MONDAY, MARCH 2, 2026
But what were the surroundings? Last Friday night, we happened to sit up, awake, at roughly 1:30 a.m. On all three major "cable news" channels, the attack was already underway.
In Blue America, the decision to attack Iran has largely been challenged. In Red America, the assessments have generally been quite different. Indeed, consider this:
Twenty-four hours into this war, at 1:15 on Sunday morning, we saw a remarkably upbeat claim asserted once again.
Even at that late hour, the Fox News Channel was broadcasting live, with Jon Scott in the anchor chair. He spoke with Matt Terrill, introduced as former chief of staff to Marco Rubio's presidential campaign.
For the record, Secretary Rubio's presidential campaign ended in 2016. By way of contrast, Terrill's upbeat assessment of President Trump's decision was thoroughly up-to-date:
SCOTT (3/1/26): [Secretary Rubio] was supposed to go to the Middle East this Tuesday. Do you think that that was a kind of a ruse? That the Iranians figured that they wouldn't have—that they wouldn't be seeing this kind of attack until at least after the secretary of state departed the region?
TERRILL: Well, Jon, is it possible that that was a head fake? Potentially! I'll let the administration speak to that. But this is a president, and Secretary Rubio, and an administration in general, that's playing four-dimensional chess...
The president's playing four-dimensional chess? So said the upbeat Terrill, on Red America's official news channel.
As you may recall, Joey Jones had offered a similar assessment, on the Fox News Channel's Big Weekend Show, just one week before:
JONES (2/21/26): You know, [the Democrats] play this game that's— They're not very good at it, I don't think.
President Trump is smarter than they are. He's playing checkers, they're playing— or, He's playing chess, they're playing checkers.
Jones had said that one week earlier. Now, the sitting president was said to be playing chess again—and there's no way to prove that that's wrong.
Has President Trump been playing chess while others are playing checkers? It hasn't always looked that way to us! For starters, consider the banner headline across the top of the front page of this morning's New York Times:
U.S. TROOPS KILLED AS BLASTS JOLT MIDEAST; FEAR OF WIDER WAR AFTER IRAN’S RESPONSE
Trump Says He’s Willing to Talk to Tehran’s New Leadership
Say what? The president has said that he's willing to talk to Iran's new leaders?
Indeed, the president told The Atlantic, on Sunday night, that he's willing to return to negotiations! He had just killed forty of the Iranian regime's previous leaders—and now he was willing to talk to whoever's left!
Rightly or wrongly, that almost seemed a bit odd to us. It didn't exactly seem to make sense, although we could always be wrong.
Then too, Jonathan Karl has now tweeted this:
Jonathan Karl
@jonkarl
Pres Trump told me [on Sunday night] the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack.
"The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates," Trump told me. "It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead."
Just our luck! The president had replacements in mind for the post of Supreme Leader. But in the course of his first attack, he managed to kill the top three!
In fairness, things like that can happen. But even before the attack commenced, the president had oddly described the magic or secret words he was longing to hear.
Once again, we offer Jonathan Karl, reporting what the president said to a group of network news anchors during a preview of last Tuesday's State of the Union address. You can see Karl make his report at this report by The Wrap:
KARL (2/24/26): One notable thing, we did talk about Iran. He said that "Iran wants a deal more than I do," but they just can’t say the magic words, which he said was that they won’t build a bomb.
They just can’t say the magic words! But was that a direct quote?
We aren't completely sure about that. But that evening, in the address itself, the president used a slightly different term of art:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (2/24/26): They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America. After Midnight Hammer, they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular nuclear weapons, yet they continue. They’re starting it all over.
We wiped it out, and they want to start over again, and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions. We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal but we haven’t heard those secret words: “We will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Again, the president said he'd never heard those magic or secret words. But did that seem to make sense?
Hasn't the regime in Iran always said that it doesn't seek to have nuclear weapons? And since no one believes what the regime's leaders say, what difference would it have made if he had heard those secret or magic words—if the Iranians had made that pledge?
For ourselves, we don't hear four-dimensional chess being played by this president. In fairness, that doesn't prove that he has made the wrong decision with respect to this war. It doesn't tell us what history will say about this war, if history as we've always known it will continue to exist.
For ourselves, we don't have confidence in this president's judgment, which doesn't mean that his judgment was wrong in this case. In part, we lack confidence in his judgment because we find it easy to believe what his niece said, on CNN, just last Thursday night.
In Saturday's report, we showed you what she said. We know of no obvious reason to assume that her assessment is wrong, which doesn't prove that it's right:
ERIN BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a [cognitive] decline?
MARY L. TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.
But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.
The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's true. But his niece, the doctorate-wielding clinical therapist, said she sees a cognitive decline layered on top of life-long "psychiatric disorders."
Within this political context, we vastly prefer the term "medical." But a sitting president was making a very important decision even as that was being said.
We don't know how the president's decision will turn out. We do know certain things about the decision's surroundings.
What do we mean when we refer to the decision's "surroundings?" We're speaking about the rapidly crashing national culture within which that perilous decision was finally made:
We're thinking of his niece's statement last Thursday night. We're thinking of a speech President Biden made, in South Carolina, on that very same evening.
We're thinking of the moral and intellectual squalor which suffused the Fox News Channel in the weeks leading to that decision. We're thinking of the refusal of Blue America's major news organs to report and discus that astonishing level of journalistic disorder.
We're thinking of the ludicrous state into which the State of the Union had fallen as of last Tuesday night. We're thinking of the need to builds a culture war out of a (very good) hockey game.
We're thinking of this opinion piece by Alex Griffing of Mediate—an opinion piece in which Griffing examines the type of serious policy issue we Americans no longer discuss. We're thinking of the way CNN and the Fox News Channel spent the weeks leading up to this war talking about almost nothing except a (tragic) missing person case concerning which nothing was known.
We're thinking of the crazy claims this president won't stop making. We're thinking of the crazy things he routinely posts on his Truth Social site, very late at night.
We're thinking of his birther years. We're thinking of the southern border during the Biden years, and of what was said about it—including by President Biden himself, just this past Thursday night.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our rapidly failing American culture is an embarrassment and a danger. The decision emerged from these gruesome surroundings. We Blues are a part of that too!
Tomorrow: We'll probably have to start right there
