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Trump Embedded White Nationalist Rhetoric Into His King Charles Welcome. The King Condemned Trump Without Saying His Name.

Ahmed Baba — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:21:54 GMT

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This week’s Across the Pond felt like a culmination episode, and not just because it coincided with King Charles III crossing the Atlantic. The timing was remarkable: before the King delivered what amounted to a defense of democratic values to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump embedded blood and soil rhetoric into his own welcome remarks that barely anyone caught in real time. But James and I caught it.

We spent the bulk of this episode doing what I think we do best: going deep on the things other people are moving past. The white nationalist language in Trump’s welcome speech. The systematic way King Charles rebutted every core Trump position without once saying his name. The historical through line from Nixon’s Southern strategy to what Trump is doing now. And what the United Kingdom’s increasingly impossible diplomatic position looks like when the president is threatening to hand Argentina the Falkland Islands as punishment for Britain staying out of the Iran War.

It was a wide-ranging conversation you won’t want to miss.

Watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.

The Speech No One Was Talking About

While everyone focused on King Charles’s congressional address, Trump’s remarks at the welcome ceremony contained language that should have set off immediate alarms. I caught it in real time and was genuinely surprised by how little pickup it got on cable.

Trump said that for nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was “settled and forged by men who bore their souls and the blood and noble spirit of British” blood. The explicit invocation of British blood as the foundational substance of America is not a rhetorical flourish. It is ethno-nationalist language with a specific ideological lineage.
He then described America as a “wild, untamed continent” that was settled by people who “let loose the ancient English love of liberty.” The erasure of Indigenous peoples, reduced to a savage backdrop against which European civilization heroically arrived, is not accidental. It is a core feature of white nationalist historical revisionism.
The line that hit hardest: Trump said the veins of the founding generation “ran with Anglo-Saxon courage.” Anglo-Saxon is not a neutral historical descriptor in this context. As James pointed out, in Europe that language is taught in schools as textbook Nazi and fascist rhetoric. The only political movements in Europe that invoke Anglo-Saxon identity as a political category are the far right, the AFD in Germany, and white supremacist organizations like the KKK, which organized specifically around White Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity.
Trump then struck down the idea that America is “merely an idea,” echoing almost verbatim what J.D. Vance said in his Claremont Institute speech last year: “America is not just an idea. It’s a particular place with particular people and a particular way of life.” The Claremont Institute speech set off alarms among people attuned to white supremacist rhetoric at the time. Trump saying the same thing from the White House welcoming podium should have set off the same alarms.
We flagged that this is almost certainly Stephen Miller’s fingerprints. The purpose of this rhetoric is not just to excite the base. It is to build an intellectual and ideological framework that justifies the denaturalization of foreign-born citizens, mass deportation, and a fundamental redefinition of who counts as American. The language precedes and enables the policy.
I noted that Trump appeared to be speaking not just to his domestic base but to the European far right, sending a signal of kinship after the Orbán loss in Hungary. The blood and soil framing is a transnational far-right calling card, and its deployment during a royal visit was a calculated message to allies like Nigel Farage and the broader European nationalist movement.

King Charles Condemned Trump Without Saying His Name

What made the King’s congressional speech remarkable was not just what he said. It was that almost every substantive point he made was a direct rebuttal to something Trump embodies.

On diversity: King Charles said, “In both our countries, it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse, and free society that gives us our collective strength.” This is the precise opposite of the Christian nationalist, anti-diversity agenda the Trump administration has been pursuing. Coming from the head of a thousand-year-old monarchy, it landed as a rebuke that carried the weight of institutional history behind it.
On checks and balances: Charles cited the Magna Carta’s presence in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, and specifically highlighted its role as the foundation of the principle that “executive power is subject to checks and balances.” That line, landing in the context of an out-of-control President Trump, received a standing ovation from Democrats.
On the rule of law: Charles said the rule of law, the certainty of stable and accessible rules, and an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice were foundational to shared prosperity. On the same day, Trump’s DOJ was charging former FBI Director James Comey in what I described as an obviously retaliatory prosecution. The contrast was not subtle. Trump attacks the judiciary constantly. The timing made Charles’s words feel like a live fact-check.
On NATO, Ukraine, and climate: Charles explicitly mentioned NATO by name, expressed support for Ukraine, and climate change. These are all things Trump has actively undermined. As James noted, because the King is not a politician and technically does not have politics, he can say these things in a way that makes them sound like settled facts rather than partisan positions. Trump cannot attack him for it without looking like he’s attacking indisputable truths.
James made a point I want to sit with: he said he never thought he would find himself agreeing with a monarch, but that Charles spoke Tuesday in ways no European leader could have. The fact that the most compelling defense of progressive democratic values in that room came from an unelected king rather than an elected president says everything about where American democracy is right now.
James also noted that King Charles’s military service came up in the speech, which served as an implicit contrast with Trump’s draft dodging. Not a direct attack, but a double-edged line that landed precisely because of who was sitting in the room.

Blood & Soil Is Not New — It’s The Southern Strategy Unmasked

Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric did not emerge from nowhere. I laid out the full historical through line because understanding where this comes from is essential to understanding why it is now combusting.

The Nixon Southern strategy was built on a simple transaction: feed white working-class grievances about Black and brown people taking their stuff, while actually governing for the wealthy. Lee Atwater, Nixon, Reagan with welfare queens, all of it was coded racial language designed to turn disaffected Southern Democrats into Republicans after the party lost the South by passing the Voting Rights Act.
Trump was the culmination of that strategy. He ripped the mask off entirely. He stopped coding it and started saying it out loud. Immigrants are taking your jobs. Black and brown people are responsible for your problems. And in exchange, the white working class was supposed to get something material in return.
What’s different now is that Trump is not delivering his side of that transaction. He raised their prices with tariffs. He started a war that made gas more expensive. He betrayed every promise he made on the Epstein files, on affordability, on no new wars. You can keep feeding people racial grievances for a while, but when they can see it is their president raising their prices rather than the immigrants he blamed, the con becomes visible.
I made the point that even Nick Fuentes, an avowed white nationalist, is now telling people to vote Democrat. Tucker Carlson, who pushed great replacement theory on Fox News for years, is speaking out against Trump. When you have lost the white supremacists, the blood and soil rhetoric is not a winning play. It is a desperate one.
I made the point that Reagan, the alleged hero of the modern right, gave his final speech in office as an ode to immigration. He said anyone could come to America and become an American. That was the foundational Republican position on national identity for decades. Trump’s administration has abandoned it entirely and replaced it with something that has a very specific historical name.

The UK’s Impossible Position & The Falklands Threat

James gave me the clearest window yet into how fragile the US-UK relationship actually is beneath the ceremonial surface of this visit.

A leaked Pentagon memo reported by Reuters revealed that as punishment for the UK’s refusal to join the Iran War, the Trump administration was considering supporting Argentina’s territorial claim on the Falkland Islands. James’s reaction was measured but clear: the idea that America would use a long-standing British territorial claim as a geopolitical bargaining chip to punish an ally for exercising sovereign foreign policy judgment is a fundamental departure from how alliances are supposed to work.
James noted that Britain could not have held the Falklands in the 1982 war without American support for Thatcher’s government. The threat to flip that support to Argentina’s Milei government, whom Trump has praised repeatedly, is not a small thing. It is a reminder that no alliance is safe when the other party treats relationships as purely transactional leverage.
The King Charles visit was, in James’s read, a deliberate deployment of Britain’s strongest diplomatic asset. Starmer has struggled to manage Trump. Charles carries a different kind of weight with Trump: the monarchy appeals to Trump’s obsession with status, glamour, and legitimacy. Sending the King was a strategic move to try to insulate the relationship from Trump’s volatility.
James also made a prediction: Keir Starmer may not be Prime Minister by September. If the May 7th elections in Scotland, Wales, and English local councils go as badly as expected for the Labour Party, the pressure on Starmer’s leadership could become untenable. Trump could soon have a new UK PM to contend with. Perhaps one that is tougher on him.

Bottom Line

Trump embedded blood and soil language into a royal welcome ceremony, and barely anyone flagged it. King Charles walked into Congress the same day and dismantled every core Trump position without once saying his name. James and I spent this episode making sure the record is clear on both counts.

The Southern strategy is combusting. The white nationalist rhetoric is a desperate play by a president who has failed to deliver on every material promise he made to his base. And the UK is navigating an alliance relationship with a president who is threatening to hand their territory to a rival as punishment for independent foreign policy decisions.

Democracy had an unusual champion this week. He wore a crown.

James is out there in Edinburgh fighting this fight. I am here in Brooklyn doing the same. Support independent journalism that tells the truth about what is happening. Subscribe to James Matthewson. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.

Democrats Have The Edge In The House Redistricting Fight & The Senate Is In Play - With Ahmed Baba & Charles Douglas

Ahmed Baba — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:01:33 GMT

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Charles Douglas and I do this every Friday, and this week we had a lot of good news to work through. That does not happen often enough, so we took our time with it.

Virginia’s redistricting referendum passed Tuesday night. Democrats are now ahead by one in the overall redistricting battle, a reversal of fortune that would have seemed unlikely just last year when Trump pushed Texas to redistrict mid-decade, and it looked like Republicans were about to rig the map for a generation. They did not count on Democrats fighting back, and they did not count on their own maps backfiring.

Charles and I went deep on the numbers: the dummymander situation in Texas, the Cook Political Report shifting four Senate races toward Democrats, the generic ballot advantage in the 36 battleground districts that will define the House, and what a potential Democratic Senate majority would actually mean for the last two years of Trump’s presidency. We also got into the broader philosophical shift that made all of this possible: Democrats are finally willing to wield power. That is new, and it matters.

Watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.

Democrats Just Got The Edge In The Redistricting War

Virginia’s referendum passing is a big deal, and the context matters as much as the outcome. This fight did not start with Democrats. Trump pushed Texas to redistrict mid-decade, outside the normal census cycle, and it looked for a moment like Republicans were going to lock in a structural advantage before the midterms even arrived. That is not what happened.

Democrats are now ahead by one in the overall redistricting seat count, with California, Utah, and Virginia all approving Democratic-backed measures. On the Republican side, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and potentially Florida are in various stages of their own efforts. The battlefield has shifted.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Hakeem Jeffries deserve direct credit here. Jeffries did significant work behind the scenes, pushing blue states to move on this. Newsom pushed California. They understood that you cannot unilaterally disarm when the other side is rewriting the rules.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger deserves particular recognition. Charles made the point that as a moderate Democrat in Virginia, she could have stayed out of this entirely and remained popular. She chose to push it forward anyway, taking a political hit for the broader goal. That kind of decision is what separates leaders from politicians.
On the court case: a rural Republican judge in Virginia temporarily blocked the new maps, but I want to be clear about the legal landscape. The Supreme Court already greenlit partisan gerrymandering and ruled that the judiciary has no role to play. That ruling now cuts both ways. Democrats learned the rules of the game. They are playing by them.
The close margin in Virginia is not a sign of weakness. It was a confusing race: Republicans ran ads using an older Obama statement opposing gerrymandering in the abstract, while Democrats ran ads featuring current Obama backing the referendum. Independents who generally oppose redistricting on principle made it closer than it needed to be. Charles’s read, which I share, is that a reluctant yes vote from people who do not love redistricting but recognize the necessity of it is actually a healthier sign than an overwhelming landslide. It means voters are making grown-up decisions, not just partisan ones.

The Dummymander: Republicans Shot Themselves In The Foot

This is the part of the story that is not getting enough coverage. The headline is that Democrats have a plus one advantage. The real story is that the Republican maps may have made their situation significantly worse than that number suggests.

Charles and I introduced the dummymander concept, and it is the right frame. Republicans drew their maps based on 2024 Trump data, specifically his historic Latino support numbers from that election. Those numbers have since collapsed. Latino approval of Trump has dropped from 48% in 2024 to 22% as of a March 2026 Economist analysis. They built their gerrymander on a demographic foundation that no longer exists.
To create new competitive districts out of safely blue ones, Republicans had to dilute their own deep red seats. They thinned their own margins to manufacture new ones. Our argument is that this means the actual Democratic advantage in the House is wider than a plus-one-seat count implies, because Republicans are now defending districts that are lighter red than they were drawn to be.
Charles identified North Carolina as the biggest dummymander candidate in the country, larger than Texas. North Carolina’s districts were so heavily watered down from deep red to pink that Democrats have a real structural opening there, especially with Roy Cooper running for Senate and capable of lifting the down-ballot congressional candidates alongside him.
The GOP buyer’s remorse is already showing up in reporting. An Axios piece captured it plainly: Republicans who pushed for redistricting are now saying they wish none of this had happened. The NRCC chairman, when asked about it, declined to say whether it was a good idea and distanced himself from the decision. When your own party’s campaign arm will not defend a strategy, that is a tell.
I made the point that this is a pattern with Trump: he does not think through consequences, and he does not anticipate that other people are sentient beings capable of responding. He pushed for aggressive redistricting without modeling what Democrats might do in response. Newsom, Jeffries, and Spanberger responded. Now Republicans are dealing with maps they cannot walk back.

The Generic Ballot & The Senate Map

The redistricting win is one data point. The broader electoral environment is the bigger story, and the numbers are moving in one direction.

Cook Political Report has Democrats ahead in the generic ballot, and more importantly, ahead by six points in the 36 battleground districts that will actually decide the House. That is the number that matters. The generic ballot across all districts includes safe seats that are not competitive. The six-point advantage in the districts that are actually in play is a meaningful signal.
Cook Political also shifted four Senate races toward Democrats this month: North Carolina and Georgia moved from toss-up to lean Democrat, Ohio moved from lean Republican to toss-up, and Nebraska moved toward Democrats as well.
I walked through the Nate Cohn New York Times Senate chart, which showed a scenario that was completely unthinkable heading into this year. Last year, the conventional wisdom was that Democrats might scratch out a seat or two on a favorable map if everything broke right. That framing is gone. The House is, in my read, a done deal in terms of who wins, with the question being the margin. The Senate is now a genuine possibility.
A Democratic Senate combined with a Democratic House in the final two years of Trump’s presidency would mean something real. Investigations with subpoena power. The ability to block judicial nominations. A legislative majority that can put bills on Trump’s desk and force him to veto things the American public overwhelmingly supports. It would mean a checked Trump living out the rest of his presidency bogged down rather than operating without constraint.
Charles made the projection I find useful: forget a specific seat number. We are going to pick up enough House seats that future votes will be decided by Democrats alone, with the internal debate being between the progressive majority of the caucus and the moderate members from swing districts. That is a completely different political universe than what we are in now. Fighting among ourselves about policy is so much better than what the current GOP House majority is doing.

Democrats Are Finally Willing To Wield Power

This is the shift that made all of the above possible, and it is worth naming directly because it represents a genuine evolution in how Democrats approach politics in the Trump era.

I made the point using the Andor frame, which Charles geeked out about, six minutes into the pod: Luthen Rael says he is forced to use the tools of his enemy. That is exactly where Democrats are. In a perfect world, Democrats would not be pursuing mid-decade redistricting. We do not live in a perfect world. The Supreme Court greenlit this. Republicans have been doing it. You do not win a battle by unilaterally disarming while the other side advances.
Charles’s observation about the close Virginia margin is an important counterpoint to anyone treating the slim win as a warning sign. A reluctant yes vote from people who do not love this tool but recognize it is necessary is exactly what a healthy democracy looks like. The alarming outcome would have been voters enthusiastically embracing partisan gerrymandering as a permanent feature. Instead, people made a pragmatic decision and signaled they want things to return to normal once the crisis has passed.
I noted that Democrats have finally gotten the memo: you wield power when you have it, or you lose it. The era of hoping good governance would speak for itself is behind us. Spanberger making a political sacrifice for the broader goal, Jeffries doing the organizing work behind the scenes, Newsom moving California, these are people who understand the stakes and acted accordingly.

The Coalition That’s Actually Winning

Charles closed with the argument that I think needs to be heard more clearly inside Democratic circles, because there is a live debate happening about what the party’s coalition should look like. Elections have already answered that question.

Charles laid it out plainly: the coalition that won every major race in November 2025 runs from voters in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former district who backed Shawn Harris, 20% of whom were Republicans, all the way to progressive primary winners. That is the actual coalition. It is not a theory about what the coalition should be. It is the empirical record of who showed up.
The Hasan Piker discourse got a brief mention, and my take is that it is a pointless distraction. His name recognition outside very online circles is minimal. Treating him as some kind of gatekeeper or arbiter of Democratic politics is not a serious read of the electoral landscape. The Iran War is happening. The midterms are months away. Focus fire.
Charles’s closing line on the midterms is the one worth sitting with: it is within a margin of effort. The data is moving. The maps are shifting. The coalition is real and has been tested. What happens next depends on the work, on the doors knocked, on the volunteers deployed, on the candidates fielded.

Bottom Line

Trump started the gerrymandering war. Democrats fought back, and they are now ahead. Republicans drew maps based on a 2024 electorate that no longer exists, diluted their own safe seats in the process, and are already expressing buyer’s remorse. Four Senate races shifted toward Democrats this month. The generic ballot advantage in battleground districts is six points. The House is a question of margin. The Senate is in play.

Democrats got the memo. The coalition is real. The work continues.

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Groundhog Day At The Strait: How Trump's Iran War Is Creating A More Dangerous World - Across The Pond With Ahmed Baba & James Matthewson

Ahmed Baba — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:53:02 GMT

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I’m writing this from Boston, where my wife and I came to visit our friends at Boston Children’s Hospital, where their kid has been undergoing procedures. It also meant I was doing today’s Across the Pond from a family friend’s home library, in front of what James correctly identified as an intellectual’s bookshelf.

Even with a lot going on at the personal level, James and I still managed to have one of our best conversations yet. James joined from sunny Edinburgh, and we did what we always do: turned the cameras on, started talking, and let the conversation go where it needed to go.

This week, we took a look at the full scope of the Iran War’s fallout. The ceasefire whiplash has become a weekly ritual. The strategic reality that Iran has discovered a deterrent more powerful than nuclear weapons. The global economic damage that is now being measured in food shortages, stagflation warnings, and European central banks postponing rate cuts. The radicalization risks that are not getting nearly enough coverage. The UK’s impossible position under Keir Starmer. And a question that I think about constantly: what does it actually take to oppose Trump effectively?

We also got into the Virginia redistricting win that came through last night, what it means for the midterm map, and why Vance is now permanently attached to this war’s outcome, whether he wants to be or not.

As always, watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.

Groundhog Day At The Strait Of Hormuz

We are nearing month two of a conflict that keeps recycling the same headlines. James put it well: journalists are running out of words because Trump has put the world in a loop. Ceasefire extended. Strait opens. Strait closes. Vance flies to Pakistan. Repeat.

This morning, the UK Maritime Trade Operations reported two ships attacked near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s IRGC claimed they seized two vessels for “disrupting order and safety.” This directly undermines Trump’s repeated claim that Iran’s Navy has been decimated and its military capability obliterated. They clearly have enough left to seize commercial vessels.
The ceasefire deadline that was set to expire yesterday has been extended again, this time until Iran submits a unified proposal. Trump said he was waiting on Iran’s “fractured” government. The naval blockade on Iranian ports remains in place. Iran has said it will not negotiate under the shadow of threats while the blockade continues.
James raised the Groundhog Day quality of all of this: the same headlines, the same positions, the same cycle of escalation and retreat. I made the point that the madman theory only works if there’s an actual theory underneath it. A strategy requires an end goal. If there is no overarching goal, you’re left with a madman screaming in a White House failing to contain him.
Trump screamed at aides for hours after learning a fighter jet had been shot down, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a senior administration official. The reporting also indicated he was kept out of the room during planning for the downed pilot rescue operation because officials feared he would interfere. The President of the United States was excluded from a military operation because his own team couldn’t trust him in the room.
We are back to the same place we were two weeks ago: genocidal threats, civilian infrastructure targeting, a blockade, and negotiations going nowhere. The primary objective of these negotiations is to reopen a strait that was open before the war started.

Iran Believes It Has The Strategic Upper Hand

Whatever happens from here, one thing is already settled. Iran has learned something about its own power that it did not fully understand before this war began. That knowledge cannot be unlearned.

I made the core point: Iran now knows it has a more powerful and accessible deterrent than a nuclear weapon. The ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and short-circuit the global economy at will is a discovery this war handed them. They watched Kim Jong-un get treated with deference because of his nuclear program. Now they have something more immediate: a chokepoint that moves 20% of the world’s oil, 20% of its liquefied natural gas, fertilizer, helium used to cool MRI machines, and manufacture semiconductors. They closed it and watched the world convulse. That is a lesson they will not forget.
Iran tried to leverage the Strait during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, but this is the first time they’ve seen the full scope of its power. The International Crisis Group’s Iran Project Director Ali Vaez put it plainly: “In the attempt to try to prevent Iran from developing a weapon of mass destruction, the U.S. handed Iran a weapon of mass disruption.”
The European Central Bank postponed planned interest rate reductions and raised its 2026 inflation forecast. UK inflation is projected to breach 5%. Chemical and steel manufacturers across Europe have imposed surcharges of up to 30%. Arab countries absorbed over $120 billion in damage by the end of March.
We now have a more extreme Iran led by a new supreme leader who does not carry the previous fatwa against nuclear weapons or the commitment that produced the JCPOA. We achieved nothing that was promised and created the conditions for something more dangerous than what we started with.

The Global Whiplash — A View From The UK

James gave me a clear window into what this looks like from outside the United States. The picture is not flattering.

On April 17, 49 countries gathered in Paris for an emergency summit to plan a multilateral naval mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, coordinated independently of Washington. Starmer was there. Macron was there. Merz was there. While they were in that meeting, the announcement came through that Iran had opened the Strait. James’s reaction: Imagine being the person who pulled that meeting together. Then, Trump maintained the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports, Iran concluded the ceasefire conditions weren’t being met, and by April 18, the strait was closed again. The entire episode in a couple of days.
King Charles is still planning a visit to the United States. James’s read is that there is very little public sympathy in the UK for that decision, cutting across the political spectrum. Even conservatives who might ordinarily defend the monarchy feel it’s disrespectful to the institution, given how Trump has treated British allies. James’s view: Charles should have done a video message celebrating the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, drawn a clear line between the American people and the Trump administration, and declined the visit. Instead, the government is hoping the royal visit buys a few more weeks of Trump being slightly less hostile to Britain. James called it sycophancy, which he is right about.
James just received a Reform UK campaign leaflet for the May 7th Scottish Parliament elections. It says “Make Scotland Great Again” on it. At the bottom: a demand that the Union Jack and the Scottish flag fly high, explicitly contrasted with the Palestinian flag. James was direct about what that means: they are not talking about marches where people wave Israeli flags. They are not evoking Scotland’s history of flying the ANC flag during the anti-apartheid movement. They are targeting Muslims. The MAGA playbook has been exported to Scotland wholesale.
Trump is now a live question in Scottish Parliament debates, Welsh Parliament debates, and English local council elections. How you stand up to Donald Trump was a centerpiece of a recent Scottish leaders’ debate. James made the point that this is the overspill of American politics into every corner of democratic life globally, and it will continue until it is actually dealt with at the source.
James described the general UK public sentiment: a fatigue that has quietly curdled into an eye roll at anything American. Not hatred of Americans, he was clear about that, but an exhaustion at having to absorb American politics on top of everything else. It is pointed squarely at the administration.

A Factory Of Hatred

James used a phrase in this conversation that I want to make sure lands properly: factory of hatred. It is the right frame for what this war is producing at the ideological level, and it is not getting nearly enough coverage.

James made the argument that bombing Iran has not weakened the Ayatollahs ideologically. It has strengthened them. Generations of Iranians who were questioning the regime, who were watching the IRGC harass their sisters in the streets and thinking, wait, is America actually the threat here, now have proof that American military power is willing to bomb their country. That proof likely validates claims the Iranian leadership has made for decades. The anti-American ideology that fuels these regimes is now being fed by American actions.
I raised the Minab school strike as the most direct illustration of this. That is a small town. Everybody knew those girls. At least 175 children and their teachers were killed. The reverberation of that single strike, if you are a young boy, if you are one of those children’s brothers, is a radicalization risk. You do not need a central command to produce terrorism. You need desperation, grief, and a ready-made ideological framework that tells you who is responsible.
The ISIS parallel is not rhetorical. ISIS did not come from nowhere. It emerged from the destabilization of Iraq and Syria, from the power vacuum created when we toppled a regime without a plan for what followed, and then abandoned the people who helped us. I raised the Kurds specifically: repeatedly armed, repeatedly abandoned. James noted that young British Muslim men, already feeling culturally dislocated, were recruited online by ISIS with promises of identity and belonging. Most of them are dead now. That cycle is going to repeat.
I put it plainly: the next Democratic administration is likely going to inherit a resurgence of radical jihadism that Trump created the conditions for, and Republicans will find a way to blame Democrats for it. That is the pattern. Bush created the environment, Obama grappled with ISIS, and Trump fear-mongered about it while creating the next round of terrorists. The factory keeps running.
James added that infrastructure can be destroyed, but ideas cannot be bombed. And when you become the living proof of what the Ayatollah has been saying about America for forty years, you do not weaken that ideology. You give it new life.

Trump Is Amoral — Understanding That Is the Key to Opposing Him

This is something I’ve come to understand after eleven years of covering Trump, and I think it explains why so many world leaders keep getting it wrong with him.

Trump is amoral. I want to be precise about that word. He has no moral compass, and he projects that worldview onto everyone else. He assumes that everyone is performing, that decency is an act, that virtue is signaling, and that there is no genuine self-sacrifice. That is why he called soldiers suckers and losers. He genuinely cannot understand what is in it for them. James added: In Trump’s mind, he is the honest one, because he is honest about playing the game. Everyone else, in his view, is pretending not to play it.
Because of that worldview, he respects people who push back effectively. He may attack them publicly, but behind closed doors, he registers them as winners. Mamdani called him a fascist, and Trump is effusive about him. Mark Carney gave one of the most effective speeches against Trump by any foreign leader, redefining the global order without calling him an unstable maniac, and Trump has not gone to war against Canada or hit them with additional tariffs. Nancy Pelosi. He shit-talked her constantly, but respects her privately.
Starmer does not understand this. James told a story I found revealing: in 2017, at a Labour Party conference in Brighton, Starmer told a room of nine people that he does not care about politics, he cares about the law and international law. That is an honorable worldview. It is also completely incompatible with understanding a man who sees everything as a performance with no moral stakes. Starmer cannot put himself in Trump’s headspace. He cannot understand someone who looks at a public servant taking a modest salary and thinks: sucker.
The supplication strategy does not work. James said that the UK-U.S. relationship has been maintained not by Starmer and Trump but by civil servants, the so-called deep state, people doing unglamorous work out of genuine service who are holding the institutional relationship together while the principals cannot find common ground. The animosity toward those people is one of the most damaging things Trump has done to the architecture of democratic governance.
The path forward, for world leaders and for Democrats alike, is to understand what drives him and oppose him on those terms. You do not go to his level. But you have to be inventive, effective, and willing to trigger the right pressure points. The Lincoln Project running ads in Mar-a-Lago to get under his skin understood this. Mamdani understood this. Carney understood this. The leaders who groveled got nothing.

Virginia, Vance, & What Comes Next

Before we closed out, I flagged something that happened last night that deserves more attention than it is getting.

Virginia’s redistricting referendum passed. That is a four-plus-seat gain for Democrats from a single state vote. It was close, but it passed. That is a direct result of the Democratic organizing and the broader anti-Trump environment we have been tracking all year. It matters for the House math heading into November.
Vance now owns this war. He tried to build a record of quiet opposition through strategic leaks to the Haberman-Swan piece. He tried to position himself as the reluctant participant who saw the risks. Now he is heading to Pakistan again to lead negotiations, and whatever happens next is attached to him. If talks collapse again, that collapse is his. If the ceasefire deteriorates further, that deterioration is his. He has negative political capital on this issue and no obvious way to recover it heading into 2028.
The next administration, Democratic or otherwise, is going to inherit the full weight of what this war has produced: a more extreme Iran, a resurgence of radicalization risks, a fractured transatlantic alliance, and a global order that has absorbed a serious lesson about what American leadership now means. That inheritance is going to require more than competence. It is going to require a clear moral and strategic vision for how to rebuild what was broken.

Bottom Line

Trump’s handling of the Iran War has created unsustainable global whiplash. Iran has learned that it can short-circuit the global economy at will, and that knowledge is now permanently part of the strategic landscape. James called it a factory of hatred, and he is right: the ideological damage from this war will outlast the military damage by a generation. Trump handed Iran a weapon of mass disruption in exchange for a more extreme regime, a destabilized Lebanon, and a global economic crisis that is still unfolding.

Meanwhile, Virginia passed redistricting last night. The midterms are coming. The MAGA fractures are real. Democrats have the advantage.

James is out there in Edinburgh fighting this fight. I am here in Brooklyn doing the same. Support independent journalism that tells the truth about what is happening. Subscribe to James Matthewson. And if you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.

A Supermajority Opposes Trump's Disastrous Iran War, Leaving The GOP Hobbling Into The Midterms - My MS NOW Appearance

Ahmed Baba — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:37:24 GMT

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As many of you who watch my Substack Live shows know, I took a little break from cable news appearances. Well, on Sunday night, I ended my hiatus with a return to one of my favorite MS NOW shows, The Weekend Primetime.

I was on with hosts Ayman Mohyeldin, Antonia Hylton, Elise Jordan, Catherine Rampell, and co-panelist former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, breaking down two of the biggest stories in American politics right now: why Trump and Vance now jointly own a disastrous Iran War, and what the Republican Party’s weakness actually looks like heading into the midterms.

I was on for two full blocks, and we got into a lot of topics.

You can watch some clips above and read key takeaways below.

Trump Owns The Disastrous Iran War. Now Vance Does Too.

There is a reason a supermajority of Americans, 67%, oppose Trump’s handling of the Iran War. The war has made the world a more dangerous place. And now JD Vance, after a day of contradictory signals about whether he would even lead the U.S. delegation to Pakistan, owns it alongside him.

We now have a more extreme Iran with a more powerful deterrent than nuclear weapons: the ability to short-circuit the global economy at will by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has realized that capability and will not forget it. Trump handed them that leverage.
I made the point on air that Vance is desperately trying to signal opposition to the war without actually opposing it. Throughout the Haberman-Swan NYT piece, you can see it: every few paragraphs, the narrative breaks to note that Vance expressed concerns, that he had reservations. That is Vance’s team building a record for 2028.
Elise Jordan flagged that Buckley Carlson, Tucker Carlson’s son, exited Vance’s office just this week. Antonia noted that every major outlet had sources saying the vice president wasn’t comfortable with the war.
Rubio would rather be at a UFC fight than doing these negotiations. These men know what they signed up for, and they are trying to quietly exit before the bill comes due. But Vance is once again set to lead negotiations in Pakistan. Whatever happens next is now his to own heading into 2028.

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The Republican Party Is Running From A Place Of Weakness

Antonia asked me what’s behind the Cook Political Report shifting four Senate races toward Democrats: North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Nebraska. My answer: a broad American repudiation of Donald Trump.

Trump is raising prices on Americans while enriching himself and betraying every core promise he made, from the Epstein files to no new wars to affordability. He came in, started tariffing everybody, started a war, and now owns rising gas prices. We are seeing 20 to 30 point swings away from the GOP as a result. Even the Senate is in play.
We are seeing massive swings in key districts like Manassas, Virginia, a heavily Latino population. Trump is underwater on every issue that was supposed to be his strength: the economy, inflation, immigration, and now foreign policy and war.
The Senate is now in play. That was unthinkable when Trump won in 2024, and the narrative was that the far right had won once and for all. The American people have worked through that story and rejected it.
Catherine Rampell made the point that Republicans are running ads against Abigail Spanberger for things she did not do. Her office had to put out a press release with the subject line: Governor Spanberger does not sign tax bills that the General Assembly never passed. When you are making up boogeymen out of thin air, that is what running from weakness looks like. Shellacking incoming.

Bottom Line

Trump owns this disastrous Iran War. And now Vance does too. The Republican Party has nothing real to run on, so they are manufacturing issues out of thin air. The American people see through it. The midterms are going to reflect that.

If you liked this panel, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it.

MAGA Is Fracturing. Here's How Democrats Can Use Trump's Weakness To Fuel Wins In 2026 & Beyond.

Ahmed Baba — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:51:47 GMT

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Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas joined me for our weekly Friday live, and this one was a genuinely fun conversation while being one of the more analytically sharp ones we’ve had.

Charles just got back from Georgia, where Common Power was on the ground for the special election in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former district, and he brought real field intelligence to go alongside the polling. If you want to watch it, I’ll warn you: we went on some hilarious tangents. So if you don’t want lighthearted banter to end your week, skip this episode.

But underneath the banter, the substance was real. We broke down why the MAGA fractures are not just a new MAGA media drama - they are showing up in the data.

We talked about Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and how his Republican support has dropped to the 70s and 80s instead of 90% and above in his first term. We talked through the NBC News poll showing Republicans are split 50/50 between MAGA and traditional Republican identity. We talked about the Pew Research numbers showing 42% of Republicans no longer believe Trump acts ethically in office. And we talked about what Democrats need to do with those numbers, specifically: the anti-corruption message, the economic populism argument, the Hungary proof of concept, and where Common Power is deploying volunteers right now to turn these fractures into wins.

This midterm environment is ripe with opportunities. The fractures are real, the polling supports it, and for the first time, there is a permission structure in place that lets Republican voters question Trump without feeling like they’ve lost their identity. That is a door opening. The question now is whether Democrats will choose to walk through it.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

100% Of A Shrinking MAGA Pie

Trump’s team loves to cite his near-universal support within MAGA. What they don’t mention is that MAGA itself is shrinking. I raised this in the live because it reframes the entire conversation about his base.

The December 2025 NBC News Decision Desk poll, conducted among 20,252 adults between November 20 and December 8, found that Republicans are now split exactly 50/50 between identifying as MAGA and identifying as traditional Republicans. In April 2025, that split was 57/43 in MAGA’s favor. That is a seven-point shift in eight months.
The intensity numbers are also moving. Among self-identified MAGA Republicans, strong approval of Trump dropped from 78% to 70% between April and December 2025. That eight-point drop in the most loyal slice of his base is significant. The share of Republicans who strongly approve of Trump’s job performance dropped from 52% in January to 43% by April, according to CNN.
My framing in the live: you can have 100% of a shrinking pie, and that gets you nowhere. If MAGA is now only half the Republican Party and that half is also softening in intensity, the structural math for 2026 and 2028 is genuinely bad for Trump’s coalition.
Charles made the point that Trump was already on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo pre-spinning the midterms, essentially saying all presidents lose the midterms. When a president starts normalizing a shellacking before it happens, he knows what’s coming.

The Anti-Trump Permission Structure

The gains made in the Georgia special election in MTG’s former district were a direct product of these fractures. Charles came back from the ground with a clear read on what made that race competitive and why the permission structure concept is the key to understanding this moment.

Charles explained that MTG gave Republican voters a way to question Trump without fully breaking with him. The early framing was strategic: blame the administration, blame the people around him, blame Vance or Musk, and preserve your fealty to Trump himself. That gave voters an offramp. Then she ramped up her criticism at key betrayal moments, from the Epstein Files to the Iran War. Now, we’re here.
That emotional and psychological scaffolding is what made the Georgia district competitive. Shawn Harris didn’t make big gains because Republicans voted Democratic. He got close because the most MAGA district in the country had a permission structure to feel conflicted, and some of them acted on it.
I made the point that once that first crack appears, a cascade follows. With cults, you only need one question. Once someone allows themselves to question one thing, they start questioning everything. The de-radicalization is self-driven because the radicalization was self-driven in the first place.
Both Charles and I flagged that Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene are likely eyeing 2028. The early opposition to the war and to Trump’s most extreme moves is not just criticism; it is credential-building. They want to be able to say in two years that they called this. Obama had the Iraq War credibility in 2008. These people are trying to manufacture a version of that.

Not a Moral Awakening. A Market Opportunity.

Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly. They are not waking up. I want to be precise about this because conflating their positioning with principle does real damage to how we think about what’s happening.

I made the core argument: these are people who see a media market for anti-Trump, right-leaning content and are moving to monetize it. There are donors behind this who are losing money, losing market access, losing business partners because of the war, the tariffs, and the economic chaos. That money is now looking for a new lane. The influencers are following the money and the audience simultaneously.
Charles added the donor dimension explicitly: wealthy people who had shares in Trump, politically and financially, are now looking for an exit and pushing influencers toward a new position. It is the same ecosystem that funded MAGA media, now being redirected.
Don’t mistake any of this for allyship.

The Anti-Corruption Message

The Pew Research data from January 2026 is one of the most important polling numbers in this conversation and the one I think Democrats are finally starting to amplify on.

Pew found that only 42% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are confident that Trump acts ethically in office. That is down from 55% at the start of his second term, a 13-point collapse within his own party in one year.
Separately, only 52% of Republicans say Trump respects the country’s democratic values, down from 60%. Only 66% say he has the mental fitness to do the job, down from 75%. The direction is consistent across every measure Pew tracked.
I flagged that this is the anti-corruption message’s opening. When 42% of Republicans already don’t think their own president acts ethically, you don’t have to convince them that Trump is corrupt. You just have to give them a candidate who offers the alternative clearly and boldly.
Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is already running this playbook. He’s been giving speeches and cutting clips demanding Congress investigate the insider trading patterns around Trump’s market-moving posts. He looks presidential doing it. Charles noted that Rob Sand in Iowa is running a similar frame, with his line “not bluer or redder, but truer and better” as the pitch.
The Hungary parallel is the international proof of concept. I raised Peter Magyar as an example of what this looks like when it works. Magyar ran on anti-corruption, asset recovery from Orbán’s cronies, and populist economic policy. He was a former Fidesz insider who turned on the party, won a two-thirds supermajority, and ended 16 years of Orbán’s rule. That is the energy Democrats need to match.

How Democrats Can Use MAGA’s Fractures Against Them

The economic case is the thread that ties all of this together. Charles and I spent the back half of the conversation mapping out what the message should actually be and where Common Power is putting its resources.

Charles made the argument that wealth redistribution is actually wealth re-redistribution. The money was taken through stock buyback policy, favorable tax treatment of investment income, defunding of schools and social services, and, most recently, the big beautiful bill, which I have been calling the reverse Robin Hood bill since it passed. It was the largest upward transfer of wealth in modern American legislative history. Getting it back is not radical, it is repair.
I raised the war cost argument: Trump himself said explicitly that the federal government cannot afford daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, and childcare because we have a military to fund. He made the connection for us. The first week of the Iran war alone could have helped fund universal college. Democrats should be tallying that number and saying it out loud constantly.
Several Democratic senators are already floating proposals to exempt the first $75,000 of income from federal taxes. That is the kind of bold economic proposal that cuts across the partisan divide and speaks directly to the working-class voters Charles described as increasingly including people earning six figures in blue cities who still can’t afford to live.
Charles mapped out where Common Power is deploying: Atlanta, Bakersfield, Bangor, Dubuque, Memphis for Justin Pearson, and Alaska for Mary Peltola in the fall, with plans to hit every competitive Senate race they can reach. They are one of the only organizations getting into primaries right now, which matters because the fight to define what the Democratic Party stands for is happening in primaries, not general elections.
I closed with the de-radicalization point: MAGA voters self-radicalized, which means they can only truly self-de-radicalize. What Democrats can do is give them a roadmap, a pathway back, a permission structure of their own. You don’t condescend them. You meet them on the economic betrayal, on the war, on the corruption, and you let them walk themselves out. Charles saw it on the ground in Georgia. It works.

Bottom Line

The fractures are not media noise. They are showing up in the NBC News data, in the Pew ethics numbers, in special election results, and on the ground in every district Charles and Common Power have been working. Trump has 100% support of a base that is shrinking and softening. The anti-corruption message has a 42% opening inside the Republican Party itself. The economic populism argument crosses every partisan line when it’s made clearly and boldly.

Democrats don’t need to wait for MAGA to collapse. They need to run toward the fractures with a message that deepens them and gives people a reason to vote for them.

If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! Ahmed Baba News is now in the top 100 rising political Substacks because of your support! Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. And if you’d like to get involved and knock doors this election year, I also highly recommend checking out Common Power.

Orbán Falls, Carney Wins, & Trump Is Losing the World — Across The Pond With Ahmed Baba & James Matthewson

Ahmed Baba — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:29:47 GMT

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This week’s Across the Pond, where we bridge the gap between U.S. and European politics, was one of the most wide-ranging and important conversations James and I have had. We started with genuinely good news, something we don’t get to say often enough, and ended with one of the most sobering reports I’ve heard on this show.

In between, we laid out a thesis that the data is now starting to confirm: the global far right is losing, Trump is accelerating that collapse, and the world is paying a steep price for what he has set in motion.

The good news first. Viktor Orbán is gone. After 16 years of entrenching himself in Hungary’s institutions, eroding the judiciary, corrupting the media, enriching his allies, and serving as the global far right’s blueprint for authoritarian statecraft, he lost in a landslide. The opposition party led by Péter Magyar won with 53% of the vote, enough for a supermajority. Orbán, somewhat surprisingly, conceded on election night. We also talked about what it means for the far-right project more broadly, including Project 2025, which Orbán inspired.

Mark Carney’s Liberal Party victory in Canada added another data point to the same pattern. Leaders who stand up to Trump are being rewarded by their electorates. Leaders who try to walk the tightrope, as Keir Starmer has been doing in the UK, are struggling. James brought the breaking news: Trump threatened to tear up the UK-US trade deal, reportedly as punishment for Britain’s refusal to join the Iran War. Starmer’s response was to say he wasn’t changing his mind. His polling has gone up for tough stances against Trump. The lesson keeps repeating itself, and some leaders are still not learning it.

Then James shared something that stopped the conversation cold. A good friend of his, a journalist on the ground in Lebanon working with the Sky News team, called him shaking before the live. In the past 48 hours, 33 children have been confirmed killed in Lebanon by Israeli military action. One of them, a 12-year-old girl named Zayna, survived with 65% burns on her body. If she makes it through the night, someone will have to tell her that her entire family on both sides was killed. James said it broke him. It broke me too. And we both said plainly: this has to be said out loud, not buried in a news cycle, not treated as an acceptable casualty of war.

We closed the show talking about collective amnesia, about trauma, about the cycle that keeps repeating when people choose to forget rather than reckon. James used a therapy analogy to make the point. I connected it to Germany and Japan after World War II, nations that reckoned with what they had done and built something better because of it. The United States keeps pulling back from that reckoning. And people are dead today, including those schoolgirls in Iran and children in Lebanon, who would not be dead if we had chosen differently in November 2024. That is not a hyperbolic statement. It is a factual one.

Thanks to all of you who made it live! You helped enrich our talk. If you’re just catching it now, I appreciate you being here. This conversation was incredibly wide-ranging. You’ll want to stick around in full.

You can watch it in full above and read key takeaways below.

Orbán Has Fallen & The Global Far Right Is Losing

Viktor Orbán was not just a Hungarian politician. He was the blueprint for far-right authoritarianism globally. The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts explicitly called him “the model” for “conservative statecraft.” Project 2025 drew directly from what Orbán built, which I’ve written about extensively. His fall is indicative of a wider erosion of the global far right.

I laid out Orbán’s record directly: 16 years in power, replacement of civil servants with loyalists, targeting of political opponents, enrichment of allies through government contracts and straight corruption, coercion of media and universities. I asked the audience to notice how familiar it sounds. It is Project 2025 implemented, tested, and now repudiated by the Hungarian people.
James said he was genuinely shocked that Orbán conceded. The result was so overwhelming, turnout so high, that even a leader who had spent 16 years eroding democratic institutions could not manufacture a different outcome. Our takeaway was important: it shows that even entrenched authoritarianism can be voted out if the opposition is unified and the public is motivated.
James described Orbán as not just an inspiration but an active collaborator for the European far right, a font of far-right energy that drew support, funding, and strategic guidance from Hungary. He also noted the direct strings running back to Putin. The oligarchic model, the enrichment of friends, the erosion of independent institutions: it was Putin 101 applied inside the EU.
We made the point that the global far right has been operating as a coordinated international movement that we have not discussed with the same urgency we once applied to international communism. Elon Musk beaming himself into German rallies, Tommy Robinson being invited to Congress. These are not isolated incidents. They are a network. Orbán’s fall damages that network.
I noted that the global far right is now seeing enough data to see a pattern of losses: the AFD in Germany, the far right in France and the Netherlands, and now Hungary. I made the argument that Trump’s toxicity is accelerating this. Far-right rhetoric can win elections. But you cannot govern as a kleptocratic, corrupt, authoritarian regime and expect to maintain power. Orbán proved it. Trump is proving it.

The Magyar Playbook: How You Beat an Authoritarian

Péter Magyar won by being anti-corruption, pro-democracy, and economically populist. That combination matters for anyone thinking about what the playbook looks like on this side of the Atlantic.

I described Magyar as what you would get if Mitt Romney came back to take down Trump in an authoritarian third term. He is a moderate conservative, a former member of Orbán’s own party, not a progressive. He did not beat Orbán by out-lefting him. He beat him by being honest about what Orbán had done and offering a credible alternative.
Magyar ran on tax cuts for working families, expanding healthcare, larger child benefits, and a staunch anti-corruption platform that included asset recovery. The asset recovery piece is significant: he told voters we are going to take back what was stolen from you and return it. That is a populist message that works across ideological lines.
James and I both noted that a viewer in the chat pointed out that Magyar has given the U.S. a playbook for defeating authoritarianism. I agreed. The core of it is not ideology. It is moral clarity about corruption, a credible economic message for working people, and a unified opposition that refuses to fracture.
James raised questions about areas where Magyar’s record is less clear. But James made the pluralist argument plainly: if you get someone in power who you disagree with on some things but who respects democratic institutions and can be removed, that is infinitely preferable to an entrenched authoritarian. Democracy requires that trade-off.
I made the point that Trump has speed-run his authoritarian project so badly that it may be too late for him to course-correct. He has already lost Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, and Candace Owens. There is now an America First anti-Trump segment of the Republican Party. He overreached, and he has not done enough to consolidate power before his coalition started fracturing. That trajectory points toward 2026 and 2028 losses.

Carney Wins. Starmer Watches. The Lesson Is Clear.

Every time a world leader stands up to Trump, their electorate rewards them. The data on this is no longer ambiguous.

I framed Carney’s Liberal Party win in Canada as another entry in the same pattern we are seeing globally. Carney delivered one of the most important speeches of the Trump era at Davos earlier this year, laying out in clear terms what Trump has done to the global order. He was rewarded politically for it. The lesson is direct: do not appease, do not triangulate. Stand up.
James reported breaking news directly from his network during the live. Sky News’s chief American reporter received a call with Trump in which Trump threatened to tear up the UK-US trade deal, apparently as punishment for Britain’s refusal to join the Iran War. That threat caused immediate panic in British political circles. The Liberal Democrat leader raised it at Prime Minister’s Questions the same day.
Starmer’s response to the threat was to say he was not changing his mind on Iran. James reported that his polling has gone up as a result of standing firm against Trump. The same dynamic played out in Canada. The more you resist Trump, the more your electorate recognizes it as leadership. The more you try to walk the tightrope, the more you look weak to everyone.
James made the point that Trump’s threat to tear up the trade deal would hurt American businesses and workers as much as British ones. He is willing to destroy agreements that benefit his own people out of spite for not getting what he wants on Iran. That is not a foreign policy. That is a tantrum.
James raised the upcoming King Charles’ state visit to the U.S. and argued it should be reconsidered or reframed. He pointed out that Trump admitted in an interview that he did not know the Prime Minister controls where the king goes, not the king himself. James’s argument was that sending the king to visit Trump right now, after the trade deal threat and the Iran War conduct, sends the wrong signal. I agreed. Carney’s model is the right one. Treat this president as the pariah he is.

Trump Is Losing the World

The Gallup numbers are in, and they are staggering. The United States now has lower global leadership approval than China. That is the result of what Trump has done to America’s standing in one term.

I cited the Gallup International poll directly: U.S. leadership approval is at 31%, China’s is at 36%. That is the widest gap in 20 years. The world is looking at Chinese hybrid authoritarian capitalism as more stable than Trump’s erratic, impulsive leadership. Given what Chinese-style governance actually means for the countries it reaches, that data point should alarm everyone.
James added polling from European countries showing that majorities in several nations now consider the United States the primary threat, ahead of China. He wrote a Substack piece on this. America’s reputation on the world stage, as James put it plainly, is in tatters.
I connected this to a conversation I had with Adam Mockler earlier in the week. Trump is not transactional. He is extractive. He is not making deals where both parties gain something. He is squeezing. And when the most powerful nation on earth operates on a might makes right basis, it licenses every other nation with geographic leverage to do the same.
I made the point that China and Russia’s fundamental critique of America has always been that we are unstable, hypocritical, and unreliable. Trump validated that critique. The world now has to plan for both a Republican United States and a Democratic United States as if they are different countries. That instability is itself a form of weakness, independent of any specific policy.
I noted that Trump is also deliberately yielding the future of renewable energy to China by doubling down on fossil fuels. If we had a domestic renewable energy base, we would not be fighting wars over straits and oil routes. The strategic cost of this shortsightedness is going to compound for decades.

Lebanon: The Human Cost We Should All Be Talking About

James received a call before this live from a journalist friend on the ground in Lebanon working with the Sky News team. What they reported should be front-page news everywhere.

James shared the report with a content warning. In the past 48 hours, Israeli military action in Lebanon has killed 33 confirmed children. Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford, who has covered every major conflict for 25 years, said she has seen similarities to Gaza but nothing on this scale with the bombing in Lebanon.
James told us about Zayna, a 12-year-old girl with 65% burns on her body who, about six hours before the live, began moving her pinky finger to communicate with nurses. If she survives, someone will have to tell her that her entire family on both sides was killed overnight. James said the journalist who called him was shaking. I said there is no excuse. There is just no excuse.
James cited the child casualty percentages directly. In the Ukraine-Russia conflict, children represent 1% of casualties. In Lebanon, in just the past few weeks, that figure is already 32%, according to James. James made the point clearly: that is not collateral damage. That is deliberate targeting of civilians.
I laid the accountability plainly: I put this at the feet of Netanyahu and at the feet of the U.S. government for backing it. Netanyahu is doing this to stay out of prison. He was headed toward the end of his political career and a corruption conviction. Instead, he chooses a war because war keeps him in power and out of a cell. He is allergic to ceasefires because a ceasefire ends his political life.
I was direct about the electoral connection. Those schoolgirls in Iran killed in the U.S. strike on the Minab school would be alive today if Trump had not won. The Iran War would not have happened if Trump had not won. I said it on the live, and I will say it in print: that is not hyperbole. It is a factual statement about cause and effect. People who enabled this president own a share of these consequences.

Collective Amnesia and the Cycle We Keep Repeating

James and I closed the conversation with a framework about political trauma. I want to give it the space it deserves.

James made the argument that as a populace, we keep repeating the same cycle because we have not reckoned with our trauma. He used the analogy of someone who keeps dating people who remind them of an abusive parent, unable to understand why, because they have never done the work to face what happened to them. The United States keeps electing versions of the same disaster and wondering why.
I connected it to the Germany and Japan examples. After World War II, both countries sat with what they had done, reckoned with it collectively, and built something better because of it. Germany today is a different country because it chose not to forget. The United States has never fully done that. We get moments of reckoning, and then they get rolled back. Reconstruction, then the Southern Strategy. The Civil Rights Act, then the backlash. Every gain gets erased because we never fully processed what produced the wound.
James made the point that collective trauma produces a flight response. COVID is the clearest example: it is spoken about as if it never happened, because processing it is too painful. But as anyone who has been in therapy knows, unaddressed trauma does not disappear. It lives in you and expresses itself in behaviors you cannot fully explain, like maybe electing a psychopath.
I made the point that the Trump project, the broader authoritarian project, is in the process of failing. The judiciary has not fully capitulated. Elon Musk combusted within months. Project 2025 has been pursued but not fully implemented. Trump overreached and did not consolidate power before his coalition started fracturing. I believe we are watching the end stage of what happens when kleptocratic authoritarian governance meets a public that is hungry and angry.
James closed with something I want to hold onto. He said love has more stamina than hatred. Hatred consumes the people who carry it and destroys. Love creates. The people in our audience, showing up every week, maintaining the fight, not losing their edge: that is what bends the arc. As I said to close the show, good always wins. But not unless we push it.

Bottom Line

Orbán is gone. Carney won. The global far right is fracturing under the weight of its own failures. And Trump is losing the world, not just in polls and perception, but in the human cost of what his presidency has incentivized into existence.

Zayna is in a Lebanese hospital with 65% burns on her body. Her family is gone. She is 12 years old. That story belongs in this write-up because it belongs in the conversation about what this moment actually means. Numbers numb us. Individual stories do not.

James is out there in Edinburgh fighting this fight. I am here in Brooklyn doing the same. Support independent journalism that tells the truth about what is happening. Subscribe to James Matthewson. And if you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.

A Blockade Built On Failure, A Mad King With No Guardrails, & A Grift Machine With No Principles

Ahmed Baba — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:13:40 GMT

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Adam Mockler and I just had an excellent Substack Live. The conversation hit high-level analysis quickly as we made sense of a presidency that is producing new layers of chaos faster than anyone can track.

What started as a breakdown of Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz turned into something bigger: an accounting of what Trump is actually doing to the global order, what it incentivizes other nations to do, and why the people now speaking out against him in new MAGA media are not our friends. They’re grifters who smell Trump’s weakness.

The blockade is the headline, but the logic underneath it is the story. Trump ordered a naval blockade of a strait that was only closed because of a war he started to destroy nuclear capabilities he already claimed were obliterated. That is not a coherent strategy. That is a cascading failure. I described it as a Russian nesting doll of self-inflicted wounds: you open one, and there’s something worse inside, and then you do something worse on top of that to cover for the previous mistake.

Adam had been calling this mission creep in the early weeks of the war. He’s now calling it mission fuck-up, because the new mission is to fix the original mission’s failures.

The bigger frame here is not just about incompetence. It’s about Trump’s worldview. People keep calling Trump transactional. That is the wrong word. What Trump is doing is extraction. He is not making deals. He is squeezing. And when the most powerful nation on earth decides that might makes right and force is the primary language of international relations, it doesn’t just affect the current conflict. It rewrites the permission structure for every nation with geographic leverage over a waterway, a chokepoint, a corridor. That is the world Adam and I are watching take shape in real time.

And then there’s the Pope. The first American-born Pope spoke out against this war, called Trump’s genocide threat unacceptable, and Trump responded by calling him weak on crime, posting himself as a Christ-like figure, and then deleting it.

Adam called it the mad king theory, and he’s right. No guardrails, no one around Trump with the standing or the courage to say no, just a feedback loop of sycophants affirming his worst impulses until he posts a Jesus meme after attacking the Pope, and someone finally blinks and deletes. This is what happens when you spend a second term laser-targeting every institutional check that slowed you down in the first one.

We ended the Live talking about the right-wing grifters, who are newly condemning Trump, are not acting out of principle, but out of self-interest. They can smell Trump’s weakness and clearly see a media market for anti-Trump right-wing content. We should see their critiques clearly.

You’ll want to watch this conversation in full. It was a great one.

Watch above and read key takeaways below.

A Blockade Built On Failure

The Strait of Hormuz blockade is not a strategy. It is the latest entry in a chain of self-defeating decisions, each one designed to fix the damage caused by the one before it.

I opened the live by laying out the core absurdity: Trump has ordered a blockade of a strait that was closed only because of a war he started to destroy nuclear capabilities he already claimed were obliterated. The blockade is specifically targeting Iranian ports and the toll revenue Iran has been collecting, not all traffic through the strait. But the fundamental problem remains: the thing he is now trying to fix is a thing he created.
Adam had been calling this mission creep in the early weeks of the war, warning it would expand in size, scope, and scale. He’s now calling it mission fuck-up. A month and a half in, the new mission is to fix the original mission. That reframing is exactly right.
Adam made the point that Iran has no incentive to negotiate or engage in long-term diplomacy when the United States continues to bomb them every time talks stall. That is why Vance walked out of Islamabad with nothing. The blockade does not change that calculus. It hardens it.
Adam also raised the escalatory risk directly: if the U.S. is interdicting ships in international waters, that includes Chinese ships that have been transiting with Iranian clearance. Direct naval contact with Chinese vessels is not a theoretical risk. It is a real one. That is a level of escalation no one in this administration appears to have war-gamed.
I described it as a Russian nesting doll of self-inflicted wounds: every layer you open reveals something worse, and the response to each failure is a bigger gamble on top of it. That pattern is not going to stop until someone with actual authority forces a different approach, and there is no one in this administration positioned to do that.

Trump Isn’t Transactional. He’s Extractive.

The word people keep reaching for when they describe Trump’s foreign policy approach is transactional. It is the wrong word, and the distinction matters enormously for understanding what is actually happening to the global order.

I made the point directly on the live: this is not transaction, it is extraction. A transaction implies a deal where both parties get something. What Trump is doing is squeezing. He is taking. The difference is not semantic. It describes a fundamentally different relationship to power and to other nations.
Adam raised the question that follows directly from that: if the most powerful nation on earth operates on a might makes right basis, what stops every other nation with geographic leverage from doing the same? Why can’t Malaysia toll the Strait of Malacca? Why can’t Turkey toll the Bosphorus? Why can’t Denmark toll the Baltic Sea? Adam’s friend put it plainly: the UK could put missiles in Gibraltar and demand payment for Mediterranean passage. That is the world Trump is incentivizing into existence.
I pointed out that there was always a reason the post-World War II rules-based order existed. It was not perfect. The U.S. fell short of its own proclaimed ideals repeatedly. But there was at least a framework, a stated commitment to something beyond raw force. Trump has stripped that away entirely. And in doing so, he has handed China and Russia the validation they have been seeking for years: that the U.S. is unstable, hypocritical, and not committed to any principle beyond its own short-term advantage.
I cited a recent Gallup International poll showing that the world now favors Chinese leadership over U.S. leadership. That is a staggering data point given what Chinese-style hybrid authoritarian capitalism actually means for the countries it reaches. The fact that the world is looking at that model as more stable than what the U.S. is offering right now tells you exactly how much damage has been done.
I framed this with a Superman analogy: Superman is the most powerful entity on earth and chooses to be restrained, chooses to be kind, chooses to be good. That is what American power was supposed to represent at its best: the choice not to use leverage to its maximum. Trump has abandoned that choice. And he has taught Iran, and every nation watching, that the lesson of this moment is that short-circuiting the global economy is a viable option if you have the geographic leverage to do it.

Status Quo vs. Revisionist Powers: America Was Already Winning

Adam brought a framework to the conversation that reframes what Trump has done to America’s place in the global order: the difference between status quo countries and revisionist countries.

Adam laid out the theory directly. Status quo countries are satisfied with the existing international order because it benefits them. They support the current distribution of power, borders, and trade. Revisionist countries are dissatisfied and want to alter or overturn the system. The United States should be, without question, a status quo country. We built the order. We were at the top of it.
Adam walked through what that order actually delivered: free trade with most of the world, NATO backing, EU partnership, the ability to call out border violations like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because we had established that borders matter. That was a world order that was broadly good for the United States and broadly bad for authoritarian regimes that wanted to operate without accountability.
Trump made a catastrophic error. He looked at that order and decided the U.S. was a revisionist power that needed to shake things up. But as Adam put it plainly: you can’t go up from the top. You can only go lower. Every shake of the foundation only weakens what was already working in our favor.
Adam used the analogy of a perfectly built mansion with a great foundation. Why would you try to shake that around? The answer is that you wouldn’t, unless you fundamentally misread your own position in the structure. Trump misread it completely. And the people around him either didn’t know enough to correct him or didn’t have the standing to try.
I connected this to the global perception shift. The world now has to start planning for both a Republican United States and a Democratic United States as if they are two different countries, because the swings between them are now that dramatic. The globe is looking at the U.S. as bipolar. That instability is itself a form of weakness, independent of any specific policy. China and Russia have been making that argument for years. Trump proved it for them.

The Mad King & The Pope

Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV is a window into a presidency that has fully lost its guardrails.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born Pope, spoke out against the Iran War and called Trump’s threat to end the whole civilization of Iran unacceptable. Trump’s response was to call him weak on crime. Adam noted on the live that he genuinely did not know what that meant applied to a Pope, and that, in a dark way, it was almost funny. The Pope, the known street crime-fighting vigilante, is not doing his job.
Adam called it the mad king theory, and the post that followed made the case for him. Within hours of attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself depicted as a Christ-like figure, using divine power to heal a man while soldiers and eagles looked on. Then he deleted it.
I made the point about the feedback loop that enables this: Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, careerists, and grifters who affirm everything he says and validate his worst impulses because they know that pushing back means being pushed out. No one around Trump has the standing or the courage to say, Mr. President, this is not a good idea. That is what happens when you spend a second term systematically removing everyone who ever said no to you in the first.
Adam connected the Jesus post to the mad king pattern directly: threatening to wipe out a civilization, mocking Mueller, and posting Jesus memes. These are not isolated incidents. They are a sequence that shows a man with no reality check, no walls around him, operating in a closed loop of affirmation.
I made the point that all of this behavior tracks with what we saw in the first term: every time Trump started acting erratically, something was coming. A report dropping, a legal development, some external pressure. The difference now is that he is like that all the time, because he is in a constant state of fear. The midterms are coming. His poll numbers, per a recent survey I cited, are as low as 33%. The MAGA empire is fracturing. This is all desperation.

The Right-Wing Grift Machine Has No Principles

Megyn Kelly is speaking out. Alex Jones is speaking out. Tucker Carlson is speaking out. Candace Owens is speaking out. None of this is a moral awakening. It is a market pivot amid Trump’s weakness.

Adam said it directly, and I agreed: these people are not on our side. I noted that they are media grifters who have identified an audience opening and are moving to fill it. The emotional response of feeling like they’re finally getting it needs to be immediately followed by the rational response of remembering what they spent the last decade doing.
Adam laid out the Tucker Carlson case specifically: Tucker spent years lying about election fraud on air while texting privately that he did not believe it. Today, his ideology largely aligns with Vladimir Putin. The reason he is taking anti-war positions on Iran is not because he has woken up to something. It is because being pro-Putin and being anti-this-war happen to point in the same direction right now. That alignment will not hold. It never does with Tucker.
I added the context that Tucker was pushing great replacement theory on Fox News not long ago, and that his anti-Israel positions, which happen to be correct in this context, have historically been rooted in antisemitic views. For the first time, his various ideological threads have converged to put him on the right side of a specific issue. That does not make him right. It makes him accidentally correct once, for the wrong reasons.
Adam made the Candace Owens case: she filed a complaint about being racially profiled as a young person. She knows exactly what racism looks like in America from lived experience. Her claim to fame became saying that systemic racism is a lie and the left is lying to you about it. That is not a sincere political evolution. That is a person who found out what paid better and took the money.
I pointed out that Candace Owens started with an anti-Trump blog in 2016. I was starting my media company that same year. The difference is that I made a choice about what I stood for. She made a different choice. I also noted that the financial incentives in the right-wing ecosystem for Black conservatives specifically are enormous. Private donors, institutional money, the whole infrastructure floods in the moment you decide to back Trump.

Bottom Line

The blockade is a failure built on a failure built on a lie. The global order that benefited the United States for decades is being dismantled by a president who does not understand that he was already at the top of the order he inherited. Iran is more entrenched. China is gaining ground in the global perception battle. And the voices now speaking out from the right are not allies. They are people who watched the market shift and adjusted their product accordingly.

Adam and I are out here doing this because we believe independent media is where the real work gets done. There are no billionaires funding the pro-democracy coalition. No institutional money is propping up the people speaking truth on this side.

If you want to see this kind of analysis continue, support the people producing it. Subscribe to Adam Mockler. And if you haven’t yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.

Trump Started A War He Didn't Understand & The World Is Paying For It

Ahmed Baba — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:37:52 GMT

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In our latest Substack Live, Don Lemon opened with a simple question: Is this a ceasefire or not?

The honest answer is, we don’t know. What we have right now is a fragile, contested, actively violated pseudo-ceasefire that the Trump administration is trying to sell as a win, while bombs were still falling in Lebanon and ships are still parked outside the Strait of Hormuz waiting for clearance that isn’t coming. Don and I spent the conversation pulling apart the gap between what this administration is claiming and what is actually happening on the ground, and it’s a wide gap.

The big picture verdict is not complicated. Trump put us in a worse position than we were in on February 27th, the day before the war began. A more extreme Iranian government is now in place. Iran has more leverage over the Strait of Hormuz than it did before the war, not less. They’re moving to monetize that leverage through crypto toll payments on shipments. Enriched uranium is still there. Lebanon is destabilized. Hezbollah is likely to try to expand its terrorist activities. And the President of the United States sent out a genocide threat on his phone that the media moved past far too quickly.

There was also the inside story this week from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan at The New York Times about how Trump actually made the decision to go to war, and it is a story about a president who was warned of the risks, who was told by his own people that Netanyahu was overselling, and who did it anyway. That piece is essential reading, and it confirmed what we have been saying since this war began.

On top of all of that, there is a political subplot underneath the ceasefire negotiations that deserves attention. J.D. Vance is heading to Pakistan this weekend alongside Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and the question of why Vance is at the center of this now, and what it means for his future, is something Don and I dug into directly.

And then there’s the MAGA fracture. Alex Jones. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Candace Owens. Megyn Kelly is begging Trump to be a normal human being. People who in 2024 were the loudest voices in his coalition are now calling for the invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Don’s read is that MAGA is cooked, and I agree. The electoral data and the betrayal on tariffs, the war, the Epstein files, and affordability all point in the same direction.

You can watch the full conversation above and read our key takeaways below.

A Fragile Ceasefire

The state of play is chaotic, and the Trump administration’s own messaging makes it worse. What’s being sold publicly as a breakthrough is, on close inspection, a very fragile ceasefire built on a miscommunication between two governments that weren’t actually talking directly.

The Trump administration is claiming it did not agree to all of Iran’s 10-point plan, even though Trump previously called it a good starting point. Iran interpreted that signal as acceptance and sold it as a propaganda win. Neither side had a clear shared understanding of what was actually agreed to, including whether Lebanon was part of the ceasefire at all.
J.D. Vance stated publicly that Lebanon was never part of the negotiations. Iran’s position is the opposite. Netanyahu then announced a desire to start direct talks with Lebanon over Hezbollah disarmament, which added another layer of confusion to an already broken communication channel.
Don pointed out what the numbers actually show: the Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 150 ships per day under normal conditions. A handful of ships passing through does not constitute an open strait. Ships are parked off the coast of Oman waiting. The administration’s claim that the strait is open is false.
Saturday’s planned trip to Pakistan with Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner would, in my read, represent the actual beginning of direct talks since the war started, because up to this point, both sides have largely been selling propaganda wins to their respective bases rather than negotiating in good faith.

The World Is Worse Than Before the War

There is no honest accounting of this war that produces a positive outcome. I asked Don directly if he could name a single thing that is better today than it was the day before the strikes. I couldn’t. Neither could he.

Iran is now led by the son of the previous Supreme Leader, who is significantly more extreme and does not carry the same commitment to avoiding nuclear weapons. The previous leader had a fatwa against nuclear weapons and agreed to the JCPOA. That baseline is gone.
Iran now has more leverage over the Strait of Hormuz than it did before the war, not less. According to Wall Street Journal reporting I raised during the live, Iran is moving to toll the strait and accept crypto payments for passage. They are actively monetizing the leverage this war handed them.
Don laid out the basic before-and-after: gas prices were low, ships were moving, a deal was on the table. Now, gas prices are high, the Strait is functionally closed, Iran is making more money, and there is no regime change.
I made the point that the media needs to stop moving past Trump’s genocide threat against Iran. That notification landed on people’s phones. That moment cannot be normalized. It is evidence of how volatile this president is, and the exhaustion Americans feel living inside that volatility is real, and it is accumulating.
Lebanon is now destabilized as a direct outcome of this war, and Hezbollah is going to use that instability to try to expand its global reach. We achieved nothing that was promised and created multiple new crises in the process.

Netanyahu Oversold It, Trump Bought It

The New York Times piece from Haberman and Swan this week is the inside story of how a foreign leader walked into the White House, gave a presentation that Trump’s team didn’t fully believe, and still got the war he wanted.

Don flagged the seating arrangement in the Situation Room as significant, and I agreed: Trump did not sit at the head of the table. He sat on one side with Netanyahu directly across from him. Don’s read was that it signaled equal footing, that Netanyahu was not a guest being briefed but a co-principal driving the meeting.
Netanyahu’s presentation to Trump laid out a four-step plan: a decapitation strike, military capability erosion, popular uprising, and then regime change. Trump was focused on steps one and two. He did not seriously engage with three and four.
General Caine warned after Netanyahu’s presentation that Israel was overselling. That is a pattern, he noted, something Israel does. The promise that Iran’s military would be wiped out so completely that it couldn’t even exert control over the Strait of Hormuz was not credible.
Ratcliffe called the regime change portion of the plan farcical. Rubio called it “bullshit,” and other administration officials also pushed back on Netanyahu’s promises about the Iranian people rising up and Kurdish forces quickly filling the vacuum. Trump heard all of this and proceeded anyway.
I framed this as the story of this administration at its core: a president who runs on gut instinct, rejects facts, and doesn’t attach consequences to his decisions. He was told. He knew. He did it anyway. And now the primary objective of these negotiations is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war started.

MAGA Is Cooked

Don said it plainly: MAGA is cooked. I agree. And the fracture is not coming from the left; it is coming from inside the house.

Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Candace Owens are now calling for the invocation of the 25th Amendment. I pointed out that if you had told anyone in 2024 that those three names would be calling for Trump’s removal using the same language as 2017 resistance members, no one would have believed you. That is how far this has moved.
Megyn Kelly went on air begging Trump to just be a normal human being. Don called it immediately: the day before, she said she would vote Republican even if they dropped a nuke on Iran. Don’s verdict was that she’ll do anything for a click. His read is that she’s a fraud. I took it further and said that these are not moral awakenings. These are people who see a market opening up and are moving to monetize anti-Trump sentiment. There is no principle driving it.
Don made the point that the bro podcast ecosystem, the Manosphere, the independent streaming voices that helped put Trump in office, these are not controllable by corporate media. Fox can manage its audience. Fox cannot manage what Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, or the podcasters say. And if those voices are speaking out against Trump heading into the midterms, that carries.
The electoral signals are already showing it. I brought up the Georgia special election and the broader trend of massive swings in Republican-held districts. Not every race is flippable, but the tide is moving in one direction. Republicans are going to get shellacked in the 2026 midterms if this trajectory holds.
Every betrayal compounds the last: the Epstein files, the war, the tariffs, the affordability promises. Each one chips away at the coalition a little more. Don and I were calling these fractures early, back when the Epstein file debate was playing out last summer. What was a crack then is a split now.

The Vance Setup

Vance is now front and center in the Iran negotiations, heading to Pakistan this weekend. Whether that is an opportunity or a trap is an open question, and it is one worth watching closely.

I raised the observation that throughout the Haberman-Swan NYT piece, there are moments where Vance’s opposition to the war surfaces in ways that feel sourced from Vance’s team. The framing keeps pivoting back to Vance saying he was against this. That is the kind of narrative shaping that happens when someone close to a principal is talking to reporters and trying to build a specific record.
My speculation here, and I want to be clear this is speculative, is that Vance is quietly trying to separate himself from the war’s outcome while Trump may be doing the opposite: putting Vance at the center of negotiations precisely so that whatever happens next gets tied to him.
Don flagged the real danger in Vance’s potential leak strategy: if Trump figures out who is talking and alerts the MAGA base, it is political suicide for Vance. The same coalition that made Trump would turn on Vance instantly. The leaking, if that is what it is, is a high-wire act.
What is not speculative is the consequence: whoever owns these negotiations owns the outcome. If talks collapse, that failure will be attached to whoever was in the room. Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner are all heading to Pakistan. Rubio has also already tied himself to defending the war. None of these names are clean heading into 2028.
Don’s framing was right. This administration sent a fast-talking salesman to close a deal that requires actual foreign policy expertise. And the people around Trump who do have some experience have already burned their credibility by going along with a war that his own team privately called farcical before the first bomb dropped.

Bottom Line

The ceasefire is not a stable ceasefire. The Strait of Hormuz is not open. There was no regime change. Iran is more extreme, exerting more leverage, and more dangerous than it was the day before this war started. Trump was warned by his own people, told directly that Netanyahu was overselling, and proceeded anyway. The world is paying for it. The American people are paying for it at the pump, in the instability, and in the memory of a genocide threat that the media moved past too quickly.

Don and I have been tracking the MAGA fracture since the Epstein file debate last summer. What we are seeing now is not just a fracture. It is a collapse in slow motion. The question heading into the midterms and 2028 is not whether the damage from this Iran War is real. It is whether the people who enabled this will be held accountable for it at the ballot box.

If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter and supporting Don Lemon. Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. You can subscribe and/or upgrade below:

Trump Backed Down. The World Is Worse Off Than Before The War. And We Cannot Move On From His Genocidal Rhetoric.

Ahmed Baba — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:12:24 GMT

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James Matthewson and I talked through one of the most consequential news cycles of this entire administration. Trump threatened to wipe out a whole civilization. Then he backed down. And the world woke up to a shaky “ceasefire” that leaves Iran with more leverage than before this war even started.

This is Across the Pond, my weekly Wednesday live with James, a BBC and Sky News contributor, former Labour Party adviser, and one of the most clear-eyed voices on what this political moment looks like from the UK.

We both ended up in the same place: furious, exhausted, and determined not to let the “ceasefire” be used to memory-hole Trump’s genocidal threats.

We covered the “ceasefire” terms, which don’t include halting Israel’s strikes on Lebanon, and why the outcome is objectively worse than the world before this war. We talked about why we cannot let the media normalize Trump’s genocidal rhetoric just because he pulled back at the last minute. We got into James’s abusive relationship framework for understanding what Trump is doing to the American people. We talked about the global far right as a collaborative movement. And we talked honestly about the personal cost of doing this work, the death threats James has been receiving, a decade of racist DMs in my inbox, and why none of it is going to stop us.

We closed where we needed to close: on hope.

This was another great conversation. You can watch it in full above and read key takeaways below.

Trump Backed Down. The World Is Worse Off Than Before The War.

Trump threatened genocide. Then he moved forward with Iran’s 10-point plan as the framework for negotiations, not his own 15-point proposal. The Strait of Hormuz, which was open before this war, is now under Iran’s monetized control. Lebanon is still being bombed. And the man who started all of this is calling it a total and complete victory. It is not.

I laid out the terms plainly. Iran’s 10-point framework includes the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions, continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, potential U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East, an end to attacks on Iran and its allies, and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The Strait, which was open to free shipping before February 28, is now being tolled by Iran. James confirmed this in real time: ships are already being rerouted through a natural corridor between two islands at the northern end of the Strait, where Iran is reportedly collecting payments of around two million dollars per vessel. That did not exist before this war.
James walked through the full accounting of what this war produced. A country that every U.S. president for fifty years had managed to avoid all-out war with is now more radicalized, not less. The civilian population of Iran, which previously wanted support in overthrowing their own government, now sees the U.S. as just another tyrannical force. Over 1,600 Iranian civilians are dead. More than a million people are displaced in Lebanon. Global energy prices are still elevated. And Iran ends up with more than it had at the start.
The ceasefire does not extend to Lebanon. Israel is continuing its assault on Beirut. James noted that as we were speaking, Beirut had just undergone some of the worst bombing it had seen. I made the point that what we accomplished here was spending enormous blood and treasure to reopen a strait that was only closed because of a war the US started. The primary objective of the war became fixing a problem that the war itself created. That is not a victory. That is a circular catastrophe.

We Cannot Move On From Trump’s Genocidal Rhetoric

The ceasefire proposal is being used to turn the page. The coverage has moved to deal with the terms, oil prices, and what comes next. James and I refused to turn the page. What Trump said on Easter Sunday and what he said the morning of April 7th are not normal political statements. They are not negotiating tactics. They are genocidal rhetoric from the President of the United States, and they cannot be memory-holed.

I made the point that is not being made loudly enough. Trump threatened to wipe out a whole civilization. He said a civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. That is not a pressure campaign. That is not deal-making. That is a president threatening to eradicate a people. Imagine being on the receiving end of that threat, in that country, as a human being. The most powerful nation on earth just told you that you might cease to exist by tonight. That people shrugged because a fragile “ceasefire” followed does not make what was said acceptable. Words have to matter even when Trump acts like they do not.
I called out a specific media failure by name. On CNBC, a host asked whether Trump’s threat to eradicate a whole civilization was an upside risk or a downside risk for investors. That question was asked. Is genocide upside or downside for the market? That is what we have normalized. I said directly that journalists, commentators, and independent media people have to be anchors to reality. You cannot journo-speak your way through a genocide threat. You cannot sanitize it into a palatable policy analysis.
James was unequivocal on the media accountability point. He said he will be asking that question every day for the rest of his life, as long as someone is standing at that podium. There is no subjective framing that softens what Trump said. Trump said a whole civilization dies tonight. That specificity, that certainty, that dehumanization cannot be treated as just another news cycle moment and then moved past. James put it plainly: Trump killed decency. He killed morality. That is what happened, and we should not let anyone pretend otherwise.

Trump Is Gaslighting A Nation

James offered a clear framework for what Trump is doing to the American people. This is not just bad policy. This is not just incompetent leadership. This is an abusive relationship. And the threat followed by the “ceasefire” followed by the victory lap is textbook manipulative behavior.

James described the moment in the Edinburgh cafe when everyone’s phones started pinging. An American couple on holiday, passing their phone back and forth, looking sad. Students looking shaken. People in Edinburgh and all over the world are having their peace shattered because one man woke up and decided to threaten to annihilate a civilization. James asked the question I think about constantly: How have we got to a point where one man’s emotions, one man’s cruelty, one man’s ego can impact the lives of so many? And then James answered it with the framework that landed: this is an abusive relationship. Threatening violence and then not following through is classic abusive behavior. It keeps everyone in a permanent state of stress and uncertainty. That is the point.
I added my own version of that night. I was wondering whether I needed to cancel my dinner plans with my wife because the president might be decimating civilian infrastructure while I was at the table. That is not a normal thought to have. That is a thought produced by a man who is repeatedly manufacturing crises, ratcheting up anxiety to the absolute limit, and then backing off so he can declare victory while everyone else processes the damage to their nervous systems. James said he had been booked provisionally for multiple media appearances set to go live if the worst happened. He sat alone, painting miniatures at 1 a.m., wondering whether he was about to watch footage of innocent people being bombed in their homes by a democratically elected Western leader.
James noted that his therapist in Edinburgh is now hearing about Trump. A UK therapist talking about the actions of an American president in therapy sessions. That is the scale of this. I noted that I am in therapy too, and that I recommend everyone see a therapist at least weekly right now because these are not normal times. They are traumatic times. The people in Iran and Lebanon are bearing the most direct weight of this, but the collective trauma is reaching everywhere. James framed it precisely: he is gaslighting a nation. He is abusing a nation. And that will be his legacy.

The Rot Trump Identified & Exploited

Trump did not create the rot at the center of American politics. He identified it, monetized it, and gave permission to everyone carrying it to let it out. That is what his rise really did. And now the world is grappling with a monster of our own making.

I made the point that Trump is the id of American materialism and shamelessness. He looked at the ugliest impulses in the country, the depravity, the anger, the resentment, the desire to stop pretending to be polite, and said: This is profitable. Do it. Lying gets you power. Shamelessness works. Depravity is actually the move. And then he did it, and they all enabled him. It is not just one man. As commenters in our chat kept correctly pointing out, it is the Republican Party that had multiple accountability moments, from January 6th to his first impeachment to his second, and chose cowardice every time. If Mitch McConnell had convicted Trump after January 6th, we would not be here.
James observed that traditional conservatism has essentially vanished. He said he cut his political teeth battling Tories in the UK, classical conservatives with their sense of decorum, presentation, and propriety. He cannot find them anymore. They have all gone far right. The conservative party in the UK saw Trumpism, saw the power it generated, and decided to emulate it. Now they have politicians saying Muslims praying in public makes them sick. That is what happens when you adopt the frame. I made the point that the far right is a globally collaborative movement, and we are both watching it operate across our respective countries in real time. I noted that JD Vance being in Hungary with Orban is not a coincidence. It is coordination.
James’s point about Mike Johnson crystallized the Republican enabling dynamic perfectly. You can see Johnson sitting there cringing at Trump’s garish language like a perverse uncle at the dinner table. He does not really like it. It makes him uncomfortable. But he is fine with it because Trump is making him powerful. That is all Trump had to do because he was never one of them in the first place. He is a base individual driven by base needs. And he got them all in line behind him by offering them exactly what they wanted: power and money, no decency required.

The Cost of Speaking Truth

James has been receiving coordinated death threats, three in the past week, with identical language about acid attacks, from three different accounts. I have spent a decade getting the N-word in my DMs on social media. Neither of us is stopping. But we are not pretending it does not cost anything either.

James described the three threats in detail. Same language across all three accounts, threatening an acid attack, saying they had his address, saying they would change his life forever. He reported them to the police through a broadcasting inbox. The police expressed sympathy but did nothing. What struck James was not the threats themselves, which he was largely desensitized to, but the reaction of someone close to him who heard about them for the first time. Their shock made him realize he had been blocking it out. He acknowledged it for what it is: he should be scared. He is choosing not to be because he knows the objective is intimidation, and he will not give them what they want.
I told my own truth. Ten years of racist messages in my DMs and replies. Growing up in Virginia, I had face-to-face run-ins, too. I have become desensitized to it, which is its own kind of telling. But my reframe is genuine: whenever I get it, I think about the fact that the person behind that keyboard, sending that message to a stranger, is miserable. That is the truth of it. No matter how Trump has made being a bad person seem profitable, these people are not rewarded with anything except being horrible people nobody wants to be around.
James made the broader point that these people exist because Trump told them this is the way. Be callous. Lead without empathy. And then when everyday people try it, they do not get the power or the money. They just become people nobody wants around. James knows people who have lost family members to this radicalization, people who have disappeared into the rabbit hole entirely. The grief of that is real.

Visualize Spring In the Shire

We closed where we needed to close. Not on the ceasefire terms. Not on the death threats. On hope. On what is coming. On visualizing spring in the Shire.

The results from yesterday told the real story. In Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old seat, the Democratic candidate overperformed far above where Kamala Harris ran in that same district in 2024. Republicans are cooked. Trump is overreaching. Every data indicator, the polling, the marches, the No Kings protests, the special election swings, is pointing in the same direction. Democrats are about to go crazy at the ballot box, and the American people’s decency is going to strike back.
James gave the marching orders I think everyone in this community needs to hear right now. He will not have anyone in this chat feeling guilt or shame for being authentically themselves, living with joy, and putting their hearts on their sleeves. Nothing is wrong with you. Hold your head high. Have dignity. James has one word for what his politics is about: dignity. He wants everyone to have it and to live with it. That is what we are fighting for.
James invoked Sam’s speech from “The Lord of the Rings.” By all rights, we should not even be here. We did not choose this. We did not want this. But this shadow is but a passing thing. When Sam looks up through the clouds and sees the light, he knows it will be springtime in the Shire again. That is where we have to keep our eyes. That’s what we need to do. Visualize the spring in the Shire that is coming. Visualize how you will feel the morning after the midterms. Remember how you felt in 2020 when people were celebrating in the streets of New York like it was the end of Return of the Jedi. We made it then. We are going to make it again.

Bottom Line

Trump backed down. The world is far worse off than before the war. The Strait of Hormuz is now being monetized by Iran. Lebanon is still being attacked by Israel. And the man who threatened to wipe out a whole civilization is calling it all a total and complete victory.

We are not moving on from what Trump said. We are not letting the ceasefire erase the genocidal rhetoric. We are not pretending this is normal.

But we are also not giving up. Not even close. The swings we are seeing at the ballot box, the fracturing of Trump’s own base, the polling collapse, and the marches all point in the same direction.

This shadow is but a passing thing. There will be springtime in the Shire.

If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter and supporting James Matthewson. Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. You can subscribe and/or upgrade below:

Adam Mockler & Ahmed Baba: Trump Threatens War Crimes, Uses Genocidal Rhetoric As His Desperation Grows

Ahmed Baba — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:44:27 GMT

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President Trump once again has the world on edge, as he threatens new war crimes against Iran. In this moment of uncertainty, I was happy to try to make sense of it all with my friend Adam Mockler.

Adam Mockler is one of the best political debaters working in independent media right now. We first met on a CNN panel with Kevin O’Leary and linked up again for viral moments when debating Scott Jennings. Every time we’re on the panel together, it’s like a dynamic duo. I’m glad he joined me today to break down this incredibly volatile moment.

With Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline looming over Iran tonight, Adam and I got into all of it: the genocidal rhetoric coming out of the White House, why Trump’s Venezuela playbook is failing catastrophically against Iran, the calculation Tehran is making to hold firm, the MAGA fractures that have Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene sounding like 2017 resistance liberals, and the compounding affordability betrayal hitting Trump’s own base hardest. We also closed on something I think every Democrat and independent media person needs to hear: how to actually win the argument.

This was a conversation I was very much looking forward to. Adam does not mince words. And on a day when the President of the United States threatened to wipe out a whole civilization, that is exactly the energy we need right now.

A few things I want to say directly before we get into the takeaways. What Trump posted on Easter Sunday and what he said this morning are not normal political statements. Threatening to bomb civilian infrastructure, power plants, and bridges is a war crime. Threatening that a whole civilization will die tonight is genocidal rhetoric. Full stop. No journalist should mince words about this.

We also got into the leadership failures of Trump. Trump has been A/B testing war narratives like a small Facebook marketing firm, calling different reporters with different justifications, moving deadlines over and over, and threatening the most extreme possible actions without any apparent understanding of what actually motivates Iran. The presidency is a job that requires stillness. He brings chaos.

I have always said the most important guardrail on a president’s power is the guardrail of their own character. We are seeing in real time the result of having a president with no character.

You won’t want to miss this conversation. You can watch it in full above or read key takeaways below.

Trump Threatens War Crimes Using Genocidal Rhetoric. We Should Not Mince Words.

On Easter Sunday, Trump posted a profanity-laced message threatening to bomb Iran’s civilian infrastructure if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened. This morning, he went further, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” We opened by telling the blunt truth: the President of the United States is threatening genocide against the Iranian people. That is not hyperbole. That is a factual description of what he said.

I laid out why the Easter post and this morning’s threat are not just unhinged rhetoric. Threatening to destroy civilian infrastructure, power plants, and bridges is a war crime under the Geneva Convention and various international statutes. The Iranian regime responded by asking citizens to form human chains around power plants. That image, civilians wrapping themselves around infrastructure to prevent a strike by the United States, is what this presidency has produced.
Adam made the point that even the threat of war crimes, independent of whether the strikes happen, is disqualifying behavior from a president. What chapter of the Art of the Deal, he asked, is just threatening genocide against your opponent? This is not leverage. This is a man with no moral compass doubling down on the most extreme possible position because he has no internal guardrail stopping him. The vacuum of moral clarity leads directly to these stances.
I noted that the media cannot keep letting this slide. Every time Trump moves a deadline, every time he escalates the rhetoric and then backs off, the coverage treats it as a negotiating tactic rather than what it is: a president who has no strategy, no endgame, and no understanding of what he has started. We had a President of the United States threaten war crimes on Easter Sunday. That is what happened. We should not let anyone reframe it as anything else.

Trump Thought Iran Was Venezuela. It Isn’t.

Trump’s entire approach to Iran is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what Iran is. He decapitated the leadership and expected the body to fall in line, the same way it did in Venezuela. It is not going to work. Adam and I walked through exactly why, and it comes down to one thing: the IRGC is not a head. It is a hydra.

I made the point that Trump does not understand what motivates Iran. He does not know about the UK-US coup in 1953 that removed Mossadegh. He does not understand how the IRGC was formed during the Iraq-Iran War. He does not understand the ideological nature of the regime or its decentralized mosaic military structure. You can bomb different heads all you want. The IRGC keeps moving. This is a regime that killed its own people. Threatening to bomb their civilian infrastructure is not going to make them concede.
Adam’s analysis of the IRGC was sharp. After IRGC members retire from service, they do not disappear. They become teachers, bankers, university administrators, and manufacturers. They are so deeply embedded in Iranian institutions that they are inseparable from the society itself. The regime is not one person. It is not their air force. It is the entire institutional fabric of the country. Taking out their missiles and their navy is not a victory. It does not achieve any nuclear goals. It just removes the conventional military capacity while leaving the ideological infrastructure completely intact.
I connected this to the nuclear question directly. By bombing Iran this way, Trump is not preventing nuclear proliferation. He is incentivizing it. Iran looks at what happened to Gaddafi in Libya after he gave up his nuclear ambitions. They look at Saddam. They look at how Putin maximized Russia’s nuclear capacity because he understood what happens to leaders without deterrence. And they look at Kim Jong-un, who had a summit in the DMZ with Trump. The lesson Iran is learning from this war is that the only protection is a nuclear weapon. Trump has made the problem he claimed to be solving dramatically worse.

Iran Is Making A Calculation On Holding Firm

Adam made a clear case for why Iran is holding firm, and it is not because they are irrational. It’s because they’re learning from their dealings with this Administration.

Adam’s framework was precise. If Iran reaches a deal right now and cedes to the United States and Israel, they hand Trump a political victory at the exact moment he is most desperate. They also allow the United States to rearm and regroup, and in eight months, they get bombed again. Holding the Strait of Hormuz generates revenue, inflicts maximum economic pain on the U.S. and its allies, and forces the world to keep watching. The longer this goes, the worse it gets for Trump politically. Iran is not failing to understand the situation. They are reading it clearly.
The JCPOA history is essential context here. Adam pointed out that the original deal was not perfect, but the implication was that Iran would be a rational actor over time, that more trade and interaction with the West would slowly stabilize the country. I noted that Trump tore it up in 2018, even when his own State Department and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran was compliant. He did it because he hated Barack Obama. The previous Supreme Leader agreed to the JCPOA, but the new Supreme Leader is more extreme. He is thirty years younger than his father and more radicalized. Trump had an adverse effect on everything he claimed to be preventing.
I made the point that the negotiators need to think through what actually motivates Iran, not what Trump wants Iran to want. Iran wants survival guarantees. They want concrete commitments that cannot be torn up in a few weeks. They have been bombed multiple times during negotiations. Their foreign minister has said directly that they no longer trust the United States after the strikes happened in the middle of talks. You are not going to get a deal by threatening to wipe out a civilization. You get a deal by giving them something real enough to risk trusting you again.

The MAGA Fractures Over Iran Are Real

In the last 24 hours, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Candace Owens have called for Trump to be removed via the 25th Amendment. These are the people who helped bolster MAGA. They are now sounding like 2017 resistance liberals on Twitter. Adam and I broke down what is actually happening here, and it is more complicated than a simple ideological break.

I was direct about what is driving some of this. For Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, this is partly about seeing a monetizable media market. There is now a lane for America First, anti-Trump content, and they are running toward it because the audience is there. For Marjorie Taylor Greene, there is a political lane opening up, too. I would not be surprised to see her on the 2028 primary stage. This is not purely about integrity or decency. It is about market positioning. That does not make it less real as a political signal, but we should understand what is driving it.
Adam’s framing of the rug pull was sharp. Trump simultaneously rug-pulled the American people and the Iranian people. He promised no new wars and immediately started multiple regime change operations. He promised transparency and covered up the Epstein files. He promised to lower prices and then raised them. He is now calling the economy an A-plus-plus-plus while Americans are struggling with tariff costs, rising healthcare prices, and a war that is spiking energy prices globally. The MAGA base is realizing that if Trump gets to define what MAGA means, and he defines it as invading other countries, they are no longer MAGA.
The fracture has been building across multiple betrayals. It started with Musk and the Project 2025 overreach. It deepened over the Epstein files. It accelerated with the Iran War. Now, even Nick Fuentes is telling his audience to vote Democrat. That is how far this has gone. The coalition Trump glued together in 2024 is splintering in slow motion, and the Iran War is the accelerant. Adam closed this section plainly: what average Americans have gotten out of this war is higher gas prices, more dead troops, and nothing else.

The Affordability Betrayal Compounds

The Iran War is not just a foreign policy disaster. It is an affordability crisis hitting Trump’s own base directly. I made this point clearly, and Adam built on it with the specific numbers.

The Strait of Hormuz closure is not just an oil story. Twenty percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas passes through that strait. The resources used to create fertilizer pass through it. That means farming costs are spiking on top of the tariff damage that was already hitting agricultural communities. I noted this directly: the Iran War has become another affordability betrayal, compounded by everything else. His base trusted him on no new wars. They trusted him on costs. He delivered the opposite of both simultaneously.
Adam added the specific economic ramifications. Tariffs are adding roughly a thousand dollars in costs to American families. ACA subsidies are expiring, meaning healthcare costs are rising. Rising diesel prices mean the cost of transporting anything goes up, which means the cost of everything goes up. And the South Pars gas field, one of the most important energy facilities in the region, was struck on both sides in recent days. Adam said it will take three to five years to recover. That means elevated energy prices are not a temporary war spike. They are baked in for years.
Trump’s response to all of this is to go on camera and say we have won on a daily basis. Adam made the debate point that this creates a perfect unanswerable question for CNN panels: Did we win? Republicans cannot say yes, because clearly we have not. They cannot say no, because that contradicts their president. So they deflect. And Adam does not let them deflect. He pins them down until the contradiction is visible to everyone watching.

How To Win The Argument

We closed on something that I think every Democrat, every independent media person, and every engaged citizen needs to hear right now. Adam is one of the most effective political debaters in the game. I asked him directly: What goes into it, and what should Democrats be doing?

Adam’s methodology is worth understanding. He spends almost all day making content about the subject matter, so he already has a deep grasp of the news cycle before he walks into a studio. He then identifies questions that are not really answerable, the kind where any honest answer from a Republican pundit would contradict their own president. He role-plays conservative arguments with his prep partner before he goes on, running through what they will say so he is not caught flat-footed. And he makes a deliberate choice to be more aggressive than people might expect, because if he is not, they will slip away.
I added what works for me: couching your argument in things that are indisputable. If the foundation of your point is a fact they cannot challenge, they have to either agree with you or deflect somewhere else entirely. When they deflect, you do not follow them. You bring them back. We’ve done this on CNN each time we’re on together.
The broader advice for Democrats is the same principle at scale. Stop letting Republicans reframe the question. The question is not whether Trump’s military strategy is working. The question is whether he told the truth about why we went to war. The question is not whether strikes were successful. The question is whether there is a strategy, objectives, and an endgame. Those are the questions that cannot be answered honestly. Ask them every time and do not move on until they try.

Bottom Line

Trump threatened war crimes using genocidal rhetoric. This morning, he said a whole civilization will die tonight. His party is fracturing in real time. His base is paying the price at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and on their healthcare bills.

Adam Mockler and I are not going to mince words about any of it. The greatest guardrail on a president is the guardrail of their own character. When that guardrail does not exist, this is what you get.

We are going to keep fighting. Democrats are going to win the midterms. Democrats are going to win in 2028 if the pro-democracy coalition keeps hitting the gas. But that requires all of us to state clearly what is happening right now, not softening it, not reframing it, not giving it room to be normalized.

A whole civilization does not have to die tonight. Trump might end up backing off from his threats, but the fact that a President of the United States said those words is something none of us should ever forget.

If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter and supporting Adam Mockler. Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. You can subscribe and/or upgrade below:

Live From The Georgia Runoff: Volunteers Share Insights From The Race To Replace MTG

Ahmed Baba — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:39:48 GMT

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Today I went live with Charles Douglas, Executive Director of Common Power, while he was literally on turf in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, knocking doors for Shawn Harris ahead of tomorrow’s runoff election.

Charles wasn’t calling in from a studio. He had volunteers splitting off in a Latino neighborhood, 77 doors and 93 voters to hit on this single turf. Common Powers staff and team of volunteers will be hitting dozens of these turfs before election day tomorrow with Shawn Harris’ literature in hand. We watched democracy happen in real time.

This is one of the reddest districts in the country. Marjorie Taylor Greene won it by 29 points. Trump carried it by 37 in 2024. And yet Shawn Harris, a retired Army brigadier general and farmer, just set the record for the highest vote share any Democrat has ever received in this district. He got 37.3% in a crowded special election field, and now he is in a one-on-one runoff against Trump-endorsed Republican Clayton Fuller. Speaker Mike Johnson’s House majority now sits at just 217-214. That is slim, so the stakes of this race are now even higher.

The conversation kept coming back to the same point: the two biggest issues in America right now are the Iran War and affordability. Shawn Harris is a brigadier general with a 40-year military record, including serving in combat in Afghanistan and receiving a Bronze Star. He is also a farmer who is being hit directly by the tariff crisis and the Strait of Hormuz closure’s impact on fertilizer prices. He is not making an abstract argument against this administration. He is making a personal one, from direct experience, in both directions at once. You could not have engineered a more credible candidate for this specific political moment.

Charles and his team of volunteers, including Kelly from Seattle and Michael from the Bay Area, were out knocking on doors while we spoke. Kelly checked back in after she enfranchised a voter, a woman whose dogs were barking at the door, who didn’t know if she was registered. Kelly pulled up the Secretary of State website right there, confirmed the woman was registered, found her polling place three minutes away, and sent her off with literature for her siblings. That happened live on this show. This is what fighting for democracy looks like.

This was a really great live. From our big-picture political analysis to real-time anecdotes like Charles’ conversation with a Republican who vehemently opposed the Iran War, and a 92-year-old woman who vowed to vote for Shawn Harris, we looked beyond the data and heard from the people.

You won’t want to miss this one.

You can watch the full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

Democracy In Action In A Deep Red District

Charles Douglas and Common Power are in Georgia’s 14th for a reason that goes beyond this one race. Even if Harris doesn’t win, what Common Power is doing here matters. They are showing that Democrats will fight in red districts, build relationships with voters who have never been spoken to, and lay the groundwork that will pay dividends when Jon Ossoff runs for Senate in the fall.

We saw the volunteer door-knocking system play out in real time. Volunteers get assigned turfs through the Minivan app, a canvassing tool that assigns doors, tracks voter information, and maps neighborhoods. The team Charles was leading had just arrived at a turf with 77 homes and 93 voters in a heavily Latino neighborhood in Rome. They split up to cover the ground, handed out yard signs that read “Leadership Matters,” and made the case for Harris at every door. This is the infrastructure of a functioning ground game, and it was being built in a district most Democrats would have written off entirely.
Kelly, who happens to be a paid subscriber to this newsletter and traveled from Seattle to knock on doors, had one of the best moments of the live. She got into a conversation with a woman who was not on her list because her dogs were barking. The woman didn’t know if she was registered. Kelly pulled up the Georgia Secretary of State website on the spot, confirmed she was registered, found her polling place three minutes away, and gave her literature for her siblings. That is one voter turned into potentially four. That is how margins move.
Charles made the broader strategic argument plainly: Common Power is not just here to win this seat. They are here because a strong showing by Harris in this district builds relationships with voters who will matter when Ossoff is on the ballot in November. As Charles put it, all local politics are now national. This race will send a message to independents across the country about whether the Democratic Party is willing to fight for them where they live.

Harris’s Argument: Not Just A Democrat, A Maverick

The messaging strategy Harris is running is precise, and it has to be. You cannot flip a district Trump won by 37 points by asking Republicans to become Democrats. Harris is not doing that. He is asking voters who are already frustrated with both parties to give someone new a chance.

Charles walked through the literature they are handing out at doors. Harris is running on fixing healthcare, bringing down costs, term limits, banning stock trading for members of Congress, holding elected officials accountable, protecting veterans, and passing an equitable farm bill. None of that is ideological. All of it is concrete. As Charles noted, the line about banning stock trading is a direct signal about corruption, a nod to voters watching Trump and his allies enrich themselves off policy announcements before the public knows about them.
The framing Charles described is surgical. Harris is telling Republicans they do not have to become Democrats to vote for him. He is speaking to voters who believe both parties’ elected officials have failed them. I noted that this makes sense in a district like this. You have to channel Republican anger at the Republican Party and Democratic anger at the Democratic establishment simultaneously, and then position yourself as the alternative to both.
Charles made the point that Chuck Schumer has become a useful punching bag for candidates running in swing districts. I mentioned that this could function the same way Nancy Pelosi functioned in 2018 when she told candidates to say whatever they needed to say to win. Schumer is not publicly chafing against candidates who distance themselves from him. That is the right instinct. When you let candidates run against the party establishment to empower the party, that is where you actually make a difference.

The Iran War Is Showing Up On Voters’ Doorsteps

This is where the race gets genuinely remarkable. The two biggest issues in American politics right now are the Iran War and the affordability crisis. Shawn Harris is a brigadier general who saw combat in Afghanistan and a farmer who is being directly hit by tariffs and the Strait of Hormuz closure. He is not making these arguments from a distance. He is living them.

I made the point that Harris sits at the exact focal point of both crises in a way few candidates in the country can claim. As a brigadier general with a Bronze Star who served in Afghanistan as an infantryman, he knows what these wars cost. He knows the difference between a war of choice and a war of necessity. He is calling this a war of choice. That is not a talking point from him. It is a professional assessment from someone who has been on the ground in the Middle East. Fuller, by contrast, has glued himself fully to Trump and is calling the war a success.
As a farmer, Harris is also being directly hit by the affordability crisis in the most concrete way possible. Not only are the tariffs hitting farmers, but the Strait of Hormuz closure is not just an energy story. It is a fertilizer story. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply, 20% of global liquefied natural gas, and a significant share of the resources to create fertilizer pass through that strait. When it closes, farming costs spike. Harris does not need to explain that to voters in northwest Georgia. He is living it on his own land. Charles connected this directly to the campaign literature: farmers, veterans, high costs, and corruption.
Charles described what he is hearing at the doors. A big, burly Republican opened a door at the home of one of the voters they were trying to reach. He was wearing a Freedom Fighters t-shirt and appeared to be someone who, by every visual cue, you would expect to be hostile to Democrats. Then he started talking. He said he did not understand why we were in this war. He was angry about the cost of goods. He was talking about corruption, about elected officials making themselves rich. Charles’s observation was sharp: six months ago, those were Democratic talking points. Now they are universal. I noted that this is being reflected in polling. He is headed toward George W. Bush second term polling territory, and this voter gives us insight into why.
Trump’s Easter Sunday Truth Social post landed in this district like a grenade two days before election day. I said it directly: you could not have designed a worse possible tweet for a deeply religious, military, farming community in the South. Threatening to bomb civilian infrastructure while signing off with “Praise be to Allah,” on Easter, in a district where the church is the central institution of community life, is the kind of thing that moves votes. Charles noted that Fuller has fully connected himself to Trump. Every Republican voter who saw that tweet and felt something turn in their stomach now has to reckon with the fact that Fuller is running as Trump’s MAGA warrior.

The MAGA Betrayal Election

Charles put the clearest frame on what is actually happening in this district and in the country. Voters who supported Trump in 2024 made a calculation. They made trade-offs for the promise of economic relief. They got the opposite.

A woman at a cafe that morning approached Charles’s team and asked for buttons and stickers for her kids. She said people are just tired of the hate. But she added something important: it was different when there was at least a potential that prices would come down. People were willing to accept some of the terribleness in exchange for economic benefit. Now they are getting the terribleness with no benefit attached. The deal they made with themselves has collapsed.
Charles described what happened as a moral transaction that failed on its own terms. Enough people in November 2024 voted against their own values because they believed Trump would improve their economic lives. They voted against their spirituality, their religion, their sense of what was right, because they thought it would help their families. Now they are watching prices go up, a war that nobody voted for, and a president enriching himself in real time. The betrayal is not just political. It is personal.
I connected this to the polling. Trump hit a new low of 33% approval in a recent UMass poll. I would not be surprised to see Trump hit the 20s before the midterms. The voters who held their noses in 2024 are now looking for somewhere to go.

Why This Race Matters Beyond This District

Even if Harris loses tomorrow, what is happening in Georgia’s 14th is a data point that matters for every race between now and November. Charles was explicit about this, and I think he is right.

The math of the House majority is razor-thin. Republicans hold 217 seats to Democrats’ 214, with Kevin Kiley (R-CA) having switched to independent, still caucusing with Republicans, and two additional vacancies. As Charles noted, a seat flip is not just plus one for Democrats. It is plus one on one side and minus one on the other, a two-seat swing. Every race that moves in this environment, even one that does not flip, sends a signal about where the map is headed.
Charles made the argument for why Common Power is here, even in a race that looks uphill: the ground game they are running in this district is laying infrastructure for Jon Ossoff’s Senate race in the fall. Voters who meet a respectful canvasser at their door and have a real conversation, even if they do not vote for Shawn Harris, are going to remember that a Democrat walked up and did not patronize them. That is how you begin to change a district’s relationship with a party over time. It is slow work, and it compounds.
I noted that the 20 to 30-point swings we are seeing in elections across the country since 2024 are not something you can dismiss. Marjorie Taylor Greene won this district by 29 points. If the swing is anywhere close to what we have seen in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, this race is competitive in a way that the 2024 numbers do not predict. The electorate has moved. The gerrymandered maps drawn on 2024 data are already out of date. Charles closed with the line that stuck with me: all politics used to be local. Now all local politics are national. Even if Shawn Harris doesn’t win this race, tightening the margin here matters.

Bottom Line

Shawn Harris is the right candidate at the right moment in the right kind of red district. A brigadier general who saw combat in Afghanistan is arguing against a war of choice. A farmer is arguing against the tariffs and the Strait of Hormuz closure that are spiking his costs in real time. A candidate is telling Republicans they do not have to become Democrats to vote for him.

Charles Douglas and Common Power are on those streets because they understand that you fight in every district. Not because every district flips. Because every district where you show up builds something for the next race and the one after that. A 92-year-old woman is going to the polls tomorrow for Shawn Harris. Kelly enfranchised a voter today who is taking her siblings with her.

That is how you win democracy back. One door at a time.

If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. And if you’d like to get involved and knock doors this election year, I also highly recommend checking out Common Power.

Don Lemon & Ahmed Baba: Pam Bondi Overreached, Fumbled, & Got Fired

Ahmed Baba — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:29:28 GMT

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In our latest Two Brothers Talking conversation, Don Lemon and I broke down the breaking news of Pam Bondi’s firing as Attorney General. We started the live discussing reports that the firing was imminent, and then Don and I reacted live to the confirmation that she was, in fact, fired. Not just as AG, but from the Trump Administration entirely.

You’ll want to stick around for this conversation because Don’s reaction was priceless.

Pam Bondi’s tenure as Attorney General was defined by vindictive prosecutions of Trump’s political targets and complicity in the administration’s effort to cover up the Epstein Files. Now, her time is coming to an end.

Don and I had called this weeks ago. On this very platform, we predicted Bondi would be next after Kristi Noem, and that Tulsi Gabbard would likely follow. The pattern was always clear: Trump is cleaning house ahead of the midterms, throwing people under the bus rather than taking ownership of his administration’s failures. Bondi was never going to be the exception. She was always going to be an example.

What made this firing particularly revealing is not just that it happened, but why. According to reporting from Semafor and MS NOW, Trump felt Bondi had not aggressively enough pursued his political opponents. Really? She targeted journalists, like Don. She went after protesters. She tried to prosecute Trump’s political targets and got laughed out of grand jury rooms. She covered up the Epstein files on his behalf. And it still was not enough. That is the nature of loyalty in this administration. It is a one-way street, and it always ends the same way.

Don broke the news live on air, doing a one-take video announcement right there on the stream. That’s what these lives are all about. Dissecting the biggest news stories in real-time.

After we went through the news, I closed the live with some breaking news of my own: my wife and I are expecting a baby boy.

You can watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.

Pam Bondi Overreached & Got Booted

Bondi’s record as Attorney General was one of spectacular incompetence and desperate loyalty performances. She stumbled over her own feet at every turn, and the results speak for themselves. By my count, she did not successfully prosecute a single one of Trump’s targets.

I pointed out that the fumbles started early. From the mishandling of the Epstein Files to the Lindsey Halligan hiring, which directly contributed to the Letitia James and James Comey prosecutions falling apart. The grand jury would later reject the Letitia James case twice. The James Comey case has since been dismissed, due to the unlawful nature of Halligan’s appointment. I noted that across every high-profile target Trump sicced Bondi on, there is not a single successful prosecution to show for it. Zero for however many attempts.
Don flagged the congressional hearing moment as the clearest sign her days were numbered. Claiming the Dow was over 50,000 could not save her. She was performing for Trump, saying what she thought he wanted to hear, and it was embarrassing on a national stage. I noted that by the time she was behaving that desperately in public hearings, it must have already been clear internally that she was on notice. The hearing did not cause her to be fired, but it was likely one of the straws that broke the camel’s back.
Don made the broader point that the DOJ under Bondi was fundamentally off the rails, and that whoever replaces her inherits that wreckage. Chasing political enemies is a fool’s errand, Don argued, because it crowds out the actual work of the Justice Department: child sex trafficking, real civil rights violations, and issues that demand serious institutional attention. Bondi spent her tenure on loyalty performances instead.

Targeting Journalists & Political Targets

Bondi did not just fail to prosecute Trump’s enemies effectively. She went after people who had no business being targets in the first place, and the overreach ultimately accelerated her exit.

Don spoke directly about what Bondi’s DOJ did to him. I noted that I read the indictment, and it is frivolous and meritless. The charges do not hold up against what actually happened in his live stream. Some of what is in the indictment is flatly false. This prosecution was a loyalty performance that targeted journalists for doing their jobs.
I pointed out that Bondi specifically targeted Black independent journalists alongside protesters, a pattern that was both legally overreaching and politically revealing. Don made the point that even conservatives should be alarmed by a DOJ that arrests reporters for reporting, because the precedent cuts both ways. If a Democrat takes office and the same logic applies, conservatives become the targets. Most rational people understand that, Don argued, even if Bondi did not.
The core problem, as I framed it, is that Bondi confused aggression with competence. She thought going harder after Trump’s enemies would protect her job. What it actually did was expose how weak her legal footing was. Most of the vindictive cases she brought either collapsed at the grand jury stage, got thrown out, or stalled. She overreached, tripped over her own feet, and handed the people she was targeting the moral high ground in the process.

Loyalty Is A One-Way Street With Trump

The most clarifying thing about Bondi’s firing is not what she did wrong. It is what she did right and still got fired for, anyway.

I made the point that Bondi did everything Trump asked. She covered up the Epstein files. She went after his political opponents. She performed loyalty at every congressional hearing, even when it made her look ridiculous. And none of it was enough to save her job. Don and I have been saying this for months: loyalty in this administration flows in one direction only, toward Trump, and it does not protect you when you become inconvenient.
Trump’s Truth Social post confirmed that Pam Bondi is going to the private sector, which means she is out-out. She got booted.
I argued that what is driving this purge is the midterms. Trump is cleaning house and misplacing blame, trying to create the impression that his administration’s failures belong to the people he is removing rather than to the decisions he made. It is the same deflection pattern Don identified in our last conversation: the replacement becomes worse than what he was trying to fix, and the cover-up becomes worse than the original problem.

Firing Women First

Don flagged a pattern that deserves more attention. Every cabinet member Trump has fired or is reportedly considering firing is a woman.

Don read out the observation from writer Amy Siskind: Noem, Gabbard, and Bondi are the three names in the firing or near-firing conversation. Meanwhile, Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel remain in place despite embarrassments that dwarf anything Bondi did. Patel has been photographed flying on government jets with his girlfriend while the FBI investigates serious crimes. Hegseth has been a walking scandal since confirmation. Kennedy cannot find a CDC director to match his agenda. None of them are being fired.
I pointed out that the reason Hegseth is still there has nothing to do with performance. Trump likes the way Hegseth beats his chest at press conferences and yells at reporters. It is hyper toxic masculinity as Cabinet policy. The women in this administration are being held to a standard of results that the men are not, and when they fall short, they go first.
I noted that Bondi and the others are not feminists, and this is not about defending their records. The pattern is still the pattern. Trump is targeting women first in his midterm cleanup operation, while the men who have embarrassed him equally or worse remain untouched. That tells you something about how decisions are actually being made inside this White House.

Who’s Next

Bondi’s firing is not an isolated event. Don and I both think this is the beginning of a broader pre-midterm purge, and the names are already emerging.

Tulsi Gabbard is next in the crosshairs. I noted that reporting from The Guardian suggests Trump has been taking an informal straw poll among cabinet members, asking whether he should fire her. Don and I called this weeks ago on this platform. Her congressional testimony, where she refused to say Iran posed an imminent threat and contradicted the White House justification for the war, made her a liability. She is an opportunist who has outlasted her usefulness, and the same logic that took out Bondi applies to her.
Don raised Kash Patel as another likely departure. Patel has been a laughingstock, Don argued, and the Epstein files angle creates a complicated dynamic: can Trump really fire both Bondi and Patel, the two people with the most direct knowledge of how those files were handled, without raising more questions than he answers? I noted Trump’s solution is likely the same as always: move them sideways into invented roles rather than push them fully out and create enemies who might talk.
Todd Blanche is now acting AG, and Lee Zeldin’s name is being floated as a permanent replacement. Don and I agreed that Zeldin is more competent than Bondi, which makes him more dangerous. Don made the point plainly: a competent loyalist who actually knows how to prosecute is a worse outcome than an incompetent one who keeps fumbling the cases. The DOJ’s direction is not going to change. The execution might.

Bottom Line

Pam Bondi covered up the Epstein files, targeted journalists, went after Trump’s political enemies with frivolous indictments, and her cases got laughed out of grand jury rooms across the country. She did everything Trump asked. It was not enough.

That is the lesson of her tenure and her firing. Loyalty in this administration is extracted, not rewarded. The people who debase themselves most completely are not protected. They are just useful for longer. When they stop being useful, they go.

Don and I called this weeks ago. The midterm purge has started, and Trump is doing what he always does: replacing the people around him rather than examining the decisions he makes.

On a personal note, I closed this live with some news of my own: My wife and I are expecting a baby boy. I hope we can bring our son into a world that is better than the one we have right now. I’ll keep working to make that happen.

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Don Lemon & Ahmed Baba: Trump Can't Keep His Iran War Story Straight While His Team Manages His Fragile Ego

Ahmed Baba — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:03:37 GMT

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Don Lemon and I had a great conversation in our latest episode of Two Brothers Talking. We kept coming back to the same unfortunate truth: Donald Trump is being managed through this war like a child. His Cabinet is curating his reality, his party is inventing awards to keep him happy, and the people closest to him are making decisions he doesn’t fully understand while feeding him a two-minute montage of things blowing up and calling it a briefing.

This is a wartime president whose team treats him like a child. And we are all supposed to pretend that’s normal.

The Cabinet meeting today made it impossible to ignore. Two hours of Trump rambling with laminated folders in front of him, veering off script, letting Cabinet members take turns publicly glazing him while the country is at war. Don pointed out what should be obvious: he has never seen a president go through specific artillery in a Cabinet meeting like a man trying to convince a room he knows what’s happening. Don argued that this is not what winning looks like. That is what pounding the table looks like when you know you’re losing the argument.

And then there is what’s happening behind closed doors. NBC News reported that Trump’s daily war briefings consist largely of two-minute video montages of successful strikes, what one official described as “stuff blowing up.” When five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were hit at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, Trump wasn’t briefed. He found out from media reports. He then went on Truth Social and accused the media of wanting America to lose. His team is gaslighting him, and his instinct is to blame the press for telling him the truth.

Don and I kept landing in the same place: the people around Trump believe his ego needs to be managed. He is the frontman. He is not in the weeds. And so they are feeding him what he needs to keep performing while they do work he doesn't know the details of. That might work fine when you are selling condos in New York. It does not work when the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and troops from the 82nd Airborne are being deployed to the Middle East.

You won’t want to miss this conversation. You can watch it in full above and read key takeaways below.

The Managed President

Trump’s daily reality is being constructed for him. The Cabinet meeting today was Exhibit A, but the NBC News reporting on his war briefings is what crystallizes it. This is not a president who is being kept informed. This is a president who is being kept calm.

I pointed out that the two-minute montage briefings are not an accident. Officials told NBC News that Trump’s briefings tend to draw better feedback when they focus on U.S. victories. So that is what he gets. A carefully curated reel of successful strikes, with comparatively little detail about the negative ramifications of the war. His team has built him a version of this war that does not match the one the rest of us are watching.
Don described watching Trump at the Cabinet meeting, thumbing through laminated folders, reading a little, going off on tangents, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sat there visibly unsure where he was going next. He said it plainly: none of it makes sense. A president who actually understood the situation would not need to recite the artillery. He would be talking about strategy, objectives, and endgame. Instead, we got a performance.
The most damning detail from the NBC reporting: when Trump learned from media coverage that U.S. refueling planes had been struck, he did not question his advisers. He questioned the media. His team had successfully convinced him that anything contradicting the highlight reel was fake news. They are not just managing his briefings. They are managing his perception of reality itself.

A Walking Contradiction

I noted that we are living inside the volatility of this man’s mind. The contradictions are not occasional. They are Trump’s modus operandi. And in wartime, this disorienting back-and-forth is destructive.

Don and I walked through the contradictions. Trump says the war is won, but the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The war is won, but we need to send more troops. The uranium enrichment sites are obliterated, but the threat was imminent within days. We had productive talks on Monday, but today, Trump says it is up to Iran whether the war ends. Don asked the question directly: if the war is won, why are you asking for more help? If you don’t need your allies, why are you publicly mad at them? No one in that cabinet room challenged him.
Don flagged the NATO contradiction specifically. During the cabinet meeting, Trump said he was disappointed in NATO, that allies didn’t want to help. In the next breath, he said we don’t need them. Don’s point was precise: you can’t be pissed at people you claim not to need. The fact that he is publicly airing that frustration is itself a tell that things are not going the way his highlight reels suggest.
I noted that the stated objectives of this war have shifted at least three times. First, it was nuclear capability. Then it was missile capability. Now it appears to be reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which was closed because of a war that Trump started. So the victory condition has become: fix the problem he created. And even that is not done. Don made the point plainly: even if Trump pulled everyone out tomorrow, Iran and Israel would keep fighting, and Iran would be coming for us.

A/B Testing Iran War Messages

Trump is not just being managed from above. He is also running his own chaotic messaging operation, trying out different versions of the war in real time to see which one lands. Don put it precisely: Trump is the slogan guy. He does not fully understand what is happening, but he is trying to sell it anyway, and the sales pitch keeps changing.

I made the point that on the weekend the war started, Trump was calling different reporters and floating multiple different justifications in a single day, all contradicting each other. That is not a commander-in-chief with a strategy. That is how a marketer behaves when they’re A/B testing Facebook ads. The difference is that this is not a marketing department. People are dying.
Don’s framework was sharp: Trump’s team feeds him the positive information, keeps him performing, and handles the actual decisions on the other side. But because Trump is also consuming media and getting outside input, reality keeps bleeding through. Someone tells him Hegseth might be a mistake. He turns on Fox News and sees Iran is still bombing Israel despite being told they’ve been obliterated. The cognitive dissonance builds, and his response is to keep throwing different messages at the wall.
Monday morning’s Truth Social post claiming “very productive talks” with Iran was a live example of this. I pointed out the timing: $580 million in oil futures flooded the markets fifteen minutes before that post went up. Whether or not his allies were positioned to benefit, Trump was clearly trying to manufacture a positive news cycle, move oil prices, and claim a win. Iran then publicly stated there were no negotiations. The A/B test failed in real time.

The Participation Trophy Party

The Republicans who spent years mocking participation trophies just invented one and handed it to the President of the United States during a war. Don said it, and he was right: they are treating him exactly the way they accuse the left of treating children.

At Wednesday’s NRCC fundraising dinner, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that House Republicans had created a brand new award, something they had never done before, and named Trump its first-ever recipient: the “America First Award,” a golden statue. I pointed out that this follows the same pattern as FIFA inventing a “FIFA Peace Prize” to give to Trump after he grumbled about not winning the Nobel. The people around him believe that if they keep the awards coming, they can keep him manageable.
Don called it immediately: a participation trophy. The same party that has spent years arguing that everyone-gets-a-trophy culture produces weak people and entitlement is now manufacturing bespoke honors for a 79-year-old man to prevent a tantrum. They are not treating him like a president. They are treating him like a kid who needs to be kept happy while the adults handle the situation.
The Cabinet meeting glaze fest was the daytime version of the same dynamic. I described it directly: Cabinet members going around the circle, publicly telling him he is the greatest man who has ever lived, while a war is happening and Americans are dying. Don’s framing was right. It is the cabinet room version of a courtroom where you are losing, and you start pounding the table. The performance is for an audience of one.

You Can’t TACO This War

Don and I closed on the question of where this actually goes. And neither of us had a reassuring answer. The problem with this war is not just that it was started without justification or a plan. It is that there is no clean exit. You cannot TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) this war.

I made the point that Iran is not Venezuela. You cannot remove the head of the regime and assume the body follows. Iran has been pissed at the United States and the United Kingdom since 1953, when the U.S. and UK engineered the coup that removed Mossadegh. The IRGC has been operating from a posture of defiant resistance for decades. The idea that killing Khamenei and bombing enrichment sites makes them compliant is not a strategy. It is a fantasy.
Don raised the concern that a foreign policy expert has been warning about: Iran is going to start looking for other ways to hit back, including soft targets, and that risk does not stay in the Middle East. I added that Lebanon is already over a million people displaced as Israel moves in and strikes there. The regional destabilization is feeding extremism risks that will outlast this war for years. The blowback does not end when the Strait of Hormuz reopens.
Don made the most clarifying point of the conversation on this: even if Trump declared victory tomorrow and pulled out, Iran and Israel will likely keep fighting. And Iran will seek retaliation against the United States regardless. This is not a war with a clean off switch. Trump has sought to deflect from his domestic political problems, and as Don has said every time, the deflection became worse than whatever he was originally trying to hide. Now he has to deflect from the deflection. The objectives keep shifting because there was never a real objective. Just a man A/B testing his way through a war he does not fully understand, being fed highlight reels, and collecting golden trophies while the region burns.

Bottom Line

Donald Trump is not running this war. He is being managed through it by a team that feeds him curated montages, manufactured awards, and public praise because they have concluded that is the only way to keep him functional. The Cabinet meeting today was not governance. It was a two-hour performance designed to make one man feel good about a war that 60 percent of Americans oppose and that has no clear endgame.

Don and I have been saying this for weeks. The contradictions are not gaffes. They are the operating system of a president who does not fully understand what is happening, surrounded by people who need him not to. And when reality breaks through the bubble, his instinct is to call it fake news because the cognitive dissonance is too much for his fragile ego to bear.

You cannot TACO this war. The region is destabilizing, the objectives keep shifting, and the people closest to Trump know it. The fact that Rubio and Vance have gone essentially dark is all the evidence you need. When the people positioning themselves for 2028 go stealth, it means they know this is not going well.

Propaganda Briefings, Market Manipulation, & Lies: Why Trump Is The Worst Possible Leader For This Moment

Ahmed Baba — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:38:03 GMT

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This week, James Matthewson joined me from Edinburgh for another Across the Pond episode, and we dug deep. Deeper than the headlines. Deeper than the mixed messaging and the fake claims of peace talks. We got to what is actually driving all of this: the character of the man making these decisions, and what this moment demands that he simply cannot provide.

This week, Trump declared the war won. Simultaneously, sent more troops. Claimed Iran was in peace talks. Iran said that it was fake news used to manipulate oil markets. And through all of it, NBC News reported that Trump has been receiving his daily war briefings in the form of two-minute montages of successful airstrikes, described by one official as videos of “stuff blowing up.” This is the President of the United States having his ego managed like a child.

We also got into the insider trading pattern that is becoming impossible to ignore. $580 million in oil futures flooded the market 16 minutes before Trump’s Truth Social post announcing peace talks. $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures were purchased, and $192 million in oil futures were sold five minutes before the same post. Senator Chris Murphy called it “mind-blowing corruption.” And the administration has undermined the very agencies that would investigate it.

We also made time for something important: a careful, principled conversation about Netanyahu, the Israeli government, and why nuance in this moment is a necessity.

You can watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.

Trump Is Happy-Talking His Way Through A War He Cannot Control

Trump spent this week trying to talk his way out of a war he cannot control. He declared victory while Iran kept firing. He claimed peace talks were underway while Iran called it fake news designed to manipulate oil markets. And when he stood by Marine One and spoke for a single minute, James counted six direct contradictions. He said the leaders were dead, but the U.S. is negotiating with them. The war is won, but send more troops. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, but we have never been in better shape.

I raised the central absurdity of Trump’s position this week. He cannot simultaneously tell the world the war is won and ask allies to send ships into a minefield. If the war is won, why do you need reinforcements? And if you need reinforcements, what exactly have you won? Iran explicitly responded to his peace talks announcement by calling it “fake news used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.”
James made the point that cuts to the heart of how far we have fallen. We are now in a position where America’s allies cannot determine who is telling the truth between the United States government and the Iranian regime. At one time, that would have been obvious. It is not anymore. James noted that Trump lies on an hourly basis, minute by minute, and the result is a world where even those who despise the Iranian regime cannot simply trust the American president over them. That indictment deserves to sit with us.
I pointed out that what Trump is really doing is happy-talking a war he privately knows has no clear off-ramp. When he was younger, Trump got deeply into manifestation thinking and positive self-talk. He now operates from a worldview where speaking something positively enough makes it real. That is not leadership. That is delusion cosplaying as confidence. Iran has a vote in when this war ends. Any deal available now will be worse than the deal available before this war started, because the regime has been decapitated toward its more extreme elements, the IRGC is expanding its power, and its military command uses what is called mosaic leadership, a decentralized structure with no central command to dismantle. You cannot bomb your way to a negotiating table with people who have nothing left to lose.

The Propaganda Reel: Trump’s Two-Minute Briefings & The Sycophancy Machine

NBC News reported this week that Trump has been receiving his daily war briefings in the form of two-minute video montages of successful US strikes on Iran, described by an official as clips of “stuff blowing up.” He is reportedly frustrated that media coverage does not match the success story he is being shown. This is not incidental. It is the operating logic of this entire administration.

I laid out what this reporting actually tells us. Trump is being managed. People around him are curating his information flow to keep him happy, the same way you keep a child calm with a screen. He has no attention span for real intelligence briefings, required picture books in his first term, and now requires a highlight reel in his second. The result is a commander-in-chief who does not have a stable grip on reality during an active war. A president needs all the facts, including the negative ones, to make sound decisions. Trump cannot receive negative information without seeing it as an attack on himself. So his staff filters it out.
James identified the pattern underneath the briefing problem. Trump associates people with how they make him feel. If someone delivers bad news, they become the bad news. They get fired. It is a base impulse, animalistic even. And the entire administration has adapted around it. Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, presents herself as a steadying hand but has become, as I put it, an efficiency machine for sycophancy and loyalty. The system is not malfunctioning. It is working exactly as designed by a man who cannot tolerate reality.

The Leadership Void: What This Moment Demands & What Trump Cannot Provide

This is the thread that ran through the entire conversation. I have been reading Ryan Holiday’s Stillness Is the Key, and it gave us a framework for exactly what is missing. The book walks through how leaders in history - from Lincoln to JFK - relied on stillness, deliberation, and the capacity to sit with complexity before acting. Trump is the antithesis of every one of those qualities.

I raised JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis as the clearest possible contrast. Advisors around Kennedy were telling him to bomb the missile sites in Cuba. He took a beat. He sat with it. He chose the blockade, a show of force that did not escalate beyond the point of no return. That deliberation is what prevented nuclear war. Trump would have bombed. He responds to force, so he assumes everyone else does too. He cannot project himself into the shoes of an adversary, which means he cannot understand what an adversary needs to stand down. Hegseth said this week that the US is “negotiating with bombs.” That is not a negotiating strategy. That is a confession of foolishness.
James drew the Obama contrast using Obama’s own memoir. In office, Obama would go around the table, collect multiple opinions, weigh them against each other, and choose the best path. Trump does the opposite. He starts with his conclusion and finds people who agree with it. He is not gathering intelligence. He is seeking validation. The result is a war launched without a coalition, without an exit strategy, and without any understanding of how Iran actually works. James put it plainly: every intelligence agent who briefed this president knew about Iran’s decentralized military command. Trump did not care.
I made the point that Trump sees everyone as an NPC, a non-player character with no inner life, no sentience, no interests worth understanding. He views the world as a game in which he is the only real person and everyone else exists to serve his will. That is why he called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers.” He cannot comprehend self-sacrifice because it does not exist in his worldview. And as James noted, it is why everything Trump does is projection. I added that he sees people acting with genuine decency, but he cannot accept it as real. He assumes they are performing the same way he performs. It is the only explanation that fits his behavior.

Profiting Off The War: The Insider Trading Pattern

The corruption case around this war is not hypothetical. It is documented, it is patterned, and the regulatory infrastructure that would investigate it has been deliberately dismantled.

I laid out the facts. $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a single spike 16 minutes before Trump’s Truth Social post on Monday, claiming peace talks with Iran. Five minutes before that same post, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures were reportedly purchased while $192 million in oil futures were sold. Orders four to six times larger than anything else happening at that hour. No news event. No economic data scheduled. Senator Chris Murphy said publicly, “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption. Mind-blowing corruption.” The same pattern appeared before the Maduro capture in January, before the Liberation Day tariff pause last spring. This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.
James called it what it is: blatant, obvious, and almost certainly consequence-free. He connected it to the 2008 financial crisis, where financial crimes of enormous scale produced almost no accountability. He put it in terms that cut through the abstraction: someone made hundreds of millions of dollars from a single trade on a Monday morning when people cannot afford eggs and cannot put fuel in their cars. He called it the “let them eat cake” moment of this administration. The people running this country are enriching themselves and their friends off the suffering they are creating with their own policy decisions. James also flagged that he personally had to pay £26 in Trump tariffs to collect a birthday gift sent from the US, Trader Joe’s products that are only available in America. That is the policy in its most human form.
I also added that the prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi, are completely unregulated spaces where people are effectively gambling on war and death in real time. I called for a full ban on stock trading for all high-level government officials while in office, and robust regulation of prediction markets that have become vehicles for insider trading on national security decisions and everyday reality itself.

Netanyahu, The War’s Extension & The Importance of Nuance

While Trump was announcing peace talks, Netanyahu was deepening Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, with over a million people displaced and a humanitarian crisis growing by the day. James and I both took time to say the quiet part loud: Netanyahu is extending this war for domestic political reasons, but we also made a point that Netanyahu’s actions must be criticized with care so we don’t stoke antisemitism.

James made the distinction that I want to be unambiguous about. He criticizes the Iranian regime. He criticizes the Israeli government. He does not criticize the Iranian people or the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish people are not responsible for Netanyahu’s actions. Most of the Jewish people James knows in Britain are on pro-Palestinian marches every weekend. The equation between the Israeli government and Jewish people globally is not only false, it is a trap, and Netanyahu benefits from it every time someone falls into it. James also noted that Bibi Netanyahu uses antisemitism as a shield to deflect from actions that have nothing to do with Jewish culture or faith.
I pushed back on something in the chat where a viewer said Israel had lost the right to exist as a country. No. That is not where we go. There is a line. The Israeli people deserve safety. I also noted that Netanyahu and his far-right coalition are doing in Gaza and Lebanon is setting back the Israeli cause. His conduct is what feeds those who would generalize their contempt for a government into contempt for an entire people. I have spent years editing academic work on antisemitism and extremism. I know the tropes and the history. And that is exactly why I refuse to let the nuance get flattened.
James closed this section with something worth repeating. He said: Be angry, be outraged, criticize every corrupt man in every country who is destroying this planet and oppressing his own people. But the second that anger falls into hate of people who had nothing to do with any of this, you have fallen for the trap. The people trying to divide us, Trump, Netanyahu, the Ayatollahs, the white supremacists, are all two cheeks of the same arse. They all benefit when we generalize. The only response is to resist it.

Bottom Line

Trump is happy-talking a war he cannot control, receiving briefings as propaganda reels, sending contradictory signals that even America’s allies cannot decode, and presiding over what looks very much like systematic insider trading on his own market-moving announcements. The agencies that would investigate it have been dismantled. The IRGC’s mosaic leadership cannot be bombed into submission. Israel’s offensive is extending the conflict while Trump claims it is over.

James’s closing words said it best. The clock is running out. The world does not have enough oil supply to sustain a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Something is going to break. And when it does, we need to be ready to hold this administration accountable for everything it has done.

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Don Lemon & I Analyze How Trump's Own DNI Just Proved The Iran War Was Built On A Lie

Ahmed Baba — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:46:21 GMT

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In our latest Two Brothers Talking conversation, Don Lemon and I discussed what should be the lead story everywhere.

Tulsi Gabbard sat before Congress and, in a written statement submitted to the committee, claimed that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated after the summer strikes and that there had been no effort since to rebuild that capability. Gabbard confirmed that testimony under firm questioning from Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA).

That is the Director of National Intelligence directly contradicting the president’s stated justification for launching a war that has killed at least 13 American service members, wounded at least 200, driven up gas prices, and killed 175 people at an Iranian elementary school with outdated targeting data.

Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned the day before Gabbard’s testimony and proclaimed Iran posed no imminent threat. He then told Tucker Carlson that Iran was not on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon three weeks ago when the war started, and they were not in June either. The previous Supreme Leader had a fatwa, a religious ban, against nuclear weapons. The intelligence community said there was no imminent threat. And Trump launched the war anyway.

This is like if we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction three weeks into the invasion of Iraq.

You can watch the full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

The DNI Just Called The President A Liar Without Saying It

This is the most significant intelligence revelation since the war began. Tulsi Gabbard walked into those hearings with a written statement that directly undermined the president’s justification for the war and then confirmed it under questioning from Senator Jon Ossoff. What she could not do was say the words out loud. What she did instead was make the conclusion unavoidable.

I raised the Iraq parallel that I think is the clearest way to understand the scale of what just happened. If we had been three weeks into the Iraq War and the top intelligence official had come before Congress and confirmed there were no weapons of mass destruction, it would have been an administration-halting scandal. Wall-to-wall coverage. Hour by hour. Instead, Gabbard’s testimony moved through the news cycle like just another story. Don said he could not understand why there was not a code red, why people were not calling for the president to answer for this.
I raised the specific mechanics of what Gabbard did because it is worth understanding precisely. She submitted a written statement to the committee saying Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated after the summer strikes, and there had been no effort to rebuild. She then read her opening statement aloud, omitting that line. Ossoff caught it and questioned her directly. Under that questioning, she confirmed it was the analysis of the intelligence community. Her only out was to say the determination of imminence was up to the president alone. Don noted what that actually means: she was telling Congress that the intelligence community told Trump there was no imminent threat, and he decided there was one anyway. That is calling the president a liar without using the word.
I added the fatwa point that compounds everything else. Under questioning, Gabbard also acknowledged that the previous Supreme Leader had a religious ban against nuclear weapons. So the administration’s own DNI confirmed both that Iran’s nuclear capability was obliterated after the summer strikes and that the leader they killed had a fatwa against building one. Every pillar of Trump’s stated justification for this war has now been undermined by his own intelligence apparatus.

MAGA Is Fracturing & The Iran War Is Why

The Joe Kent resignation is not just a news item. It is a signal that the anti-war coalition inside the MAGA ecosystem is real, growing, and now intersecting with the conspiracy theories that have been building since Charlie Kirk’s death. Don and I both noted that watching the conspiratorial machine turn on itself has been one of the stranger dynamics of this war.

Don flagged Joe Kent’s resignation and his Tucker Carlson interview as the moment the fracture became undeniable. Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, went on record saying Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons three weeks ago when the war started, and was not doing so in June either. Kent has his own serious problems; his ties to Nick Fuentes and white nationalist figures are documented and reprehensible. But on the imminent threat question, he is saying the same thing as Gabbard’s written statement. That alignment matters regardless of who is saying it.
Don raised the Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories circulating in right-wing media because they are now colliding directly with the anti-Iran war sentiment. Candace Owens has been building a whole argument that Kirk was taken out because of his opposition to Israel. Joe Kent insinuated something similar to Tucker Carlson. Don noted that it sounds like a Candace Owens conspiracy theory. I said I have seen no hard evidence and personally do not believe it. But the fact that it is gaining serious traction in right-wing information spaces, and that it is converging with Megyn Kelly’s break from the pro-war lane, shows just how deeply fractured the MAGA base has become over this war.
Don observed that the Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin beef, which reached a level of absurdity neither of us will repeat in full detail here, is itself a symptom of what is happening. Trump had to weigh in to defend Levin. The fact that the president of the United States is being pulled into disputes between right-wing media figures over the Iran War shows how far the consensus has collapsed. And this is happening in a midterm year.

Short-Term Pain, Long-Term Reckoning

Don had an insight during his show the morning of this Live that I think is worth sitting with. He said maybe the administration is right that this is short-term pain for long-term gain. Just not in the way they mean it.

Don posed the thought that the short-term gain could lead to the long-term gain of Trump’s movement collapsing. He also made the point that the Senate and congressional hearings, painful as they are to watch, are functioning as transparency. They are forcing the people placed in these positions to sit before the public and demonstrate, on camera, that they either do not know what they are doing or are unwilling to tell the truth about it. The American people can see it. It is not being buried. And in a midterm year, that visibility has consequences.
I agreed and extended the argument. Everything Trump has done, the war, the tariffs, the attacks on allies, the economic instability, is backfiring in ways that are slowly but surely collapsing the political foundation of this administration. The conditions being created right now are very similar to what produced Barack Obama’s rise. An unjust war in the Middle East. An economy with serious risk factors. A Republican base that’s fracturing over presidential overreach. The recipe is the same. The question is whether the Democratic Party is ready to produce a candidate who can take advantage of it.
Don made the point I keep coming back to. It is not up to Trump to decide when this war ends. Iran has a vote. If Trump announces a pullback, Israel and Iran will keep going. The war does not stop because he declares it over. He has stumbled into a quagmire, as Don put it, and no amount of Hegseth press briefings or media pressure campaigns changes that underlying reality. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The body count is still rising. And his own intelligence director just confirmed the war was built on a lie.

Bottom Line

The Director of National Intelligence testified that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were obliterated after the summer strikes and there was no effort to rebuild them. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center resigned and said there was no imminent threat. The previous Supreme Leader had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Every stated justification for this war has now been contradicted by Trump’s own people.

Don said it best. If this were a Democratic administration, Sean Hannity’s head would be popping off. Instead, it is moving through the news cycle. We cannot let it.

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Trump Is Begging The Allies He Antagonizes To Save Him In The Strait Of Hormuz. They're Saying No.

Ahmed Baba — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:36:08 GMT

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James Matthewson and I were both sick for this Substack Live, but we powered through because the conversation couldn't wait and because nothing happening in the world right now is going to pause for a cold.

Donald Trump spent his entire first year of this term tariffing our allies, threatening Greenland, calling European leaders freeloaders, and treating NATO partners like adversaries. And now, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and the war he launched without consulting anyone spiraling beyond his control, he is going back to those same allies and begging them to send their ships into a minefield to clean up his mess. They are refusing. And from where James sits in Edinburgh, that refusal looks not just rational but inevitable.

This conversation gave us the European view of what is happening in real time, from a Westminster contact’s frank assessment of where this ends, to a St. Patrick’s Day taxi driver in Edinburgh who surprised James with genuine sympathy for ordinary Americans. We also got into the historical ignorance behind the Venezuela comparison, the manosphere documentary that James says is required viewing, and what the next American president is going to need to repair what has been broken.

You can watch the full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

Trump Is Begging For Help He Has No Right To Ask For

The central absurdity of this moment is that Trump launched a war without building a coalition, without warning allies, without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz, and is now asking those same allies to put their service personnel and vessels at risk to bail him out. The request is not just diplomatically tone-deaf. It is structurally incoherent. And Europe is not buying it.

James made the political reality plain. No elected leader in Europe who wants to survive the next election would side with Trump right now. His approval ratings across Europe are staggering in their negativity. James noted that Keir Starmer, who was unpopular as UK Prime Minister, has actually seen his poll numbers improve since standing firm and refusing to join the war. The political benefit of opposing Trump is now measurable. That dynamic makes the coalition ask not just unlikely but impossible.
I raised the core contradiction that nobody in the administration seems able to answer. Trump has been declaring the war a success and saying it is essentially won. And then in the same breath, he is asking allies to come help him in the Strait of Hormuz. If you have won, why do you need reinforcements? And if you need reinforcements, what exactly have you won? James put it simply: one minute the war is won, and there has never been a better success. The next minute, send your ships. You cannot hold both of those positions.
James described what the ask actually requires of allies. Sending ships into an active war zone where Iran is laying mines, where Iranian drones and missiles are still active, where the US Navy itself has said it is too dangerous to conduct escorts. Trump is asking European nations to put their personnel into that environment for a war he started without consulting them, for goals that shift by the press conference, with no clear endgame. James’s answer was the answer of every European leader right now: why on Earth would we do that?

What Trump Fundamentally Misunderstands About Iran

James and I both landed on the same diagnosis. Trump projected his transactional worldview onto a regime that is ideological to its core. He thought Iran would be Venezuela. He thought you decapitate the leadership, find your Delcy Rodriguez, and someone raises their hand to make a deal. Iran is not Venezuela. It has never been Venezuela. And anyone with even a passing knowledge of the region’s history could have told him that.

I laid out the historical throughline that makes the Venezuela comparison not just wrong but insulting to the complexity of the situation. The US and UK engineered a coup of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 to secure oil interests. That led to the rule of the Shah, which led to the 1979 revolution, which led to the Iran-Iraq war, which produced the IRGC, which is what we are fighting now. Iran has been building its ideology and its grievance for decades. Trump does not know this history.
James made the point about ideological regimes that cuts to the heart of why Trump’s dealmaker worldview fails here. Nations and peoples do not act on a predictable set of transactional circumstances. They act on faith, belief, tribal affiliation, domestic political survival, historical grievance, and things that cannot be compressed into a business negotiation. James noted that Trump is surrounded by religious fundamentalists himself, and still cannot comprehend that Iran’s leadership operates from a belief system that does not have a price. America is the great Satan to them. That is not rhetoric. That is theology.
James quoted a Westminster contact who described the current situation as the final act of a Shakespeare play. The mad king staggering about, lashing out at everyone, the vultures circling, people knowing it is only a matter of time, and a protracted war where people are expected to die on his behalf and be grateful for doing so.

The View From The Other Side Of The Atlantic

James gave us something in this conversation that almost no American media outlet can provide: a ground-level reading of how Europe actually sees this moment, not from analysts or governments, but from ordinary people. The picture is more nuanced than simple anti-Americanism, and more hopeful than you might expect.

James described the scene on St. Patrick’s Day in Edinburgh. American students out in their green, celebrating. A taxi driver pointing at them, about to slag them off, and then stopping himself. He said, you know, you’ve got to feel sorry for them right now. It can’t be easy. James said he thought that moment was striking because sympathy is not what you expect from a rambunctious Edinburgh taxi driver talking about loud Americans in a bar. But it was there. The world, James said, is distinguishing between Trump and the American people. And that distinction is what makes restoration possible.
James noted that one unexpected consequence of Trump’s behavior has been the reunification of Europe. Brexit fractured relationships. Anti-European movements created friction across the continent. And now, from Pedro Sanchez in Spain to Keir Starmer in Britain to Friedrich Merz in Germany, leaders who disagree on many things are united in their position on the Iran War. James said the next democratically elected American president will inherit a stronger, more cohesive European bloc to work with, precisely because Trump forced them together.
I raised the 2028 parallel to the conditions that produced Obama. An economy with serious risk factors, a war of choice in the Middle East destabilizing the region, a surge in terrorism coming, a Republican Party that overreached catastrophically. James agreed that the pendulum swing is coming and said it deserves to be severe. But he also noted the UK could swing the other way at the same time, as it often trends toward the opposite of America’s political direction with a slight delay. The transatlantic relationship, he said, is bigger than any one government on either side. That is what conversations like ours are about.

The Manosphere, Fragile Masculinity & What Is Driving All Of This

James recommended the Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere by Louis Theroux, and we used it as a jumping-off point for something we have talked about in previous Lives: the toxic masculinity that is driving not just online grifters but the actual conduct of this administration.

James described Theroux’s technique of the long pause, asking these men to explain themselves and then simply not filling the silence. The men end up doubting their own words on camera. James said he watched it and then flipped over to the news and saw Pete Hegseth. The embodiment of it right there.
I raised the broader cultural point. The manosphere is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a symptom of what our overall culture has been promoting to young men: fake toughness, dominance performance, and the idea that strength means controlling other people. Trump sits at the top of that ecosystem. This is the logical endpoint of a culture that valorizes aggression and calls it leadership.
James closed with something worth sitting with. He said he grew up politically with a lot of anti-American sentiment in his reading. Marx, Castro, and anti-imperialist texts. But seeing what is actually happening to the American people under this administration produced something he did not expect: genuine sympathy, and a renewed belief in the promise of America.

Bottom Line

Trump spent a year treating allies like adversaries. Now he needs them, and they are saying no. That is not a betrayal. It is a consequence. And consequences, as James noted, are something Trump is confronting for perhaps the first time in his life.

The war is unpopular at home, rejected abroad, killing children, destabilizing the region, and producing a more extreme Iranian regime rather than a compliant one. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The war has spiraled out of control, and hopefully, Republicans will begin to see what their votes have wrought.

The world is waiting to welcome America back. That is both the most hopeful thing James said and the most damning indictment of where we are.

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How Trump Got The Iran War So Wrong: No Plan, No Coalition, & No Regard For How Iran Would Respond

Ahmed Baba — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:29:06 GMT

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This was one of the best foreign policy conversations I’ve had on this platform. Adam Ali is one of the sharpest foreign policy minds I know, and it was great to really get into the weeds on exactly why President Trump and his administration of sycophants are failing in this war.

We dissected the truth about what has gone wrong, piece by piece.

We covered everything. The closed planning circle that excluded virtually the entire national security apparatus. The hubris that came from Venezuela and the 12-day war. The failure to build a coalition. The total misunderstanding of what motivates an ideological regime like Iran. The JCPOA and how Trump’s destruction of it made any future deal impossible. The consequences nobody planned for. And a closing conversation about the American project itself and whether we can still leave it in a better place than we found it.

Adam opened with something that set the tone for the whole conversation. He said watching a world order that our grandparents built being thrown out at a rapid clip keeps him up at night. It keeps me up, too. But we did not end in despair. We ended with something closer to resolve.

You can watch the full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

The Closed Sycophantic Planning Circle & The Hubris Behind It

One of the most consequential structural failures of this war was the decision to keep planning within an extremely small group. The Wall Street Journal’s reporting revealed that the interagency process, the weeks or months of deliberation, and the airing of dissenting views were all skipped. What you get when you skip that process is a war launched without anyone in the room who would tell the president what he did not want to hear.

Adam made the point directly from the WSJ reporting. Typically, war preparations include weeks or months of classified deliberations, written planning documents, dissenting views from diplomats and intelligence officials, and National Security Council meetings with cabinet members. None of that happened here. The narrowed circle narrowed the advice, the information, and the range of scenarios the president was forced to consider before committing American forces.
I raised the purge of the general officer ranks as the deeper structural explanation. There are no Mark Milleys, no Mark Espers in this Pentagon. The people who would have walked into the Oval Office and said this is a catastrophic idea have been systematically removed and replaced with loyalists. General Caine reportedly warned Trump directly that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation. Trump dismissed it. When you build a command structure of people who tell you what you want to hear, you get a war built on what you want to believe.
Adam traced the hubris directly to Venezuela. The Maduro operation went off without consequence, without pushback, without visible blowback. Trump got high off it. And critically, as Adam noted, Cuba is already in an energy crisis, a consequence that nobody in that small circle was thinking about. The pattern was set. Take the excursion. Declare success. Move on. Iran was supposed to be the same playbook.

The Coalition Failure & What It Reveals About Trump’s Worldview

Even if you accept every false premise of this war, the failure to build a coalition before launching it is indefensible. Europe was given minutes of notice. Gulf allies who were going to absorb Iranian retaliation were not warned. And now Trump is going back to those same allies, begging them to help protect the Strait of Hormuz, and getting nothing. Adam drew the Iraq comparison precisely because it shows how far below even that catastrophically flawed precedent this war falls.

Adam walked through the post-9/11 Camp David meeting where Bush’s war cabinet assembled within days of the attack. Even with Ground Zero still on fire, the Bush administration spent months building political consensus, assembling a coalition, and prepositioning assets from spring 2002 through the March 2003 launch. Fifty countries had signed on fifteen days after the war began. That war was launched dishonestly, and the outcome was catastrophic. But the work was done. Here, our Gulf allies learned about the strikes from the news.
Adam noted that the Gulf states are furious and for reasons that go beyond politics. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Dubai, Qatar, Oman, and Jordan have spent decades trying to position the region as a stable, tourist-friendly, economically open zone. Dubai is now under fire almost daily. Oman, which was facilitating negotiations, is under attack. These are countries that had every reason to believe Trump was their ally. He took billions in investments, hosted state visits, and collected diplomatic wins. And then he launched a war that immediately destabilized everything they had spent decades building without a single heads up.
I made the point that has not gotten enough attention. Trump spent his entire first year of this term attacking NATO allies, threatening Greenland, calling European leaders freeloaders, and undermining every relationship he could. And then he turned around and asked those same allies to send their ships into a minefield in the Strait of Hormuz to clean up a mess he created without consulting them. The fact that they are refusing is not a betrayal. It is a completely rational response to how they have been treated.

What Trump Fundamentally Misunderstands About Iran

This is the section of the conversation that gets to the root of everything. Trump did not just miscalculate tactically. He went into this war with a fundamental misunderstanding of what Iran is, what motivates the regime, and why no deal was ever going to emerge from decapitating its leadership. Adam put it plainly: Trump does not understand ideologues. He does not understand people with sincerely held beliefs. He thought he would find his Delcy Rodriguez.

Adam laid out the core delusion. Trump genuinely believed that if you remove enough layers of Iranian leadership, someone would raise their hand and say they wanted to make a deal. He projected his transactional worldview onto a regime that is ideological to its core. He thought Iran was Venezuela. Iran is not Venezuela. The Iranian regime has survived 47 years of isolation, sanctions, the Iran-Iraq war, and repeated military degradation precisely because survival is what it considers victory. The regime still stands. By their own logic, they are winning.
I raised the 1953 coup because it is the historical context that makes everything else legible. The US and UK overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government to secure oil interests. Iran has never forgotten it. Everything that followed, the 1979 revolution, the IRGC, the hostility toward any deal with Washington, flows from that original betrayal. Trump does not know this history. Witkoff made comments about uranium enrichment technology during the Geneva negotiations that were, as I said on the Live, just insane. These were not serious negotiations. They were theater.
Adam made the point about Marco Rubio that I think is one of the sharpest analytical observations in the whole conversation. Rubio cut his teeth in Bush world. Trump has railed against neoconservative ideology since he came down the escalator. But he has been morphed into the instrument of the very ideology he claimed to hate, out of desperation, out of vanity, out of his need to exert power somewhere when his domestic position was weakening. He has become what he said he hated and does not appear to know it. Or he does know, and just doesn’t care.

The Tearing Up Of JCPOA & The Destruction Of American Credibility

Nothing in this conversation made me angrier than the section on the JCPOA. Because the people who are now claiming Iran was never going to comply with any deal are the same people who destroyed the one deal that was working. Trump’s own State Department said Iran was in compliance. The UN’s atomic watchdog said Iran was in compliance. Every objective observer said Iran was in compliance. And Trump tore it up anyway because of his hatred of Obama.

Adam made the credibility argument in terms that go beyond Iran. We have now established a pattern that the words of a Republican president mean nothing. And the words of a Democratic president mean nothing either, because a Republican can come in and declare the previous administration illegitimate and tear up whatever agreements were made. No country can negotiate with that. The destruction of the JCPOA did not just end one deal. It ended America’s ability to be a credible negotiating partner for the foreseeable future.
I raised the North Korea comparison because it illustrates the lesson every regime is now drawing. Kim Jong-un has a nuclear weapon. Trump treated him with deference, flew to North Korea, gave him legitimacy, and never struck. Iran gave up its nuclear program under the JCPOA. Iran is now being bombed. Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program. Gaddafi was killed in the street. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons under the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine was invaded. The lesson every authoritarian regime on earth is internalizing right now is that nuclear weapons are the only real protection against military force.
Adam added the USAID point as the soft power corollary. The alternative to war is soft power. It is USAID. It is the tools that build relationships, credibility, and influence without firing a single missile. This administration has shuttered those tools. And now reports are emerging of using AIDS funding in Africa as leverage. As Adam put it, this is how you end what historians will likely label the Pax Americana, the period between 1945 and roughly 2013 during which American power, for all its contradictions, maintained a certain global order.

The Ramifications Nobody Planned For

Adam’s framework from the beginning of the conversation was about the failure to consider second, third, and Nth order effects. We saw it in Venezuela, where Cuba is now in an energy crisis. We are seeing it in the Strait of Hormuz, where a closure the Trump Administration didn’t adequately plan for is threatening to destabilize the global economy. And we are going to keep seeing it as the downstream consequences of this war ripple out in ways the small planning circle never modeled.

Adam described what the endgame actually looks like from a clear-eyed view. The Washington Post reported this week that the Iranian regime is consolidating rather than collapsing. The more moderate elements that could have credibly negotiated an off-ramp are being killed off. Adam specifically named Larijani, a pragmatist by Iranian standards, as someone who might have been interested in a negotiated exit and who Israel says it killed this week. Every moderate voice removed is replaced by a more hardline one. We are not producing a compliant successor regime. We are producing a more radical one with a deeper personal grievance.
I raised the radicalization pipeline because it is the consequence that gets the least coverage. The school strike killed 165 children in Minab, a small town where everyone knew those girls. There are now young men in that region with a concrete, personal grievance against the United States and nothing to lose. We saw this in Iraq. We saw it in Syria. We are going to see it here. Iran’s proxies across the region are now more infuriated, not less. Syria was just starting to get its footing after years of destruction. Lebanon is being destabilized again. The conditions that produced ISIS are being recreated with a fresher grievance and a broader geographic footprint.
Adam closed this section with a quote from the Bush era that landed perfectly. Ron Suskind captured a Bush aide mocking the “reality-based community,” saying we are an empire now, we create our own reality. That arrogance was proven catastrophically wrong in Iraq. The same arrogance is operating here. And as Adam said, we have still not recovered from Iraq. We are still within that window of destabilization. What we have done now is pour gasoline back on it.

Bottom Line

Trump did not just miscalculate tactically. He went into this war without understanding the history, without understanding the ideology, without building a coalition, without a plan for the day after, without listening to the people who warned him, and without any apparent awareness that the enemy gets a vote.

Adam ended by quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates in a recent appearance with Ezra Klein. The struggle gets left where you leave it. Hopefully, in a better place. Oftentimes not. Our ancestors, our grandparents, the people who built the institutions and agreements that kept the world from tearing itself apart for seventy years, they did not live to see all of it pay off. Neither will we. But we leave what we leave, and the next generation picks it up.

America’s promise is real. The people who believe in it most are often the ones it has treated worst. That has always been true, and it remains true now. This is not who we are. And it is on us, right now, to prove it.

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Democracy In Action: Views From The Ground In Chicago On Primary Election Day

Ahmed Baba — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:18:21 GMT

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This Substack Live was different. Charles Douglas did not join me from a studio or a living room. He joined me from a park in Edgewater, Chicago, in the snow, with his team behind him, flyers in hand, splitting turf and heading to doors. This was not a conversation about politics. This was politics happening in real time, and you got to see it.

The Illinois 9th Congressional District primary is one of the most closely watched primaries of this cycle. Jan Schakowsky, 81, is retiring after 27 years, opening the first real contested seat in this district since 1999. Fifteen Democrats entered the race. Three emerged as frontrunners: Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, state Senator Laura Fine, and 26-year-old former journalist and progressive researcher Kat Abughazaleh. Common Power is on the ground for Kat, and Charles brought us along for the ride.

What made this Live special is what it showed people who have never canvassed before. The carpools, the turf splits, and the coordination in real time between volunteers. This is what the work actually looks like. And Charles made clear that this kind of organizing, replicated across 50 races in 20-plus states this year, is how you rebuild a party from the ground up.

You can watch the full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

Who Is Kat Abughazaleh And Why Common Power Is Backing Her

Kat Abughazaleh is not a conventional candidate. She is 26, a first-time candidate, a former journalist who spent years dissecting far-right media and disinformation at outlets like Media Matters, Mother Jones, and Zeteo News. Charles gave the clearest portrait of her candidacy from the ground, and it is worth understanding what makes her different before you understand why she matters beyond this district.

Charles described how Kat’s campaign office doubles as a mutual aid hub. Coats, boots, hand warmers, and hats donated by supporters are given out to anyone in the community who needs them. She is actively serving her potential future constituents while she is still running. Charles connected this directly to Chicago’s resistance culture, where immigrant communities targeted by ICE raids have increasingly relied on mutual aid networks for basic goods they can no longer safely buy in stores. Her campaign is not just a political operation. It is embedded in the community it wants to represent.
Charles noted that Kat was indicted by the Trump DOJ in October 2025 for her presence at protests outside the Broadview ICE detention facility, which she called a political prosecution and an attempt to silence dissent. That indictment has become a rallying point for her campaign rather than a liability. In a district where ICE raids hit hard and voters remember it, her willingness to show up with a megaphone is exactly the credential her supporters are looking for.
I pointed out that Kat’s campaigning tactics are potentially pioneering regardless of whether she wins. Fundraising on Twitch while playing video games. A self-attacking ad that went viral. A mutual aid pipeline run out of her campaign office. Charles agreed, noting that even candidates who lose their races can reshape how politics is done. Stacey Abrams lost two gubernatorial races and built Fair Fight and New Georgia Project. Beto lost in Texas and turned his grassroots machine into a statewide infrastructure. Kat’s movement in Chicago does not end on election night.

What Charles Heard From Voters On The Ground

Charles was at a polling site on the morning of Election Day and spent the day talking to voters in Edgewater, one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the district. What he reported was not a blowout for either candidate. It was a split that reflects the broader argument the Democratic Party is having with itself right now.

Charles said the early vote in this primary is running at multiples higher than the 2024 presidential year turnout in this district. A non-presidential year primary eclipsing a presidential year general is unprecedented in his experience. He said the same phenomenon happened in the Texas primary, where Democratic primary turnout exceeded the vote total for Kamala Harris in the general. Voters are engaged, and they are showing up. The energy is real.
The dominant issue at the doors was not a single policy. Charles described it as a national fight instinct. Voters want someone who is going to push back against authoritarianism. Chicago was directly targeted by ICE. People remember JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson holding press conferences about how to respond. The woman patrolling the block outside the polling site with a whistle, photographing suspicious cars, is not a political abstraction. She is a voter who has not forgotten what the federal government did to her neighborhood.
Charles was honest that the race is split. Biss is the safe choice for voters who want stability, experience inside government, and a proven record. Some of those voters have a Kamala sign still in their window and are looking for continuity over disruption. Kat is the choice for voters who think the moment demands something different entirely. Charles framed Biss not as a bad candidate but as the kind of candidate who would have been ideal in 2014. The question is whether 2026 calls for something else.

The Bigger Picture: What This Race Is Really About

Charles made clear early in the Live that Common Power’s investment in this race is not just about one district on the north side of Chicago. It is about what the Democratic Party looks like nationally and whether candidates like Kat can change the perception of what a Democrat is.

Charles argued that the Democratic Party has a national brand problem. Trump is polling historically low. So is the Democratic Party. The way you fix a national brand is not with a messaging campaign. It is by producing candidates who redefine what the party stands for in the minds of voters who have given up on it. Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old former journalist who turned her campaign office into a mutual aid hub and got indicted for standing up to ICE, changes that perception in ways a press release cannot.
I raised the point that this district’s primary is a different kind of argument than, say, the Texas Senate primary. The coalition needs to be wide enough to include candidates who look nothing like each other and represent districts with completely different needs. Charles put it cleanly: a sign of a genuinely broad coalition is when Democrats in one place look at Democrats in another place and say, what is wrong with that person. That tension is not a failure. It is evidence that the tent is wide enough.
Charles also flagged Common Power’s upcoming schedule. Maine, Iowa, California, Tennessee, and Georgia are all on the calendar for May and June. They are also sending a small team to challenge Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old seat in Georgia, a Trump-plus-30 district. The logic is straightforward. Any doors knocked in deep-red territory are doors primed for Jon Ossoff in the Georgia Senate race. The work compounds even when the immediate race is a long shot.

Bottom Line

This is what democracy looks like. A team of volunteers in a park in Chicago on a freezing Tuesday morning, splitting turf and heading to doors before the polls close. Charles and Common Power have been doing this work across the country, and they are going to keep doing it through November.

If you want to be part of it, go to commonpower.org or email hello@commonpower.org. The work is real, and it is accessible.

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Fox News Urged Trump To Attack Iran. Now, They're In Full War Propaganda Mode.

Ahmed Baba — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:06:14 GMT

Fox News segment with chyron that reads “WH: Iranian Regime Is Being Crushed.”

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If you’ve been watching Fox News coverage of the Iran War, it’s like taking a time machine back to 2003, ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Fox has gone into full war propaganda mode, uncritically projecting the Trump Administration’s narratives and making the case to their audience that this war with Iran is not only necessary, but succeeding.

Other mainstream outlets have, fortunately, done a better job, covering Trump’s shifting justifications, incoherent objectives, and clear strategic failures.

MS NOW remains one of the lone progressive voices in cable news. CNN, while they do have panels with Trump Admin defenders, their coverage has been largely critical and honest. Print media like The New York Times have produced revelatory coverage, including the visual investigation that revealed the Trump Administration was responsible for the strike on an Iranian school that killed over 175 people, most of them children.

These strikes aren’t popular throughout all of right-wing media either. We’re seeing fractures forming in New MAGA media, with right-wing personalities like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson opposing the war. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has also spoken out forcefully against the war.

On Fox News, however, diverging even from The Wall Street Journal’s coverage (also owned by Rupert Murdoch), we’ve seen an attempt to sell the Iran War to the American people. But it isn’t just the American people that Fox News has sold the war to. It’s the president himself.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has wanted the U.S. to help it launch a full-scale war on Iran for decades. Previous presidents have resisted. President Trump’s desperation level finally reached sufficient levels to be persuaded to join. And Fox News helped Netanyahu convince Trump.

President Trump reportedly refused to endorse Israeli strikes on Iran in April of last year. But in June, Israel went ahead and began striking Iran without the U.S. Fox News ramped up their coverage of the strikes, interviewing Israeli officials, praising Israel’s military campaign, inflating the threat of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and urging President Trump to join the strikes. Trump, liking the way the war was playing on Fox, joined the strikes by targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, and was then praised by Fox for them. That effort became known as the 12-day war.

Fast forward to the end of February, and President Trump is still high off his capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and Israel is gearing up for another effort. On Fox News, their coverage and media personalities began openly calling for President Trump to attack Iran.

On Friday, February 27, hours before the attack would launch, Fox Host Brian Kilmeade said, “I hope the president chooses to go at it. We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this President likes to make history.”

Mark Levin told Fox News Host Sean Hannity that same night that, “This president knows right from wrong. He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there’s only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this.”

“We don’t need to put up with their crap,” Hannity replied. “It’s time to put it to an end.”

On Saturday, February 28, the Trump Administration launched joint strikes with Israel that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with much of Iran’s top leadership. In that opening wave of strikes, the Trump Administration also mistakenly struck an elementary school in the small Iranian town of Minab, killing over 175 people, 165 of them children.

Since then, Fox News has continued its pro-war propaganda, carrying water for the Trump Administration’s false narratives while ignoring their failures and miscalculations.

In an effort to get a bird’s-eye view to analyze right-wing coverage, I once again used Ground News. It’s a news site and app that analyzes articles from 50,000 news sources daily, tracks their bias, compares headlines, and showcases how each outlet is covering a given story, or if they’re covering it at all. It’s an excellent tool I use and have recommended to students for years in my media literacy and anti-disinformation guest lectures.

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Fox News’ propaganda efforts have been applied to stories both big and small. Fox News even went as far as to air an old clip of Trump attending a dignified transfer for fallen soldiers because they didn’t want to show him disrespectfully wearing a baseball cap. They later apologized.

When it comes to spinning big stories, the strike on an Iranian school is one that did not get widespread coverage on Fox News.

When the initial strike occurred, and it wasn’t yet clear if the U.S. or Israel was responsible, Fox News did not cover the strike with a standalone segment at all, or at least it wasn’t published online, according to Ground News.

Fox News was not among the 341 outlets that covered this story

On March 7, The New York Times published its visual investigation, which found that the U.S. was likely responsible for the strike.

That same day, President Trump sought to blame Iran for the strike in a press gaggle on Air Force One. In this instance, Fox News aired the remarks uncritically and posted the clip online with this title:

When reports of an initial Pentagon investigation found that the strike was, in fact, likely executed by the U.S., Fox News was once again nowhere to be found in the Ground News database of 311 outlets that covered this development.

While there was a segment I found with one of the few good journalists working at Fox, Fox News Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin, who pushed back on Trump’s claims about the school strike, it was just a quick moment, then back to their regularly scheduled programming.

While New MAGA media remains frayed, as they grapple with a base that was betrayed by Trump’s promise of “no new wars,” Fox News is essentially operating as state TV.

Fox does not just cover Trump. It shapes him. It helped sell this war before it started, and it is now selling the fiction that the war is going well.

That is not journalism. That is propaganda. And the American people are paying for it at the gas pump.

Fortunately, the propaganda is not working. A Quinnipiac University poll found 53 percent of voters oppose the US military action against Iran, while only 40 percent support it. Independents oppose it 60 to 31 percent. It also found that 74 percent of voters oppose sending ground troops into Iran, and even among Republicans, more oppose it than support it.

Across multiple other polls, a majority of Americans say the war makes the US less safe, not more. And 65 percent say the Trump Administration has not clearly explained the war's goals, according to The Washington Post.

Fox News can call this a strategic success all it wants. The American people are not buying it.

This post is powered by Ground News. Like me, Ground News is supported by subscriptions. If you use my link, ground.news/ahmed, you’ll get 40% off your subscription, which is only $5 a month. It’s a great way to support my independent journalism. Ground News is the real deal, and I can’t recommend it enough.

You can use it as a casual news site and get a bird’s eye view of exactly how the biggest stories in politics are being covered, or as an investigative tool to catch disinformation campaigns in real-time.

I’m subscribed to their Vantage plan, which includes the features I used when researching for this piece. It’s been invaluable in helping me to understand the media landscape and quantify how the biggest developments are covered. It also tells you who funds each media organization, so you can make an informed decision about which companies you’re supporting.

Subscribe To Ground News & Get 40% Off

I hope you check it out. We have to hold our media to a higher standard, call out false narratives when we see them, and take our media diet into our own hands.

You can find my past pieces where I used Ground News to analyze media coverage below:

The Debate Over Generational & Ideological Change Is Now Playing Out In The Democratic Primaries

Ahmed Baba — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:05:01 GMT

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The Democratic Party is in the middle of a debate about who it is and who it is for. That debate is not happening in think tanks or cable news panels. It is happening in primaries across the country, in door-knocking operations in Texas, Chicago, and Maine, and in conversations like this one. The generational and ideological fights are real, they are happening now, and they are going to tell us a lot about where Democrats are headed.

Charles runs Common Power, one of the most serious grassroots organizing operations in the country. He, his team, and volunteers from across the country knock on doors in nearly every state. That ground-level view shaped everything in this conversation, and it is worth paying attention to.

I want to be clear about something going into this write-up. We are not talking about older people generally. We are talking about the people in power who are refusing to give it up. Many of the people who have been in this fight the longest are of that generation, but they also know when to pass the baton. The conversation is about the ones who are not. I often think this conversation can veer into ageism, and we tried our best not to do that here.

As I said in the Live, everyone in the chat and those of you reading this now, who engage, who show up every week, get it. This is for the people who need to hear it within the Democratic Party, because these conversations need to be had.

This conversation was really great and showed what happens when you have necessary, difficult conversations. It’s ok to disagree while knowing you’re ultimately on the same pro-democracy side.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

The Generational Backlog Is Real & It Is Reshaping Democratic Primaries

The generational fight inside the Democratic Party is playing out in races across the country. But it is bigger than age. It is about whether the party can create a bridge to the future before it runs out of time.

Charles laid out the structural reality plainly. Gen Xers have not had their seats yet. Millennials are right behind them. Gen Zers are already taking positions in Congress. There is a backlog, and it is not moving because the people at the top are not moving. He pointed to specific races like the Al Green and Christian Menifee primary in Texas, where a 37-year-old pushed a 78-year-old to a runoff, as evidence that voters are ready for this shift even when party infrastructure is not.
I raised the Biden example because it is the clearest and most consequential version of this argument. In hindsight, most people recognize that an earlier transition, whether a one-term commitment or an open primary in 2022, would have changed the outcome. That is the conversation we should have had years earlier, but did not.
Charles made a distinction I thought was important. Stepping aside does not mean disappearing. Nancy Pelosi is not gone. She is quietly mentoring her successor, aligning fundraisers, and building the infrastructure for the next generation of leadership. That is what passing the baton with dignity looks like. Charles named Clyburn as someone who should be doing the same thing, using his power to lift the person who shares his values, rather than occupying the seat until he cannot anymore.

The Ideological Shift That Comes With Generational Change

The generational fight and the ideological fight are not separate. They are the same fight. Younger candidates are more likely to reject corporate PAC money, more likely to come from working-class communities, and more likely to understand the technologies that are reshaping the economy and the country. Charles connected these dots directly from his door-knocking experience.

Charles argued that wealth inequality is breaking across generational lines, which means younger candidates naturally arrive with more populist politics. They are not performing progressivism. They are living the economic reality that older establishment Democrats are increasingly insulated from. That insulation, he said, shows up in how they vote, who they take money from, and who they actually represent when they get to Washington.
I raised the technology point because it is underrated in this conversation. If Trump had not flattened the political debate, one of the central issues of this era would be AI, autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, and the displacement of the workforce. We need people in Congress who understand these things from the inside.
Charles was honest about the limits of ideological purity as a governing strategy. He talked about knocking on doors in El Paso and being corrected by Hispanic voters who do not want to be called Latinx. He talked about backing candidates in red-leaning districts who would never win in Seattle but can win where they are. The point is not to export Seattle liberalism to other states. The point is to read what the voters in each district actually want and back the candidate who can win there and hold the seat.

The Coalition Question: Who Are We Willing To Negotiate With?

This is where the chat ran into disagreements, and I think it is the most important part of the conversation. Building a coalition large enough to win means including people you do not fully agree with. That is uncomfortable. It is also unavoidable.

Charles used the example of a Democratic House member in southern Washington state who has voted for legislation that runs contrary to Dem positions. The question is not whether her votes are good. They are not. The question is whether losing her seat to a hard-right Republican who votes with Republicans 100 percent of the time is better.
I raised the Manchin and Sinema comparison because it is the version of this argument most people remember. My take is that they are not the same case. Manchin was holding a seat in a state that was going to elect a Republican otherwise. He passed the Inflation Reduction Act as part of the deal. Sinema was in Arizona, had no excuse, and was performing for donors. The distinction matters when you are deciding who to tolerate and who to primary.
Charles’s broader framework is one I think the left needs to take seriously. He said the reason Democrats win close elections is not because liberals suddenly turned out in massive numbers. It is because people who voted for Trump multiple times switched sides. If the party cannot offer those voters a candidate with wide appeal, and cannot offer a path back to people who have made mistakes, the coalition will not be large enough to win. That is not a values argument. It is a math argument.

What These Primaries Are Actually Telling Us

The specific races Charles and his volunteers are working on this cycle are not random. They are a map of where the generational and ideological debate is actually being decided, on the ground, by real voters.

Charles named a series of races that Common Power is backing or watching. Each of these races involves a younger challenger taking on an older establishment figure. Each involves a question about ideology, electability, and what the party is willing to become.
I noted that AOC is the best example of how this can work. She came in as a disruptor. She later became one of the most effective members of Congress and built her power by collaborating with Pelosi rather than just fighting her. The generational shift does not require burning the party down. It requires building something new alongside what already exists.
Charles closed with the point that I think deserves to be the takeaway from the whole conversation. The House was designed to be representative of regular people. Two-year terms, cycling through farmers and teachers and engineers and working people. It became a career ladder for professional politicians and a revenue stream for grifters. What these primaries represent, at their best, is regular people deciding they are outraged enough to run.

Bottom Line

The Democratic Party’s generational and ideological debate is not coming. It is here.

Charles and I do not agree on everything. We said so on the Live. That is fine. What we agree on is that these conversations need to happen, that the left cannot win by talking only to itself, and that the primaries this cycle are going to tell us whether the party is serious about change or just performing it.