trampled on the rights of its citizens but he is buddies with Vladimir Putin whose Ukraine strategy he openly suports while also sharing some of those NATO secrets he’s privy to. While noodling over his Iran obliteration plans, Trump found the time to accept a staged call from Vance to express his love for Viktor. Although to be fair, it took two attempts for Vance to get through to Trump as his first attempt ended up in voicemail. 

Special Elections:  Former Congresswoman Margie Taylor Greene’s replacement will be Republican Clay Fuller.  That’s good news for Speaker Mike Johnson who needs every Republican House member he can get.  The bad news for him is that though Fuller won easily, his 12 point margin of victory was way below Trump’s 37 point 2024 margin in the same district.  That 25 point shift toward blue in a ruby red district is another omen of what is likely to be a blue wave in the midterms, assuming that is that the elections take place, Democrats don’t screw things up, and that the Republican’s much larger cash cache doesn’t transform into loads of red votes.  The Georgia election wasn’t the only significant one that took place yesterday.  With little fanfare, liberal candidate Chris Taylor won election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court beating her rival by 20 points in a state where statewide elections are generally won by the slimmest of margins. As a result, the make-up of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is now firmly in liberal hands.

More 💩:  Yesterday, during his first press conference as Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche said he loves Trump, really he said that.  That’s not normal, nor is normal that he also said that it’s appropriate for a US Attorney General to do whatever the president wants him to do even if that means targeting his opponents for made-up crimes.  Apparently weaponizing the judiciary is only a bad thing when done, or allegedly done, by Democrats.  To that end, Harmeet Dhillon the Assistant Attorney General running the Civil Rights Division into the ground has been tasked with prosecuting Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who had the guts to speak truth to power.