How Trump changed the future, kill the suicide bill and other commentary
From the right: Don Just Changed the Future
'In the case of the Middle East what Trump said about himself is true,' marvels Commentary's John Podhoretz. 'He said he doesn't start wars. Trump said he ends wars' — and Saturday night 'was Trump ending this evil war of Iran's, either right now or after more pain causes the mullahs to cry uncle. For Israel didn't start this war either. It was launched, by Iran and its catamites, on Oct. 7.' The strike's 'impact is potentially so enormous, and so world-historic, we needn't rush into interpreting its larger meaning.' But: 'Trump has said since the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., that he believes God spared him for a reason. And now, so do I.'
Conservative: Kill the Suicide Bill
Gov. Hochul should veto 'The Medical Aid in Dying Act, which passed the State Assembly in April,' and 'would allow people diagnosed with terminal illnesses to request a prescription for lethal drugs,' urges City Journal's John Hirschauer. Besides moving to 'effectively recognize suicide as a human right,' 'the bill has relatively few safeguards,' as 'it does not require that the person requesting the drugs be psychiatrically evaluated.' 'And the bill's drafters declined to include a residency requirement,' meaning people from across the country could come to New York and euthanize themselves. 'Human life is marked by terrible suffering.' 'But once the state decides that anyone, on account of illness, has the 'right' to kill himself, it has decided that suffering can render life worthless.'
Liberal: UFT Winning Mayoral Primary
New York schools are 'worse today' despite 'an incredible $36,000 spent per pupil — about twice the national average — with National Assessment of Educational Progress scores of 28% proficient in reading and a few points more in math,' grumbles Joe Klein at Substack. One problem: Teachers, like other city workers, are 'unable to be fired.' Although education 'is the absolute key to future success for New York,' it 'hasn't been much discussed in the Democratic mayoral primary.' In a Manhattan Institute report, all of the candidates 'received D's and F's, except one' — Whitney Tilson, 'an obscure Wall Street moderate' despised by the teachers union. The UFT hasn't endorsed any candidate, likely due to its 'utter confidence that the winner will abide by its wishes.'
From the right: LA Needed Trump's Help
'Gov. Gavin Newsom told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that local law enforcement officers were 'sufficient to maintain order' ' in Los Angeles, yet LAPD officers tell Heather Mac Donald at The Wall Street Journal, 'We don't have s— under control.' She cites numerous instances of violence that, by 'sheer luck,' weren't life-threatening. 'Should Trump have waited to see if the locals' would eventually control the situation? The answer's clear: 'Police Chief Jim McDonnell put the LAPD on tactical alert' and canceled all time off. Yet days later, Mayor Karen Bass nonetheless had to order a curfew. 'Still the disorder continued.' Fact is, 'There is more danger from tolerating' lawlessness than from responding to it 'with all legal means.'
Libertarian: Cut the F-35
'As the U.S. grapples with ballooning federal budgets and increasingly necessary spending cuts, the military remains ripe for austerity,' blares Joe Lancaster at Reason. The F-35 jet is a perfect example of a 'program that deserves to be scrapped.' Since its inception after 9/11, 'the jet has proven itself not ready from prime time, both more expensive and less functional than promised.' Too bad 'the House Appropriations Committee's proposed Defense Appropriations Bill for 2026 would spend $8.5 billion on F-35s,' and 'President Donald Trump has called the F-35 'the greatest fighter jet in the world.'' 'The F-35 means to replace previous-generation aircraft like the F-16, but instead, the obsolete models are running circles around their intended replacement.' Every new thing we hear about the F-35, 'proves that it's long past time to kill the program.'
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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Boston Globe
18 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Shifting views and misdirection: How Trump decided to strike Iran
It was almost entirely a deception. Trump had all but made up his mind to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, and the military preparations were well underway for the complex attack. Less than 30 hours after Leavitt relayed his statement, he would give the order for an assault that put the United States in the middle of the latest conflict to break out in one of the world's most volatile regions. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Trump's 'two weeks' statement was just one aspect of a broader effort at political and military misdirection that took place over eight chaotic days, from the first Israeli strikes against Iran to the moment when a fleet of B-2 stealth bombers took off from Missouri for the first U.S. military strikes inside Iran since that country's theocratic revolution in 1979. Advertisement Interviews with administration officials, Trump allies and advisers, Pentagon officials and others familiar with the events show how, during this period, different factions of Trump's allies jockeyed to win over a president who was listing in all directions over whether to choose war, diplomacy or some combination. Advertisement Outsiders tried to divine which faction was ascendant based on whom Trump met with at any given time. Trump seemed almost gleeful in telling reporters that he could make a decision 'one second before it's due, because things change, especially with war.' All the while, Trump was making blustery statements indicating he was about to take the country into the conflict. 'Everyone should evacuate Tehran!' he wrote last Monday on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns. The following day, he posted that he had not left a meeting of the Group of 7 in Canada to broker a Middle East ceasefire but for something 'much bigger.' So, he told the world, 'Stay tuned!' These public pronouncements generated angst at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command, where military planners began to worry that Trump was giving Iran too much warning about an impending strike. They built their own deception into the attack plan: a second group of B-2 bombers that would leave Missouri and head west over the Pacific Ocean in a way that flight trackers would be able to monitor Saturday. That left a misimpression, for many observers and presumably Iran, about the timing and path of the attack, which would come from another direction entirely. The strike plan was largely in place when Trump issued his Thursday statement about how he might take up to two weeks to decide to go to war with Iran. Refueling tankers and fighter jets had been moved into position, and the military was working on providing additional protection for U.S. forces stationed in the region. Advertisement While the 'two weeks' statement bought the president more time for last-minute diplomacy, military officials said that ruse and the head fake with the B-2s also had the effect of cleaning up a mess -- the telegraphing of the attack -- that was partly of the president's making. Asked to comment on the details of this article, Leavitt said the president and his team 'successfully accomplished one of the most complex and historic military operations of all time' regarding Iran's nuclear sites. She added that 'many presidents have talked about this, but only President Trump had the guts to do it.' A shifting tune Trump had spent the early months of his administration warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against a strike on Iran. But by the morning of Friday, June 13, hours after the first Israeli attacks, Trump had changed his tune. He marveled to advisers about what he said was a brilliant Israeli military operation, which involved a series of precision strikes that killed key figures in Iran's military leadership and blasted away strategic weapons sites. Trump took calls on his cellphone from reporters and began hailing the operation as 'excellent' and 'very successful' and hinting that he had much more to do with it than people realized. Later that day, Trump asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were 'playing.' He said that 'everyone' was telling him he needed to get more involved, including potentially dropping 30,000-pound GBU-57 bombs on Fordo, the Iranian uranium-enrichment facility buried underneath a mountain south of Tehran. The next day, the president told another adviser he was leaning toward using those 'bunker buster' bombs on Fordo, while taking pride in both the bomb's destructive power and the fact that the United States is the only country that has the bomb in its arsenal. The adviser left the conversation convinced that Trump had already decided to bomb Iran's nuclear sites. Advertisement At the same time, the president's team was closely monitoring how their most prominent supporters were reacting on social media and on television to the prospect of the United States joining the war in a more visible way. They paid close attention to the statements of Tucker Carlson, the influential podcaster and former Fox News host, who was vehemently opposed to the United States joining Israel in taking on Iran. Trump became infuriated by some of Carlson's commentary and started complaining about him publicly and privately. Political advisers to Trump had been swapping notes on various public and private polls examining the popularity of military action against Iran, noting that American support for an operation depended in part on how pollsters asked the question. While polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans did not want the United States to go to war with Iran, most Americans also did not want Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel's military operation and featuring guests urging Trump to get more involved. Several Trump advisers lamented the fact that Carlson was no longer on Fox, which meant that Trump was not hearing much of the other side of the debate. Deliberations among administration officials about a possible American strike on Iran were in full swing by Sunday night, June 15, when Trump left for Canada for the G7 meeting. Trump seemed to his advisers to be inching closer to approving a strike, even as he told them that Israel would be foolish to try to assassinate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. Advertisement Moreover, he said, if the United States were to strike Iran, the goal should be to decimate its nuclear facilities, not to bring down its government. The 'biggest threat to Opsec' By then, a small group of top military officials at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, had already begun refining attack plans on the Fordo facility and other Iranian nuclear sites that military planners had drawn up years ago. The planning was led by Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the Centcom commander, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs. B-2 stealth bombers, based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, are the only warplanes capable of delivering the GBU-57 bombs without detection by Iranian radar. B-2 bomber pilots have done extensive rehearsals for extended-range missions like the one before them -- crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, refueling multiple times before syncing up with fighter jets for the final flight leg into Iran. But even as the military planning was being conducted in secrecy, each of Trump's social media posts seemed to be telling the world what was coming. The president, said one military official, was the 'biggest threat to opsec,' or operational security, that the planning faced. To build confusion into the attack plan, military officials decided to have two groups of B-2 bombers leave Missouri around the same time. One group would fly westbound, toward Guam, with transponders on that could be tracked by commercial satellite companies. Another group of seven bombers, carrying a full payload of bombs and with their transponders off, flew east toward Iran, undetected. Advertisement During a news conference Sunday, hours after the U.S. strike, Caine called the Guam feint a 'decoy.' Shaping the conversation By Tuesday, June 17, Trump had largely made up his mind to strike Iran. But he took his coercive diplomacy to a new level, issuing menacing threats over social media. 'We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,' he posted on Truth Social, adding, 'We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there -- We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.' He demanded, in all-caps, 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!' By this point, several people in the anti-interventionist camp of Trump's advisers realized they most likely could not prevent the president from hitting the Iranian nuclear facilities. So, they turned their focus on trying to ensure the American war did not spiral into an expansive 'regime change' war. That day, June 17, Vice President JD Vance posted a long series of posts on social media that many within the anti-interventionist camp interpreted as him seeding the ground for a potential U.S. military operation and preemptively defending the president's likely decision. 'He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision ultimately belongs to the president,' Vance wrote in the widely shared post. 'And of course, people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy. But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue.' Prominent activists began working to shape the conversation for what was likely to come after the bombing: a debate about whether or not to engage in a war intended to bring about new leadership in Iran. 'Regime change has quickly become the newly stated goal of this operation,' wrote influential activist Charlie Kirk, in a social media post two days before the U.S. strikes. 'America should learn its lesson and not involve itself in a regime change war.' Even as Trump was posting his own hawkish statements, he was becoming annoyed as he watched pundits on television telegraph his likely strike against Fordo. He was infuriated when The Wall Street Journal reported that he had already given a green light to putting the pieces of the operation in place but had not given the final order. On Thursday, Trump was joined for lunch at the White House by Bannon, one of the most prominent critics of U.S. involvement in Israel's war with Iran. Some wishful thinkers in the anti-interventionist camp interpreted the meeting as a sign that Trump was getting cold feet. Leavitt reinforced that sentiment when she delivered Trump's statement, not long after Bannon arrived at the White House, indicating that he had given himself up to two weeks to make a decision, a time frame he often invoked for decisions on complex issues when he had no clear plan. But Trump had already dictated Leavitt's statement before he met with Bannon. It was a calculated misdirection intended to buy some breathing room for the president while suggesting that no attack was imminent. Up through that point, Trump had been willing to continue to listen to those skeptical about the Iran strike, and to hear arguments about its possibly dire consequences -- including for oil prices, civil war in Iran and a possible refugee crisis, in addition to the prospect of retaliatory attacks that could bring the United States into a sustained conflict. On Friday, Trump left the White House in the afternoon for a fundraising event at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, his main summer retreat, further feeding the impression that no attack was imminent. But within hours, around 5 p.m. Friday, Trump ordered the military to begin its Iran mission. Given the 18 hours it would take the B-2s to fly from Missouri to Iran, he knew he still had many more hours to change his mind, as he did at the last minute in 2019, when he ordered airstrikes against Iranian targets and then aborted them. But few in his administration believed he would pull back this time. A one-off, or not A complex and highly synchronized military operation began. Many hours after the two fleets of B-2s took off in opposite directions, the bombers bound for Iran joined up with fighter jets and flew into Iranian airspace. U.S. submarines launched 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles on the nuclear facilities in Natanz and Isfahan. As the planes approached Fordo and Natanz, the fighter jets swept in front of the bombers and fired strikes meant to suppress any surface-to-air missiles that Iran might muster, Caine said in the Pentagon briefing Sunday. At 2:10 a.m. Sunday morning Iran time, the lead bomber dropped two of the GBU-57 bombs on the Fordo site, buried deep under a mountainside and hundreds of feet of concrete. By the end of the mission, 14 of the 'bunker buster' bombs had been dropped, the first time they had ever been used in combat. Pentagon officials said Sunday that the U.S. bombers and jet fighters never encountered any enemy fire. Hours after the American aircraft had departed Iranian airspace, Trump gave a triumphant speech at the White House saying that the mission had 'completely and totally obliterated ' Iran's nuclear capabilities. He suggested that the war could end with this one-off mission if Iran would give up its nuclear program and negotiate. By Sunday afternoon, however, U.S. officials had tempered the optimism of the night before, saying that Iran's nuclear facilities might have been severely damaged, but not entirely destroyed. Vance acknowledged that there are questions about the whereabouts of Iran's stock of near-bomb-grade uranium. He and Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed that a regime change in Tehran -- which could mean a protracted U.S. engagement -- was not the goal. But Trump, whose operation was the subject of praise in news coverage not just from allies but some of his critics, had already moved on, hinting in a Truth Social post that his goals could be shifting. 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,'' he wrote, 'but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change???' This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
18 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
GOP tax bill would ease regulations on gun silencers and some rifles and shotguns
Advertisement Republicans who have long supported the changes, along with the gun industry, say the tax infringes on Second Amendment rights. They say silencers are mostly used by hunters and target shooters for sport. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Burdensome regulations and unconstitutional taxes shouldn't stand in the way of protecting American gun owners' hearing,' said Clyde, who owns two gun stores in Georgia and often wears a pin shaped like an assault rifle on his suit lapel. Democrats are fighting to stop the provision, which was unveiled days after two Minnesota state legislators were shot in their homes, as the bill speeds through the Senate. They argue that loosening regulations on silencers could make it easier for criminals and active shooters to conceal their weapons. Advertisement 'Parents don't want silencers on their streets, police don't want silencers on their streets,' said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. The gun language has broad support among Republicans and has received little attention as House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., work to settle differences within the party on cuts to Medicaid and energy tax credits, among other issues. But it is just one of hundreds of policy and spending items included to entice members to vote for the legislation that could have broad implications if the bill is enacted within weeks, as Trump wants. Inclusion of the provision is also a sharp turn from the climate in Washington just three years ago when Democrats, like Republicans now, controlled Congress and the White House and pushed through bipartisan gun legislation. The bill increased background checks for some buyers under the age of 21, made it easier to take firearms from potentially dangerous people and sent millions of dollars to mental health services in schools. Passed in the summer of 2022, just weeks after the shooting of 19 children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas, it was the most significant legislative response to gun violence in decades. Three years later, as they try to take advantage of their consolidated power in Washington, Republicans are packing as many of their longtime priorities as possible, including the gun legislation, into the massive, wide-ranging bill that Trump has called 'beautiful.' 'I'm glad the Senate is joining the House to stand up for the Second Amendment and our Constitution, and I will continue to fight for these priorities as the Senate works to pass President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill,' said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was one of the lead negotiators on the bipartisan gun bill in 2022 but is now facing a primary challenge from the right in his bid for reelection next year. Advertisement If the gun provisions remain in the larger legislation and it is passed, silencers and the short-barrel rifles and shotguns would lose an extra layer of regulation that they are subject to under the National Firearms Act, passed in the 1930s in response to concerns about mafia violence. They would still be subject to the same regulations that apply to most other guns — and that includes possible loopholes that allow some gun buyers to avoid background checks when guns are sold privately or online. Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, who supports the legislation, says changes are aimed at helping target shooters and hunters protect their hearing. He argues that the use of silencers in violent crimes is rare. 'All it's ever intended to do is to reduce the report of the firearm to hearing safe levels,' Keane says. Speaking on the floor before the bill passed the House, Rep. Clyde said the bill restores Second Amendment rights from 'over 90 years of draconian taxes.' Clyde said Johnson included his legislation in the larger bill 'with the purest of motive.' 'Who asked for it? I asked,' said Clyde, who ultimately voted for the bill after the gun silencer provision was added. Clyde was responding to Rep. Maxwell Frost, a 28-year-old Florida Democrat, who went to the floor and demanded to know who was responsible for the gun provision. Frost, who was a gun-control activist before being elected to Congress, called himself a member of the 'mass shooting generation' and said the bill would help 'gun manufacturers make more money off the death of children and our people.' Advertisement Among other concerns, control advocates say less regulation for silencers could make it harder for law enforcement to stop an active shooter. 'There's a reason silencers have been regulated for nearly a century: They make it much harder for law enforcement and bystanders to react quickly to gunshots,' said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. Schumer and other Democrats are trying to convince the Senate parliamentarian to drop the language as she reviews the bill for policy provisions that aren't budget-related. 'Senate Democrats will fight this provision at the parliamentary level and every other level with everything we've got,' Schumer said earlier this month.
CNN
22 minutes ago
- CNN
Iran's nuclear facilities have been smashed, but the race toward a bomb may be gathering pace
US President Donald Trump quickly heralded the US strikes on Iran as a 'spectacular military success,' saying the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities were 'totally obliterated.' Western military sources tell CNN it's still too early to fully assess the damage wrought by more than a dozen US bunker buster bombs, plus an array of Tomahawk cruise missiles, slamming into Iran's main nuclear facilities. But even if Trump's characterization turns out to be accurate, the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities may not mean the end of the Iranian nuclear threat. Far from it. For years, hard-line voices inside the Islamic Republic have been calling for a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against exactly this kind of overwhelming attack. Even as Iran continues to insist its nuclear program is for strictly peaceful purposes, those calls will now inevitably have been bolstered and the nuclear hard-liners may finally get their way. Ominously, Iranian officials are already publicly hinting at pulling out of a key treaty – the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT – designed to monitor and prevent the global spread of nuclear weapons. 'The NPT is not able to protect us, so why a country like Iran, or other countries interested to have a peaceful nuclear energy, should rely on NPT,' Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told a conference in Istanbul. Other Iranian lawmakers have called for the Islamic Republic to formally withdraw from the treaty, in what would likely be interpreted as a virtual confirmation of Iranian intent to build a nuclear weapon. Of course, intent is different than capacity. And nuclear capacity is likely to be a big issue in the immediate aftermath of the US strikes. As the latest satellite images appear to confirm, being struck with more than a dozen bunker buster bombs will have seriously impeded, if not destroyed, Iran's nuclear program. But if there is political will, nuclear enrichment facilities can eventually be repaired or rebuilt, while Iran's technical know-how survives, despite the targeting by Israel of multiple Iranian nuclear scientists. Meanwhile, officials at the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, say they are uncertain of the whereabouts of the nuclear material Iran has already manufactured, including the large amounts of uranium-235 enriched to 60%, which is very close to weapons-grade levels. Iranian state media says the three nuclear sites struck by the United States – Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan – were 'evacuated' beforehand, raising the possibility that some or all of that material is being stored elsewhere, possibly in a secret facility, unknown to nuclear inspectors. None of this dangerous nuclear uncertainty is what Trump seems to have bargained for. 'Iran, the bully of the Middle East,' he announced after the US strikes, 'must now make peace.' But with the entire region now braced for more Iranian retaliatory strikes – on Israel, US military bases or key shipping lanes, such as the Strait of Hormuz – peacemaking seems vanishingly distant. 'Our talks with Iran were a real window of opportunity,' one European diplomat insisted to CNN, referring to the brief meetings held between European and Iranian officials in Geneva on Friday. 'But the Americans have now slammed that window shut,' the diplomat added.
