The most important thing General David Petraeus did during his multiple tours in Iraq and his command of allied forces in Afghanistan was not “the surge” he conceived in Iraq in 2007. On the first or second day after the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 2003, Petraeus, then commander of the 101^st Airborne Division, turned to Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson and said, “Tell me how this ends.”

It’s the question being asked today in every capital in Europe, every Emirate on the Gulf that is being bombarded daily by missiles and drones from Iran, every oil company trying to move tankers through the Strait of Hormuz to the Suez Canal, every trucking and shipping company moving goods to market with fuel prices exploding daily, every dinner table of every family with sons or daughters on U.S. ships and stationed in military facilities in the Middle East, around every table of every editorial board of every newspaper in the U.S. and around the world, hell, it’s the same with everyone who watches or reads or listens to the news anywhere. Nobody knows when or how this war will end, and that makes everybody nervous.

Petraeus was smart enough to see early on in Iraq the futility of moving great numbers of U.S. troops into a country that clearly did not want them there. The 101^st was getting hit by fire from Iraqi army units that had dispersed as the Americans crossed the border from Kuwait. The American soldiers were moving down roads in Humvees and trucks with canvas sides and tops, not a scrap of armor to protect them from small arms fire and RPG-7’s Iraqis were shooting at them. Later would come roadside bombs – they came up with a word for them, Improvised Explosive Devices or IED’s – placed under piles of trash and buried under dirt roads, even hidden in the body cavities of dead animals that lay along roadsides.

Petraeus had no way of knowing in March of 2003 that insurgents fighting against U.S. forces would go on for the next eight years, but he suspected that the attacks his division was experiencing during the initial invasion of Iraq were not signs of anything good. He knew it would get worse. He just didn’t know how much worse and how fast. He was also knew that American politicians back in Washington D.C. had gambled their political careers on the invasion of Iraq, and they would be unlikely to want to order a pull-out of U.S. forces anytime soon.

Petraeus’ prescient question should probably go on his tombstone when he is buried at West Point and be taught in the classrooms to cadets not only after he is gone, but right now. The U.S. has had a very bad habit of getting involved in wars it has not been able to win. This trend began with the ceasefire and division of Korea into North and South that ended the war but did not win it; the misbegotten war in Vietnam that ended with our ignominious departure in 1975; through the First Gulf War in 1991 that achieved its goal of running the Iraqi army out of Kuwait but did not result in either the destruction of Iraq’s army or the end of the reign of Saddam Hussein.

Then came the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which no sane military historian would claim the U.S. “won.”

Now we are in the age of Donald Trump, who ran for president promising “no more forever wars,” a clear reference to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he supported until he opposed them.

Donald Trump was bothered by Iran when he took office the first time in 2017. He hated the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by John Kerry and signed by Barack Obama, mainly because it was a “Democrat deal” and was not his, so he cancelled it. Then he bided his time until he won back the presidency and appointed enough lackeys to his cabinet and intelligence services and to the Pentagon that he could do anything we wanted with the U.S. military, so he decided to do something about Iran. First, he bombed its nuclear facilities last year, declaring they were “decimated” and not to be worried about any further.

But that wasn’t enough for Donald Trump. Josh Marshall in his column in Talking Points Memo pointed out that as Trump has become more bedeviled by frustrations at home – the Epstein files come up with a new horror about his friend, and even himself, practically every day; the Supreme Court took away his emergency tariff powers; his campaign to rid the country of undocumented immigrants is going so poorly he had to fire Kristi Noem; inflation is proving to be stubborn; employment figures are tanking; Republicans are resigning wholesale from Congress; his poll numbers have hit all-time lows – Trump has turned “more and more to the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has.” Marshall sees Trump “leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.”

But it’s the kind of self-care of a man suffering from an ulcer that he decides to cure by operating on himself with hand tools from his garage and dull knives from his kitchen. We are seeing that there was little planning for this war beyond assembling a whole bunch of ships and bombers and jets and missiles and bombs and giving the order a week ago to attack, from a ballroom in Mar a Lago, no less.

Donald Trump is clearly among those in positions of power in this country who failed to learn from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan that the enemy gets a vote. If you hit someone in the face, you are going to get hit back, and it’s going to hurt.

Here is the key to those wars and this one: they live there, and we don’t. All you had to do to realize the folly of Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan was to look at what we built there. We built temporary little Americas and called them “base camps.” Our military forces ventured outside of those base camps at their peril. When we left Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, we left our base camps behind, because our soldiers were never going to live there and establish a presence that could only be achieved by absolute victories over our enemies such as we had at the end of World War II over Germany and Japan, when they accepted terms of unconditional surrender and we became what amounted to permanent occupiers.

Trump is not well schooled, or even schooled at all, in military history, but he is smart enough to know that he will not be able to get what he wants from Iran unless that country agrees to “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” as he demanded on Truth Social today, because of course, that’s how you get an enemy to give up. You do it on social media.

After his demand on Truth Social, Trump called Axios and explained what he meant on the phone: “Unconditional surrender could be that they announce it. But it could also be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”

This, of course, is blind and dumb flat-out madness. Iran is an enormous country with a huge population, more than 92 million people. If you took Iran and placed it over the United States, it would cover everything from Maine to Florida. That means its territory would cover every major population center on the Eastern seaboard, from Bangor to Boston to New York and New Jersey to Washington D.C. to Richmond to Charlotte and Raleigh to Atlanta to Jacksonville to Orlando to Miami. The combined populations of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida is about 95 million people, more or less equivalent to Iran’s population.

Now let me ask you something: If another country decided it didn’t like us, and that country decided to do something about its dislike and started bombing the Eastern Seaboard of the United States with its 95 million people, how do you think we would react? Would all those states, and all those Americans, just lie down and say, in effect, please stop, we give up?

The first thing to know is, it would take hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds of bombs to force into submission a territory as big as our eastern states. Nobody has that many bombs. We don’t have that many bombs. We don’t have enough missiles and conventional bombs to bomb Iran into unconditional surrender. There are too many towns and cities, too many structures, too many roads, too many factories, too many single family and multiple family homes, too many schools, too many mosques…

Too many of everything that makes up a modern society and nation including people.

Israel over the last two-plus years has been able to basically flatten Gaza. But Gaza is 25 miles long, seven miles wide at its widest point, with a population of two million. Have the Palestinians of Gaza given up? Has Hamas unconditionally surrendered?

The answer is no, and that answer is a lesson that neither Donald Trump nor Bibi Netanyahu has learned. We should have learned that lesson by now. In ten years of war in Vietnam, the U.S. dropped about seven to eight million tons of bombs on North and South Vietnam.

That war ended 51 years ago. We have had plenty of time to learn that Vietnam won. Our soldiers went home. Our ships left Vietnam’s waters. Our jets took off and flew to American bases on Guam and Hawaii and other islands.

Dominating another nation using military means is impossible in our modern age. It doesn’t matter how tough Pete Hegseth thinks he is, or how bothered Donald Trump is by Iran and its mullahs. Iran and its people will not give in or give up to Trump and Netanyahu, no matter how many bombs they drop, or how many airborne divisions we move from the U.S. to the Middle East.

We’ve have moved airborne divisions to the Middle East before. David Petraeus can tell you that it didn’t work. The war in Iran, which is being fought by the U.S. and Israel with bombs and missiles and defended by Iran with drones armed with bombs and missiles, will not end because Donald Trump wants it to end. Russia’s war on Ukraine will not end because Vladimir Putin wants it to end. Iran won’t stop fighting, even if they fire their last missile and their last drone, because they live there, and we don’t. Donald Trump will not get to pick their next leader.

There are no forever wars. There are only countries that don’t want to be bombed and attacked with missiles and invaded by foreign armies. Iran is one of them. Our military should pack up and go home before more of its members die in Trump’s fruitless attempt to flex his muscles and distract from everything that is driving him crazy here at home. It’s not our war, it’s Trump’s war, and after just one week, he is already losing it.

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The Medicines for the People Act Would Lower Drug Prices

It is common for people in elite circles to engage in magical thinking disconnected from reality.

For example, it is common for people engaged in policy debates to claim that we can get returns in the stock market that are totally unconnected to the rate of growth in the economy or to current levels of the price-to-earnings ratio.

We can’t.

That leads ostensibly serious people to project that we can get stock returns of 10 percent a year indefinitely, even when the price-to-earnings ratio is already near 40 to 1. (Before the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes, the ratio was around 20 to 1, or about half the wildly inflated p-e ratio today.

It was also the standard wisdom that we could reduce tariff barriers to manufactured goods without any substantial negative impact on employment and wages. Even when the data clearly showed that a soaring trade deficit was costing millions of manufacturing jobs, most of the people who dominate policy debates denied reality.

The first decade of this Century was pretty awful for manufacturing workers. In December of 1999, we had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. By December 2009, this fell to 11.5 million, a loss of 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that had existed at the start of the decade. That looks like a pretty big deal.

Patent Monopolies

In this vein, it is a widespread view among policy types that we can’t get innovation without patent monopolies.

This should strike the reality-based community as pretty whacked out.

After all, patent monopolies are only one way to provide incentives for innovation. So why in the world would any serious person think it’s the only way? After all, it’s undisputed that people will work for money.

Patent monopolies are especially problematic in the case of prescription drugs.

Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. Most drugs would sell for just five or ten dollars per prescription in a free market, but because we give a drug company a patent monopoly, a drug can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Inviting Corruption

As everyone who has taken any economics knows, these patent-protected prices are an invitation for corruption.

When a company can sell a drug for $500 that costs $5 to manufacture and distribute, they have an enormous incentive to lie about its safety and effectiveness to get as many people as possible to buy it.

We saw this corruption most dramatically with the opioid crisis, where the manufacturers of the new generation of opioids misrepresented their addictiveness to have them prescribed as widely as possible. (This scandal is the motivating story in the CBS drama Matlock starring Kathy Bates.)

Opioids are an extreme case, but the problem of misrepresented research is widely recognized. Medical journals have to contend with ghost-authored articles, while medical associations have to worry that drug companies are paying conference speakers.

Cheaper Alternative

We could largely eliminate corruption by simply paying upfront for the research and then selling new drugs in a free market without expensive patent monopolies or related protections.

This is where Representative Rashida Tlaib’s Medicine for the People’s Act comes in. Her idea is to create a new division of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute for Biomedical Research and Development.

This institute would be charged with developing drugs in important areas. It would be responsible for everything from basic research to developing an actual drug, running clinical trials, and eventually shepherding successful drugs through the FDA approval process. At that point, since it has all the rights to the new drug, the institute could allow the drug to be sold at a low free-market price.

In addition to the advantages of cheap drugs and reduced incentives for corruption, advanced funding of research should also enable greater transparency and faster sharing of research results. (No law requires drug companies to disclose results of  testing on the many failed drugs.)

With patent monopoly financing, however, drug companies have an incentive to squirrel away their findings until they can secure them with a patent. By contrast, the institute’s interest would be in promoting good healthcare.

The bill would not prohibit drug companies from developing drugs on their own. And they could pitch ideas for funding to the proposed institute.

To that end, it would want to publicize any notable finding as quickly as possible.

Obviously, Representative Tlaib’s bill will not become law. Republicans control both houses of Congress and are not likely to give it a warm reception. Even if the Democrats controlled Congress, it’s unclear whether Tlaib’s bill would have much better prospects.

But Tlaib’s bill can be a jumping-off point for robust, serious debate about the best way to finance the development of new drugs. It is absurd that an archaic system like patent financing continues, unquestioned, in the 21st Century.

We can do much better with an alternative system like the one outlined in Tlaib’s bill.

We need—at the very least—to discuss better and cheaper ways to develop new and better drugs.

This opinion column, in slightly different form, was originally published on March 6, 2026, by the Center for Economic and Political Research.

The post Drugs Would Be Cheap but for Patents That Make Them Expensive appeared first on DCReport.org.

I have tried to avoid writing the following sentence for more than ten years, but the day is finally here:

It has come to this.

It really has. You can argue about politics, you can argue about policy, you can argue about who really won the 2020 election and the 2024 election for that matter. You can argue over the efficacy of vaccines, you can argue over food policy, you can argue about what causes poverty, you can argue about education and why so many kids can’t read by the 4^th grade. You can argue about which religion is the “real” faith, you can argue about doctrine and the tenets of faith, you can argue about what the founders meant in the words of the Constitution.

But when you fire missiles and drop bombs and the leader of a foreign nation is killed, along with much of its top political leadership, when a girls’ school is hit by a bomb and more than 160 schoolgirls die, when six U.S. service men and women are killed, when a U.S. submarine sinks a foreign warship and sends it and more than 180 sailors to the bottom of the sea, when explosions topple buildings and civilians die in the fire and rubble, I thought, at least until today, that we could agree that we were waging war.

Not according to Republicans. They argued today when opposing the vote forced by Democrats over the war powers resolution that the attack by U.S. forces on Iran isn’t a war. We are engaged in “targeted, strategic military strikes,” according to Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who explained what’s going on in Iran in an interview on MSNOW over the weekend. In case we didn’t get what she meant, Luna completed her thought with this: “We did not invade. Are you seeing boots on the ground there? Because I have not.”

While this nonsense is going on in the foreground, as Republicans attempt to redefine Trump’s orders to the military so they don’t fall under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, military commanders all around the world have quite a different definition of Trump’s actions. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has reported receiving more than 110 complaints from service members from every military branch at 30 military installations around the world. They report that commanders are framing Trump’s war on Iran as “Biblically sanctioned” and part of the “End Times” prophesy in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. One non-commissioned officer wrote in an email to the MRFF that his commander told his soldiers that Trump’s attack on Iran was “all part of God’s plan” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

Oka-a-a-ay…

But according to Republicans in the Senate, it’s not a “war,” at least as it’s defined in a law written by the United States Congress, which states that a president can only commit military forces to war with the authorization of Congress, or if there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” Under such a condition, the president must notify the Congress of the military action he has ordered within 48 hours, and the actions ordered by the president are forbidden to last more than 60 days without a specific authorization of the use of military force or declaration of war by the Congress.

No such formal notification has been made by Donald Trump to the Congress, nor has he requested an authorization of the use of military force.

It’s tempting to say that we are in untested waters here, but we’re not. We’ve been here before, and recently. Trump committed soldiers into combat when he ordered special forces to attack President Maduro’s compound in Venezuela and kidnap and remove him to stand trial in the United States. Seven U.S. service members were wounded during the assault which killed 47 Venezuelan soldiers and 32 Cubans who were serving as a special military guard for Maduro. Additionally, during his State of the Union speech last week, Trump awarded the Medal of Honor to the pilot of one of the helicopters involved in the raid on Maduro’s compound, who received multiple gunshot wounds during the action.

Uhhhh, the last time I looked, the Medal of Honor is the highest award for heroism that can be given for actions in combat, and combat happens during a war, so Trump has committed troops to war at least once already, and possibly twice, if you define his aerial bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last year as combat, and given the fact that U.S. aircraft were dropping bombs on Iran that killed people on the ground and destroyed Iranian military facilities, I would call that combat, and thus a war.

Quibbling and hairsplitting over the use of the word “war” is unbecoming of this nation and an insult to the men and women who serve in our armed forces. So are the statements made by Secretary of War – there’s that word again – Pete Hegseth, when he attacked the media today for reporting on the deaths of six American service members because they want to “make the president look bad.”

The president already looks bad, Pete. He has called soldiers who lost their lives in our wars “losers” and “suckers.”

Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are bound and determined that our military forces should perform this all-out bombing campaign on Iran because…

Well, actually, they’re still figuring out reasons and excuses and justifications and explanations for attacking Iran. But it’s not a war, okay? Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, has figured out what it is: “We’re not at war with Iran. We’re making sure that they do not have the capability to harm us anymore.” Presumably, Markwayne will get back to us with an example of the last time Iran brought “harm” to us.

Maybe they should just call it a “special military operation,” Vladimir Putin’s term for his four-year war on Ukraine.

It’s perfect, in a twisted, horrid, unthinkable way: They not only don’t know what they’re doing, they can’t even agree on what to call it.

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The American work environment has gone through a significant transformation in the last 20 years. Millions of people today make a living through app-based platforms, freelance marketplaces, as well as contract-based industries. 

However, the workers compensation systems were tailored to the traditional employer-employee relationship. Independent contractors are usually outside of that protective frame. This detachment has resulted in a wide coverage gap that exposes many injured workers to financial vulnerability.

A System Built for a Different Workforce

The workers compensation laws emerged in the early twentieth century as a compromise between labor and industry. Employers agreed to bear liability to job-related injuries irrespective of the fault and workers waived the right to sue in the majority of cases. In exchange, workers gained medical coverage and partial wage replacement during recovery. However, eligibility depends on classification as an “employee”, a distinction that has become increasingly contested.

The Expansion of Contract-Based Work

Independent contracting has taken off in transportation, delivery, construction, media, health, and technology. By categorizing workers as contractors, companies save on payroll, escape the obligation to provide benefits, and restrict insurance claims. Digital platforms have expanded this model through short-term, task-based arrangements. 

While flexibility may benefit some individuals, the structure shifts substantial risk onto workers who may not fully understand the consequences of their classification. As more individuals operate outside traditional employment models, the number of workers without automatic workers’ compensation coverage continues to grow.

When Injury Occurs Without a Safety Net

If an employee gets injured on the job, their medical bills are covered and wage replacement begins during recovery. When an independent contractor is injured, there is no automatic safety net. The individual may rely on personal health insurance, pursue civil litigation, or absorb the costs directly. 

In metropolitan areas like Miami, a Miami workers comp lawyer may consider misclassification, but that process can be lengthy and uncertain. During the consideration period, the income often stops so medical expenses accumulate. The absence of guaranteed benefits creates immediate financial strain, particularly for households dependent on a single income.

Catastrophic Outcomes and Legal Complexity

The stakes become higher in severe incidents. If a contractor dies in the course of executing his work-related responsibilities, families may end up with wrongful death lawsuits without workers compensation death benefits. Civil claims involve establishing negligence which is heavier than a no-fault claim. 

Criminal lawyers can be also introduced in situations connected with unsafe working conditions or misconduct on the side of the employer, especially, when the deaths were caused by regulatory violations. These layered legal processes highlight how far removed contractors are from streamlined protections.

The Patchwork of Classification Standards

Legal standards for determining worker classification vary by state. Some jurisdictions apply a control-based test, while others rely on the ABC test or economic realities analysis. This patchwork creates inconsistent protections. Enforcement agencies often lack resources to investigate widespread misclassification, as a result questionable practices persist.

The consequences extend beyond individual workers. When injured contractors lack adequate coverage, costs shift to public healthcare systems and family support networks, undermining the original purpose of workers’ compensation.

Endnote 

Addressing the gap requires deliberate reform. Legislators could broaden legal definitions of employment, increase the punishment of misclassification, or impose portable benefits such as injuries, which are paid into by firms that depend on contract workers. Without structural adjustments, labor protections will remain misaligned with today’s workforce.

Photo: Indosup via Pixabay.

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The post Independent Contractors and the Workers’ Comp Coverage Gap appeared first on DCReport.org.

Why did Donald Trump start a war with Iran?

It does not, on first glance, make much sense. The president has now run three times on a platform of making America great again, by which he clearly stated meant making America isolationist again. The Iraq War, he has said many times, was a debacle and an embarrassment. Kamala Harris, he insisted, would torpedo the country into war with Iran.

To believe that this all meant Trump had an ideological opposition to wars of choice is to fundamentally understand the president’s views, and the man himself.

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Trump is ideologically flexible on just about everything, but he has a handful of very particular impulses that have shaped his entire life. The first is that he believes power is zero-sum, that it is grabbed rather than earned, and that he needs – and deserves – as much of it as possible. The second is a deep suspicion of people who are different from him, in terms of race but also in terms of approach to life. It’s racism, but not just racism – he can find common cause with Saudi royals who share his fecklessness, unadulterated self-interest, and dismissiveness toward their many lessers, but is triggered to rage at the thought of hard-scrabble immigrants taking great risks to make it to America and doing back-breaking work once they arrive, and devoid of even the barest shred of empathy for young Black and brown men born into every disadvantage, especially when, like the much-luckier Trump’s, their life choices veer into the criminal. Trump disdains the weak, but he also disdains those who hustle and scrap, and he really hates those who inconvenience him in any way. Finally, he is both spectacularly thin-skinned and a master of the distraction spectacle. He understands, perhaps better than any politician in my lifetime, just what valuable currency attention can be. And he rose to power at the exact time the attention economy surpassed all others.

Trump was never anti-war. He just believed that Iraq made America generally, and George W. Bush specifically, look weak. He was never an isolationist – he just wanted America to be dominating other nations, not helping them.

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The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for over 15 years, and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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It’s been just two days since our authoritarian regime started a full-scale bombing campaign on Iran, blowing up a good chunk of their authoritarian regime. Trump and the GOP have been spraying incoherent nonsense all over social media and the news to explain why we are doing this now.

We’re there to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Which we totally destroyed last year. We’re actually there to liberate the people of Iran. But we blew up a school filled with little children. We’re definitely not doing regime change. We are doing regime change. Iran has been attacking us for decades, so this is actually self-defense. Argle Bargle Operation Epic Fury! ‘Muuuuurika! Fuck yeah!

In reality, there are several real reasons we’re attacking Iran, none of them legitimate, and absolutely none of which the regime (our regime) can explain to the public without immediately being dragged out into the street and lynched by their own base.

Among the more immediate goals:

• Boost Trump’s rock-bottom popularity with a little wag the dog action

• Change the nation’s attention away from the Epstein files

• Set up a “national threat” narrative to seize control of the midterms

• Pay back the massive bribes from several Gulf states

• Boost the price of oil to help Russia’s war effort

• Soothe Trump’s fragile ego after being slapped down by “his” SCOTUS last week

There’s also the whole “Fulfill the biblical prophecy of war in the Middle East and the destruction of Israel” yadayadayada that the Evangelicals frenetically masturbate over on a daily basis. That last one is not really high on Trump’s list of things he gives a shit about, but there are more than enough theocratic neo-cons in his regime that do, and they are whispering in his ear how tough blowing up brown people in the Middle East will make him look. Trump is a moron who believes anything he is told as long as he’s told it will make him look tough and manly.

The problem is that our would-be dictator has surrounded himself with equally stupid people who are wildly out of touch with even their own base, much less the rest of the public. While MAGAland is dutifully obeying and making mouth noises in support of the Dear Leader, there has not been the intense “rally around the flag” effect the regime was looking for:

Poll Finds No Rally Effect After Iran Strikes

Morning Consult: “Trump approval (44% to 53%) and his foreign policy approval (43% to 52%) are unchanged from pre-strike baselines. The strikes have not moved his numbers immediately.”

The country is split: “41% of registered voters say strikes necessary vs. 42% who prefer diplomacy.”

What happens when you throw a war and no one rallies to your flag?

It’s not really all that hard to understand why this didn’t work. The regime looked at how George W. Bush’s popularity surged during the Iraq War and assumed they could replicate it. Things were awesome back then. The press fell in line. Dissent was crushed. The regime had a free hand to do any illegal thing it wanted, no questions asked.

But, again, these are very stupid people who are only looking at the end result and want to take shortcuts to get there. Regardless of whether you think our decades of heavy-handed “diplomacy” in the Middle East justified 9/11 or not, we were attacked. We were hit harder than we have been in over half a century. The Bush regime followed that up with months of carefully planned and planted lies and propaganda to justify a war of aggression against Iraq after we had, not unreasonably, invaded Afghanistan.

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All of that combined allowed the Bush regime to launch a war of choice with a lot of public support, even as it kicked off the largest anti-war protests in history. Protesters were smeared as “terrorist-lovers” and silenced by the press because everyone was afraid of the right’s “toxic patriotism.”

But the Trump regime doesn’t have a terrorist attack to weaponize and they were too lazy or stupid (or both) to bother with a coordinated propaganda campaign. They quite literally cannot settle on a single lie about why the fuck we’re attacking Iran. It changes from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour.

There was never going to be a boost in public support under those circumstances, and a first-year PR graduate would have been able to explain that. Hell, I don’t have any PR training at all, and even I knew that.

Meanwhile, even though the Epstein files are not currently the front-page headlines, that’s not going to last long. There are millions of files still being pored over, and we know the DoJ tried to hide dozens of pages, describing in graphic detail, how Trump sexually assaulted a little girl. That story is just one of many that haven’t run their course yet.

There are also still millions of files being illegally withheld, and one can only imagine how much worse those revelations will be when we finally get them. Maybe they’ll be leaked. Maybe someone will post them by accident. Maybe the courts will force the regime to obey the law. Regardless, they won't stay hidden forever, and the cover-up guarantees we will continue to talk about Donald Trump being a pedophile.

So, while Trump is paying back his Middle East benefactors and helping out his good friend Vlad while also making himself feel like a Big Boy playing with his military, Trump’s main goals have already failed. Honestly, though? He’s probably made things worse.

As the weeks drag on and more Americans are killed, Trump’s already precarious popularity will dwindle. When gas prices spike and inflation spikes with it, his base will become enraged. They won’t abandon him, because that will never happen. But they will vent their anger on their elected Republican officials, and their already low enthusiasm will dry up even further. The midterms, already a trainwreck for the GOP, will start to resemble the kind of wipeout you read about in history books and wonder how it could possibly be real.

That means Trump’s plans to seize control of the elections will be thwarted on the spot. With no public support from anyone, including his own base, his regime of fascists will not have the juice to seize control of elections anywhere. Not in blue states, red states, or blue cities in red states. Nothing. Nowhere. Maybe if the regime had waited to attack until closer to the election or maybe not told everyone their plan to issue an executive order claiming China Iran was attacking our elections, they might have pulled it off. But, again, they were too lazy or stupid to plan this properly.

I’ve said this before, and I will definitely say it again (probably a lot): When the history books are written about this period, they will note that the thing most responsible for bringing down Trump’s fascist regime was their own monumental incompetence. Thank god for idiot Nazis.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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There are 245 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.