Chris Cilizza On Thom Tillis

I'm trying to get my head around this whole Thom Tillis retirement business. After Tillis annmounced that he couldn't support Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, putatively due to Medicaid cuts, Trump posted,

Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis,” Trump wrote in another post. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America.

Tillis immediately folded, saying near the end of a rambling statement,

As many of my colleagues have noticed over the last year, and at times even joked about, I haven't exactly been excited about running for another term. That is true since the choice is between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with the love of my life Susan, our two children, three beautiful grandchildren, and the rest of our extended family back home. It's not a hard choice, and I will not be seeking re-election.

His tone was rueful. He referred to

working across the aisle in the Senate to pass the largest investment in mental health in American history, passing the Respect for Marriage Act and monumental infrastructure investments, and reestablishing the Senate NATO Observer Group. Sometimes those bipartisan initiatives got me into trouble with my own party, but I wouldn't have changed a single one.

In Washington over the last few years, it's become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.

So the subext seems to be that he'd been digging a hole for himself with Republicans, he knew it, but he didn't have the stomach for the primary fight he almost certainly now anticipated.

So let's move to the video from Chris Cilizza embedded above. Cilizza's career has been uneven. He left a ten-year gig at The Washington Post in 2017 for a step up at CNN, but was laid off there in 2022. More recently he's been pitching himself on YouTube as an "independent journalist", which is to say someone who lost a high-profile network job but hasn't found a new one, just like Megyn Kelly or Tucker Carlson or Mark Halperin.

In the video, he reviews Tillis's opposition to Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. At 1:54:

Tillis voted against it because it has cuts to Medicaid that he said would adversely impact his constituents in North Carolina. Makes some sense, right?

Well, maybe, except that the Medicaid cuts are national, they'll affect people in all 50 states, including the constituents of every Republican senator. He seems to be the only one concerned enough to make the cuts a deal breaker. (Rand Paul, the other Republican "no" vote, thinks spending cuts in the bill don't go far enough.) Why is Tillis the only standout on this issue? And before he went to the Senate, he built his career in North Carolina with a harder line on those same constituents:

In a 2011 speech, Tillis said, "What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance" by getting people who "had no choice" but to receive public assistance "to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government."

In other words, Tillis has been all over the landscape over his career, and it's hard to deny that some of his positions have been taken from expediency. Cilizza draws a different moral at 4:42:

It is unique to have a President of the United States who simply wants agreement with everythiing he does, even if it is bad politics for a senator or a house member. Trump just wants you to say you support Trump. That's it. So even if Tillis had legitimate worries and complaints about Medicaid cuts impacting his constituents, that doesn't matter to Trump. Trump wants you to be for him. That's it . . . which leaves you basically with two options in the modern-day Republican party, you can one, get on board with Trump always and forever, or two, get out of politics.

He's buying into the stereotypical view that Trump is narcissistic, ego-driven, a my-way-or-the-highway type. Considering Trump's record of success against generally bad odds throughout a political career undertaken as a retirement activity, I think this view is harder and harder to sustain. But now Cilizza contradicts himself. He thinks it's reckless for Trump to drive Tillis out of politics when Tillis is the safest bet to keep that Senate seat Republican in 2026:

And Donald Trump as party leader, his goal should be to hold on to as many Senate seats as possible, House seats too, because that's how you retain power in Washington. But I think his real goal is to drive total and complete adherence within the party.

The problem is that if you get too many Tillis-style "independent thinkers" who are " willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise", especially with the majorities as slim as they currently are, you don't actually retain power in Washington. Hasn't this been the lesson of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell? It's pretty plain that Trump's object is to remake the Republican Party, and a big part of that job has been to force certain retirements, so far including Romney, McConnell, and Tillis, with several others still to go.

Cilizza seems oblivious to Trump's purpose here, but even Tillis's Wikipedia entry should make things clear:

In 2014, Tillis announced that he would not seek reelection to the state House, instead running for U.S. Senate against first-term Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan. In the Republican primary, he was endorsed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, then-North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The New York Times called Tillis a "favorite of the party establishment."

. . . On May 6, he won the nomination with 45.68% of the vote over Greg Brannon and Mark Harris, described as a victory for the Republican establishment over the insurgent Tea Party movement.

. . . After the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 United States presidential election, Tillis called Trump's comments "indefensible". According to Politico, he "began the Trump era by negotiating with Democrats on immigration and co-authoring legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller" but has increasingly aligned himself with the president due to pressure from his party.

Tillis won both of his Senate campaigns with slim margins, suggesting that he's less of a Republican favorite than someone North Carolinians judge a little less bad than his opponents, and they'll hold their noses and vote for him if that's their only choice. It seems to me that Trump is still feeling lucky, and he may as well gamble that he can come up with a better alternative.

The Biden Enterprise Is Broke

Hunter Biden is now being sued for unpaid legal fees by Winston & Strawn. https://t.co/FCb4qAnZB3 With his father out of power and influence peddling no longer an option, bills are coming due for Hunter ...

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025

The most recent news from the Bidens is that the white-shoe firm Winston & Strawn is suing Hunter to recover $50,000 in unpaid bills. For a firm like that, $50,000 is de minimis, so I'm a little puzzled, except that it probably shows the firm no longer sees any benefit at all to writing the money off as a lagniappe for the Bidens.

This comes on the heels of Kevin Morris's family cutting him off after he "loaned" Hunter $6.5 million to cover legal fees.

I think this is also directly related to Joe's last-minute pardons for his brothers and sister, their spouses, and not least, Hunter, saying "he wanted to prevent them from being targeted by 'baseless and politically motivated investigations'". The real meaning is there's no longer any money in the kitty to finance their lifestyles, much less pay their lawyers.

The Biden boodle has never been anything more than smoke and mirrors. Hunter and Joe's siblings prospered based on the idea that any money people lost in blue-sky deals with them could be made up in favors from Joe, which never quite materialized. Meanwhile, Joe himself seems to have been giving them money in addition to what they could snatch from their marks, all of it on the basis that it would one day pay off big, whixch it never quite did. Kevin Morris is not unique.

There's also a difference between the Bidens and the Clintons, who were able to enrich themselves after leaving the White House broke, that due to the legal bills they faced after Bill's impeachment. They were able to get book deals and speaker fees, as well as Hillary's ability to attract money and favors, first from being in the Senate, then from being Secretary of State, and then from being about to be probably president.

There's no such continuing potential with the Bidens. Joe's memory is so badly shot that any book he could get ghostwritten would have no insight, no anecdotes, no insider revelations worth reading. Any attempt to put him on the speaker circuit has already proven laughable. Dr Jill's star appeal has faded, such as it ever may have been, and any new book would just be ghostwritten bromides. Hunter has already written his tell-all.

The question is why anyone ever thought the Bidens were worth the investment. This piece suggests that even the putative "coverup" if Biden's mental decline was actually delusional trust in Biden's abilities by his staff:

A cover-up, as we’ve understood the term to mean since Watergate, involves deliberately hiding something you know to be true. Biden’s closest advisers, however, were operating in a fog of delusion and denial; they refused to believe what they could see with their own eyes. Despite the president’s obvious cognitive decline, they had convinced themselves that he was fine. Their failure to recognize, up close, what everyone else could see from afar—that Biden was too feeble to run for reelection at the age of 82—led to a political disaster.

. . . Mike Donilon, Biden’s senior adviser and confidant, who was with him more than almost anyone, swears he never saw the president mentally diminished. So unless someone produces a failed neurological exam--or a deep-sixed Parkinson’s diagnosis--this was not a classic cover-up but a case of collective denial among Biden, first lady Jill Biden, and the president’s closest aides. Out of a desire to cling to power or just wishful thinking, they believed what they wanted to believe.

I'm wondering if the whole Biden enterprise was anything other than a confidence game. It sure took a long time for the bubble to burst.

The Wall Street Journal Changes Its Tune, Sort Of

Via Real Clear Politics, a highly reliable organ of the conventional wisdom, I found a link to this piece at the WSJ by Tunku Varadarajan plugging Walter Russell Mead's weekly column there, Global View. Oddly, the Varadarajan piece isn't behind the WDJ paywall, but Global View is. In fact, Real Clear Politics often links to WSJ pieces that you must subscribe to read, an annoying practice that most aggregators don't follow.

What that says to me is that the WSJ is worried that Walter Russell Mead by himself isn't pulling enough paying readers in, and actually, considering his career arc, I think I can see why.

According to the piece, Mr Mead has come to the conclusion that Trump is a Jacksonian:

Jacksonians believe the most important priority of the U.S. government in both foreign and domestic policy is the security and well-being of the American people. A Jacksonian holds that the U.S. “should not seek out foreign quarrels, but when the U.S. or its allies are attacked or threatened or even insulted, they can become very energized, like a hive of bees. If the hive is attacked, they will sting with everything they’ve got.” That describes Mr. Trump, whose airstrikes on Iran Mr. Mead calls “a very Jacksonian action.”

Mead has been interpreting presidents as Jacksonian for almost 30 years, but as far as I can tell, all he means by the term "Jacksonian" is "good". On one hand, I will certainly agree that a review of Andrew Jackson's character and career shows similarities with Trump. His marital irregularities made him politically vulnerable. He was notorious for his quick temper. He had a record of failures in real estate. Like Trump with Canada and Greenland, Jackson advocated annexing Florida:

In December 1817, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun initiated the First Seminole War by ordering Jackson to lead a campaign "with full power to conduct the war as he may think best". Jackson believed the best way to do this was to seize Florida from Spain once and for all. Before departing, Jackson wrote to President James Monroe, "Let it be signified to me through any channel ... that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished."

So yes, I'll definitely agree that for these and many other reasons, Trump is a Jacksonian. The problem is that Mead made his reputation a generaton ago by announcing that Dubya was Jacksonian, too:

In 1999, American foreign policy academic Walter Russell Mead wrote an influential essay, The Jacksonian Tradition. In it, he identified a strand of US political thought associated with its conservative and anti-intellectual middle and working classes.

The article was highly prescient in anticipating the appeal of George W Bush as president. Now, as the US teeters on the brink of electing an unimaginably worse candidate [Trump 45], it’s worth reading again. Mead’s analysis turns out to be just as perceptive an insight into Donald Trump’s supporters and their political attitudes.

. . . The more idiotic his proposals – like the childish idea that a massive wall is the answer to illegal immigration – the more Jacksonians love him.

. . . Mead’s analysis of Jacksonian foreign policy gives a stark warning of the dangers of a Trump presidency, especially when Trump himself is so notoriously thin-skinned.

But while Andrew Jackson was a real person, "Jacksonianism" is a hypostatization, a fallacy I discussed here. It's a castle in the clouds that you can use to beat or praise whomever you choose without the need to excuse inconvenient contradictions. But let's look at why Dubya, despite Mead's view, was hardly Jacksonian.

Jackson was a product of the frontier and orphaned at 14. He seems to have secured legal training on the basis of his personal qualities alone, as he had no influential relatives. Dubya's family was aristocratic high society; he attended Phillips Exeter and was a legacy bonesman at Yale. According to the Wikipedia link,

[Dubya's] administration increased federal government spending from $1.789 trillion to $2.983 trillion (66 percent), while revenues increased from $2.025 trillion to $2.524 trillion (from 2000 to 2008). . . . Discretionary defense spending was increased by 107 percent, discretionary domestic spending by 62 percent, Medicare spending by 131 percent, social security by 51 percent, and income security spending by 130 percent. Cyclically adjusted, revenues rose by 35 percent and spending by 65 percent. The increase in spending was more than under any predecessor since Lyndon B. Johnson. The number of economic regulation governmental workers increased by 91,196.

. . . Nearly eight million immigrants came to the U.S. from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year period in the nation's history.[177] Almost half entered illegally.[178][unreliable source?] In 2006, Bush urged Congress to allow more than twelve million illegal immigrants to work in the United States with the creation of a "temporary guest-worker program".

In both the elections of 1824 (which he lost to John Quincy Adams when the election went to the House) and 1828 (when he defeated Adams), Jackson ran against Adams as an out-of-touch elitist, something Adams's performance in the White House reinforced. Like John Quincy Adams, who was a Harvard legacy, Dubya was a Yale legacy. Seen from this perspective, that Dubya would wear cowboy boots with black tie is as incongruous as Kamala Harris's upper-class wardrobe and accoutrements as she addressed the urban poor in street argot. Why would Mead and so many orhers who've cited him approvingly ever think of Dubya as a Jacksonian?

I wonder if the wardrobe choices of both Dubya and Harris, especially Dubya in hindsight, aren't a sign that the Americn electorate has gotten smarter over the past decades. At least it's gotten better at telling the difference between a phony Jacksonian and a real one. The Wall Strert Journal and Walter Russell Mead seem to be grudgingly edging over to get on the right side of history.

Asking The Right Question

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse raises an obvious question that nobody else has brought up:

How can a group within America openly threaten police, use violence against police, throw Molotov cocktails, bricks and explosive fireworks at police. Use batons, shields, bats and physical violence against police and federal law enforcement; destroy vehicles, set cars on fire, destroy property, trash and block the streets and create chaos…. Completely without being stopped?

. . . How does any individual or group get to do this without being arrested?

Although he's speaking in the context of Antifa and the BLM riots, I think the approach has changed under Trump 47. Beyond that, the argument has been made that federal arrests were in fact made after the 2020 riots:

The Justice Department targeted more than 300 protesters by charging them with federal crimes for their roles during the civil unrest last summer after the murder of George Floyd, according to a new report from The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of Black advocacy groups.

The report found that more than 90% of federal cases against Black Lives Matter protesters could have been charged in state court – and that in 88% of those cases, the federal charges carried more severe penalties than similar state charges.

In fact, at least accordinmg to the CNN link, BLM protesters were unfairly singled out and treated too harshly:

“This persecution resulted in hundreds of organizers and activists facing years in federal prison with no chance of parole,” the report read. It was co-authored by CUNY School of Law’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility Clinic.

But Sundance has a point. Why have we seen a renewed attempt to incite summertime violence in the cities this year if the perpetrators had been effectively prosecuted after 2020?

If the FBI did not support Antifa, quite simply Antifa would not exist. They are right there, highly visible, doing illegal things on camera, repeatedly, all over the country, and the FBI doesn’t lift a finger to stop them. Why?

The only thing that makes sense is that the FBI wants this activity to take place.

By "Antifa", I think he means a group or groups with equivalent tactics and objectives, although so far this year, they aren't specificslly calling themselves Antifa or carrying the back-and-red Antifa flags as they did in 2020. I also think despite the mistrust of Attorney General Bondi and FBI Director Patel in some MAGA quarters, the FBI strategy has changed. The Justice Department has been making well-publicized arrests:

The U.S. Department of Justice charged 48-year-old Grzegorz Vandenberg with “transporting explosives in interstate commerce with the knowledge and intent that that [sic] they would be used to kill, injure, or intimidate individuals,” per CBS News.

Vandenberg visited a travel center in Lordsburg, New Mexico, on June 12, where he allegedly purchased various fireworks and explosive devices. During the purchase, he reportedly asked for help in choosing fireworks that could be “thrown directly at people to cause harm.”

“He told store employees that he was prior special forces military and claimed he could make pipe bombs,” the DOJ said in its press release. “Vandenberg further stated that he was traveling to Los Angeles, California, for the riots, with the intent to kill law enforcement officers or government officials.”

In Portland, OR:

Rioters in Portland on Wednesday night were seen assaulting law enforcement with fireworks and explosives.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shared video of the assault from rioters opposed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.

“Last night, Portland rioters violently targeted federal law enforcement— 250 rioters launched fireworks, shined lasers in officers’ eyes to temporarily blind them, and stormed an ICE field office,” said the DHS. “Ultimately, five individuals were arrested on various charges including assault on federal law enforcement.”

As we saw in Los Angeles, there's also increasing pressure on local law enforcement to respond to such incidents:

A 38-year-old Portland man was arrested Thursday days after police said he threw debris at passing cars and left an explosive device on Interstate 5 in Northeast Portland.

Alexander Wick is accused of felony charges of attempted arson, criminal mischief, possession of a destructive device and manufacturing a destructive device. He remains in Multnomah County custody and is scheduled to appear in court Friday afternoon.

One difference since 2020 is that the response from federal departments is across-the-board:

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said that states that don’t cooperate with the federal government’s deportation efforts may not receive any funding to rebuild their infrastructure.

“The @USDOT will NOT fund rogue state actors who refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement,” Duffy wrote on X on Monday. “And to cities that stand by while rioters destroy transportation infrastructure — don’t expect a red cent from DOT, either. Follow the law, or forfeit the funding.”

Another approach is either to embarrass or prosecute outright politicians who storm the barricades themselves. This happened recently with the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka during a confrontation outside an ICE facility, about which a judge subsequently complained, “An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences. . . " But wasn't that the point?

This was the same effect intended in the Homeland Security and FBI takedown of Senator Alex Padilla, when he rushed Secretary Noem at a press event and was briefly handcuffed. On one hand, it was stressed that this folowed protocol in any such instance, but on the other, it sent the message that politicians wouldn't be exempted from ordinary consequences if they chose to act out. The message is apparently getting through:

Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) on Wednesday addressed fears stemming from federal charges tied to her visit to a New Jersey detention facility operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The lawmaker is facing 17 years for forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers on three counts after she tussled with law enforcement while exiting the facility.

“I never thought I would be facing charges as a sitting congresswoman. . .” McIver said during a Wednesday interview on MSNBC.

What's changed is that the Trump 45 cabinet was loaded with figures who for whatever reason didn't feel beholden to Trump, in particular Attorney General Barr and FBI Director Wray, but also including a succession of defense secretaries, a succession of national security advisers, and Vice President Pence. Trump 47 has nothing like these problems. I suspect it's an indication of how thoroughly he's gained control of the Republican Party in the intervening years.

I think that with the new approach of recognizing the full nature of the problem and creating credible disincentives, there will be far less unrest this summer than in 2020.

CNN's Problem

Full disclosure: the image above is a satirical manipulatiion, not an actual photo of CNN's Dana Bash. But this just makes my point stronger: every time I see her, I get the inescapable impression that she's everyman's ex-wife. Other headline figures are just as bad: Kaitlan Collins has such a permanent self-satisfied smirk that I keep wondering if her mother used to tell her, "If you keep making that face, one day it's going to stick that way", and that finally happened. No problem, CNN put her in front of the camera anyhow.

So I think Axios is being really, really polite in this story:

Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company to cable channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT and the streaming service HBO Max, announced Monday that it plans split into two publicly traded companies, parting its television networks from its streaming business.

. . . WBD Streaming & Studios will include HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios, while WBD Global Networks will include CNN, TNT Sports U.S. and Discovery.

. . . Global Networks will take on most of the company's debt, but will retain an up to 20% stake in WBD's stand-alone streaming and studios business, helping to "enhance the deleveraging path for global networks," Wiedenfels said on an investor call.

. . . WBD was formed in 2022 when [David] Zaslav's Discovery, which was made up mostly of cable networks and some smaller streaming services, merged with WarnerMedia, which housed the Warner Bros. Pictures movie studio, a general entertainment streaming service and several cable networks.

The merger created more than $50 billion in debt, of which nearly $20 billion has already been paid off.

So basically, Warner Bros Discovery decided it had two kinds of business, winners and losers. The losers included CNN and Discovery, which it plans to spin off, along with most of the debt, leaving basically Warner as the winner company, freed to expand into other fields. The Washington Free Beacon is less circumspect:

Liberal television networks are increasingly viewed as declining assets nobody wants to own. Their audiences are getting smaller, older, and deader. Viewership rates among Americans who don't currently reside in an assisted living facility are plummeting to zero. Nobody wants to invest. Media companies are desperate to get these failing networks, and the exorbitant paychecks of their vainglorious anchors, off their books as soon as possible.

. . . Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, made a similar announcement earlier this month. CNN and other declining television assets will be split off into a new company called "Global Networks," while the conglomerate's more promising assets, such as the Warner Bros. film studio and the HBO Max streaming service, will form another company investors might find attractive. . . . CNN and its celebrity anchors are in for a rude awakening courtesy of new CEO Gunnar Wiedenfels, a notorious figure in media circles known for his ruthless cost-cutting.

. . . Morale is "really grim," one CNN employee told Fox News, a much more successful network.

So what seems to be happening in the latest controversy over the "fake news" CNN report of ineffective results of the bunker buster attack on Fordow is an attempt by fading CNN headliners to double down on same old-same old.

BREAKING: CNN discloses "top secret" information on live TV, claiming the strikes on Iran left their nuclear sites "largely intact."

The claim has since been refuted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

"Based on everything we have seen, and I've seen it all, our bombing campaign… pic.twitter.com/rqTcDzT8Eh

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 24, 2025

The difference with Trump 47 is that he and his people see problems and create a situation where, as Wittgenstein would put it, the solution to the problem occurs with the disappearance of the problem.

KAROLINE LEAVITT: Whoever leaked to CNN "should go to jail."

"The FBI is investigating." pic.twitter.com/CXlSANPMWI

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 25, 2025

The administration right new has a deep bench of spokespeople who can take advantage of legacy media's business disadvantage. A big part of this strategy is that the administration figures are simply more attractive than people like Dana Bash or Kaitlan Collins, which legacy media noted with discomfort after the election:

There’s a common trait that President-elect Donald Trump is clearly prizing as he selects those to serve in his new administration: experience on television.

Trump loves that “central casting” look, as he likes to call it.

. . . It’s also true that those seeking positions in Trump’s orbit often take to the airwaves to audition for an audience of one. Tom Homan, Trump’s choice for “border czar,” is a frequent Fox contributor. Ohio Sen. JD Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate in part because of how well he comes across on air.

So it's no surprise that attractive figures are leading the counterattack against CNN, and they're doing it effectively. Look at the performances of Vice President Vance and Secretary Hegseth below:

To recap, an out of context, “low confidence” and incomplete intelligence report was selectively leaked to the media. The media reported on the findings without any real effort to figure out whether they represent any part of (much less the full) truth. The way the media has presented the report is contradicted by the IAEA, the Iranians themselves, and the administration’s political and defense leadership. More importantly, the media’s reports are contradicted by common sense.

. . . There is actually an interesting story here, if the media was interested in telling it. Why are members of the intelligence community leaking incomplete reports against the elected leadership of the country? Why have the same reporters who have gotten so much wrong learned so little? What is the purpose of these leaks–who is behind them, and what are they trying to achieve?

The media won’t investigate that story, though it would be in the public interest to do so. So pay attention to the reporters who are laundering talking points from junior careerists in the intelligence community.

President Trump has obliterated the Iranian nuclear program. The American media seems destined to obliterate their own credibility on this fake story.

These are young, attractive people making powerful arguments. Dana Bash, Kaitlan Collins, Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, and Wolf Blitzer aren't in that league. The great Rush Limbaugh frequently observed that politics is Hollywood for ugly people. At some point, CNN seems to have decided it needed to have ugly people on screen to get credibility with politicians, when Trump recognized he needed Hollywood types -- not the pretty-boys, though, the solid male leads like John Wayne or James Stewart -- to talk over the heads of the politicians.

This is just one part of Trump's innovation.

Just War Theory And The 12-Day War

I've looked at two commentators who've tried to apply just war theory to the 12-day war just finished, Bp Joseph Strickland (here) and the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser (here and here). Both have since responded to the US bombing of Iran's nuclear sites and the cease fire. I think both have the same problem, Trump's strategy was simply not what they anticipated, and he achieved his ends before anyone could say much of anything.

In this YouTube, Bp Strickland acknowledges the bombing, but while he says it's a consequence of sin (isn't the Catholic Church as well?), he has little else to say beyond noting that Pope Leo XIV hasn't yet reversed any of Francis's policies or appointments. This strikes me as wanting just to change the subject and move on.

Edwared Feser goes on at greater length in a post, Preventive war and the U.S. attack on Iran. His original argument, like Strickland's, anticipated things that Trump didn't do. Last week, referring to a social media post from Trump, Feser said,

Taken at face value, this indicates that the U.S. will participate in an attack that will threaten the entire city of Tehran. And he has called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” Meanwhile, Israel is indicating that regime change is among the aims of its war with Iran.

There are two criteria of just war theory that the president is violating, at least if we take his words at face value. First, for a war to be just, it must be fought using only morally legitimate means. This includes a prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. To be sure, just war theory allows that there can be cases where harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure can be permissible, but only if (a) this is the foreseen but unintended byproduct of an attack on military targets, and (b) the harm caused to civilians and civilian infrastructure is not out of proportion to the good achieved by destroying those military targets.

But even last week, his complaint was that Israel was urging the evacuation of Tehran, not bombing it. He correctly noted that this would cause much trouble and confusion, which it did, as the highwwys out of the city were clogged for several days, but this was hardly a war crime, and there were not the mass deaths he anticipated. The US dropped something like 14 bunker-buster bombs on two isolated nuclear facilities that had previously been evacuated and fired submarine-launched missiles at a third; as far as anyone can tell, no humans died in any of those attacks.

At that point, Trump determined that he had achieved his goal, and he imposed a cease-fire, which after brief uncertainty has held. Every indication is that both the US and Israel did everything possible to keep civilian casualties to a bare minimum, and I challenge Prof Feser to show that either of the conditions he lists was violated. I might grant that Trump was impolite in calling for regime change and unconditional surrender, but he clearly did not impose either on Iran, and his representatives made clear that neither was an actual war aim.

By most measures, Trump basically left Feser without an argument, but here's the problem with this thing called "just war theory": it's a hypostatization.

Hypostatization, (reification in one of its many senses) or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness refers to an abstraction being “treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.” Hypostatization has occurred when concepts, frameworks, and theories freeze into pictures of reality that cannot be shaken by reality.

"Just war theory" is an abstract concept that has developed over thousands of years, with many different expressions. What's fascinating is that just war theorists never seem to be able to codify a single expression of the theory -- might they not be satisfied with CCC 2309, for instance, which even says of itself, "These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the 'just war' doctrine"? It lists four main consideratons:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

But as we've already seen, these aren't enough for either Bp Strickland or Prof Feser. Strickland mentions CCC 2309 only in passing before going on to cite Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope St John Paul, while Prof Feser repeatedly asserts that there are seven elements to just war theory, not just the four in CCC 2309 -- but so far, I haven't found anywhere he lists all seven. Here's the problem.

Going only by the four listed above, Trump and Bibi pass the test. The potential damage from Iran's nuclear program, not just against Israel, but against other Middle Eastern countries and even the US, is lasting, grave, and certain. Negotiations, either in the 2025 round or others over a 40-year period, have been fruitless. There are serious prospects of success. And the use of arms by the US and Israel in the 12-day war scrupulously avoided civilian casualties, to the point that in the US attack, there were no casualties, either civilian or military.

But the text itself mentions the need to consider "the power of modem means of destruction" in evaluating conditions -- which would in fact add weight to the need to stop Iran's nuclear program.

If I refer to "the US Constitution", I mean a particular document with particular words. If I refer to "just war doctrine" or "just war theory", I don't mean the same thing. I mean a vague set of notions that can mean whatever I want it to mean. I can cite CCC 2309, which is a particular document with particular words, but it's never enough, because I'm always trying to prove War X is unjust. So besides CCC 2309, Feser pulls a new rabbit out of his hat:

This brings us to an issue which I only touched on in my earlier essay but which is obviously no less important (indeed, even more important) than the two criteria I focused on: the justice of the cause for which the war is being fought, which is the first criterion of just war doctrine. The reason I did not say more about it is that the issue is more complex than meets the eye.

The justice of the cause is the first criterion of just war doctrine! And those dunderheads who wrote CCC 2309 completely left it out! But does Feser cite the particular statement of just war doctrine equivalent to the US Constitution's Article 1 that defines just cause in specific words? Of course not, there is no single authoritative document that unequivocally spells out what the criteria are, in order, using specific words. "Just war doctine" is actually an abstraction with certain imprecise elements on which there has never been complete agreement, yet Feser treats it as something authoritative and final. The CCC is in fact more authoritative than Feser's unspecified abstraction.

Prof Feser is a professor, and professors will be professors, something I learned doing hard time in graduate school, and I eventually recognized I wasn't called to be a professor. But it's worth considering that Prof Feser's PhD is in philosophy, a field that through much of the 20th century was dominated by Wittgenstein and supporters like O K Bouwsma, figures who stressed the need for carerful linguistic analysis and rigorous expression. I would not rate Prof Feser high on either of those traits, although I'm sure he wouldn't give me a very high grade in his classes at Pasadena City College, either. But I quit taking philosophy classes long ago.

Damn With Faint Praise

In a peculiar op-ed at The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker decides Trump is no big deal, he just did what any president would have done:

No country, let alone a superpower, can approach national security with a rigid dogma about the use of force, and for all the binary nature of the contentions we have had on the subject in the past few decades, I suspect no American president ever has.

. . . Seen in this light President Trump’s decision to order a U.S. military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities isn’t a “win” for the interventionists against the noninterventionists in the president’s coalition, a decisive departure in Trumpian foreign policy. It looks instead like a classic and—as far as we can tell—effective piece of operational expediency born of tactical opportunism to advance legitimate strategic objectives.

As far as I can see, the sort of any-president Mr Baker has in mind must be Josiah Bartlet, the one played by Martin Sheen in The West Wing. The problem Trump appears to have solved as a real president is the one created by Jimmy Carter and tolerated in one way or another by all of his real successors. Rick Moran at PJ Media has a much clearer assessment:

While the CIA was telling presidents that the Iranians had stopped trying to build a bomb in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, work continued on a bomb until the window to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon closed.

Trump's decision to strike Iran's nuclear facilities was more than 40 years in the making and represents a generational failure of leadership of historic proportions. Each president in turn—beginning with George H. W. Bush, through Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, the first Trump administration, and Joe Biden—acknowledged the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon but refused to act on it.

He mentions "generational failure", and the only equivalent failure I can think of is the inability of Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan to resolve or even effectively compromise on the slavery question until it degenerated into a shooting war with Lincoln's election.

The solution seems to have required a new approach from a new political party, which led to the rise of the Republicans, who held their first national convention only in 1856, when they nominated John C Fremont. Fremont came in second in a three-way contest among James Buchanan, the Democrat, and Millard Fillmore, a former Whig who had succeeded to the presidency as vice president in 1850 but lost to the Democrat Pierce in 1852 and had since become a Know-Nothing.

The upshot of this political stalemate was that by the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, the Democrats entered a political wilderness, and the Whigs and Know-Nothings faded from the picture, with the anti-slavery factions of both absorbed into the Republicans. Lincoln became a highly controversial figure who was nevertheless able to to take advantage of a new anti-slavery political alignment.

Lincoln had the old problem forced on him in a new way, but it's worth noting that unlike his predecessors, he was able to recognize the new alignment and act on it. Yes, an idealized President Bartlet would do the same -- in fact, let's face it, Bartlet would be far less narcissistic, obnoxious, crass, and generally in-your-face, which is why The Wall Street Journal seems to think it necessary to point out that of course, the Iran move had nothing to do with Trump, Bartlet would do what any American president would do, except that given the opportunities, none actually did.

I think Iran's Military Central Command was much more insightful when it addressed him as "Gambler Trump". As things appear to be turning out, first, unlike 2003, Iran actually appears to have had a nuclear program that was close to building a bomb. Then, second, unlike Jimmy Carter's 1980 Operation Eagle Claw, there was no ignominious desert disaster:

Eight helicopters were sent to the first staging area called Desert One, but only five arrived in operational condition. One had encountered hydraulic problems, another was caught in a sand storm, and the third showed signs of a cracked rotor blade. During the operational planning, it was decided that the mission would be aborted if fewer than six helicopters remained operational upon arrival at the Desert One site, despite only four being absolutely necessary. In a move that is still discussed in military circles, the field commanders advised President Carter to abort the mission, which he did.

As the US forces prepared to withdraw from Desert One, one of the remaining helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft that contained both servicemen and jet fuel. The resulting fire destroyed both aircraft and killed eight servicemen.

Considering the complexity of the B-2 raid, it's remarkable that nothing like that occurred -- recognizing in addition that Trump appears to have purged and replaced much of the Pentagon leadership that was tasked with its planning and exrecution. President Bartlet would certainly have done a better job overall without creating such unnecessary turmoil, but doggone it, Trump was lucky.

And it's better to be lucky than good. But I have an increasing feeling that Trump is also good -- like Lincoln good, not Bartlet good.

Why Did Trump Go To Bedminster Friday Night?

I've been intriged by Trump's Bedminster, NJ golf facility ever since it surfaced in the "wiretap" kerfuffle during the 2016 transition, which I discussed here in a 2024 post (the full links are at that post).

The original story, which appears to have been assiduously scrubbed, was that National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers met with Trump after the election to inform him that Trump Tower wasn't secure, and as a consequence, Trump moved his transition headquarters to his Bedminster, NJ golf club. The record does reflect that a meeting between Trump and Rogers did take place in mid November, 2016. . . . And Trump did in fact move his transition headquarters from Trump Tower to Bedminster on November 16. . . . There was no mention in any of the reports about what Rogers discussed with Trump in the meeting, nor why the move to Bedminster took place. Exactly what kind of surveillance was involved, on whom, and who ordered it has never been clear[.]

Not much, in fact, is ever said about Bedminster. A few weeks ago, Sean Spicer, who was part of the first Trump administration, remarked on Mark Halperin's Morning Meeting 2WAY program that even in his position, he was never high enough in the administration to rate his own room at Bedminster when Trump chose to move there; he presumably lodged off site. And that's about it. All I can surmise is that Trump, who must have highly capable corporate security staff at his disposal as well as the Secret Service, feels more confident in the electronic measures in place at Bedminster than in any other facility, including the White House.

Which brings us to the runup to the B-2 bombing raid on Fordow this past weekend:

On Friday afternoon, a day after suggesting the attack could be delayed, Trump gave Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the green-light to launch the B-2 bombers.

The public, of course, knew nothing about this. Apparently after giving Hegseth the approval, Trump flew to Morristown, NJ, en route to Bedminster, where he gave an impromptu press conference:

President Trump is again questioned about Gabbard’s statements from March where she repeated an Intelligence Community assessment that Iran was not currently building a nuclear weapon. President Trump accepts the misleading question and responds by saying, “she’s wrong.”

President Trump’s admonishment of the manufactured statement is then amplified by the Israel-First group, which includes Laura Loomer and Mark Levin, both ‘influencers’ hoping to see Tulsi Gabbard removed, and replaced with a more pro-Israel, pro-war intelligence head. Watching this unfold is quite remarkable.

In hindsight, this was yet another diversion designed to further the impression that there was ongoing debate within the administration over bombing Fordow, when Trump had already approved the mission.

On Saturday afternoon, while still at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump was told the bombers were about to reach the point of no return — the moment they would go into full radio silence.

Shortly after, Trump boarded Air Force One and flew back to Washington to be in the Situation Room as the first bombs hit their targets.

Sitting in the Situation Room, the president saw that the media was still reporting he was undecided, a U.S. official said. That's when Trump grew confident the operation would be successful.

When I heard that Trump was going to Bedminster Friday afternoon, I immediately thought something was up, just based on the little I'd heard about why he goes there. In addition,

The Pentagon Pizza Report, a social media account that claimed to have accurately predicted Israel’s initial June 12 military strikes on Iran, posted that local pizza traffic near the Pentagon was "HIGH" within an hour of the U.S. launching attacks against Iranian nuclear sites Saturday night.

Less than an hour before the announcement, the account said "HIGH activity is being reported at the closest Papa Johns to the Pentagon."

Account administrators added Freddie's Beach Bar, a restaurant and bar near the Pentagon that has also been previously used as an indicator of impending military action, was reporting abnormally low activity levels for a Saturday night.

"Classic indicator for potential overtime at the Pentagon," the account wrote.

But food service at Bedminster would have been in-house, and even the internal phone lines would have been highly secure. I believe the Saturday Situation Room meeting at the White House was scheduled Friday, but that would take place after operational security was no longer important. It appears that Trump wanted his approvals leading up to the actual strike to come from Bedminster:

Rubio signaled on Sunday that Trump didn’t give his final go-ahead for the bombing campaign until the very last minutes before it was carried out.

“There are multiple points along the way in which the President has decisions to make about ‘go’ or ‘no-go,’” he said in a Fox News interview Sunday morning. “And it really comes right up to 10 minutes before the bombs are actually dropped.”

What this suggests to me is that at least for the time being, Trump's purge of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies has been successful, at least insofar as operational security was maintained, with absolutely no leaks. But it sounds to me that Trump trusts the security at the White House only as far as it goes, and he still prefers Bedminster if he wants absolute secrecy.

I've never bought the conventional wisdom that Trump is bombastic, ego-driven, always playing to the grandstands. But he's willing to let that impression work for him if it serves his purpose. Trump may be lucky, but he's also good, and the better he gets, the better luck he seems to have.

So Did Trump Get It Right?

Michael Scherer outlines the basic issue in Trump's Iran attack in this piece at The Atlantic:

Precisely what convinced Trump that Iran was close to making a weapon remains mysterious. For years, including when Trump was last in office, the U.S. intelligence community has publicly stated that Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reiterated that bottom-line conclusion during congressional testimony in March.

But Trump dismissed her statement and the information behind it. “She’s wrong,” Trump told reporters on Friday, days after he had already made the decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran had gathered “a tremendous amount of material,” he continued, apparently referring to the enriched uranium necessary to create a bomb. Earlier in the week, Trump had said that he thought Iran was “very close to having” weapons.

The U.S. intelligence community had also said that Iran was enriching uranium that could potentially be used in a weapon, and was stockpiling highly enriched uranium far in excess of what would be needed for a civilian energy program.

But crucially, U.S. intelligence agencies had long ago determined that Iran’s supreme leader had suspended the weapons program in 2003. Enriching nuclear material is just one component of a weapon. A nuclear warhead has to be fitted onto a ballistic missile capable of surviving reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and landing on its target—not a trivial feat of engineering.

One of the chief reasons to doubt that Iran was enriching uranium in order to build nuclear weapons was the disastrous failure of the US intelligence apparatus in the runup to the Iraq war in 2003:

The case for invading Iraq in March 2003 was built on three basic premises: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD); that it was developing more of them; and that it was failing to comply with its disarmament obligations under a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions. All of these premises were based on scraps of unreliable information. None of them was true.

In looking at current developments, I can't help wondering what a Trump-style president might have done in the wake of these revelations. Instead, Dubya appointed a commission. It's hard to pinpoint just what reforms were undertaken, especially considering that Dubya's dad had been CIA director himself and was a senior member of the intelligence-political establishment.

In any case, it was a consensus group of that intelligence-political establishment that released a letter on October 19, 2020 claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation". This claim turned out to be as trustworthy as the same establishment's claim that Saddam Hussein was building WMDs, and the letter was signed by individuals who had been members of that same group, still with that unwarranted prestige.

At the start of his current term, Trump announced:

In the closing weeks of the 2020 Presidential campaign, at least 51 former intelligence officials coordinated with the Biden campaign to issue a letter discrediting the reporting that President Joseph R. Biden’s son had abandoned his laptop at a computer repair business. Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

. . . The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions. This fabrication of the imprimatur of the Intelligence Community to suppress information essential to the American people during a Presidential election is an egregious breach of trust reminiscent of a third world country. And now the faith of Americans in all other patriotic intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect the Nation has been imperiled.

. . . Effective immediately, the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, shall revoke any current or active clearances held by the following individuals: [the order lists the 49 living signatories of the 2023 letter, plus John Bolton].

There's no indication that Dubya took any equivalent action in 2003, but it seems likely had he done so, the country would have been better off. Following Trump's January 20 order, he continued a "purge" of all the intelligence agencies:

Last week, President Donald Trump fired the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). Though Trump campaigned on downsizing the federal government, the removal of four-star Gen. Timothy Haugh was one few could have seen coming.

. . . The purge went deeper than just the NSA and USCYBERCOM. Trump also fired at least six members of the National Security Council, which advises the president on national security and foreign policy. On Monday afternoon, the official NSC page on WhiteHouse.gov had a “404 Page Not Found” error message.

. . . These firings spotlighted Laura Loomer’s influence in the White House, and the president has acknowledged that she has almost unprecedented access to him. Not even tech billionaire Elon Musk, named to head the “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE, has Trump’s ear like Loomer.

. . . It appears that Trump took her suggestion of the officials’ disloyalty to heart without seeking additional insight on the matter.

According to Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, the surviving members of the intelligence-political establishment (the IC) are trying to fight back:

For the sake of urgency I’m going to talk in direct and bold terms about the targeting of Tulsi Gabbard. The IC system is attempting to remove her as a disruptive influence by using Iran as a wedge to get her out, but the issue they have with Director Gabbard has nothing to do with Iran.

CTH approaches this after being very concerned about Tulsi Gabbard’s ability. Not because of intent, but rather we doubted her understanding of the scope of the IC opposition aligned against an effective Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Gabbard started out with these weaknesses, but she learned quickly – grasped the opposition– and has become a transformative force within the Intelligence Community. Director Gabbard’s recent efforts within the Intelligence Community Inspector General office is another feather in her cap of competence. Gabbard is now a threat.

. . . If President Trump allows the Brutus crew in his orbit to isolate, ridicule and marginalize Tulsi Gabbard, he will be putting a significant part of his administration at risk. This is the Six Ways from Sunday crowd.

The proof of the pudding is going to be who turns out to have been right in the question of how accurate the intelligence estimates on Iran were. Trump and his inner circle have purged the organs of state security and replaced them with what they feel are trustworthy people, and Trump is making a big gamble that this was the right move. My guess continues to be that Trump is good, but more important, he's lucky. It's better to be lucky than good.

The Continuing Problem Of Jericho

In a 2000 article at Catholic Herald arguing for the immorality of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Edward Feser cites Gaudium et Spes 80:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.

But the Almighty approved of Joshua taking this same action after the walls of Jericho came down (Joshua 6:20-27):

20 As the horns blew, the people began to shout. When they heard the sound of the horn, they raised a tremendous shout. The wall collapsed, and the people attacked the city straight ahead and took it.

21 They observed the ban by putting to the sword all living creaturese in the city: men and women, young and old, as well as oxen, sheep and donkeys.

. . . 24 The city itself they burned with all that was in it; but the silver, gold, and articles of bronze and iron they placed in the treasury of the house of the LORD.

25 Because Rahab the prostitute had hidden the messengers whom Joshua had sent to reconnoiter Jericho, Joshua let her live, along with her father’s house and all her family, who dwell in the midst of Israel to this day.

26 On that occasion Joshua imposed the oath: Cursed before the LORD be the man who attempts to rebuild this city, Jericho. At the cost of his firstborn will he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son will he set up its gates.

27 Thus the LORD was with Joshua so that his fame spread throughout the land.

The city was burned with everything in it; all the living creatures, men, women, infants, and animals, were put to the sword; the land itself was cursed. Sounds a lot like a nuclear attack to me. Under certain circumstances, God not only approves of it, he orders it to be done. But in the case of the cities of the plain, God does it directly Himself (Genesis 19: 1-29):

23 The sun had risen over the earth when Lot arrived in Zoar,

24 and the LORD rained down sulfur upon Sodom and Gomorrah, fire from the LORD out of heaven.

25 He overthrew those cities and the whole Plain, together with the inhabitants of the cities and the produce of the soil.

26 But Lot’s wife looked back, and she was turned into a pillar of salt.

27 The next morning Abraham hurried to the place where he had stood before the LORD.

28 As he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole region of the Plain, he saw smoke over the land rising like the smoke from a kiln.

29 When God destroyed the cities of the Plain, he remembered Abraham and sent Lot away from the upheaval that occurred when God overthrew the cities where Lot had been living.

At one point, I posed the question to Feser in a comment on one of his posts about the immorality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks asking how he reconciled his view (which had in fact changed recently as of 2020) with the destruction of Jericho, but he didn't answer. In fact, going over some of his posts on this subject, visitors have asked him to explain why he's changed his view, and I have yet to find an answer to those comments, either.

Certainly a good Thomist is going to say that, first, God is perfect. His instructions are perfect, and His own actions are perfect. Scripture is inerrant; neither the stories in Genesis nor Joshua are incorrect. The only way I can reconcile this is with the moral of Job, as outlined in Catholic Answers:

There is a happy ending, and the moral is quite clear, even if Job does not grasp it. But he does realize now that there is no reason why God should have to account to anyone for what he does. Man cannot grasp the mysterious ways of divine providence. In permitting the innocent to suffer and even die and in not punishing the evildoer during his lifetime, God has his reasons, even if man cannot grasp them.

The bottom line is that, contra Just-war hardliners, things aren't that cut and dried. CCC 2309 on one hand lists "rigorous conditions for moral legitimacy", but at the same time, it provides for "evaluation of these conditions" within the "prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good". Would nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki be less grave than the evil to be eliminated, to wit, the millions that would be killed, including innocent civilians, in a land invasion of Japan?

The just-war hardliners propose some sort of negotiation that might have averted both -- but wouldn't that necesssarily involve other compromises like, for instance, allowing Japan to retain some territories it had conquered in China, South Asia, Manchuria, or Korea? It needs to be recognized that any such compromise would allow Japan to continue genocidal policies comparable to those Hitler had imposed in Europe. This is the same fantasy that the Operation Valkyrie conspirators against Hitler entertained -- that eliminating Hitler would allow a negotiated end to the war that might let Germany keep Poland, say, while withdrawing from Russia and France.

But as it applies to Trump -- so far, Trump hasn't ordered a thing. One comment on social media sticks with me: "Trump is giving a lesson in how to actually use our power without resorting to war". Certainly what he's doing now lies well within the province of prudential judgment, including projecting the idea that he might in fact behave irrationally.

Let's Acknowledge That Trump Is A Smart Guy

I ran into an interesting take on Trump at the G7:

A G7 assembly with a final day invitation list that brought Australia, Mexico, Ukraine, South Korea, South Africa, India, the United Nations and the World Bank into it. Why? Because President Trump, that’s why.

U.S. President Donald Trump smartly exited the G7 assembly a day early, he departed just before the crowd of interests arrived. If we drop the pretending we all know why Canada invited them and these nations came running – Tariff$!

He was supposed to have sideline meetings with Ukraine's Zelensky and Mexico's Sheinbaum. We know he was able to avoid meeting Zelensky by leaving early; whether he met with Sheinbaum is uncertain, but he would have had little to say to her in any case -- the Mexicans who are leaving the US voluntarily far outnumber those formally deported, and this will diminish remittances to folks back in Mexico no matter what.

This all says to me that Trump is playing a bigger game than the news cycle recognizes. He left the G7 ostensibly to follow pressing developments in Israel and Iran, but we shouldn't be too sure of that. He may not have been thinking about Iran at all when he left the G7. When he said, “The Wall Street Journal has No Idea what my thoughts are concerning Iran!” I think he meant more than he was explicitly saying.

Consider that over the past several days, his remarks on Iran have been all over the landscape. On Tuesday, he posted UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, which gave Edward Feser the vapors:

When a country tells an enemy’s government and citizens that it will settle for nothing less than their surrender with no conditions at all – thereby putting themselves entirely at their foes’ mercy – they are obviously bound to fight more tenaciously and brutally, which will tempt the threatening country to similarly brutal methods of warfare in response.

. . . As they routinely do, Trump’s defenders may suggest that his words should not be taken at face value, but interpreted as mere “trash talk” or perhaps as exercises in “thinking out loud” rather than as final policy decisions. But this helps their case not at all. War is, needless to say, an enterprise of enormous gravity, calling for maximum prudence and moral seriousness. Even speaking about the possibility must be done with great caution. (Think of the chaos that could follow upon trying quickly to evacuate a city of nearly ten million people, even if there were no actual plan to bomb it.) A president who is instead prone to woolly thinking and flippant speech about matters of war is a president whose judgment about them cannot be trusted. (And as I have argued elsewhere, he has already in other ways proven himself to have unsound judgment about such things.)

Yet by yesterday, he extended Iran's deadline for negotiations, which he'd earlier strongly implied had expired after 60 days when Israel attacked Iran on June 13, by another two weeks (or maybe not):

“Based on the fact that there is a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place in the near future, I will make my decision of whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday, reading a statement from the president to reporters.

Reuters has finally figured out that Trump's strategy is to keep everyone guessing:

President Donald Trump kept the world guessing about whether the United States will join Israel's bombardment of Iranian nuclear sites as the Israel-Iran conflict entered its seventh day on Thursday. Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump declined to say if he had made any decision on whether to join Israel's campaign. "I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do," he said.

Trump in later remarks said Iranian officials wanted to come to Washington for a meeting and that "we may do that." But he added, "It's a little late" for such talks.

. . . Asked if he thought the Iranian government could fall as a result of the Israeli campaign, Trump said: "Sure, anything could happen."

Referring to the destruction or dismantling of Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment center, Trump said: "We're the only ones that have the capability to do it. But that doesn't mean I'm going to do it - at all."

This reminds me again of Henry Kissinger's negotiating strategy with the Soviets: warn them that Nixon is unstable and could fly off the handle at any time, and Kissinger is the only one who can control him -- but if the Soviets do something Nixon thinks is extreme, it could set Nixon off even beyond Kissinger's ability to reason with him. This appears to have succeeded.

I'm not sure who Edward Feser thinks has sound enough judgment to negotiate with the Iranians, unlike Trump. Biden? He might not necessarily remember Khamenei's name. Obama? He sent pallets of cash to Iran that financed their nuclear program. The only alternative that comes to mind is Mitt Romney, whose demeanor would be calm, stable, and deliberative, but I have a feeling the ayatollahs would interpret that as namby-pamby.

I saw a comment on YouTube that wondered why everyone is focused on the deeply dug nuclear facility at Fordow. Why would Israel or the US be going to such trouble to telegraph their intentions, letting the Iranians focus on the idea of a bomber strike there with bunker busters? Doesn't this sound like strategic deception? They must actually be planning something else.

In any case, there are several lessons to be learned from Truman's strategy that led to Japan's surrender in 1945. The Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, issued two days after the successful testing of the atomic bomb, renewed a call for Japan's "unconditional surrender", but it mentioned the term only once, and contrary to prior statements, it made no mention of the emperor's status.

The short-lived interim Secretary of State Joseph Grew had advocated for retaining the emperor as a constitutional monarch. He hoped that preserving Hirohito's central role could facilitate an orderly capitulation of all Japanese troops in the Pacific theatre. Without it, securing a surrender could be difficult. Navy Secretary James Forrestal and other officials shared the view.  Allied intentions on issues of utmost importance to the Japanese, including whether Hirohito was to be regarded as one of those who had "misled the people of Japan" or even a war criminal, or alternatively, whether the Emperor might become part of a "peacefully inclined and responsible government" were thus left unstated.

The Japanese were fully aware of the apparent movement in the Allied terms reflected in the declaration, and some in the government interpreted this as meaning a military surrender without the removal of the emperor. However, it was the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki that drove both the emperor and a cabinet majority to the view that, provided the Allies agreed to retain the emperor, Japan would surrender.

Thus a careful carrot-and-stick approach, including the actual detonation of atomic bombs, tempered by the tacit application of a few actual conditions to the term "unconditional surrender", brought an end to the war, something hard line just war theorists like Edward Feser apparently don't acknowledge.

It seems to me that Trump is acting very much in the spirit of both Truman and Nixon-Kissinger, allowing hmself a great deal of leeway to deal with circumstances as they arise, while on the other hand leaving the level of his actual cooperation with Israel unstated and uncertain from both a domestic and foreign policy point of view.

Bishop Strickland On Israel And Just War Doctrine

In the YouTube embedded above, Bp Joseph Strickland uses just war doctrine, as partly outlined in CCC 2309, to, question the moralty of Israel's attacks on Iran. He cites it at 2:10:

"The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration." That's from the Catechsm of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2309.

But then he departs from the Catechism and never quite comes back to it:

A preemptive war, a war launched not in defense but in anticipation, is not a just war. As Pope St John Paul II said before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, "War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity," from his address to the dioplomatic corps, January 13, 2003. And Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, with clarity warned that the concept of a preemptive war does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. . . . A nation does not have the moral right to wage war simply because it suspercts it might be attacked.

I've been looking carefully at the arguments pro and con for both Israel's right to attack Iran starting on June 13 and the justification for any US direct military assistance in that and potential succeeding attacks, although we must acknowledge that the overall strategy behind the attacks, which were timed to begin immediately after the expiration of Trump's 60-day deadline for negotiations to conclude, was clearly worked out in collaboration with Trump from the start.

For now, Bp Strickland's attempt to use just war doctrine against Israel leaves me unconvinced. His unstated assumption is that the Israel-Iran conflict began on June 13 with Israeli aerial attacks on Iranian air defenses and nuclear facilities. However, the conflict between Israel and Iran has been an ongoing proxy war for decades, something Wikipedia acknowledges with an entry on Iran-Israel Proxy Conflict.

While this conflict has existed since the Iranian mullahs seized power, its current phase dates to October 7, 2023:

In the weeks since the Hamas massacre on October 7, pundits have debated whether or not Iran helped Hamas develop the plan for the terrorist assault and if Iran had foreknowledge of the attack. Citing a Hamas source, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran helped plot the attack and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp gave it the go-ahead at a meeting in Beirut. Another Journal report claims that in the weeks leading up to the assault, hundreds of Hamas and other Islamist militants received specialized training in Iran. . . . Ultimately, the details of Iran’s role in the plot itself will emerge. But this much is already clear: Iran has funded, armed, trained, and provided intelligence to Hamas for decades. Though Hamas has multiple income streams, funding from Iran has been especially important for the group’s military and terrorist structures.

In other words, the June 13 attack isn't something that emerged de novo between parties that had previously been at peace like, say, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As of May 2024,

Senior Iranian military officials are developing concepts for destroying Israel without having to defeat the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Iran recognizes the technological superiority of the IDF and the risk that an overt war could draw in the United States, which Iranian leaders desire to avoid. . . . Their thinking proceeds from the theory that destabilizing Israel would cause Jewish citizens to flee Israel and end the long-term viability of a Jewish state in Israel.

So I'm not entirely on board with the idea that the June 13 attacks created an entirely new, preemptive state of war. Instead, Israel since its founding millennia ago has been in a defensive posture vis-a-vis its surrounding states, something current Israeli leadership continually cites.

But there's another problem with the Biblical context of the Almighty's purpose for Israel. In Numbers 13, God tells Moses to send spies into the Promised Land to evaluate its suitability. They return and report that it certainly is suitable, but they'll have to fight the current inhabitants, and they're not sure if they want to do that. The upshot is that Moses hesitates. In Numbers 14, God condemns Israel to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, one year for each day the spies spent in Canaan, for its unwillingness to follow God's plan.

So then we eventually come to the Siege of Jericho, which is definitely not part of a defensive war on Israel's side -- Israel instead is belatedly trusting God's instructions. Jericho amounts to a major conundrum for supporters of just war doctrine, especially for those who argue that the atomic bombs used against Japan weren't justifiable -- except that the destruction of Jericho was an event comparable to a nuclear blast:

Following God's law, the Israelites killed every man and woman, the young and the old, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. Only Rahab [a Canaanite prostitute who hid two Israeli spies], her parents, brothers and all "those who belonged to her" were spared. They were incorporated into Israel. Joshua then cursed anybody who rebuilt the foundations and gates, with the deaths of their firstborn and youngest child respectively. This was eventually fulfilled by Hiel the Bethelite under King Ahab's reign.

I asked the web, "How does the Siege of Jericho conform with just war doctrine?" and couldn't find a single specific link that gave me a satisfactory answer. However, "AI" replied,

The question of how the siege of Jericho conforms with Just War Doctrine is complex and often debated. Just War Theory is a framework that outlines ethical and moral principles for judging the justification of going to war (jus ad bellum) and the methods used in war (jus in bello).

. . . The conquest of Jericho is often described as a "holy war". This suggests a divine mandate rather than a war fought for typical "just" causes like self-defense or correcting a grave injustice.

. . . God's plan for conquering Jericho involved unconventional actions, such as marching around the city and the collapse of the walls through divine intervention, rather than conventional military tactics.

. . . Some interpretations might argue that the divine command to conquer Jericho establishes a unique context where standard Just War principles may not apply in the same way.

. . . The destruction of Jericho was also seen as a way to prevent the Israelites from being corrupted by the "outsiders" and their practices. This could be seen as a form of preventative action, which is a consideration in Just War Theory.

Not too bad for AI, is it? But didn't Bp Strickland just say that no preemptive war is just? I went back to searching the web and found an essay that discusses the problem in relation to Aquinas (who, however, never directly addressed just war in relation to Jericho):

Ruling out anticipatory defense in various modes confounds morality and practicality, entailing a cure worse than the disease. Instead, prudence as St. Thomas Aquinas envisaged it—the cardinal virtue of right reason about right things to be done—ought to determine whether or not to use force sooner rather than later in accordance with the other criteria for jus ad bellum Aquinas stipulates: rightful authority, just cause, and right intention. Aquinas maintains a wise silence on the question of precisely whether or when force should be used sooner rather than later. So should we.

. . . Aquinas’s formulation of just war theory grounded in the cardinal virtue of prudence should loom large in any calculation of when, how, for what purposes, and to what effect the United States should wage war.

Whether the United States resorts to force sooner rather than later should be a prudential judgment, not a categorical one.

And this brings us back to CCC 2309, a part that Bp Strickland doesn't cite:

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

I read the whole meaning of CCC 2309 to say that although all four conditions for legitimate defense must be met, there is nevertheless room for evaluation on the part of civil and military authority.

So far, I'm leaning toward a position that it's by no means clear that the current phase of the Iran-Israel conflict is any sort of discrete, anticipatory attack on Israel's part. The justification and the proper tactics lie within the prudential judgment of US and Israeli leadership. Every current indication is that these issues are under thorough debate within US leadership in particular, and President Trump appears to be carefully weighing arguments from all sides.