Media Can’t Hide the Truth About Gracie Mansion Bomb Attempt

National Review Online

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

 

On Saturday, an internet troll named Jake Lang staged an anti-Muslim protest in front of Gracie Mansion — currently the residence of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Both its title (“Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City”) and scheduled main event (a “pig roast”) made its nature as an attention-getting provocation clear enough. Lang expected angry counterprotesters and received them in due course.

 

What neither he nor any of the peaceful counterprotesters in attendance expected was for two young men — identified in reports as Emir Balat (age 18) and Ibrahim Kayumi (age 19) — to rush forward, shout “Allahu akbar,” and hurl improvised explosive devices into the crowd. The bombs, filled with bolts and screws, thankfully failed to detonate, and the two men were immediately apprehended by a fast-moving NYPD.

 

There is no doubt as to their motivations: Both men spoke freely and unrepentantly to police at the scene, proudly claiming inspiration from ISIS and stating they had intended their terrorist atrocity to be “bigger than Boston” — a reference to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that took the lives of three and injured scores more. Only the incompetence of the bombers prevented Saturday from turning into one of the darkest days in recent New York history.

 

Yet one would know none of this were one to go only by the headlines and framing devices the mainstream media have consistently used to explain this story to American readers, who — like it or not — primarily consume their news in headline rather than article form. NBC New York got an early start on what would quickly become an overwhelming trend, telling a curiously noncommittal story over the weekend: “Multiple arrests made after ‘suspicious devices’ found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.” The Daily News’ headline whimpered, “Protestors throw smoking improvised device, clash over Jake Lang pig roast at ‘anti-Islamification’ rally at Gracie Mansion.” The tone-setting New York Times itself wrestled with curiously tortured locutions: “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House.”

 

It is impossible not to notice that all of these headlines — or countless others from similarly situated media outlets — are carefully crafted to avoid stating a politically inconvenient truth: Islamic terrorists came horrifyingly close to detonating bombs in a crowd of protesters. Instead, our attention is directed toward the “hateful” nature of the rally, and readers are asked to fill in the missing narrative gaps with their own imaginations instead.

 

By Tuesday, the sugarcoating of the obvious — that homegrown, self-radicalized jihadis had targeted a protest and nearly murdered who-knows-how-many people outside Gracie Mansion — had moved well into parody. CNN led the morning with a widely mocked (and subsequently deleted) tweet framing the acts of Balat and Kayumi as a soft-focus human interest story: “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather . . .” the piece begins. (You’ll never believe what happened next!)

 

The pattern at this point is clear: The media are consistently choosing not to report on the attack outside Gracie Mansion honestly, instead employing all of their creative writing skills to craft craven, obfuscatory headlines that aim to deceive by omission and suggestion.

 

Elected Democrats, too, have resorted to this obfuscatory framing. First it was former Comptroller Brad Lander, who on Saturday afternoon, after the names and motives of both suspects were already widely known, tweeted, “Happy to know that our Mayor and First Lady are safe, but horrified that there was such a disturbing threat of violence outside their residence. Vile displays of Islamophobia will never be tolerated in our city.” Needless to say, the threat on Saturday came from a diametrically opposed direction, but Lander gave no hint of that.

 

Neither did Mamdani, who chimed in with the same deception. Opening with a denunciation of Lang’s bigotry and Islamophobia, he then generically condemned “what followed” as being “even more disturbing” — without providing the same sort of specificity regarding the culprits.

 

“The hardest thing to see,” Goethe said, “is what is in front of your eyes.” Judging by the performance of the media and New York Democrats in the aftermath of this attack, it’s even harder for them to tell the truth about what they’ve seen.

How Trump Is Using Iran to Fund His Own Political War Chest

By David M. Drucker

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

 

President Donald Trump is using the Iran war to stockpile campaign cash, issuing multiple email fundraising appeals during Week 1 of Operation Epic Fury that cast Democrats as weak on national security and directing donations to his political operation.

 

Requests for contributions began hitting inboxes just a few days after the U.S. military initiated strikes on Iran on February 28. The digital fundraisers, designed to motivate grassroots supporters who make small-dollar donations, were presented as direct messages from Trump and crafted with the same plain-spoken and provocative language the president uses at campaign rallies and in social media posts. At press time, The Dispatch had reviewed more than a half-dozen such money asks sent by Team Trump.

 

One email charges Iran with trying “to interfere” in the 2020 and 2024 elections “to stop President Trump from winning.” In another, “radical left Democrats” are said to be “complaining bitterly about the very necessary and important attack on Iran,” and are accused of wanting to “weaken our resolve and let Iran rebuild.” The missives also seem intended to blunt blowback from the prominent Trump supporters on the MAGA right who oppose the war. “Iran wanted to bring DEATH TO AMERICA,” read one. “I had no other choice.”

 

“Strength sells,” a veteran Republican strategist with experience in digital communications told The Dispatch, requesting anonymity to discuss Trump’s Iran war messaging. “People want to be a part of something strong and victorious. The Iran operation, to the extent it stays that way, benefits from that perception.” (Per the RealClearPolitics average, voters broadly oppose the war. But Republicans, including those who identify with the president’s Make America Great Again movement, are supportive.)

 

Trump tends to discuss the Iran war with a certain bravado his predecessors often eschewed when speaking publicly about military operations they ordered—especially when, as has already happened in this 12-day-old conflict, American casualties were likely. But the president’s use of the Iran war in explicitly political messaging, for partisan advantage and to undercut his opponents, is hardly unprecedented.

 

When President George W. Bush sought reelection in 2004, his pitch was based on keeping Americans safe in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That entailed, in part, making his case for the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

“We will stay on the hunt until justice is served and America is safe from attack,” Bush said, during a July 9, 2004, campaign rally in York, Pennsylvania. “We confronted the dangers of state-sponsored terror and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We acted against two of the most violent regimes on earth. We have liberated over 50 million people. America is safer because of our actions.”

 

Still, as the Iran war entered its second week, Trump and his White House have continued to communicate about the Iran war in ways both overtly political and seemingly trivial. Particularly jarring are the highly stylized videos issued by the White House that are short and designed for consumption on social media platforms.

 

One video splices together clips of violent collisions and tackles from NFL and college football games with what appear to be satellite shots of U.S. military strikes. The song “Thunderstuck” by AC/DC plays in the background. Another video splices together military strikes with scenes from historical dramas and science fiction films about war. Yet another begins with a scene from a video game, cuts to a military strike, then switches back to a video game. The word “wasted” then flashes across the screen.

 

Those are only three examples. There are others.

 

Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, is reporting that former senior U.S. military officials are highly critical of these meme videos. “To say that they are outraged is an understatement,” Engel said. “I had conversations that were peppered with four-letter words—what are these people doing? What are they thinking? Only someone who has never really seen combat could think that it is a joke and put out material like this.”

 

Some videos are less controversial than others, featuring more mundane scenes of American military hardware in action overlayed with Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, or both, discussing the administration’s national security policy and paying tribute to the armed forces.

 

However offensive or distasteful to some viewers, Trump isn’t the first president to rely on unorthodox methods of communication to sell a war to voters, explained Shawn J. Parry-Giles, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who studies political rhetoric.

 

President Woodrow Wilson created the Committee of Public Information, a government propaganda arm, to drum up support for World War I. During World War II, the federal government aired newsreels at movie theaters to promote the conflict against Germany and Japan, and urge Americans to contribute to the effort. Presidents who followed have all, when necessary, looked for novel messaging strategies aimed at winning public support for military action, whether or not the combat in question is referred to as “war” or not.

 

“While certain segments of the population react negatively to these short videos, presidential administrations have sold wartime efforts in a diversity of ways. How they do so has changed through the years,” Parry-Giles said. “These kinds of ads that feature a fusion of popular culture and sports imagery are off-putting for some, especially Democrats. They are nonetheless getting a lot of views, which is a quick and less expensive way to promote the war, especially for those who get their news from social media.”

 

The White House did not respond to an email requesting comment.

The FBI Is Chasing Ghosts in Maricopa County

By Stephen Richer

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

 

On Sunday night, Just The News reported that “the FBI is expanding its criminal probe into suspected election irregularities … agents are receiving gigabytes of electronic election data from Maricopa County.” Early the next morning, President Donald Trump shared the article on Truth Social and wrote: “Great!!!”

 

And that whacked the hornet’s nest. The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, NPR, NBC, The Hill, MS NOW, and many local Arizona news outlets all had news stories up within a few hours.

 

The dust hasn’t fully settled, but it’s settled enough to make a few things clear: Yes, federal law enforcement did issue a subpoena for 2020 election data. But that subpoena wasn’t directed at Maricopa County election officials; it was issued to Arizona state Senate President Warren Petersen, who reported that he turned over the subpoenaed records. Petersen, a Republican, and the state Senate had possession of electronic data from Maricopa County’s November 2020 presidential election as a result of the monthslong review Petersen and then-Senate President Karen Fann commissioned in 2021.

 

We don’t yet know why federal law enforcement sought the election materials. There’s been no word on who the investigation targets or what statute may have been violated. Nor has any judge or grand jury made a determination as to the possibility or probability of such a criminal action; such a determination is not needed to issue a subpoena. 

 

This makes the Maricopa County situation quite different from that of Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI seized more than 600 boxes of 2020 election materials in January. In that instance, federal law enforcement identified two statutes (Title 52 of the U.S. Code Sections 20701 and 20511) that had possibly been violated, and a federal magistrate judge found that law enforcement had established probable cause to obtain a warrant to seize documents (I believe the underlying affidavit in that warrant application was highly problematic). 

 

Unlike Fulton County, Maricopa County no longer has the physical ballots from 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 45,000 votes in the county and won Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes. The county destroyed the ballots in 2024, well clear of the retention requirement. The county also doesn’t have the tabulators from the 2020 election.

 

Previous investigations.

 

Any new investigation by the FBI would have to brush aside the results of several investigations concluding that there was no material fraud or error in the county’s 2020 election. Most people will have long since memory-holed those previous investigations. But because I lived through each and every one of them, both as a Republican candidate on the ballot and as Maricopa County’s elected recorder, I’m here to offer you a refresher:

 

First, following the original tabulation of the 2.1 million ballots in November 2020, volunteers from the county Republican Party and county Democratic Party worked in bipartisan teams to do a hand-count audit of the results. Those teams counted approximately 47,000 ovals on ballots; they matched the machine count exactly.

 

Undeterred, Trump and his supporters continued to allege that Dominion Voting Systems-manufactured tabulators had flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden or awarded only fractional votes to Trump. That prompted Maricopa County to conduct another test of the tabulation equipment on November 18, 2020. Kelli Ward, then chairwoman of the Republican Party, signed off on that test, as did representatives from the Libertarian Party and the Democratic Party.

 

At the same time, Trump and his allies took their multitudinous allegations of voting irregularities to state and federal court. Seven times. They lost each case.

 

Those pushing the election fraud claims have maintained that all of these cases were dismissed on the basis of standing, or something else that they would deem a mere technicality. But that’s simply not true. For example, in Ward v. Jackson, the trial court permitted evidentiary examination of the county’s signature verification process and the county’s ballot duplication process. The court ruled on both issues that “[b]ased on the facts found above, the evidence did not prove illegal votes, much less enough to affect the outcome of the election.” 

 

The Arizona Supreme Court later affirmed the ruling, writing:

 

Because the challenge fails to present any evidence of “misconduct,” “illegal votes” or that the Biden Electors “did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office,” let alone establish any degree of fraud or a sufficient error rate that would undermine the certainty of the election results, the Court need not decide if the challenge was in fact authorized under A.R.S. § 16-672 or if the federal “safe harbor” deadline applies to this contest.

 

But allegations of a stolen election didn’t die, and Dominion Voting Systems was still at the heart of many of those claims. Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar repeated conspiracy theories about the company’s tabulators; so too did Ward, who made a highly stylized video titled, “AZGOP Chairwoman EXPOSES Dominion Voting Software.”

 

That prompted those of us at Maricopa County, where I had just taken office as the official responsible for voter registration, early voting, and other election-related duties, to commission yet another assessment of the county’s tabulation equipment. This time, in early February 2021, we asked two federally certified election technology companies to independently assess whether the tabulation equipment had: 1) been connected to the internet at any point during the election, 2) if the software source code had been altered, 3) if any malware had been installed, and 4) if the tabulators could “flip” votes. Both companies, SLI Compliance and Pro V&V, said no, no, no, and no.

 

Enter the Ninjas.

 

The above testing, the court cases, the bipartisan hand-count audit, and the November 2020 test of the tabulation equipment satisfied state Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers, a Republican who was ready to move on from the election. But the state Senate was a different story. In March 2021, Fann and Petersen commissioned a “forensic audit” to be performed by the Cyber Ninjas, a private company run by Sarasota, Florida, resident Doug Logan, who had never worked in election administration or auditing and had already posted to social media several popular conspiracy theories about the 2020 election (including one involving the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez).

 

The Cyber Ninjas endeavor went about how you’d expect. The process, such as it was, cost millions of both private and public dollars; it took months longer than expected; the Cyber Ninjas got into legal trouble over withholding records; the company also declared bankruptcy; and he conceded in private messages about the ballot recount that it “looks like basically our numbers are screwy.”  

 

The Cyber Ninjas also investigated and made a whole bunch of wacky, amateurish allegations–including, famously, that the county used fraudulent bamboo-laced ballots flown in from China. Maricopa County issued a 93-page response, writing that of the 75 claims, only one had any validity (the county had indeed double-counted one stack of 50 ballots out of 2.1 million ballots recorded).

 

The Cyber Ninjas did accomplish two things: One, the company embarrassed the state on The Daily Show, and two, it pleaded with Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate its allegations. It wasn’t a straight-line process, but Brnovich’s team ultimately spent (emphasis added):

 

more than 10,000 hours investigating allegations of voting irregularities and reviewing alleged instances of illegal voting submitted to our office by private parties. Some of the more high-profile matters involved Cyber Ninjas Incorporated, True the Vote, Verity Vote, and elected officials. In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations. The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.

 

Regarding the Cyber Ninjas’ allegation that dead people had voted, Brnovich stated that the people his office contacted “were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.” Later, in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Brnovich said of the stolen election claims: “most of it’s horsesh-t, and I’ve been trying to scrape it off my shoes for the past year.”

 

At this point, I’m a bit embarrassed to continue the tale, as it only shows how maniacally obsessed my wonderful state of Arizona and my political party (Republican) became with theories of a stolen election. 

 

But we did, in fact, do more to investigate the 2020 election. The state Senate and county together commissioned an investigation by former Republican Rep. John Shadegg to assess the county’s router system in response to continued allegations of digital manipulation of the vote via the internet. Shadegg, in turn, hired three different technology companies that ultimately produced a report giving the election a clean bill of health. The county also enlisted the company PacketWatch to examine the “event logs” on the Dominion server. And, we did our own internal audits of everything from signature verification to chain-of-custody forms.

 

I recount all of this now not because I set out to write the next great American horror story, but because over the next few days plenty of otherwise sensible people will say, “What’s the harm in having somebody take a look at election records?” People have looked—professionals and amateurs, over thousands of hours, costing millions of dollars.

 

The years of investigations, tests, reviews, and audits are also worth revisiting because any future allegations would have to account for why all the previous probes didn’t uncover any material fraud or error. I would politely suggest that the reason is because no such fraud or error exists. The voters of Arizona chose Joe Biden more than five and a half years ago. It’s time to move on.

Batista 2.0

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

 

Yesterday I speculated that the White House had no Plan B for the war in Iran because it didn’t expect that it would need one. I imagined the president thinking this was going to be another Venezuela, dopey as that may seem: “Neutralize the country’s leader with an awesome show of force and wait for his terrified deputies to sue for peace in hopes of avoiding the same fate.”

 

Last night the Wall Street Journal confirmed it. “Trump’s hope, according to U.S. officials, was that the Feb. 28 decapitating strike on the Iranian leadership … would trigger either a collapse of the Iranian regime or the repeat of the Venezuela scenario, in which more pragmatic officials chose to cooperate with Washington,” the paper reported.

 

It turns out that a regime of Islamist fanatics with hundreds of thousands of men under arms wasn’t ready to surrender after a single day of bombing. Suddenly everyone from congressional Republicans to Trump’s own advisers are praying for the mother of all TACOs to end the war before an energy crisis swallows the GOP’s electoral prospects whole.

 

What I didn’t get around to in yesterday’s piece is what the price of a TACO would be. A creature as obsessed as Trump is with projecting strength won’t easily stomach having to bug out of Iran with the regime intact, its enriched uranium unaccounted for, and the Strait of Hormuz still vulnerable to being menaced. MAGA zombies might buy his declaration of “mission accomplished,” but no one else will.

 

A different kind of human would be chastened by a miscalculation in Iran and rethink his hubris with respect to future military adventures, but Trump will probably become more hubristic. Haunted by appearing “weak” after failing to impose his will on the mullahs, he’ll scan the global schoolyard for a pipsqueak to dominate—ideally one whom his constituents have been spoiling to punch in the face for a long time.

 

There’s no mystery who that’ll be. Cuba wants to make a deal, the president crowed to reporters at a press conference on Monday. When asked what that deal might look like, he replied, “It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter.”

 

“Friendly takeover” was also the term he used to describe his designs on Cuba late last month. Since then, despite being in the thick of war with the most sinister Islamist power in the Middle East, he’s brought up his next regime-change target repeatedly in public appearances. Cuba is “at the end of the line”; Cuba is the “next one”; Cuba will be “easy,” requiring no more than an hour or so of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s time to strike a deal assuring the island’s submission.

 

There’s even been some movement within the Justice Department to charge Cuba’s leaders with federal crimes, which you may recall was the pretext for having U.S. troops capture Nicolás Maduro without authorization from Congress.

 

Why Cuba? Why now?

 

A ripe target.

 

Well, for starters, the regime there really is at the end of the line.

 

It’s been near the end for 67 years thanks to the economic miracle of communism and a deathless U.S. embargo enforced by presidents from both parties, but Trump’s Venezuela excursion has at last pushed it to the brink. Without cut-rate crude flowing in from the now Maduro-less government in Caracas, Cuba’s economy is in total collapse.

 

There are reports of locals picking through trash to find food, losing running water in their homes, and doing chores in the middle of the night because that’s the only time of day when electricity is available to power appliances. This week a CNN reporter based in Havana told of Cubans complaining to him that “we have returned to the Stone Age” and that they can’t feed their families. “Let the Americans come, let Trump come, it’s time to get this over with,” one whispered.

 

Forcing Venezuela to turn off the oil tap to Cuba was a brutal hardball gambit by the White House, but it achieved its intended purpose, forcing Raul Castro’s grandson and caretaker into private talks with Rubio about the future of the regime. That’s one answer to the “why now?” question: Cuba is “next” because it’s a hostile power in America’s backyard that’s never been more vulnerable than it is at this moment, especially with its friends in Moscow otherwise preoccupied.

 

As for “why Cuba?”, Trump himself supplied the rationale at a public appearance yesterday. “No other president can do some of this sh-t I’m doing,” he boasted to the crowd.

 

It’s very important to him, I think, to be remembered as a president who did sh-t no other president could do, from small-ball stuff like smearing his brand all over the Kennedy Center to world-changing matters like helping Israel assassinate the supreme leader of Iran. The common thread in his turn towards militarism this year is settling Republican foreign-policy grudges that his predecessors never forcefully addressed.

 

For years Venezuela’s Chavista regime agitated against the United States, irritating the American right. Now its heir is sitting in a U.S. jail and his successor takes orders from Washington. For years Iran’s revolutionary regime waged proxy wars on America and Israel and stockpiled enriched uranium intended for nuclear bombs, causing American hawks to warn of an apocalypse if nothing were done. Now its uranium is buried under rubble, and its leadership is dead.

 

The next, all-but-inevitable score to settle is with the communists of Cuba, who’ve outlasted every U.S. president from Eisenhower to the present day. They’re in Trump’s crosshairs not because he holds some strong ideological objection to central economic planning—to the contrary—but because he’s bent on succeeding where those who held his office before him failed. He’s going to harpoon the great white whale that eluded other American captains of state and impose regional U.S. hegemony at last on the most unlikely and infamous holdout of the post-war era.

 

No wonder crazed hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham sounds like he’s in the throes of religious ecstasy during his Fox News appearances lately.

 

Sphere of influence.

 

There’s one more answer to the “why Cuba?” and “why now?” questions, though. If Trump ends up humiliated in Iran, forced to cut the war short to avert an economic disaster before his goals are achieved, I think he might decide that he’s done with power projection outside the Western hemisphere for the rest of his presidency.

 

His administration is already trending that way. In January the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy de-prioritized the threat from China, a predictable turn to those of us who long ago saw through nationalists’ phony hawkish pretenses toward Beijing. And the president has no interest in containing Russia, needless to say. (That’s the stark, unexplained exception to his foreign-policy score-settling tour aimed at traditional Republican enemies.) If and when the shooting finally stops in Ukraine, the White House will almost certainly proceed to some comprehensive new rapprochement with Moscow.

 

That’s why France is suddenly offering to create its own nuclear umbrella for Europe. The era in which the United States meaningfully deterred Russia is unofficially over already and will be officially over soon enough.

 

As for the Middle East, I expect that it too will become a no-go for an administration that’s bruised by its failure to subjugate Iran, by the heat it’s taken from diehard “America First-ers” for waging another regional war, and by polling that shows Americans turning against Israel. Interventions there are too messy, too far-flung, and too difficult to be worth the political trouble anymore.

 

Instead, I suspect, Trump will tend to his own garden by focusing on America’s “sphere of influence” in its own hemisphere, where it can menace military lightweights with little fear of resistance until 2029. That means taking another run at Greenland eventually. (It’s coming. Don’t kid yourself.) It means attacking Mexico’s cartels at some point. And it most assuredly means dumping Castroism into the dustbin of history.

 

Regime change in Cuba is an easy win relative to regime change in Iran. But what would a “win” look like?

 

Delcy redux.

 

If the president had his wish, I think it would look like Batista 2.0.

 

Fulgencio Batista was the strongman who ruled Cuba before Castro’s rebellion toppled him in 1959. He was an s.o.b. (it was during his tenure that Marco Rubio’s parents fled to the United States) but, as the saying goes, our s.o.b. Batista was a U.S. client during the Cold War who made Cuba a playground for American corporations and organized crime before the economic resentment he sowed helped bring the communists to power.

 

He’s exactly the sort of character whom Trump would like back in charge of the island, I suspect. Who is Delcy Rodríguez, after all, if not a sort of Venezuelan Batista?

 

The president will want three things from a new Cuba. First, of course, is a leader who does his bidding unquestioningly. Second is an island economy that American businesses are free to colonize—after earning the president’s favor on an ad hoc basis, of course—and a Riviera where rich American tourists can frolic. (Remember how Gaza was teed up to become the Riviera of the Mediterranean? Wait until the Trump Havana Hotel and Casino opens in 2028.) And third is a government that will keep the population quiescent as the great redevelopment project commences.

 

An iron fist for Cubans and a velvet glove for Americans: That’s the White House’s dream candidate to lead post-Castro Cuba. Batista 2.0.

 

But where can they find someone like that? They’ve been looking for months within the regime for a Rodríguez-type who might be willing and able to fill the role but without luck, as far as I’m aware. And maybe that’s no surprise: As one Obama-era official explained to the Wall Street Journal, Cuba is far more repressive and Stalinist in its indoctrination tactics than even Venezuela is. “There’s nobody who would be tempted to work on the U.S. side,” he predicted.

 

That would also complicate American operations to remove the regime by force. “When you have a police state populated by people who have no future in a pro-American successor government, they have no incentive to give up, and they have the monopoly on firepower,” one historian warned The Atlantic of Cuba. That apparatus is diffuse and decentralized too: “Even more than [Venezuela and Iran], Cuba's revolutionary police state has been embedded and threaded throughout the country on a literally block-by-block level,” Reason’s Matt Welch explained.

 

It’s the same problem the U.S. faces in Iran. Having easily liquidated the Ayatollah and his top commanders, the White House is now at a loss as to how to dislodge the vast Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that actually runs the country.

 

But it gets trickier. In addition to being a nonstarter for Cuba’s Castroists, Batista 2.0 might be a nonstarter for anti-Castroists here in the United States.

 

At the risk of being naive, I doubt Americans will tolerate strongman rule by “our SOB” on the island as easily as they’re tolerating it in Venezuela. Cuban expats and their descendants haven’t spent 67 years calling for another Batista, they’ve spent it crying out for Cuba libre. After generations of oppression and immiseration, the Cuban people deserve real freedom—human rights, of course, and democratic elections. The moral pressure on the White House to deliver it if the Cuban leadership abdicates will be much greater than it was after Maduro was snatched from Caracas.

 

And that could work out for the president. If elections were held (er, somehow without the remnants of the Castroist police state interfering), Cubans might plausibly elect a pro-American candidate in the belief that a Trump-friendly leader would be better positioned to secure economic aid from Washington. But there are no guarantees: Decades of communist brainwashing and grievances about the U.S. embargo might produce a winner who refused to be a White House puppet. And even if a pro-American candidate prevailed, that person would serve two masters—not just Trump but the voters who elected him or her.

 

That’s precisely why the president is in no hurry to hold elections in Venezuela. The moment a new leader answerable to the people is chosen, he loses his marionette.

 

So what’s a mafioso who yearns to rule Cuba by proxy to do? How does he install Batista 2.0 in Havana without tearing Castro’s police state up by its roots and without angering the Cuba libre cohort here at home?

 

Patience.

 

I don’t know how he does it successfully, but I think I know how he plans to try. He’s going to solve the problem of how to replace the Castroists by … not replacing them.

 

A few days ago USA Today reported that an economic deal between the U.S. and Cuba is in the works and could be announced soon. “An agreement could include a relaxation on Americans' ability to travel to Havana,” the story alleged. “Discussions have included an off-ramp for President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the Castro family remaining on the island and deals on ports, energy, and tourism. The U.S. government has floated dropping some sanctions.”

 

A “friendly takeover,” we might call it.

 

The “off-ramp” for top officials could mean many things—exile, amnesty from prosecution, or simply stepping down with assurances that they won’t be targeted—but it sounds like the broader strategy is to open up the island economically and hope that the infusion of cash proves so intoxicating to the Castroist police state that its members decide to play ball with Trump.

 

Is it likely that a vast Stalinist KGB will opt to go straight and begin acting like normal peacekeeping cops? It is not. But I assume that the White House will push a lot of money at them under the table to try to secure their cooperation or, failing that, to entice them into emigrating from the island.

 

It wouldn’t be regime change as much as it would be regime co-optation, in other words, but with an extra degree of difficulty than the U.S. faced in Venezuela. In that case, Trump left the Chavistas in place without asking them to renounce their ideology; in this case, he’d be trying to bribe America-hating communists en masse into supporting a new pro-American capitalist regime.

 

“But the Cuba libre faction in the U.S. won’t trust having Castroist thugs keep order in a post-Castro country,” you might say. Are we sure about that?

 

If they can be convinced that the only way to achieve long-term freedom for the Cuban people is to do so in stages, with the first step involving economic liberalization to improve the dire standard of living on the island, they might be amenable. And I know just the guy to convince them.

 

“Cuba needs to change. It needs to change, and it doesn’t have to change all at once. It doesn’t have to change from one day to the next. ... Everyone is mature and realistic,” Marco Rubio said last month. “They need to make dramatic reforms, and if they want to make those dramatic reforms that open the space for both economic and eventually political freedom for the people of Cuba, obviously the United States would love to see that,”

 

The most credible member of Trump’s Cabinet, himself the son of Cuban exiles, is on the verge of a diplomatic breakthrough that might at last end Castroist rule in that country and send the country’s president into the sort of luxe Moscow retirement that Bashar al-Assad is currently enjoying. All he’s asking from Americans who are cheering on the effort is patience.

 

It might look initially like Batista 2.0, with plenty of thugs weaned on Castroism still in positions of influence, but only as a transitional point toward Cuba libre. That’s the ask. Patience.

 

Castro-haters aren’t the only ones capable of patience, though. Delcy Rodríguez appears to be waiting the White House out on matters like elections and severing ties with Russia and China, while making Trump happy on higher priorities like oil. By next year Democrats might be back in charge of Congress and/or by 2029 back in the White House—and an America where Democrats wield real power will be one that’s less willing to compel Caracas to carry out its wishes.

 

Cuba’s Castroists might take the same approach. If Washington wants to bail them out of the economic calamity in which the island is mired in exchange for their cooperation on “liberalizing,” they’ll take it … and then, when the president is no longer in a position to threaten them, they’ll reassert their authority by cracking down.

 

It’s less a question of whether we end up in the long run with another strongman in charge there, in other words, than how willing that strongman will be to work with the United States. That may not be Marco Rubio’s dream for Cuba. But it’s probably the realistic best he can do.

Congressional Republicans and the Ministry of Truth Social

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

 

Let’s state the obvious: We’re at war with Iran.

 

My evidence? Turn on your TV. U.S. forces, working with Israel, killed the supreme leader of Iran and many of his top aides. We sank Iran’s navy and destroyed most of its air force. We bombed thousands of military sites across the region. President Donald Trump, the commander in chief, has demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. He routinely refers to this as a “war.” Pete Hegseth, who calls himself the secretary of war, also describes this as a war daily, such as last week when he said, “We set the terms of this war.”

 

The truth that we are at war is so simple that only politicians and lawyers could make it seem complicated.

 

Indeed, a slew of Republican legislators insist we’re not actually at war. House Speaker Mike Johnson: “We’re not at war right now. We’re four days into a very specific, clear mission and operation.” Florida Rep. Brian Mast: “Nobody should classify this as war. It is combat operations.” South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham: “I don’t know if this is technically a war.” Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin: “This isn’t a war. We haven’t declared war.” Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: “Strategic strikes are not war.”

 

Pearl Harbor was a strategic strike, too.

 

Then there’s the claim that we’re not at war with Iran but Iran is at war with us. This is half true, insofar as Iran has been committing acts of war against the U.S. since it took our embassy staff hostage in 1979. But waging a war in response doesn’t make it any less of a war.

 

One is tempted to invoke George Orwell’s 1984, in which the existence or non-existence of war hinges on what the Ministry of Truth (or Truth Social) puts out on a given day. But nothing so literary is at play. This is (mostly) legalism run amok.

 

The main reason congressional Republicans reject the W-word is simple. If it’s merely a “combat operation” or “strategic strike” in response to an “imminent threat,” then the president has the authority to do it without congressional approval. If it’s a war, then it’s arguably illegal and unconstitutional within the framework of the War Powers Act or the Constitution itself. That's because, under the Constitution, declaring war is the sole responsibility of Congress. And the last thing this Congress wants to do is take responsibility for anything.

 

This at least partly explains why Trump insists he had a “feeling” Iran was about to attack us. He’s even suggested that Iran was just weeks away from having a nuclear weapon and that he prevented an imminent “nuclear war.”

 

The War Powers Act—nominally rejected by every president since it was passed in 1973—was intended to restrict the president’s ability to use force without Congress’s consent. It backfired. It says the president can respond militarily to threats as he deems necessary, but then must go to Congress within 60 days for approval to continue hostilities. The result: Presidents have a free hand to wage war for roughly two months, unless Congress stops them.

 

But congressional Republicans don’t want to stop him. That’s tactically defensible, if you believe this war was necessary. But the tactic forces Congress to say, in effect, “Don’t believe you’re lying eyes. This isn’t a war.”

 

For those who only vaguely remember what they learned in high school about the War Powers Act—or for that matter, the Constitution—this riot of legalism only fuels confusion.

 

But there’s another factor driving the evasion. Trump made the idea of staying out of “forever wars” a central tenet of America First. There’s no textbook definition of “forever war” — always a ludicrous term—so you can understand why some people believed it was code for “Middle East war” or just plain war of any kind. The irony is that Trump could make a plausible case that this war is allowable under the Authorization to Use Military Force that George W. Bush received in 2001. But symbolically, that would mean Trump is continuing Bush’s “forever war.”

 

Regardless, Republicans aren’t just under a legal clock to get this thing over with, but a political one too. Polling shows that Americans, including many Republicans, have no thirst for a long conflict, which makes sense given that they were not asked to prepare for this war at all. Hence, the insistence that this war will be short and tidy.

 

The problem is that Iran knows this. Which is why they don’t have to win, they just have to ride out the bombings until the public or Trump loses patience with this very real war.

Iran’s Stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

 

The good news is U.S. Central Command reported that American forces destroyed 16 Iranian minelayers near the Strait of Hormuz Tuesday.

 

The bad news is that the remaining Iranian military has quite a few mines — an estimated 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines largely produced by Iran, China, or Russia, according to U.S. officials talking to CBS News — and they don’t sound particularly difficult to deploy.

 

Back in 2019, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s analysis of Iran’s naval capability concluded, “Iran has an estimated inventory of more than 5,000 naval mines, which include contact and influence mines. Both navies have devised strategies to rapidly deploy mines while improving force survivability. Iran has a variety of vessels that can lay mines, but the IRGCN has integrated its doctrine of using smaller, faster vessels into its mine-laying strategy. Iran has equipped many of its Ashoora small boats with mine rails capable of holding at least one mine.” While that report could not specify how many Ashoora boats the Iranian navy has, it noted they have “hundreds of small boats throughout the Persian Gulf.”

 

Scott Savitz is a senior engineer at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy, who worked in Bahrain supporting the U.S. Navy from 2001 to 2003. He offered a detailed perspective on the uses and risks of mines in a March 5 interview with the China-Russia Report, including this concise explanation of the two main types of mines: “Contact mines detonate when a ship collides with them, while influence mines respond to the characteristic signatures of a ship in their vicinity, such as a ship’s magnetism, the sounds it generates, and the pressure drop it creates. Most contact mines are moored or drifting, and moored contact mines are the classic ‘spiky balls’ that most people envision when they think of mines, while most influence mines are bottom mines.”

 

And according to U.S. officials talking to CNN, Iran is starting to put those mines to the Strait, which is about 21 miles across at its narrowest point:

 

Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy chokepoint that carries about one-fifth of all crude oil, according to two people familiar with US intelligence reporting on the issue.

 

The mining is not extensive yet, with a few dozen having been laid in recent days, the sources said. But Iran still retains upward of 80 percent to 90 percent of its small boats and mine layers, one of the sources said, so its forces could feasibly lay hundreds of mines in the waterway.

 

One wonders how many mines the Iranian regime wants to put into the Persian Gulf or Strait of Hormuz, because this is their primary trade route, and vital for their customers in China. (More on Iranian oil shipments to China below.) Once mines get laid, they are a pain in the neck to mitigate, as Savitz explained:

 

Mines create a cornucopia of problems for those trying to transit and operate in potentially mined waters. They may not know that the minefield exists or what its boundaries are, let alone the number and types of mines present. For example, all three U.S. warships that were damaged by mines in the Persian Gulf from 1988-1991 had no idea they were in minefields until mines detonated beneath them. Mine countermeasures (MCM) operations are slow and painstaking, frustrating the rest of the fleet as it waits to enter the mined area. MCM assets move slowly in predictable patterns with few defensive capabilities of their own, making them easy targets, and they’re generally designed for low signatures rather than durability. Mine clearance is often incomplete, and there is always uncertainty about the extent of residual risk, aside from the tough judgments about whether it has been reduced to an acceptable level. After all the delays associated with MCM, the fleet has to slowly transit a cleared lane, making its movements predictable while diminishing ships’ ability to maneuver in response to other threats. Mines have powerful synergies with other weapons that can take advantage of these vulnerabilities. . . .

 

Iran depends on the Strait of Hormuz for its own commercial traffic, so it will likely prefer to mine other areas of the Gulf, as it did in the 1980s. It can selectively target ships in the Strait of Hormuz using other weapons, such as missiles and explosive-laden boats (with or without people aboard). The speed with which mined waters can be reopened depends on risk tolerance and resource commitment. Tankers were willing to run the gauntlet of mine risk in the Persian Gulf during the 1980s, paying correspondingly elevated insurance rates, and some of them were damaged. . . .

 

While the Iranians are presumably keeping detailed maps and GPS coordinates of where they’ve laid their mines, the more mines that the Iranians lay in the Gulf, the more likely it is that a mine ends up damaging one of their tankers or China’s tankers. Then again, the Iranian military may not be doing a lot of long-term thinking right now. They need ships to be afraid to sail through the Strait, for oil prices to skyrocket, and for the U.S. to decide to call it a day.

 

Then again, the U.S. may have some new countermeasures against enemy mines. Back in late 2022, DefenseNews reported, “The Navy has a number of programs in the works for small mine warfare and mine countermeasures UUVs — Unmanned Underwater Vehicles, or basically underwater drones.”

 

At 4:07 p.m. Tuesday, the commander in chief took to Truth Social to demand the remaining Iranian regime remove any mines from the Gulf:

 

If Iran has put out any mines in the Hormuz Strait, and we have no reports of them doing so, we want them removed, IMMEDIATELY! If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before. If, on the other hand, they remove what may have been placed, it will be a giant step in the right direction! Additionally, we are using the same Technology and Missile capabilities deployed against Drug Traffickers to permanently eliminate any boat or ship attempting to mine the Hormuz Strait. They will be dealt with quickly and violently. BEWARE!

 

Yesterday, Reuters reported, “The U.S. Navy has refused near-daily requests from the shipping industry for military escorts through the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the war on Iran, saying the risk of attacks is too high for now, according to sources familiar with the matter.”

 

This morning, CNBC reported:

 

Three vessels off Iran’s coast have been struck by projectiles, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said on Wednesday, the latest in a flurry of incidents reported in or near the Strait of Hormuz.

 

One of the ships reported it had been struck 11 nautical miles north of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz, causing a fire onboard and forcing the crew to evacuate, the UKMTO said. . . .

 

Two other incidents were also reported on Wednesday morning, with one vessel struck by a projectile about 50 nautical miles northwest of Dubai and another sustaining damage off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.

 

The maritime news site Windward reported yesterday, “Commercial activity through the Strait of Hormuz fell again on March 9, with only a single outbound Iranian-flagged vessel recorded and no inbound movements observed.”

 

But, as this newsletter has emphasized this week, one country is getting its flagged ships through the Strait comparably easily:

 

Iran has continued to send large amounts of crude oil via the Strait of Hormuz to China even as the war between U.S.-Israel and Iran has jeopardized broader supplies through the critical waterway.

 

Iran has sent at least 11.7 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began on Feb. 28, all of which were headed to China, Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers, told CNBC on Tuesday.

 

The firm monitors vessel movements with satellite imagery, allowing it to capture vessels that would otherwise go undetected if their tracking systems are switched off. Many vessels have “gone dark” after Tehran threatened to attack any vessel attempting to pass through the waterway.

 

Among the comments from chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine in yesterday’s Pentagon briefing:

 

U.S. Strategic Command bombers recently dropped dozens of 2,000-pound GPS penetrating weapons on deeply buried missile launchers across the southern flank. We also have struck several one-way drone factories to get at the heart of their autonomous capability.

 

Ballistic missile attacks continue to trend downward 90 percent from where they’ve started, and one way attack drones have decreased 83 percent since the beginning of the operation, a testament to our air defenders and our air defense systems. And as I said, our partners in the region continue to do great work as well.

 

Second, we’re making substantial progress towards destroying the navy in the first ten days of the conflict. We’re more than 50 Iranian naval ships into the campaign using a combination of artillery, fighters, bombers and sea launched missiles. As Admiral Cooper noted last Thursday, we struck and sank an Iranian drone carrier ship, and U.S. CENTCOM continues today to hunt and strike mine laying vessels and mine storage facilities. This — this work will continue. . . .

 

No plan survives first contact with the enemy or Murphy. They’re adapting, as are we. Of course, we have very entrepreneurial warfighters out there. I’d rather not, for operational security reasons, tell them what’s working. So, I’ll — I’m gonna non-answer that question based on that. But we are watching uh what they’re doing, and we are adapting faster than they are.

 

Yesterday, our Thérèse Shaheen noted that while our ideal outcome is a new regime, a significantly defanged foe would still represent a substantial improvement in our circumstances:

 

Eliminating that threat — to ourselves, and in partnership with Israel, to themselves — is justifiable, even without having a clear sense of what might come next for the Iranian people. The military operation is diminishing the ability of the regime to threaten the U.S. and allies in the region and globally. Curtailing Iran’s ability to do that, even if a government remains that is otherwise unfriendly, is justified. Failing to eliminate the regime may not immediately improve the circumstances of the Iranian people, but the military operation to end the threat to the U.S. includes significant destruction of the internal security apparatus that is harming ordinary Iranians. Life under the mullahs has been decades of repression, torture, and death for many who stayed; exile and separation from their homeland for those who fled. The theocracy has caused untold death and suffering for decades, and the risk for more of that was unacceptably high.

 

ADDENDUM: Our Audrey Fahlberg, the human bombshell scoop machine, continues her run: “Discussions are underway at the Department of Homeland Security about reevaluating plans to buy a Boeing 737 MAX luxury jet that had been used by Kristi Noem prior to her ouster as DHS secretary, National Review has learned. Dubbed the ‘Big Beautiful Jet’ by DHS staffers, the luxury jet and its private cabin have become a major source of consternation among Republicans at the department and the White House.”

 

We all know the true “Big Beautiful Jet” is now quarterback Geno Smith.

 

Or safety Minkah Fitzpatrick. Or linebacker Demario Davis.

 

Or edges Joseph Ossai and Kingsley Enagbare, or defensive tackle David Onyemata, or safety Dane Belton, or cornerback Nahshon Wright.

 

It’s been a busy free agency period.

 

 

Good News, CPAC, Steve Bannon Accepted Your Invitation!

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

 

I will believe that the MAGA crowd genuinely is concerned about the wrongdoing of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates when Epstein biographer, public relations adviser, and close friend Steve Bannon is no longer invited to CPAC events.

 

Note that according to the event’s website, they will be “Starting CPAC USA 2026 programming with a focus on judeo-christian [sic] values and faith.”