I hosted a discussion on Substack Live this afternoon with TPM’s voting rights reporter Khaya Himmelman, who has covered election administration and voter suppression issues for TPM for at least two significant election cycles now.

There must certainly be a word-stacking German term for the uncanny feeling of watching as a patently unqualified, far-right, election-denier white nationalist freak becomes the only administration figure to resign over the increasingly disastrous Iran War with an at least vaguely antisemitic gripe. It is an interesting moment. Let’s remember that Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, isn’t just some administration official. He’s a white nationalist extremist who had no business holding any position of trust in the U.S. government. He’s been friends to numerous antisemites long before today’s news broke.

Some people are inclined to be sympathetic to the ideas contained in Kent’s claim that “[i]t is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” If that’s you, think a bit more seriously about just how Israel would be in a position to exert this “pressure” and don’t let your animus toward Trump make you a fellow traveler with someone as odious as Kent.

Our friend John Judis had an essay over the weekend in NOTUS airing the provocative and audacious claim that Trump is a world-historical figure in the way that the German philosopher Hegel used the term. This is a proposition sure to drive many to distraction. And perhaps for good reason. But as I told John in an email I largely agree with him, but with an important exception or difference in the way he articulated the claim. Before getting to that, let me give a very, very brief outline of the concept.

The idea here is not that the figures in question — an Alexander or Caesar or Bonaparte, the figures Hegel thought of — are good people. It’s not even that they necessarily have any articulate awareness of their role in history. It’s that there are some individuals who have an intuitive sense of the opportunities of the historical moment. They then acquire power and force huge changes that drive the course of history in dramatically new directions, directions that are essentially impossible to undo. The key is there’s really no going back from the changes these people make.

I’ll be talking with TPM reporter Khaya Himmelman about her coverage of Trump’s attacks on election administration so far this year, as his Justice Department attempts to bully states into handing over sensitive voter data and as he tries to force the Senate to pass a sweeping voter suppression bill. Join us on Substack Live at 12:00 p.m. ET today. See you there!

Here’s a detail about the situation in the Strait of Hormuz that I was not aware of.

I’ve noted several times over the last two weeks that throttling oil tankers transiting the strait involves complicated definitions of risk. Iran doesn’t need to close the strait in a conventional sense. Simply creating a non-trivial risk that tankers might be damaged or sunk is enough to keep most tanker traffic from going through. In other words, even if Iran is militarily on its back, just keeping aerial and naval drones at ready or on patrol might be enough to cause a global oil supply crisis. It doesn’t need to be pretty or terribly organized. But this article from March 10 in the Journal suggests it’s much more a matter of control than a general harrying of shipping. Iran has managed to increase its shipments of oil because it’s allowing ships carrying it’s crude to go through unmolested. Iran’s oil can get through but no one else’s can.

Donald Trump’s Iran war is playing out like a Defense Department war game in which a neophyte is schooled in the stodgy and risk-averse reasons why a couple of generations of presidents and joint chiefs of staff have resisted demands to overthrow Iran’s clerical regime by force. Well, yes, we do have a super, super powerful military, the schoolers might say, and Iran is still using rusted-out jets we sold the Shah half a century ago, but here’s the thing …. and you go from there.

“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

This was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s line at the end of a rant about CNN in today’s Pentagon press conference. David Ellison, of course, is the failson progeny of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who is now in the midst of building a private sector pro-Trump state media operation which brings together Paramount, CBS, (soon) CNN, HBO and much more. CNN is already a done deal, though the takeover itself is still in process. None of this is secret. But seldom do we see it spelled out quite so clearly as Hegseth did yesterday. And it brings home what we talk about here again and again: in the Trump universe, only independent media organizations can actually be … well, independent, not be puppeteered either by Trump and his stooges or big corporate owners who want to keep on Trump’s good side.

That’s where organization’s like TPM come in. We depend solely on you. More than 90% of our funding comes from TPM readers. That means that as long as you’re satisfied with us, we’re good. It doesn’t matter what Trump thinks or the CEO or Comcast or Proctor & Gamble or Paramount or anyone else. That’s why it’s so important that if you think what we do is important that you subscribe and become a TPM member. If you’re not a member please click right here and join us.

Thank you for supporting our work and the expanded work your membership will make possible in the coming year.

From TPM Reader PT …

As I’ve thought about the suddenness with which this war started, and the abject lack of thought that went into it, I wonder the following:

Was it the irreproducible chance at a decapitation strike that triggered this whole mess?

My thinking is this:

The US and Israel aren’t actually prepared for the war in Iran, though they are getting there. At that moment, they get an unbelievable piece of intelligence: all the top people in the Iranian government are going to get together, in person, in a non-hardened location. Clearly none of these folks saw “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” or they would have known better. 

I’ve written a few posts now about a simple fact that is so apparent in news coverage that it is almost hiding in plain sight: the entire discussion of President Trump’s war with Iran right now is not how close he may be to achieving whatever his war aims might be. It’s the impact of the conflict on global energy prices and how this may impact the cost of gas in the U.S. and thus Trump’s electoral fortunes in November. We now have two closely reported articles which make clear that this wasn’t even a contingency that the White House planned for.

This passage is from a new CNN article which comes after a similar one in the Times ….

Donald Trump may have started his war with Iran with the aim of regime change. But it has quickly became a battle over control of the global oil futures market. Iran may have few, if any, conventional weapons it can use to block, retaliate against or bloody the United States. But it has the ability to menace, if not close, the Strait of Hormuz. And that means the ability to trigger a global energy and economic crisis that may force the United States or at least its president — synonymous for the moment — to relent. What’s both fascinated and confused me is the response of global oil markets to the crisis, which seems based on at least a short-term willingness to credit Trump’s public comments as having some strong relationship to reality, which of course is absurd.

Let me give you at least a few examples of this.