Soon after President Trump and Pete Hegseth launched their “excursion” into Iran, a fundraising email was sent out to MAGA supporters, announcing a “massive and ongoing operation” against that country, with a warning that “Democrats want to see us divided.” It encouraged supporters not to “stay silent at this moment,” and to support Trump personally by supporting US troops in carrying out Trump’s new war. The email begins, “It’s Team Trump, and we’re asking every SINGLE Trump supporter who stands with President Trump and our brave US troops in carrying out this mission to let us know by signing the Official Trump Supporter List NOW.” You guessed it! The “supporter list” is a donation form to send cash for Trump’s campaign cash flow — and to support US troops in the process? Trump is calling attention to our military that he placed in harm’s way, in a supposed bipartisan duty, to link their deployment and military actions to his partisan cash grifting. Hardly ethical, you think?

This is all a part of a Trump call for “Team Effort,” as he asks other countries to help him secure the Hormuz Strait out of responsibility — to do their part to get him out of a jam. The US “decimated” Iran, so they owe us, but then failing to mention that the only thing decimated is the taxpayers’ wallets. The president has alienated other countries with his insults, his disrespectful comments, and has dismissed them and pushed them away with unfair tariffs to the point that his depravity disgusts them — a storm cloud in his own private Idaho, as Bocha Blue writes on the Palmer Report. Trying to turn things around isn’t working for him, as he had no plan to start with. His childlike confusion and misjudgment on tariffs broke the US economy which is now in worse shape with soaring gas prices, and consumer goods becoming less affordable as economic growth hits a downward spiral. And despite the ‘Help me!‘ sign he’s waving, even a red-tipped white cane and dark glasses will do Humpty Trumpy no good.

Bill Palmer says Trump appeared even dumber last week, when he attempted to highlight the fact that he gifted his cabinet members with new shoes — probably from a closeout sale, so sizing didn’t matter. Palmer mentions an interview the president did with Jake Paul, an actor and professional boxer, with an internet presence. Palmer says Paul is also famous for being an idiot, so the interview was likened to a Richard Nixon sit-down with the Three Stooges, who he reminds us were merely actors. In the interview, Trump claimed that as many as seventeen hundred Iranian sleeper cells existed in the US — news that we could have used sooner, exclaims Palmer — so, perhaps Trump, Noem, and Bovino could have used their thugs to smoke out the sleeper cells instead of rounding up Hispanic-looking people and murdering white onlookers. Palmer points to Benjamin Netanyahu for giving Trump the sleeper cell rumor, but that we shouldn’t worry regardless, with Jake Paul’s entry into the case.

Daily Dose of Democracy says the war has finished its third week with no end in sight, even with Trump asking for global ‘partners’ to help secure the Hormuz Strait against a “decimated Iran” to release oil tankers to guarantee the global energy supply. President ‘No New Wars’ Trump thumbed his nose at US intelligence, thanks to ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, and threatening supposed close allies with an “or else” demand is getting him nowhere in cleaning up his mess. Former US allies are forming new partnerships without us because of the chaos, the instability, and the reckless handling of the Iran conflict. Recently Trump remarked that he would know the Iran war was over when he “feels it in his bones,” but we shouldn’t feel assured since he probably is waiting for his bone spurs to reappear.

Satirist Andy Borowitz offers his take on Trump’s Iran debacle: “Washington – Confirming the suspicions of many in the international community, on Monday Donald J. Trump revealed that intelligence played ‘no role’ in his decision to go to war with Iran. ‘People keep asking me about intelligence,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘I made this call with no intelligence whatsoever. Quite frankly, every decision I’ve ever made in my life I’ve made without intelligence,’ he boasted. ‘Intelligence is for losers.’ Trump added that ‘I don’t trust people who have intelligence, which is why I love Pete.””

Australian Richard Quick posted on Quora: “Alright, this one’s for the MAGA crowd. Sit down, shut up, and pay attention because I’m only going to explain this once and I’m using small words so the flag emoji patriots can follow along. Your boy just let the International Energy Agency announce the biggest emergency oil release in its 50 year history. 400 million barrels. Pooled together from 32 countries. And your lot lost your collective minds like Daddy just saved the world. Let’s do the math that none of you peanuts can do: The world uses about 105 million barrels of oil a day. That means your big beautiful release is less than four days of global supply. That’s not a solution…that’s a long weekend. The entire IEA strategic reserve across all 32 countries is only 1.2 billion barrels, so this one release just burned through a third of the whole planet’s emergency safety net in one go. One crisis. One third of the cupboard…gone.”

Quick continues: “But it gets dumber. Keep up. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Twenty percent of the world’s oil flows through that strait, right now none is moving. Citigroup estimates somewhere between 11 and 16 million barrels a day is being choked off the market. So even if you’re just trying to plug the gap from the strait, 400 million barrels buys you roughly a month. But it gets dumber. America’s share of this is coming from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which only holds 415 million barrels right now. That’s 58% of capacity because your guy never actually refilled the thing despite telling you he did. If the US shoulders the biggest chunk of this release, your tank is basically empty. And then what happens when the NEXT crisis hits? Because there’s always a next one.”

Quick’s post adds: “And the US can only physically pump oil out of the reserve at 4.4 million barrels a day, and it takes 13 days from a presidential order before a single barrel reaches the market. So even if they turned on the taps right now, the cavalry doesn’t arrive for two weeks and when it does it can’t keep up with the shortfall. Meanwhile the bloke who started the war that closed the strait in the first place is on local TV In Cincinnati going ‘we’ll reduce it a little bit then fill it up again,’ like he’s talking about the fuel tank on his golf cart. And you clapped. You actually clapped. This isn’t a rescue plan. It’s a press release designed to keep the stock market calm for 48 hours. A band-aid on an arterial bleed. Thirty two countries just torched a third of the world’s emergency oil supply because your president started a war he can’t finish, and if this drags past summer, the cupboard is bare, prices are in triple digits, and there is no Plan B. So, yeah champ, pop a Bud Light. Slap a bumper sticker on it. The adults are definitely in charge.”

HuffPost’s Lee Moran calls our attention to The New York Times‘ editorial board’s damning assessment of Trump’s false claims about the US-Israeli attack on Iran in an opinion piece that warns of the dangers of an ultimate backfire. There’s nothing new about the conflict in the president’s “stream of falsehoods,” since “Lying is standard behavior for Mr. Trump, of course,” the board suggests, noting the 30,000 misleading or untruthful claims from his first term as compiled by The Washington Post. The Times’ board argues that, “Lying about war is uniquely corrosive, creating a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common, ultimately undermining American values and interests.”

The editorial board acknowledges, “There is reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war, given what is described as Iran’s ‘murderous’ government and threats to people at home and abroad. But Trump is not making that case, and is just lying about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.” Trump and his MAGA mob have given so many different answers for the various aspects of the incursion, what its actual objectives are, and how long it’s projected to last, that they’ve run out of fingers on which to count motives. Pointing to past conflicts, the board says that Vietnam and Iraq should have reminded leaders that falsehoods can boomerang on the perpetrators who tell them. “Whatever short-term gain Mr. Trump thinks he is getting by lying about the war in Iran is far exceeded by the cost to him, the country, and the world,” the Times concludes.

In one of his unhinged threats to Iran, last week Trump threatened to take out the country’s electrical grid and energy infrastructure “after 48 hours” if they didn’t capitulate and open the Hormuz Strait for oil tanker access. However, the threatened strikes were postponed when Trump announced that talks had made Iran “keen to make a deal.” “Major points of agreement” were said to have been reached, but Iran’s media poured cold water on the president’s announcement, saying there has been no “direct or indirect communication” between parties. After Trump’s post on social media, oil prices declined and the stock market responded positively, but many remained skeptical about the accuracy of the president’s comments. His claim that US envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner were in touch with “a top person” representing Iran for the backchannel talks — not Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

President Trump claims that “regime change” is underway in light of the peace talks — an unidentified leader, Trump calling him “the most respected, and the leader,” who gets five days to produce results, or “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.” Khamenei hasn’t been seen since he was selected to take his father’s place, and as far as his control goes, most believe the Revolutionary Guard are calling the shots. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, says he has spoken to Hakan Fidan, his Turkish counterpart who has served as an intermediary in negotiations between Tehran and Washington, with Trump claiming that it’s difficult to find somebody to talk with since most of the Iranian leadership has been wiped out. John Byrne of Raw America says, “The question of whether this ends well for Iran is open. The US has significant military advantages it hasn’t fully deployed. But what isn’t open is whether this war is going the way Trump promised. It isn’t. And everyday the strait stays closed, Iran’s leverage grows.”

Anthony Davis on Substack, says Trump is demented and deluded, and thinks he’s hosting a reality show. Trump developed some “swagger in his real estate dealings, being performative, a little slippery, and often effective,” but that same instinct doesn’t transplant onto international diplomacy. “It doesn’t make you a savvy negotiator — it makes you unreliable, sometimes dangerously so,” says Davis. Therein lies the problem with Trump’s claims that the US is engaged in productive conversations with Iran, with Tehran’s complete denial of any talks. In a real estate deal or on a reality show such as The Apprentice, this might work, but right now, “those decisions are not abstract. The backdrop here is an active conflict: airstrikes, missile attacks, threats to obliterate infrastructure, and warnings of a regional escalation. In that environment, words are not cheap. They are signals. When a president says talks are underway and progress is being made, it suggests de-escalation,” observes Davis.

If those talks don’t exist, the signal is false — it’s destabilizing — and intermediaries trying to broker something real are left to clean up the narrative mess, and Iran has every incentive to dig in further rather than play along with a fiction resembling a reality TV show with no commercial breaks. Davis asserts, “Credibility, in this context, is currency. Not a moral virtue, not even trust in the traditional sense, but predictability. Other actors need to believe that when you say something publicly, it roughly corresponds to reality. That doesn’t mean full transparency — diplomacy often requires secrecy — but it does mean avoiding statements that are flatly contradicted by the other side. When that baseline collapses, every future statement is discounted.” It signals that there may be no real process at all, especially since Trump said just last week that we have no one to talk to since we’ve killed them all.

It is impossible to close a “deal” with a country that insists no deal is being discussed, and if those claims drift from the truth, the cost is embarrassment, confusion, miscalculation, and escalation. Davis concludes, “If there is a path out of a conflict as volatile as this one, it will to be paved with bravado. It will require quiet channels, verifiable steps, and a level of message discipline that resists the urge to declare victory before a conversation has even begun. Anything less isn’t negotiation. It’s performance — and Trump just wants to be the star of the show.”

Even without a resolution on the Iran war, Trump is rubbing his hands together about his next target. Talking to reporters, he said, “Cuba’s a failed nation. Cuba also wants to make a deal and I think we will pretty soon — make a deal or do whatever we have to do. I think something will happen with Cuba pretty quickly.” Being cut off from its oil supply from Venezuela which is  now under US control, the country has had rolling blackouts and suspended air links. Cuba has been existing under a 1960s embargo emplaced by the US, with only hit and miss support from Russia or China, so Trump is ready to carry out a “friendly takeover” of the island as a neighborly gesture to ease their pain — and find Castro’s stash of gold. Thom Hartmann of Raw America says, “We need to understand what’s really happening here. It’s not just foreign policy. It’s a pattern of a president who’s discovered he can use military force without consequence, without congressional pushback, and without a media willing to challenge him. Once a democracy lets that become normal, it’s very hard to walk it back.” See you in C-U-B-A!