Republicans Know They Can’t Win Your Vote, so They Want to Steal It

200 billion for war with Iran. Nothing for you.

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Remember when Elon Musk and his merry band of twenty-year-old racists were going around the federal government, slashing anything and everything, using ChatGPT as their weedwhacker? There were a lot of air traffic controllers fired during those mass layoffs, even right after last year’s mid-air collision in Washington. Americans tend to frown upon the notion of saying that a specific person has blood on their hands, but two pilots lost their lives yesterday as a result of the Trump administration’s seemingly insatiable need to unravel the department.

Airports around the country are facing extreme delays as a result of the partial government shutdown, which has shuttered most of the Department of Homeland Security aside from ICE, which had its funding specifically protected in the One Big Beautiful Big that was passed last summer. If you know anything about budgeting or borrowing money, you might have an idea of just how absurd it is to set aside a lump sum of 75 billion dollars in supplemental funding to ensure that Americans never go a day without ICE officers harassing them for their papers.

What are the American people getting for all that money? Our airports are a complete disaster, with some wait times exceeding six hours, but don’t worry! ICE is on the way to help, if you need to be shot on your way to your connecting flight.

A major recurring story over the past year has been ICE’s complete lack of training standards. It kind of makes sense. Kristi Noem’s priorities lie mostly in her blanket and her emotional support paramour. You don’t have time to oversee training when you’re too busy looking for your blankie.

We grumble about the TSA. Many reading this newsletter undoubtedly remember air travel before 9/11, when things were even easier. Kids these days will never understand the endings to romantic comedies when estranged lovers show up to the terminal to profess their feelings just before their love gets on the plane. A more realistic outcome would be that the movie would have a sad ending because the couple was separated in eight hours of TSA lines. Their only chance of making up would be if someone missed their flight.

The Trump administration treats personnel like checkers pieces that Donald didn’t try to eat. ICE agents don’t even get enough training to know how not to shoot innocent people. What are they supposed to do with this?

TSA agents have been working for five weeks without pay. At least 400 agents have resigned, which is to be expected when you’re not being paid for your work anymore. Their training is pretty extensive, terrorism being kind of important.

ICE agents at airports is kind of like the shitty sequel to all the times Trump deployed the National Guard to pick up trash or loiter outside federal buildings. It doesn’t do anything but waste money. Trump likes publicity stunts, usually operating under the assumption that there’s no such thing as bad press. In his case, he might be right.

I went back and forth on whether TSA or Iran should be the top story this week, two very different issues that Trump is essentially trying to solve with the same method of throwing shit at the wall. Republicans gave ICE tens of billions, which will now be used to have them stand around at TSA, doing nothing to improve wait times. Trump is reportedly also asking for 200 billion dollars to fund his ongoing efforts in Iran, sometimes described as an excursion, run by the administration so obsessed with looking tough that they renamed it the Department of Defense.

Trump loves attention, but he’s not the only world leader who likes to troll. Iranian state media posted an AI video depicting the future of the conflict from their perspective, with Lego-style figures.

Somehow, this is real life:

Fun tidbit, yours truly was quoted in Iranian state media back in 2020, for a review I wrote for the Iranian film Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness, an excellent movie. I still wonder if anyone realized they quoted an openly bisexual transgender writer. They even made a fun graphic:

Wars waged through trolling is actually not a new concept. In 1859, the United States and the United Kingdom almost came to blows over the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington, close to Vancouver, after an American farmer shot a pig eating crops on his land. Nobody was killed, but hundreds of troops were deployed in what later became known as “The Pig War.”

The battle lines of The Pig War, back when we worried about the Strait of Georgia instead of the Strait of Hormuz.

People laugh about all the bloodshed in the John Wick movies over a dead puppy, but in 1925, a battle between Bulgaria and Greece left 171 dead after Bulgarian troops shot a dog that crossed the border. If “The War of the Stray Dog” was a John Wick movie, it would have the highest body count of the films. The Lego AI is very silly, but history has shown us that war is often fought using the dumbest tools available.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a retired four-star general who commanded forces in both Gulf Wars and the War in Afghanistan, offered a blistering perspective on the picnic in Iran. Mattis identifies the key issues that pretty much everyone outside of Pete Hegseth’s makeup bunker understood before Trump wanted to go on his little adventure, namely related to control of our favorite new recurring character in this newsletter: The Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps most telling is Mattis’ acknowledgement of one basic reality, “Never in history has air power alone changed a regime.”

General Mattis is not a fan of the war.

“Regime change” used to be something that post-Bush Republicans claimed they were over. Back during the 2016 campaign, Trump and Republicans used to hit Hillary Clinton for her role in the 2011 NATO military intervention in Libya. The power vacuum in Libya was a breeding ground for ISIS, eventually acknowledged by many as a mistake. But the US didn’t act alone in Libya, but rather in partnership with our broader NATO allies.

Last week, we discussed how Trump took the opposite approach, doing everything without NATO while whining about how they don’t want to help finish the war they weren’t asked to start. Trump is preparing to send ground troops into Iran, a reality that was pretty unthinkable just a few months ago. What’s changed?

Now, Trump likes regime change. In fact, it’s already happening. Part of his comments might be semantic. They did kill most of the old regime, but it’s kind of hard to call something “regime change” when the new leader has the same last name as the old leader, his father.

Sometimes, fathers and sons are quite different. George H.W. Bush was lauded as a careful mind toward foreign policy. His son has tried to redeem his reputation through painting and giving hard candies to Michelle Obama at funerals.

David Petraeus’ words about Afghanistan have been repeated a lot since Trump’s efforts in Venezuela and Iran. “Tell me how this ends.” Mattis’s comments remind us that Trump is now destined to repeat the very same mistakes that helped get him elected. There is no easy way out.

The Fanta Fuhrer seems to think he can co-parent the Strait of Hormuz with the new regime. He’s currently claiming that Iran “wants to make a deal,” somehow suggesting that the Strait of Hormuz could be run as a joint effort between the US and Iran. Iran does not want to make a deal. I don’t know about you, but if I was just made the Supreme Leader of a country after another country killed my father, I probably wouldn’t want to be their friend.

I’ve been arguing that Iran’s meager arsenal completely undercut the administration’s argument for their tea party. One area where you don’t really need a big arsenal is the Strait of Hormuz. As Mattis reminded us just yesterday, a bunch of guerrillas with cheap missiles and a pickup truck can bring the Strait to a halt.

Remember the movie Black Hawk Down? Somali fighters with minimal training killed 18 American soldiers, wounded 84 more, and took down 2 Black Hawk helicopters in what was a deeply embarrassing moment for the United States. The greatest army in the world was tossed around by a profoundly inferior fighting force.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard is far more lethal than the Somali National Alliance, but they also don’t need to be in order to cause problems in the Strait of Hormuz. A couple of school children and an RPG could handle that. That’s what we’re up against, and why it wasn’t a good idea to invade in the first place.