Michelle Goldberg has a column up in the Times about Joe Kent’s resignation letter which I addressed yesterday below. There’s a lot I agree with. But the part I don’t is contained in the headline itself: “Joe Kent’s Resignation Letter Is Dangerous Because It’s Half True.” The phrasing of something being “half true” is always a complicated one and one that ends up almost always being misleading. Something that is “half true” is of course better termed “untrue.” That’s how true and untrue work. Few things are categorically 100% untrue. And that is the case here. Michelle I think gets closer to the mark in this line down into the piece …
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.
