'I Am Blowing Up Everything'
Plus: There is no exit strategy in Iran, Artemis II approaches the Moon, federal taxpayers get to beautify D.C., and more...
'Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards.' President Donald Trump's chaotic handling of the Iran War took a profane and bizarre turn on Sunday.
Separately, Trump told reporters that he continues to negotiate with Iranian officials in advance of the Tuesday deadline. "There is a good chance, but if they don't make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there," Trump told Axios. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said Iran would "lose every power plant" in Tuesday's strikes.
This renewed rhetorical push to get Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz comes just a few days after Trump seemed to downplay the Hormuz situation in a scripted address on Wednesday night. At the time, Trump said the strait would "just open up naturally" (though he did also promise to hit Iran "extremely hard" for two weeks).
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The Trump administration's demands, threats, and deadlines have been a moving target throughout the war. Even so, following through on this latest threat to destroy Iranian power plants and bridges would be a war crime under the Geneva Convention and other international agreements that prohibit the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. A strike on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant could also cause a "severe radiological accident," the International Atomic Energy Agency warned.
Hey, wasn't this war supposed to be saving the Iranian people from their awful authoritarian government? We seem to have slid pretty quickly into "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it" territory.
As the war enters its sixth week, at least two things are clear. First, the entire conflict underlines why the Founders required presidents to go to Congress before waging war. This war is deeply unpopular, its goals remain vague at best, and there is still no solid evidence that Iran posed an immediate threat to America (the supposed justification for not getting congressional permission upfront).
If Trump had followed the Constitution and asked Congress to sign off before this war began, what would probably have happened? The Strait of Hormuz would be open, gas prices would not be over $4, schools and universities in Iran would not have been bombed, and the dozens of Americans who were killed or wounded in our timeline would still be alive and well.
Second, there is no exit strategy. On Monday morning, Iranian leaders reportedly rejected a proposed 45-day ceasefire. Trump's plan of posting through it has not yet produced results, and any further escalation would likely expand and extend the conflict—one that Trump claimed on Wednesday would be wrapped up in just two more weeks.
Artemis update: The first manned mission to the Moon in more than five decades will arrive at its objective today.
A NASA livestream of the lunar flyby will begin at 1 p.m. ET. A little less than an hour later, the crew will have traveled farther from Earth than any other human beings in history—surpassing the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The planned orbit of the Moon will last throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening. If all goes well, the astronauts will be on their way home by the end of the day.
Go here for a full rundown of today's schedule of events, including some of what the Artemis crew will be seeing.
Scenes from D.C.: Taxpayers from across the country will have the privilege of spending $10 billion on beautification projects in Washington, D.C., one of the wealthiest places in America.
"The planned Presidential Capital Stewardship Program would be overseen by the National Park Service," The Washington Post reports. The spending is proposed as part of Trump's budget for fiscal year 2027, which begins on October 1. The administration is calling the plan a "generational investment" that will generate economic development and increase tourism.
It's a really strange form of populism that believes more money needs to be spent in D.C.
And as a fan of our national parks—I spent a few hours on Saturday climbing Pass Mountain in Shenandoah—I'm also disgruntled by the idea of spending $10 billion fixing up D.C. when the National Park Service is facing an estimated $22 billion maintenance backlog. All the more reason to privatize the parks, so they can secure more stable funding and won't have to keep competing with Trump's stupid vanity projects!
QUICK HITS
- The middle class is shrinking—because Americans are getting wealthier. In 2024, about 31 percent of Americans were part of the upper middle class, an increase from just 10 percent in 1979.
- The federal immigration officials who shot and injured Julio C. Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, claimed they had been attacked and beaten by Sosa-Celis and his housemate. Video evidence of the incident tells a different story. Why does this keep happening? (Because federal agents keep being reckless and then lying about it.)
- California's $20 minimum wage for fast food workers "raised wages in the sector by roughly 8 percent relative to the rest of the country" but killed about 18,000 jobs in the process, reports Alex Tabarrok on the findings of two recent papers covering the economic fallout of the change.
- Higher tariffs have created economic uncertainty, torched America's credibility in global markets, and imposed costs at home.
- Federal immigration officials arrested and detained 22-year-old Annie Ramos, a college student with no criminal record, just days after she married a U.S. Army staff sergeant.
- Taxpayers in Jacksonville, Florida, will spend $775 million—the largest single expense in the city's history—upgrading a stadium that was built in the 1990s for just $121 million ($263 million in today's dollars).
