Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 28
June 25, 2025
June 24, 2025
June 24, 2025
At 6:02 last night, President Donald Trump announced on his social media account that Israel and Iran has agreed to “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” that would lead to “an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that the announcement took some of Trump’s own senior advisors by surprise. Since then, Trump’s social media feed has been unusually active, posting claims that his approval rate is soaring, that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, that “for the first time ever [a] majority of Americans believe the United States is on the right track,” and that “Trump was right about everything.”
“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!” Trump’s social media feed posted at 1:08 this morning. But within hours, Israel had struck Iran again. At 6:50, Trump’s social media feed posted: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” At 7:28 it posted: ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
After Israel struck, Iran retaliated. This morning, Trump accused both countries of violating the ceasefire agreement—although, to be sure, there has been no published confirmation that any such agreement exists. Sounding angry, Trump told reporters: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f--- they’re doing.”
At 11:17 the account posted: “Both Israel and Iran wanted to stop the War, equally! It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!” It also attacked Democrats, especially women of color, at length, saying they were stupid and “can’t stand the concept of our Country being successful again.”
The account also said: “Now that we have made PEACE abroad, we must finish the job here at home by passing “THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” and getting the Bill to my desk, ASAP. It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday. We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens.”
In fact, Trump’s victory lap seems designed to be the finale to a triumphant storyline that can convince his loyalists he has scored an enormous victory before reality sets in. According to a new CNN poll, Americans disapprove of the U.S. military strikes against Iran by a margin of 56% to 44%.
Further, Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that according to early assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the damage caused by the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes did not destroy the main parts of the Iran’s nuclear program and probably set it back by only a few months. The DIA is the intelligence arm of the Pentagon.
The White House called the DIA assessment “flat out wrong.”
Later today, the New York Times confirmed CNN’s reporting.
Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested today that the Obama administration had the right approach when it negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear program. Paul said: “I’m arguing that the intervention, the military intervention, may not have been successful, as people are saying, and also that there may not be a military answer to this, that ultimately the answer to the end of the nuclear program is going to involve diplomacy.”
A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”
It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.
Tonight, Trump’s social media feed posted: “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”
Trump’s posts sound panicked, and even aside from the strikes against Iran, there is reason for his loyalists to be concerned about political events. On Saturday, masked agents from Customs and Border Patrol were caught on video chasing Narciso Barranco, a 48-year-old undocumented landscaper who has lived in the U.S. for decades, down a street with guns drawn, pinning him to the ground, and hitting him as they handcuffed him. Barranco’s oldest son, Alejandro, served in the Marines for four years and is a veteran. Barranco’s two younger sons are active-duty Marines. There has been a popular outcry over Barranco's arrest.
Barranco’s son Alejandro told Jacob Soboroff, Julia Ainsley, and Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News that his father is being held with at least 70 other people with one toilet and no privacy and that he has received very little water and even less food.
ICE's detentions continue to create a backlash. Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported that the number of migrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000, leading to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Federal law permits members of Congress to make unannounced visits to ICE facilities to inspect them, but officers at the Department of Homeland Security last week said members of Congress needed to give at least 72 hours notice before an inspection.
ICE claims the power to “deny a request or otherwise cancel, reschedule or terminate a tour or visit” by lawmakers or by members of their staff if “facility management or other ICE officials deem it appropriate to do so.”
Inspections will be hard to conduct at the newly approved detention facility deep in the Florida Everglades designed to house up to 5,000 migrants. Members of the state legislature say they were not consulted about the plan. Florida says the new facility will cost about $450 million a year to operate. The federal government will reimburse that money through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
News broke today that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the individual responsible for the administration’s draconian immigration policies, owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, the data and intelligence software company owned by Peter Thiel. Palantir has a number of valuable contracts with ICE to track undocumented immigrants.
Ken Dilanian of NBC News reported today that concern about retaliation from Iranian sleeper cells has made the FBI return agents who had been pulled from their normal duties to focus on immigration issues back to their usual focus on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity.
One source told Dilanian, “Guess they are realizing this whole national security thing is important, after all.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/world/middleeast/trump-ceasefire-israel-iran.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/24/politics/intel-assessment-us-strikes-iran-nuclear-sites
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 23, 2025, 6:02 pm.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 1:08 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 6:50 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 7:28 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 9:56 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 10:07 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 11:17 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 9:46 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 24, 2025, 7:15 p.m.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-lashes-israel-iran-dont-know-f-re-rcna214712
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-iran-israel-nuclear-strike-10074fdadf47d4ec35faf1de6ac6d54d
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/24/politics/trump-iran-strikes-poll-cnn-ssrs
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/us/politics/iran-nuclear-sites.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/us/politics/ice-congress.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/us/narciso-barranco-father-detained-santa-ana
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/ice-detention-numbers-record-high/
Bluesky:
jenrubin.bsky.social/post/3lsewo32egk2o
potustracker.us/post/3lscllo46t424
britculpsapp.bsky.social/post/3lsdxlczn7s22
potustracker.us/post/3lsdwklnqcw2d
potustracker.us/post/3lsdytaocwe2j
potustracker.us/post/3lsfiomewlr2q
codigocripto.bsky.social/post/3lsfduptwxk2t
potustracker.us/post/3lsefnjyfti2d
June 23, 2025
June 23, 2025
In a timeline of Trump’s decision to drop 12 of the reportedly 20 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs the U.S. military possessed on Iran, New York Times reporters confirmed what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo judged from the beginning: Trump wanted in on the optics of what seemed to be Israel’s successful strikes against Iran.
Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported conversations with administration officials who confirmed there was no new intelligence to suggest Iran was on the brink of producing nuclear weapons.
Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper reported yesterday in the New York Times that Trump had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu against striking Iran but changed his mind after seeing how Israel’s military action was “playing” on television. The reporters write: “The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.”
Trump began to hint he had been part of the operation, and military advisors began to draw up plans for a strike. According to the reporters, by June 17—three days after his military parade had fizzled and more than 5 million Americans had turned out to protest his administration—Trump had decided to bomb Iran.
Rather than keeping the mission quiet, Trump issued increasingly aggressive social media posts appearing to hint at a strike. David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited reports from Israeli intelligence saying that Iranian officials had removed 400 kilograms (about 880 pounds) of enriched uranium from the Fordo enrichment plant to another nuclear complex, although at least some equipment and records would likely have remained there.
Republicans have talked about bombing Iran to stop its nuclear aspirations since the early 2000s, but the relationship between the U.S. and Iran relating to nuclear technology actually reaches back to 1953. In that year, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom supported a coup against the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he called for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which British interests controlled a majority stake.
In his place, the former leader of the country, Mohammad Reza Shah, retook power. In 1954, Iran accepted a 25-year agreement that gave western oil companies 50% ownership of Iran’s oil production.
At the same time, President Eisenhower proposed trying to defang international fears of nuclear war by shifting nuclear technologies toward civilian uses, including energy. On December 8, 1953, he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City on how atomic energy could be used for peaceful ends. The initiative, known as “Atoms for Peace,”
provided reactors, nuclear fuel, and training for scientists for countries that promised they would use the technology only for peaceful civilian purposes.
In 1967 the U.S. supplied a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium to Iran, and trained Iranian scientists in the United States. In 1974, according to Ariana Rowberry of the Brookings Institution, the shah announced he intended to build 20 new reactors in the next 20 years.
Then, in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran forced out the shah and put Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power. After the U.S. admitted the shah into the country for cancer treatments, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Iran, imposed sanctions, froze Iranian assets in the U.S., and ended the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran.
Iran turned to Pakistan, China, and Russia to expand its nuclear program. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased until Republican politicians talked about bombing the sites of Iran’s nuclear program. Famously, Arizona senator John McCain joked about bombing Iran in 2007 when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ classic song “Barbara Ann.”
McCain lost the 2008 election to Democratic president Barack Obama, and in 2013 at the beginning of his second term, Obama began high-level talks to cap Iran’s enrichment of uranium that could be used for weapons. In 2015, forty-seven Republican senators, led by then freshman senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, tried to blow up the talks, sending an open letter to Iranian officials to put them on notice that “the next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
This was an astonishing breach of the longstanding U.S. tradition of presenting a united front in foreign negotiations. Nonetheless, in 2015 the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s enriched uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
At about the same time, negotiators settled an unrelated case between the U.S. and Iran at The Hague, involving the return of American prisoners to the U.S. and Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. to Iran. Since Iran was cut off from international finance systems at the time, the U.S. returned some of those assets in 2016 as Swiss francs, euros, and other currencies. Donald Trump, who was then running for the presidency, insisted that the Obama administration had sent “pallets of cash” to Iran as part of a deal to free the prisoners. “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power,” Trump told reporters.
Then, in 2016, voters put Trump in the White House. Although the nuclear deal appeared to be working, Trump left it in 2018, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” Without the U.S. the agreement broke down. Iran resumed its program for enriching uranium.
A week and a half ago, on June 12, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched strikes against Iran, and on June 21, Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, claiming that after 40 years of Iranian hostility, “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
In fact, the effect of the strikes is not at all clear, although Trump insisted yet again this afternoon that “[o]bliteration is an accurate term!... Bullseye!!!”
Trump’s strikes on Iran underscore how Republican leaders see governance. They seemed to see the careful negotiations under Obama and the international inspections that certified Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA as signs of weakness, preferring simply to use American military might to impose U.S. will. Trump has combined that dominance ideology with his enthusiasm for performances that play well on television.
This afternoon, Iran responded to the U.S. strikes with its own missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, after warning of the upcoming attack to enable Qatar to intercept the missiles.
Trump posted on social media: “Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired—13 were knocked down, and 1 was ‘set free,’ because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”
Ten minutes later, he posted: “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”
Republican dominance politics began in the 1950s as a way to prevent the federal government from protecting Black and Brown civil rights. Since then, it has reinforced the idea of asserting power through violence. And it has always reinforced the power of white men over women and racial and gender minorities.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The administration has claimed this power as part of its campaign to scare immigrants from coming to the U.S. by demonstrating that they could end up in a third country with no recourse. The court majority did not explain its reasoning; the three liberal justices—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—dissented sharply.
“In…earlier rulings, the court cleared the way for the government to treat as many as a million migrants as removable who previously weren’t,” legal analyst Steve Vladeck told Angélica Franganilla Díaz and John Fritze of CNN. “And today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/iran-uranium-stockpile-whereabouts.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/trump-iran-decision-strikes.html
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sixty-years-of-atoms-for-peace-and-irans-nuclear-program/
https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/03/politics/us-sends-plane-iran-400-million-cash
https://www.vox.com/2015/3/10/8182063/tom-cottons-controversial-letter-to-iran-explained
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-nuclear-deal/
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/status-irans-nuclear-program-1
https://www.npr.org/2007/04/20/9688222/jesting-mccain-sings-bomb-bomb-bomb-iran
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 21, 2025, 7:50 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 23, 2025, 3:52 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 23, 2025, 4:02 p.m.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/qatar-explosions-us-air-base-strikes-on-iran/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/politics/supreme-court-migrants-south-sudan-turmoil-filled-countries
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25981761-no-24a1153/
Bluesky:
June 22, 2025
June 22, 2025
Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”
For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.
It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.
Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”
Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.
In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”
This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”
There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.
After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”
On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”
At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”
On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”
What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”
The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.
One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.
Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.
Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.
“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”
Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”
But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.
In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”
Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.
—
Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 21, 2025, 7:50 p.m.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tulsi-gabbard-wrong-iran-nuclear-program/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/politics/israel-iran-nuclear-bomb-us-intelligence-years-away
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-says-countries-now-ready-supply-iran-nuclear-weapons-2088979
https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-june-22-2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/donald-trump-bombs-iran-and-america-waits
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5362973-iran-approves-closing-strait-of-hormuz/
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/exclus...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/iran-uranium-stockpile-whereabouts.htm
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance The Week AheadTuesday will be the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, the case that stripped American women of their right to get an abortion. At the time, that felt like a new low in modern-day America. Since then, however, the country reelected Donald Trump to the presidency…Read more10 hours ago · 341 likes · 40 comments · Joyce VanceX:
SeanCasten/status/1936581574188782026
BulwarkOnline/status/1936801030978642045
Bluesky:
thebulwark.com/post/3ls7fox7gbc2b
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3ls7yid6hhk22
meidastouch.com/post/3ls7nkklh7i2v
atrupar.com/post/3ls7atae7s227
chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3ls7qufdbz22q
chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3ls6bsrr3422u
June 21, 2025
At 7:50 this evening, Eastern Time, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Then he reposted a message referring to the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, assumed to be at the center of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, saying: “Fordow is gone.”
Then he posted a statement saying: “I will be giving an Address to the Nation at 10:00 P.M., at the White House, regarding our very successful military operation in Iran. This is an HISTORIC MOMENT FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ISRAEL, AND THE WORLD. IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR. THANK YOU!”
Then he posted an American flag.
Just after 10:00 tonight, flanked by Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump spoke briefly to the nation. He said:
“The U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime, Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. Everybody heard those names for years as they built this horribly destructive enterprise. Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity, and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.
“For 40 years, Iran has been saying, ‘Death to America, death to Israel.’ They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs,with roadside bombs. That was their specialty. We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate. In particular, so many were killed by their general, Qasem Soleimani [whom Trump ordered assassinated in 2020]. I decided a long time ago that I would not let this happen. It will not continue.
“I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team, like perhaps no team has ever worked before. And we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel. I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they've done.
“And most importantly, I want to congratulate the great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines tonight, and all of the United States military on an operation the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades. Hopefully, we will no longer need their services in this capacity. I hope that’s so. I also want to congratulate the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan “Razin” Caine, spectacular general, and all of the brilliant military minds involved in this attack
“With all of that being said, this cannot continue. There will be either peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight's was the most difficult of them all by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed, and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.
“There's no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close. There's never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago. Tomorrow, General Caine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, will have a press conference at 8:00 a.m. at the Pentagon.
“And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
In The Atlantic, foreign affairs scholar Tom Nichols noted: “President Donald Trump has done what he swore he would not do: involve the United States in a war in the Middle East.”
—
Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 21, 2025, 7:50 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 21, 2025, 8:04 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 21, 2025, 8:13 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, June 21, 2025, 8:44 p.m.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/middleeast/iran-fordow-nuclear-site-latam-hnk-intl
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/united-states-bombed-iran-now-what/683276/
Bluesky:
potustracker.us/post/3ls5s4zax7q2j
trumpwatch.skyfleet.blue/post/3ls5xs55hwc2x
muellershewrote.com/post/3ls5r7cbox22n
June 21, 2025
June 20, 2025
June 20, 2025
Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked into that claim and noted that by using a percentage, ICE avoids the question of just how many assaults there have actually been. He points out that year-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently 20% lower than they were in 2024 and that at least one ICE news release blurred the distinction between “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” ICE would not provide evidence for their claims.
Bump concludes: “[W]e should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” After Bump’s article appeared yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “New data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations.”
Bump noted that ICE “has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators,” and the message from Homeland Security bears that claim out. After claiming a 500% increase in assaults, it continued: “Make no mistake, sanctuary politicians are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE. This violence against ICE must end.”
The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.
On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE’s sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested.
Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and “assaulting law enforcement.” As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Lander was later released, and New York governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped.
The same pattern occurred last month, when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), charging her with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during Baraka’s arrest.
U.S. Magistrate Judge André Espinosa, a federal judge, rebuked the officials who had charged Baraka, warning them that their rush to charge the mayor suggests “a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.”
But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.
President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former vice president Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden’s son Hunter had worked.
Trump didn’t want an actual investigation; he wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched. He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration's deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the “Biden Crime Family” although there was never a Biden family business, their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization—a family business—openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent.
Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this Big Lie, and courts dismissed the many cases brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists’ support.
There was, of course, a special counsel appointed to look into Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. His name was Jack Smith, and after his investigation, in 2023 a grand jury, made up of American citizens, indicted Trump for engaging in “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct American democracy by stopping the counting of votes by which citizens choose their government officials. “Despite having lost,” the indictment reads, Trump “was determined to remain in power.”
Now he is back in office, but he remains unpopular. A new Fox News poll released yesterday shows that only 38% of registered voters like the Republicans’ budget reconciliation omnibus bill, while 59% oppose it, a difference of 21 points. The poll also showed that 55% of registered voters are worried about the economy, 84% are worried about inflation, and 57% think tariffs hurt the economy. Only 46% of respondents approve of Trump’s job performance, while 54% disapprove.
This week’s Economist/YouGov poll shows that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling deportations, while only 42% approve, and that Trump’s job approval rating among those from 18 to 29 years old has dropped 44 points since he took office. Many of Trump’s supporters believed he would be deporting only undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes, but an investigation by CNN reporters published on Monday showed that fewer than 10% of those taken into custody since October have been convicted of violent crimes.
So members of his administration are centering power in the White House while obscuring who, exactly, is giving orders that either are or might be violating the law. Administration lawyers are still hiding who was actually the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in its first months and who gave the order to send Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Making lawbreaking opaque makes it harder to prosecute those doing the breaking. It is possible at least some of the drive to hide agents’ faces comes from that impulse, just as members of the Ku Klux Klan hid their faces in the 1860s and 1870s.
There is another important parallel to the Klan in the administration's defense of masked agents who are terrorizing Americans even as they insist they are the ones under attack by dangerous Democrats. The Klan set out to “reform” governments elected by a majority of voters and take control themselves, permanently. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white Populists. The Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were “socialists” and had no idea how to run a government.
On June 12, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in Los Angeles, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
When California senator Alex Padilla, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety, tried to ask Noem a question, he was assaulted and handcuffed by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Yesterday, he noted in a New York Times op-ed that “public safety is not the point; the spectacle is.” Trump “is testing the boundaries of his power,” Padilla wrote, “[a]nd he’s using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it.”
“If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor and even local law enforcement, they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide.”
But Padilla noted that the attempt to force minority rule on the U.S. through violence shows that the administration is weak. “If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question,” he wrote, “imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans organizing will do.”
Today, at a news conference in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Vice President J.D. Vance if Trump’s administration is “cracking down on Democrats.” Vance, who served with Alex Padilla in the Senate, called his former colleague by the wrong name. Once again seeding the idea that a Democratic lawmaker must be a criminal, Vance called the California senator “José Padilla,” using the name of a man convicted in 2007 of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism.
The vice president’s press secretary said the vice president “must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/16/us/california-no-secret-police-act-proposal
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/19/brad-lander-ice-assault-masking/
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/brad-lander-arrested/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/19/new-york-mayoral-candidate-brad-lander-interview
https://newjerseymonitor.com/2025/05/19/congresswoman-charged-with-assault-over-ice-jail-protest/
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4131995-trump-indicted-on-jan-6-charges/
https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-big-beautiful-bill-fox-news-poll-2088007
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/16/us/la-ice-raids-violent-criminals-records-invs
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/opinion/alex-padilla-removal-trump.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5360620-trump-calls-for-special-prosecutor/
X:
AlinaHabba/status/1920918181951971563
Bluesky:
jackshawhan.bsky.social/post/3ls26bk7lts2j
justinbaragona.bsky.social/post/3lrgj6ff52s26
kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3ls34ac2d7k2e
factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3ls34jejx6c2s
simonwdc.bsky.social/post/3ls34bxaluk2d
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3ls3d4ko6d22a
adambonin.bsky.social/post/3lrsrswlmnc2w
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1332 followers
