A Mad King Who Enjoys Watching Things Go Boom
INSIDE: Ayatollah Khamenei ... Pete Hegseth ... López Belloza
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Going … Going … Almost Gone
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Dumb and Illegal
The scale of damage that President Trump could wreak in a second term was always greatest in foreign affairs, where the president’s powers are, generally, most robust and least subject to judicial oversight.
The misadventures on the high seas of the Western Hemisphere, in Venezuela, and now in Iran are just the beginning of what is likely to be more cowboying abroad, as his lame duck status becomes increasingly obvious and his political power at home begins to wane.
The conundrum for Americans opposed to Trump is that while foreign affairs may be the realm in which he sows the most long-term chaos, the best way to rein him in remains in the domestic arena: defending democracy at home in order to preserve the capacity for legitimate regime change here via free and fair elections; defending the rule of the law and the independence of the judiciary; and protecting blue states and marginalized peoples from a weaponized federal government.
With docile GOP majorities controlling both chambers, Congress is willingly surrendering its constitutional and political powers in foreign affairs to a mad king who enjoys pressing buttons and watching things go boom.
Trump’s every-shifting rationales for the attack neither establish a legal predicate for the U.S.-Israel strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor suggest a coherent strategic vision for relations with Iran, the U.S. role in the region, or the projection of U.S. power in the world. To the extent there was a Trump strategy for regime change, it appears to have overshot its objectives, as it were:
Despite the administration’s effort to construct an ex post facto rationale that a preemptive strike from Iran was imminent, officials told congressional staff that U.S. intelligence did not corroborate that claim and the Pentagon was slow to offer evidence to back up the claim.
The Latest on Iran …
Kuwait shot down three U.S. fighter jets in a friendly fire incident. All six crew members survived the incident.
The known death toll among U.S. service members rose to four. While the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed the circumstances, all four deaths appear to have come from an Iranian missile attack on a U.S. facility in Kuwait.
The death in toll in Iran as the U.S. air assault entered its third day reached 555, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. The worst single incident appeared to be a strike on a girl’s elementary school in the southern Iran town of Minab that killed at least 175 people.
The WSJ charts the effect of the decapitation strike on senior figures in the Iranian government.
The Regional Conflagration
The NYT and WaPo have scrambled their respective visual teams to map Iran’s retaliatory strikes in the region.
Pentagon IG Freezes Boat Strikes Review
Faced with a proposed review of military targeting used in the U.S. campaign against suspected drug-smuggling boats on the high seas, Platte B. Moring III, the new Trump-appointed Pentagon inspector general, told staff in a Feb. 11 meeting that was concerned about the political implications of the review and wanted to consult with Defense Department leadership first, the NYT reports. Since then, Moring hasn’t rejected or approved the proposal, leaving it in limbo.
Pentagon Cuts Ties with Top-Tier Schools
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is cutting academic ties between the Pentagon and 13 leading universities in performative campaign against “wokeness” and alleged anti-Americanism. The disfavored schools, according to a Feb. 27 memo from Hegseth’s office, are currently educating are:
Harvard University
Saint Louis University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tufts University
Georgetown University
Carnegie Mellon University
Brown University
Columbia University
Yale University
Middlebury College
Princeton University
The George Washington University
College of William and Mary
The memo also includes a list of favored schools, which it describes as follows: “These institutions meet the following criteria: intellectual freedom, minimal relationships with adversaries, minimal public expressions in opposition of the Department, and Graduate-level National Security, International Affairs, and/or Public Policy Programs.”
The favored schools include:
Liberty University
George Mason University
Pepperdine University
The University of Tennessee
University of Michigan
University of Nebraska
Iowa State University
University of North Carolina
Clemson University
Arizona State University
Baylor University
University of Florida
Regent University
Auburn University
Hillsdale College
The two-tiered higher-ed system was unveiled the same day Hegseth claimed he’d pressured Scouting America into banning transgender children from participating, a claim the group denied.
Mass Deportation Watch
Babson College freshman Any Lucia López Belloza — detained en route home to Texas for Thanksgiving and deported to Honduras, where she hadn’t lived since a young child — declined to board a government flight to the United States on Friday after ICE threatened in a court filing to deport her again if she returned.
Four federal judges in the Southern District of West Virginia have suddenly become a firewall against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Kyle Cheney reports.
The Trump DOJ is charging 30 more people in connection with the Jan. 18 protest at a St. Paul church that already led to charges against CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was covering the protest.
The Retribution: ICYMI Edition
The mother of all investigations of the investigators — Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones’ wide-ranging probe of a supposed “grand conspiracy” against Trump — has broadened to include investigating the FBI’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, the NYT reports.
Elections Are Existential Threat To Trump
Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer, on “the serious possibility that, when the courts are called on—and they will be—to remedy administration actions to interfere with the election, the Trump administration may respond with defiance.”
Judges Under Siege
60 Minutes interviewed 26 federal judges — nine Democratic appointees, 17 Republican, both sitting and retired — about the unprecedented barrage of threats they’ve faced under Trump II:
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B Bauer is on target. Some may ask 'what then'? Others of us ask why has he and his criminal cronies have been allowed to begin their coup much less reach this mother of all crises.
Re: Pentagon/Kegsbreath new "approved" higher-ed institutions...I looked for Bob Jones U and Oral Roberts U, but curiously omitted from the preferred list of "anti-woke/pro-Murka" schools. Surely these oversights can and will be corrected...also, had it not folded, no doubt Trump U would have made the cut as well.