Trump gave a rare prime-time speech last night. I didn’t watch it, but Tom Nichols and others did.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 1 Apr 2026: Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech, subtitled “His address raised more questions than it answered about the war in Iran.”
His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.
…
If the president meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)
That’s what the Bush administration thought about Iraq, too.
\
Lots of people have noticed a couple phrases in his speech. (“Many people are saying…”)
NY Times, 1 Apr 2026: 5 Takeaways From Trump’s Address on Iran, subtitled “President Trump did not define a clear path out of the conflict, which he estimated would end within three weeks.”
He estimated that the war should wind down within three weeks.
Or, two weeks, and maybe a couple more days, I’ve seen him say on TV. Recall my post from March 6: Everything Will Be Better in Two Weeks. It’s a ‘tell’ that he has no idea what he’s doing.
And this:
“We are going to hit them extremely hard. Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
Ages? He’s planning genocide on one of the oldest civilizations on the planet? Is that what his MAGA fans want?
\
Paul Krugman, today: Trump Doesn’t Even Have the Courage to Run Away, subtitled “What the world learned from his big speech”
Text plus video.
It turns out that the speech was sort of an anticlimax, although not in a good way. Many people expected Trump to pull the mother of all TACOs, to declare victory and surrender. He did not do that. He declared victory, of course, but he did not actually announce an end to hostilities. On the contrary, he said we’re going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age. So add massive war crimes to your schedule.
There is clearly no strategy here. There’s no endgame. There’s nothing. It’s hard to tell, as always, whether Trump is delusional or just completely unable to admit something that he actually knows.
\
No matter what he does or does not do, the cult is fine with it.
Slate, Ian Prasad Philbrick, 1 Apr 2026: MAGA Is Boiling Over About the Iran War, subtitled “But the movement is finding stranger and stranger ways to excuse the man who started it.”
That’s why it’s a cult.
\
What desperate crazies would resort to.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 31 Mar 2026: ‘Something Like A Civil War’: Eric Metaxas And James Kunstler Suggest Trump Needs To Outlaw The Democratic Party
“It seems to me that circumstances may require—may require—Mr. Trump to go to a place where he has to declare certain emergency executive powers to deal with an organization that wants to destroy the country,” …
Projection. And, as I’ve noted before, conservatives think you can change reality just by passing a law to prohibit something.
\
NPR, updated 1 Apr 2026: What to know about Trump’s future presidential library, which he says may be a hotel
Isn’t “Trump library” an oxymoron? Also, many have noted that the flag in this rendering has more than 50 stars on it.
\
Much coverage of the Supreme Court discussing Trump’s challenge to the 14th amendment.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 1 Apr 2026: The Birthright Con
On his first day back in office, President Trump issued an executive order that tried to redefine birthright citizenship to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants, despite the clear and expansive language of the amendment.
Backing Trump as he tries to rewrite the Constitution by executive fiat is much of the Republican Party and a collection of conservative legal scholars who rushed, in the wake of his decree, to try to give substance to the president’s thin, unpersuasive argument. Against Trump is the weight of Supreme Court precedent, historical consensus and the plain words of the clause itself.
Trump actually attended the Supreme Court hearings on this, yesterday, and walked out half way through when it was clear the justices were not buying his lawyers’ arguments.
I mentioned this because this is just another example of the white supremacy driving MAGA and Trump. Human morality is, at its primitive core, extremely hierarchical, and tribalistic. In-group vs. out-group. MAGA is tribalistic in this way. That’s what drives them. Not the ideals of the American Constitution.
\
Similarly.
NY Times, today: War Clarifies Trump’s Spending Priorities: The Military, Not Child Care, subtitled “As the White House prepares to release its 2027 budget, President Trump said military protection, not social programs, took precedence.”
During his first run for the White House, President Trump assailed his predecessors for wasting trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars in the Middle East and argued that the money could have been used for the benefit of the United States.
“We could have rebuilt our country twice,” Mr. Trump said in a 2016 speech in Charlotte, N.C., arguing that costly American military adventures served only to further destabilize the region: “Imagine if that money had been spent here at home.”
That was then. Now, given MAGA priority, there apparently are infinite funds to bomb brown people back to the stone age, but nothing for “day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things” for Americans, as Trump said yesterday.
This is the mark of the priorities of American civilization, under MAGA.
