Trump’s policies are self-serving and harmful

Trump’s policies are self-serving and harmful

Bob Sheak, May 11, 2026

Arlene Sheak edits

Here are some examples.

#1 – As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices

This is the title of Tony Romm’s article, New York Times, May 7 2026

(https://nytimes.com/2026/05/07/business/us-debt-trump-policies-budget.html). Here’s some of what he writes.

“The debt is outgrowing the size of America’s economy. The president’s policies could accelerate the country’s fiscal headaches, experts say, unless policymakers intervene.

The debt problem.

Romm writes this. “The U.S. government learned last week that it may have reached an unfortunate milestone: The size of its debt surpassed the nation’s total economic output.

“It was a striking imbalance, according to early estimates, one that the country has experienced only in rare circumstances — briefly during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of World War II.”

The source of the problem.

“U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.

The problem increases.

“For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.”

Republican-controlled Congress ignores the problem

“Despite winning a congressional majority, Republicans have cut little in spending over the past year. With the few savings they did achieve, they put that money toward offsetting a fraction of the cost of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, which are still expected to add more than $4 trillion to the debt in the coming years.”

Evidence

“Those fiscal risks aren’t yet fully realized in the total federal debt held by the public, which topped about $31.26 trillion in March, federal records show. By comparison, the nation’s nominal gross domestic product, a measure of its output using current dollars, reached $31.21 trillion in the 12-month period ending in March, according to data released last Thursday and analyzed by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which supports deficit reduction.”

The looming threat of a “debt spiral”

“Marc Goldwein, its senior vice president, said the symbolic milestone helped to illustrate the fiscal risk facing the United States. If its debt continues to grow faster than the economy, he said, it will only become more expensive for the government to borrow money, as investors demand higher yields on bonds to finance that debt.

“‘When that happens, at some point, you’re in this debt spiral,’ Mr. Goldwein said.

““The only way to stop it is through some kind of big shock to the system.’

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The debt will be higher at the end of this fiscal year

“…the Trump administration itself has recently estimated that the annual imbalance will still reach around $2 trillion by the end of fiscal 2026, which could mark an increase from a year earlier.

“Adding to the challenges, the U.S. government is just beginning to refund billions of dollars collected from Mr. Trump’s once-vaunted, and now illegal, global tariffs, with the first checks expected to reach businesses next week. That could further rattle the nation’s finances, just as the Trump administration simultaneously confronts the potentially towering cost of the Iran war.”

The debt will continue to grow

“In its annual report, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected in February that the government’s debt would outpace economic growth this year — and worsen in the years to follow. Pointing to a changing, aging work force, the scorekeeper estimated that U.S. debt held by the public would soar to 120 percent of gross domestic product by the end of 2036.

The effects

“If that occurred, the budget office warned, the ‘risk of a fiscal crisis’ would increase, eroding trust in the dollar and constraining the ability of lawmakers to ‘respond to unforeseen events or for other purposes, such as to promote economic activity or strengthen national defense.’”

Trump will compound the problem

“In the meantime, Republicans under Mr. Trump added to the debt, chiefly through enacting their package of tax cuts last year. William McBride, the chief economist at the Tax Foundation, which generally supports lower taxes, said that the cuts may levels of debt closer in time, maybe a few years.’

“Mr. McBride said the problem would only be compounded by Mr. Trump’s push for a massive increase in military spending, which he hopes to set at nearly $1.5 trillion starting next fiscal year. The president first indicated he would seek the boost, the largest in modern history, before declaring war on Iran — and since has suggested that the administration could seek additional money for that conflict.”

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#2 -America in Decline

In an article in The New York Times, Christopher Caldwell posits thatAmerica Is Officially an Empire in Decline” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/opinion/oran-us-empire.html).

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for the paper and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

Caldwell makes his basic point as follows.

“The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.”

“The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.”

The war on Iran demonstrates this. Caldwell writes, “That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict.” Its missiles and other weapons “are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.

Caldwell notes the U.S. has options, but it will “pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian ‘excursion.’ Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads.

The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul in this war of choice.

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#3 – As Trump’s Poll Numbers Fall, His Authoritarian Instincts Grow More Extreme

Sasha Abramsky, The Nation, April 1, 2026

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-authoritarianism-polls

Sasha Abramsky is the author of several books, including The American Way of PovertyThe House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town AmericaHis latest book is American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government.

Increasingly unpopular and facing a fracturing coalition, Trump is using government power to punish his critics, take political revenge, and revel in his own cruelty.

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“Even as President Donald Trump’s hold over the electorate wanes, his administration’s naked authoritarian tendencies intensify. If you can tell a man’s mettle by how he behaves under pressure, Trump—mired in a ludicrous standoff of his own making with Iran and cratering in the polls—is putting on a display of raw narcissism and petty cruelty unparalleled among modern democracies.

Abramsky writes: “When Robert Mueller died in March, Trump went onto social media to post a note explaining that he was glad that Mueller was dead. This was after he had declared that the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their mentally ill son was a result of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.’ Yet, when late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a mildly off-color joke about Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow”—this was before the shooting and possible assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—Trump responded first by demanding, again, that ABC fire Kimmel and then by siccing Brendan Carr’s pliant FCC onto the broadcaster, initiating an unprecedented review of many of the network’s local licenses.”

Abramsky points out, “The FCC has argued that the scrutiny being accorded ABC licenses is solely to do with an investigation into its diversity policies (since, clearly, according to the white supremacist mores of the administration any efforts to present a diverse face to US viewers are somehow, inherently, illegitimate). Yet the timing of this makes it all too clear that in reality it is spiteful, vengeance politics, designed to pressure ABC into ditching Kimmel.

“In all likelihood, the efforts to pull ABC affiliates from the air will go nowhere; after all, the broadcaster’s parent company, Disney, has pretty deep pockets, and its lawyers aren’t going to let the company go quietly into the night. But the mere fact that the Trump administration is attempting to pull this trick shows just how far from democratic norms it has strayed and just how much it is willing to lean into the playbook used to such great effect over the past two decades by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Tayyip Erdoğan.”

“Now, any wrap-up of the week’s authoritarian bilge would be remiss in neglecting to mention the extraordinary State Department decision this week to issue a limited number of Trump-embossed US passports to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Let me emphasize how abnormal this is. Not a single other country on earth—not North Korea, not Iran, not Putin’s Russia, not Xi Jinping’s China—etches its current leader’s image onto its passports.”

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#4 – Economist: Don’t Listen to Hegseth, Trump’s Iran War Will Cost ‘Very Possibly Trillions’

Jessica Corbett refers to sources that offer this viewpoint, May 8, 2026

(https://www.commondreams.org/news/cost-of-iran-war). Here are excerpts.

University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers on Friday joined a growing number of economists and other critics casting down on what he called ‘the Pentagon’s lowball $25 billion estimate’ for the cost of President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran.”

Trump’s cabinet officials vastly underestimate the cost of this war.

Corbett writes, “While testifying before Congress last week alongside US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Pentagon comptroller Jules ‘Jay’ Hurst offered the $25 billion figure. However, experts have responded with raised eyebrows. Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated that the government spent at least $71.8 billion during the first two months of the war, or around $1.2 billion each day.

Although Trump told Congress last Friday—a key deadline under the War Powers Act—that his assault on Iran had been ‘terminated,’ citing the ceasefire deal reached a month ago after his genocidal threat, the administration has maintained its naval blockade and on Thursday bombed what it claimed were ‘Iranian military facilities responsible for attacking US forces.’

“As the threat of more US bombings of Iran loomed, Wolfers wrote Friday in a New York Times opinion piece that ‘the Pentagon’s stated number reflects only a narrow accounting of the tab that Operation Epic Fury is running up. It’s the price of the more than 2,000 Tomahawk and Patriot missiles already fired, the warplanes already flown and in some cases lost, and the rest of the gear already chewed through. It does not measure the true cost of the war—including the human toll.’”

Corbett continues citing Wolfers.

“‘Since the start of the war, oil markets have been disrupted, consumer confidence has cratered, the global economy is groaning, and military budgets are growing,’ the economist continued. ‘The toll from this upheaval must be counted in lives disrupted, jobs lost, companies shut down (see: Spirit Airlines), and the income and output sacrificed. The less easily quantified costs—death, disability, and mental health—could become much more dramatic should President Trump send troops into Iran, which still can’t be ruled out.’”

The US and Israel have not achieved any of their objectives in the Iran War.

“The US and Israel said they wanted to eradicate Iran’s nuclear program and change its regime. The regime is now composed of more hard-liners than before, and Iran’s nuclear capability has not budged since last summer. Now the two sides are negotiating the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the conflict, and the terms of Iran’s nuclear program, which they were negotiating before the conflict. Moreover, the compromise being contemplated involves Iran pausing uranium enrichment in exchange for the US lifting sanctions and unfreezing Iranian funds. That sounds suspiciously like the deal President Obama struck in 2015 that Trump ripped up when he took office….”


The US war has done harm to Iran and also the US.

“All this war has done is killed thousands of people, opened a new front for Israel in Lebanon, damaged most US military sites and most energy production facilities in the region, led to oil spills that are visible from space, created a shipping bottleneck that will take at least a year to fix, raised domestic gas prices to a record for this time of year, cost American consumers $34.3 billion and countingended the life of one US airline with more likely to come, and led us down an imminent path to physical shortages of critical commodities like oil, including in the United States.

There is no end in sight.

Corbett continues. “The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Central Intelligence Agency has privately warned the Trump administration that ‘Iran can survive the US naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship,’ and its ‘analysis might even be underestimating Iran’s economic resilience if Tehran is able to smuggle oil via overland routes.’”

A global recession?

“The reporting heightened concerns,” Corbett writes, “about how long the war may drag on. The International Monetary Fund warned last month that a prolonged conflict could cause a global recession.”

Wolfers estimates “based on the movement of oil prices, along with the S&P 500—is that stocks are about 5% lower than they otherwise would be, suggesting that the war has wiped about $3 trillion off the value of these companies.”

Trump wants a huge increase in military spending

“Shortly after launching the war in February, the White House signaled it would need $200 billion for the operation. However, it is now seeking a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year—which Hegseth tried to frame as a fiscally responsible plan that puts ‘the American taxpayer first’ in a widely ridiculed video this week. Wolfers highlighted that the budget request is ‘a roughly 40% boost over this year. That’s a massive $600 billion increase, or roughly $4,000 per household.’”

Military costs will exceed what Trump anticipates

“‘The best any economist can do right now is get the order of magnitude right, and my math suggests the Iran war will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions,’ Wolfers concluded.” Current estimates from the Trump administration also do not figure in ‘lifetime medical care and disability benefits for veterans, and the higher recruitment and retention costs that follow a bloody war—all compounded by a rising interest bill.’”

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#5 – Trump Administration Covering Up “Extensive” Damage Done to US Bases by Iran

Sharon Zhang reports on this cover up for Truthout, Published, April 27, 2026

(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-administration-covering-up-extensive-damage-done-to-us-bases-by-iran).

“In their initial retaliatory strikes of the war, Iranian forces caused far more extensive damage to U.S. military assets than Trump administration officials have admitted to in public and private, new reporting finds as Germany’s chancellor says the U.S. is being ‘humiliated’ by Iran.

“In these strikes, Iran hit over 100 targets across 11 U.S. bases in the Middle East, striking ‘warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft,’ according to reporting by NBC, citing an analysis by conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Zhang continues, “These strikes caused damage that will cost billions of dollars to repair, the publication found, citing U.S. officials, congressional aides, and another person familiar with the damage. The reporting corroborates earlier findings that many of the U.S.’s 13 bases in the region have been rendered ‘all but uninhabitable’ due to strikes.

Bottom of Form

“In all,” Zhang writes, “the damage is far worse than Trump administration officials have acknowledged both in public and in private briefings with Congress, aides told NBC. The Pentagon is not even disclosing the extent of the damage or estimated costs of repairs to members of Congress, the aides said.

“No one knows anything. And it’s not for lack of asking,” one congressional GOP aide said. “We have been asking for weeks and not getting specifics, even as the Pentagon is asking for a record-high budget.”

Zhang: “Officials told NBC that the Trump administration is still gearing up to request over $100 billion — on top of its record-shattering $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget ask — in supplemental funding for the war, despite some of the more expensive aspects of the war, like airstrikes, having come to a standstill in recent weeks.

The Trump administration is attempting to withhold information on the costs of the war.

“Meanwhile,” Zhang continues, “multiple private satellite imagery companies are withholding imagery of the region at the request of the U.S. government.

“Officials are also reportedly withholding U.S. casualty numbers. The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s casualty counts keep shifting, and that last week officials actually dropped the total number of casualties from 428 to 413, without explanation. One U.S. government official said the Pentagon’s practices are the ‘definition of a cover-up.’”

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#6 – An Almost Unthinkable Threat’: Trump Warning That Iran Will ‘Glow’ Sparks Latest Fears of Nuclear Attack

Stephen Prager reports on Trump’s seeming allusion to the use of nuclear weapons in his Iran War, May 8, 2026 (https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-make-iran-glow).

Prager writes, “As he struggles to force Iran’s capitulation, US President Donald Trump issued what seemed to be yet another threat to commit an act of mass destruction against the country through nuclear warfare.

“When negotiations have faltered in recent weeks, Trump has on multiple occasions defaulted to genocidal threats—including that the ‘whole nation of Iran’ would ‘die,’ and that the whole country would be ‘blown up’—which have only seemed to anger and galvanize his Iranian adversaries rather than make them quake with fear.”

“On Thursday, the US launched what it said were ‘self-defense’ strikes on military facilities it claimed were responsible for attempting to attack three US Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran called the attacks a violation of the ceasefire and said its attacks on US ships were in response to American bombings of Iranian oil tankers the previous day.

“Trump told reporters on Thursday that if the ceasefire were truly over, everyone would know. ‘If there’s no ceasefire, you’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran,’ he said. ‘They’d better sign the agreement fast… If they don’t sign, they’re going to have a lot of pain.’”

“Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, the editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft, noted that if it were indeed a nuclear threat, it would be ‘ironic since the war today supposedly is to prevent Iran from getting… a nuclear weapon.’

“The National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) said that ‘threatening to make Iran glow—with nuclear weapons or otherwise—is an almost unthinkable threat to commit a mass war crime against 92 million people. It must never be normalized.’

“Trump’s pledge to wipe out Iranian civilization last month drew widespread condemnation and led dozens of Democratic members of Congress to call for his Cabinet to remove him from office using the powers of the 25th Amendment.”

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#7 – Sunlight Doesn’t Go Through the Strait of Hormuz: Bill McKibben on Iran Oil Shock & Green Transition, interviews on Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/30/climate_change_super_el_nino_amoc).

Bill McKibben. as a guest on Democracy Now, sees a good thing coming out of
Trump’s war on Iran, namely that some countries are moving away from fossil fuels to renewables. He has published many books and is a co-founder of 350.org and founder of Third Act.

The title of this episode it “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization”

Here it most of the Transcript of the interview.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to climate change. Last month was the warmest March on record in over 130 years in the United States, and average rainfall across the country is at a record low so far this year. The dry conditions are fueling wildfires across Georgia and Florida ahead of what is expected to be a very hot summer. And now the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization, is predicting a likely super El Niño weather pattern to begin later this year through 2027, further driving up average global temperatures.

Meanwhile, new research has found that a major ocean circulatory system in the Atlantic, known as AMOC, is in danger of weakening to the point of collapse faster and sooner than previously thought. The AMOC system, which includes the Gulf Stream, helps distribute heat around the planet. Its collapse could have catastrophic consequences. Scientists are now concerned the tipping point could be reached as early as the middle of this century.

But despite overwhelming scientific consensus, the United States, the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, is moving away from taking the threat seriously. This is President Trump earlier this month at a [Turning] Point USA rally in Phoenix.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The green new scam, one of the greatest scams in history. Remember, climate change, global warming, all of this. They actually had global warming, remember. Then that wasn’t working, because we were actually cooling as a planet. … And then they just said climate change, because climate change takes care of heat, snow, whatever you have.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump speaking at Turning Point. Despite this, the energy crisis caused by the war in Iran is underscoring the economic and security benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards renewable alternatives.

For more on all of this, we’re joined by climate activist and author Bill McKibben. His recent article in The New Yorker magazine is headlined “The Iran War Is Another Reason to Quit Oil.” Bill McKibben is co-founder of 350.org and Third Act, joining us here in our New York studio.

Welcome back, Bill, to Democracy Now! If you can talk about what the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran means for the climate?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, what it meant, what it means for energy policy is that everyone around the world can suddenly see the utter folly of relying on a fuel that not only is destroying the planet’s climate, but also that can be bottled up behind a 20-mile-long waterway. I mean, sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. That makes it a very appealing alternative, especially now that it’s cheaper than burning coal and gas and oil. So, the movement in the last month has been pretty remarkable around much of the world in the direction of what we used to call alternative energy. The only place that’s not happening, of course, is here at home.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And could you explain? I mean, first of all, the U.S. now produces the most oil in the world. So, how does that play into this?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, Pete Hegseth said the other day that there were tankers lining up outside the Texas ship channel to get good old American crude. It’s true that in the short run, this will probably be a bonus for the big American oil companies, whose profits are through the roof, and who, by the way, should be paying a serious windfall profits tax in any serious government. But over the slightly longer term, what we’re seeing is demand destruction around the planet.

Look, the forecast for how American oil companies were going to stay rich and prosperous for the next couple of decades pretty much depended on everybody in Asia deciding they were going to drive gasoline-powered pickup trucks. That’s not what’s happening. Instead, people are crowding into the showrooms of companies like BYD, the Chinese EV giant, because they don’t want to pay. I mean, we’re paying $4 and $5 for gas. It’s much higher in much of Asia, which is, you know, where this story will be decided.

Would that we were doing all this for climate reasons. I mean, we’re meeting right now, or just finished this big meeting in Santa Marta in Colombia, with many nations trying to work towards a fossil fuel phaseout on climate grounds. That isn’t happening anywhere near fast enough. A bigger catalyst at the moment is the clear geopolitical imperative to get off fossil fuel while you can.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about where you’re seeing this around the world. As you say, in fact, countries are running to this, as the U.S. administration is running away from this.

BILL McKIBBEN: The president of South Korea said the other day that he wasn’t able to sleep at night, trying to figure out where they were going to find energy supplies. The place they’re going to find them, he said, is homegrown energy. Indonesia, which is going to be one of the most important powers in the world, announced, within days of the start of hostilities, that they were going to put 100 gigawatts’ worth of solar on their grid in the next few years. Everybody’s figuring out that it is ludicrous to be exposed any more than you have to to the completely volatile and undependable supply of fossil fuel, when, you know, the sun rises pretty much every morning.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could explain, to your point — you know, the argument here is that, you know, renewables are too expensive, they take too long. But China, meanwhile, has built so much clean energy very, very quickly, it’s a world leader in clean energy investment, installation and manufacturing. How did that happen?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, the Chinese decided that this was going to be the strategic imperative, and so they got to work. And they’ve driven the price down so far that this is by far the — we live on a planet where the cheapest way, Nermeen, to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That’s been true now for three or four years. And it’s showing up in the fact that 95% of new electric generation around the planet last year came from the sun and the wind.

Now, the U.S. is the exception to that. Even here, though, we’re seeing continued investment in this stuff, just because of economics. The state where it’s growing the fastest is that radical progressive hub, Texas. And at Third Act, we’ve been having lots of luck this spring in state legislatures around the country, getting them to approve this so-called balcony solar, or plug-in solar, that’s the very easiest, cheapest way for apartment dwellers and others to get in on this burgeoning revolution.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill, we just have two minutes, and I want to get to the El Niño and the possible collapse of this AMOC, the Atlantic Ocean circulation system, what this means.

BILL McKIBBEN: Nothing good. When I wrote The End of Nature 40 years ago, this was one of the things that we were talking about as a possible result of climate change. As you melt, as fresh water pours off a melting Greenland, it changes the salinity, and hence the density, of sea water in the North Atlantic. That density drives this giant heat distribution engine, the biggest on the planet. If it collapses, as the chief scientist on this work now said is at least a 50% possibility this century, then it’s a civilizational-scale event. Temperatures plummet across Western Europe. Sea levels rise sharply and quickly along the eastern U.S. But, basically, this — basically, we add, I don’t know, 30 or 40 parts per million CO2 almost immediately to the atmosphere, as CO2 leaves the ocean. These are the kind of things that they make science fiction thrillers about. It would be the biggest tool that we have right now to do that is the very rapid deployment of clean energy.

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Concluding thoughts

Trump and his administration are taking to country into a steep decline, with their right-wing policies that benefit the rich and powerful, along with Trump and his family, greatly. At the same time, they are advancing policies that will continue doing harm to most Americans. Trump pursues vanity projects while all this is taking place. He calls for massive increases in military spending, ostensibly for the continuation of the current war and to rely on force or the threat of force in his international relations. Under Trump, the US is no longer recognized as a reliable ally and is in the process is undermining long-standing alliances. And, to top it off, he is increasing the country’s debt and undermining the nation’s future.

A war of choice

Bob Sheak, March 5, 2026

Arlene Sheak edited

Iran did not threaten U.S.

The current US war on Iran is not the result of an attack on our country or even a threat of such a war. It is a war waged by Trump and his government by choice and based on questionable assumptions about Iran’s intentions. The war also conflicts with Trump’s view of himself as a peace president.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondents for The New York Times, writes on how during his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2024, Trump promised to focus on “America First” and to avoid foreign wars (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/us/politics/trump-peace-president-war.html). Trump dubbed himself “a peace president.” In the presidential race of 2024, “he boasted of starting ‘no new wars’ in his first presidential term. He asserted that if Kamala Harris won, she would send the “sons and daughters” of Americans “to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of.”

“Barely a year later,” Baker writes, “Mr. Trump is racing to topple foreign regimes, and is sending American sons and daughters to wage another war in the Middle East. The self-declared president of peace has chosen to become the president of warafter all, unleashing the full power of the U.S. military in Iran with the explicit goal of toppling its government.” The attack is now on its sixth day with no end in sight.

Baker continues, “The bombardment of Iran on Saturday was the ninth time he had ordered the military into action in his second term, even as he has decapitated the government of Venezuela and threatened to overthrow Cuba’s dictator.

“In his middle-of-the-night social media video announcing the opening of this new war, Mr. Trump laid out a bill of particulars against Iran going back nearly half a century, including its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, its support for terrorist groups that attacked Americans and allies, the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the recent massacre of Iranian protesters. But he never explained why those aggressions required action now rather than earlier, or why his thinking evidently changed.” He also failed to offer a plan on how long he expected the war to last, what the costs will be, how it will wind up, and said Americans in Iran and the region will have to find ways to safety themselves. Given the absence of air flights, many have few options to leave.

Baker points out that Trump did call for regime change, “calling on Iranians to overthrow their leaders. ‘When we are finished, take over your government,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘It will be yours to take.’ He repeated this in a social media post Saturday afternoon announcing that the strike had killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader — ‘one of the most evil people in History,

as the president put it.”

Just how Iranians should go about taking over their country was left unclear. Mr. Trump wrote that police and revolutionary guard forces should “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves” — a remarkable notion suggesting that Iranian security officials would somehow team up with the same people they were gunning down in the streets just weeks ago.”

“His public posture, however, has veered wildly over the past year,” Baker notes. “One moment, he presents himself as a historic peacemaker, forming a so-called Board of Peace and griping that he has not won the Nobel Peace Prize while claiming, inaccurately, that he has ended eight wars — including one with Iran. The next moment, he threatens to seize Greenland, take back the Panama Canal, strangle Cuba and even go after Colombia’s president as he did Venezuela’s.”

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The Idea That Trump Is Antiwar Was Always Delusional

Michelle Goldberg addresses this point

(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/opinion/trump-iran-antiwar.html).

She argues that it is ludicrous to ever think of Trump as a promoter of peace.

She writes that “what Trump has always hated isn’t conflict but sacrifice, the notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism or care for global opinion.” His real view is conveyed by what he said at a 2025 rally:

“I’m really good at war. I love war, in a certain way, but only when we win.” One of his chief complaints about the Iraq war, let’s remember, was that George W. Bush had failed to take Iraq’s oil.”

“Trump’s first term,” Goldberg writes, “was marked by a huge surge in drone strikes: According to the BBC, he ordered 2,243 in his first two years in office, compared with 1,878 in Barack Obama’s eight years. He reversed the longstanding American policy of treating Israel’s settlement building as illegitimate under international law, one of many sops to the American right.

“It’s true,” Goldber writes, “that Trump did not start any new wars, though, in retrospect, that seems like luck as much as design. In 2020, when Trump ordered a drone strike on Iran’s top military commander, Qassim Suleimani, The Washington Post reported that the decision “came as a surprise and a shock to some officials briefed on his decision, given the Pentagon’s longstanding concerns about escalation.” If that assassination didn’t spiral into a wider conflict, it may well have been a result of Iranian restraint, with some reporting suggesting that Iran provided America advance warning of its retaliatory strikes in Iraq.

“The lesson Trump learned from his first term, it seems, is that there’s no real cost to his belligerence, and so he has ratcheted it up. Trump, according to Axios, “authorized more individual airstrikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.” Given the lack of meaningful resistance he faced from his base, it’s not surprising that he has become even more reckless. Across many different realms, Trump’s pattern is basically the same: He goes as far as he can until someone stops him.

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This Is an Unnecessary, Unauthorized, and Unconstitutional War

John Nichols contends rightly that the Trump’s Iran War “is an unnecessary, unauthorized, and Unconstitutional War,” March 2, 2026

Nichols reminds us that Congress, not the president, has “primacy over matters of war and peace” under the War Powers Act.

He reports that on Saturday morning, after President Trump launched an unnecessary, unauthorized, and unconstitutional attack on Iran, US Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie did their jobs as members of Congress.

The California Democrat and the Kentucky Republican had already cosponsored a War Powers Act resolution in hopes of thwarting a rush to war with Iran. Now the war was on. Bombs were dropping, missiles flying, and people dying. So the bipartisan team demanded that Congress step up. Khanna immediately announced, “Trump has launched an illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk. Congress must convene on Monday to vote on US Rep. Thomas Massie[’s] & my [War Powers Resolution] to stop this.”

Seeking to force a congressional debate about the war—as Khanna and Massie are doing in the House, and as Tim Kaine (D-VA) has proposed in the Senate—is a vital first step in pushing back against Trump.

It won’t be easy. Despite a notable level of congressional opposition to Trump’s new war, efforts to establish even the most basic counterbalances to presidential war making will face overwhelming odds. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who serves as Trump’s enforcer in the chamber, will do everything in his power to thwart any meaningful effort to renew the constitutionally mandated role of Congress as the arbiter of matters of war and peace. The same goes for the president.

The issue did belatedly come of a vote, as reported by Reuters (https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-senate-backs-trump-iran-014335375.html).

US Senate Republicans backed President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran on Wednesday, voting to block a bipartisan resolution aiming to stop the air war and require that any hostilities against Iran be authorized by Congress.

“The Senate voted 53 to 47 against advancing the resolution, largely along party lines, with all but one Republican voting against the procedural motion and all but one Democrat supporting it.

Nichols continues. The latest effort by Democrats and a few Republicans to rein in President Donald Trump‘s repeated foreign troop deployments, the war powers resolution was described by sponsors as a bid to take back Congress’s responsibility to declare war, as spelled out in the US Constitution. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution plainly reads, “The Congress shall have Power…to declare War.”

Senate Republican, in the majority, insisted that Trump’s action was legal and within his right as commander in chief to protect the United States by ordering limited strikes. They accused supporters of the resolution of endangering US forces.

Nichols questions their rationale. “There’s no indication that there’s any sort of circumstance that would give the President the unilateral authority to order military action. It’s true that presidents have some inherent authority to deploy the military as Commander in Chief, but that’s really limited to true emergency circumstances where there is an attack underway that needs to be repelled, or maybe an extremely clear imminent attack. But there’s no suggestion that that’s the case today—that would make the strikes illegal.”

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Trump and his Secretary of State offer rationales for why they started this war and will continue it for as long as “it takes.”

Reuters journalists Nandita BoseHumeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis report on attempts by Trump and the Secretary of “War” to justify the Iran war (https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-he-ordered-iran-strikes-thwart-tehrans-missile-program-2026-03-02) Consider how U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained it.

“The president made the very wise decision — we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we ​didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said on Monday.” All of this is unsubstantiated.

Reuters “We’re already substantially ahead of our time projections. But whatever the time is, it’s okay. Whatever it takes,” Trump said at the White House on Monday, during his first public event since the conflict began. — He made ​no mention of regime change, saying the fight was needed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, which Tehran denies seeking, and to thwart its long-range ballistic missile program.”

The regime change rationale came a little later.

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Senate votes in support of Trump’s war

Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/5/headlines)

The United States Senate rejected a resolution Wednesday that would have directed the removal of U.S. armed forces from hostilities with Iran, as Iran’s government said the death toll from joint U.S.-Israeli attacks passed 1,200. Fifty-two Republicans were joined by Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman on a procedural vote opposing the war powers resolution. This is Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker.

Sen. Roger Wicker: “I’ll vote no on the pending resolution. President Trump decided to attack Iran. That decision was profound, deliberate and correct.”

Forty-four Democrats and two independents voted to advance the war powers resolution, joined by Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. That fell short of the 51 votes needed to pass.”

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Some effects of U.S. bombing

#1 – Many Americans in the region are stranded (https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/us-iran-war-israel-strikes-tehren-lebanon-day-5-al-udeid-targeted).

“The State Department said Wednesday night that a charter flight of American citizens had departed from the Middle East and was headed to the U.S. It did not provide further details, including how many people were on board and where they had been evacuated from, citing ‘operational security purposes.’

“The State Department earlier on Wednesday said it had helped about 6,500 Americans depart the region, after it told U.S. citizens to evacuate 14 countries in the Middle East on Tuesday amid the widening war with Iran.

“The U.S. government has since faced criticism from some Americans trapped abroad for not doing more to facilitate their return.”

#2Democracy Now reports, Secretary Hegseth said that the U.S. and Israel are in the process of crushing Iran’s government “without mercy” (www.democracynow.org/2026/3/5/headlines).

“Iran’s Foreign Ministry says U.S. and Israeli attacks have struck 33 civilian sites across Iran, including hospitals, schools, residential areas and historic sites. Earlier today, airstrikes ‘destroyed’ Tehran’s Azadi Stadium, which has hosted international soccer matches. Meanwhile, two Iranian Red Crescent Society paramedics told Middle East Eye last weekend’s bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran was a so-called double-tap airstrike, with the second strike coming after the school’s principal called parents and told them to come and pick up their children. The strikes killed about 175 people, most of them young girls.

#3 – More information from Democracy Now about the

bombed girls’ school ((https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/4/nilo_tabrizy).

Reporter Nilo Tabrizy is interviewed by host Amy Goodman about this tragedy. Here are excerpts.

AMY GOODMAN: It happened early Saturday morning. One of the first strikes of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran hit a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran. The death toll is now at least 175, most of them primary school girls. On Tuesday, thousands of people filled the streets of Minab for a mass funeral. The girls’ ages range from 7 to 12. Iran’s school week runs from Saturday to Thursday. When the missile hit the school on Saturday morning, the girls were in their morning session. After the strike, parents searched for their children among the dead.

NILO TABRIZY: Yeah, absolutely. So, right now we’re not necessarily able to get in touch with eyewitnesses or, you know, friends and families of the young girls who were killed, but we were able to verify the video. So, there was one video that I saw probably around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday, and I was able to verify that and know that the video that we saw that showed at least, you know, half of the structure was hit. You know, two stories were torn down. The scene was really graphic. I saw things like a small child’s hand in the rubble, blood-stained backpacks, homework scattered everywhere. And so, when I see scenes like that, it’s important to verify and know that it’s from the current moment, so I was able to do that.

#4 – Nicholas Kusnetz points out that the “War in Iran Could Have ‘Historic’ Disruptions on Energy Markets” (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02032026/iran-war-oil-energy-markets).

Kusnetz writes, “Oil prices jumped after the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Experts say the effects on oil and gas prices will depend on how long the war lasts and whether Iran damages energy infrastructure.”

“The U.S. and Israeli war against Iran is disrupting energy markets and driving oil and gas prices higher in the United States and globally. While those increases are modest so far, experts say the war has the potential to cause more severe and lasting impacts if Iran damages the region’s energy infrastructure or restricts shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Already, the three-day-old bombing campaign has killed hundreds of people in Iran, including the country’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Iran has retaliated by hitting a broad range of targets across the region, including oil and gas sites. On Monday, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Energy said its Ras Tanura oil refinery sustained ‘limited’ damage after the interception of two drones. QatarEnergy said Monday it was halting production of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, after military attacks on two facilities.”

About one-fifth of global oil and LNG supplies pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea. On Sunday only five oil tankers moved through the strait, according to S&P Global Energy, compared with about 60 per day before the war.

“Analysts say global markets can withstand these types of cuts over the short term—global oil prices were up about 7 percent Monday compared to the day before bombing began. But the conflict also has the potential to cause ‘the largest oil supply disruption in history,’ said Jim Burkhard, vice president and head of crude oil research at S&P Global Energy, in a note.

“If the reduction in tanker traffic continues for a week or so it will be historic,” Burkhard wrote. “Beyond that it would be epochal for the oil market with prices rising to ration scarce supply and impacts in financial markets.”

Any lasting disruptions could prove even more meaningful for global gas markets, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow and head of corporate partnership strategy at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Countries generally have smaller inventories of gas than oil to cushion disruptions, Sternoff said, though the impacts would be most pronounced in Asia and Europe. The United States is the world’s largest gas producer and a net exporter, so he said consumers would be somewhat insulated.

“The biggest question now, Sternoff said, is whether Iran damages oil and gas facilities around the region.

“All of this looks like a deliberate Iranian choice to escalate really quickly against its neighbors and to try to use world energy markets and prices as a pressure point,” Sternoff said, referring to the attacks in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. “We are really quickly into a really dangerous phase here of which there is no precedent.”

“A sustained increase in crude oil prices will push up the price of gasoline, too. And unlike with natural gas, American consumers are not insulated from the global oil market, experts say. Even though the United States is a net exporter of oil, refiners still import large volumes of crude.

“If prices remain elevated for no more than a couple of weeks, there may be little lasting impact, said Alan Krupnick, a senior fellow and director of the industry and fuels program at Resources for the Future, an environmental and energy think tank. But if high prices hang on for months, Krupnick said, that could have ripple effects that cut both ways with respect to climate change and fossil fuel output.

#5 – Effects of the war on financial markets

Jason Karaian reports on how “global markets tumble as Iran War intensifies

(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/stock-markets-iran.html). Here are excerpts from his article.

“A global market sell-off intensified on Tuesday, as Iran expanded its retaliatory attacks around the Persian Gulf region while American and Israeli officials signaled that strikes on Iran could continue for weeks. Stocks and bonds slipped and oil and gas prices surged. Investors sought havens like the dollar to protect their money from the uncertain and unpredictable effects of the fighting on the world economy.

“In a prolonged conflict, the combination of higher energy costs, disrupted logistics, and a generalized confidence shock would constitute a meaningful drag on global trade volumes at precisely the moment the world economy was still digesting the inflationary and growth consequences of the tariff shock,” noted analysts at ING, a bank. “The mother of all bad timings.”

“Fears of disruption to shipping on the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway on Iran’s southern border through which a large share of the world’s oil and gas passes, upended energy markets. Oil prices continued to surge, with Brent crude oil, the global benchmark, rising more than 6 percent, to $83 a barrel, the highest level since mid-2024.

“Natural gas prices soared. European natural gas futures jumped for a second day; prices have roughly doubled over the past two days. A measure of gas cargoes in Asia rose 45 percent on Tuesday. Qatar, a major exporter of liquefied natural gas to buyers in Asia and Europe, halted L.N.G. production after attacks on its facilities on Monday. On Tuesday, Qatar’s state-owned energy company said it would also pause the production of “some downstream products” like polymers and aluminum.

“U.S. stocks were set to open sharply lower on Tuesday, with futures for the S&P 500 down 1.8 percent. Markets in New York recovered from early declines on Monday to close slightly higher, lifted by software and energy stocks.

“Stock markets in Asia and Europe recorded a second day of steep declines. The main index in South Korea dropped 7 percent on Tuesday, while stocks in Japan fell 3 percent. The Stoxx Europe 600 index fell more than 3 percent in early trading, with every market across the continent in the red.

“Bonds around the world sold off, as investors assessed the prospect of a potentially prolonged war worsening inflation and spurring higher interest rates. Rising oil and gas prices could result in increased prices at the pump for consumers and add costs to a wide range of component parts for businesses. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield, which moves inversely to prices, rose by 0.4 percentage points, to 4.1 percent. Yields on government bonds in Britain, Germany and Japan jumped even more.

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In starting this war, Trump is gambling his presidency

Tyler Pager addresses this issue (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/us/politics/iran-trump-polls-republicans.html). Here’s some of what he writes.

“Six American service members were killed, and 3 U.S. military jets were shot out of the sky. Investors are bracing for market turmoil, fearing prolonged disruption to oil supplies. President Trump says the military campaign against Iran could extend for weeks, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that ‘the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military.’”

“With his decision Friday to authorize war against Iran, Mr. Trump is taking the biggest gamble of his presidency, risking the lives of American troops, more deaths and instability in the world’s most volatile region, and his own political standing.

“Mr. Trump, facing declining approval ratings and staring down the possibility that Republicans will lose control of Congress in the midterms, plunged the United States into what is shaping up to be its most expansive military conflict since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“In just over a year since taking office, Mr. Trump has authorized military action in seven nations, even after he repeatedly promised American voters that he would end, not start, wars. During his inaugural address, he said his ‘proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.’”

“Now it is Mr. Trump who is orchestrating a rapidly expanding military effort in a region whose history and religious and factional politics make it an especially complex battleground.”

“While a handful of prominent voices in his movement have publicly denounced the decision to go to war, Mr. Trump’s base appears to be standing by him, for now.”

“Still, some of the president’s allies privately worry that there is little political upside to the attacks on Iran and huge downsides, particularly the loss of U.S. troops and rising cost of oil.

“Trump sold voters on a ‘pro-peace’ vision of himself as an America First candidate, yet in under 13 months, he has ordered strikes on seven foreign nations and plunged our country into more open-ended conflict using taxpayer dollars,” Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

“While he’s distracted by foreign conflicts and shiny ballrooms, Trump has failed to deliver on his promise to bring costs down for working families, who are paying more every day because of Trump’s actions.”

“Early polling after the attacks show most voters are not in favor of them. A CNN poll found 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s decision to launch strikes against Iran, and Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 27 percent of Americans approve of the military campaign.”

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Concluding thoughts

The President continues to act as though he can make policy like a King. But not everything is going in his direction. His poll numbers on his presidency are low. Prices remain high. Wages suffer. Employment is barely moving, except in Health Care. There is widespread criticism of ICE. The war is unpopular. And the Epstein issue lingers on. He faces impeachable offenses once he leaves office. Democratic candidates are winning elections.