It’s Always Something

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

The case for supporting Graham Platner, my Democrat friends assert, is the case for voting for any Senate candidate with a “D” next to his name. A Democrat-controlled Congress (that the Democrats will win a majority in the House is generally taken as given as of this writing, though I’m not sure it should be) puts a stop to Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, which is a very compelling argument until you consider that Donald Trump does not have a legislative agenda to speak of. But there are other levers of power attached to a congressional majority—oversight, confirmations, etc.—as well as an opportunity for Democrats to put forward their own legislative agenda, forcing Trump either to accept their bills or veto some popular proposals. And though a small Democratic majority in the Senate would not be able, on its own strength, to remove Trump (and possibly other members of his administration) from office once the Democrat-controlled House has handed down yet another impeachment (as many observers assume it will, as a matter of course), every jackass with a Kik account and a “D” next to his name who ends up seated in the Senate puts Democrats one step closer to realizing that end.

 

That isn’t nothing. There are a dozen good reasons to impeach Trump and other members of his administration and remove them from office—from the illegally launched and incompetently executed war in Iran to the massacres of civilians at sea to the still-relevant issue of the failed coup d’état of 2020–21—and it would be useful and salubrious to have an empowered congressional opposition to check Trump’s various abuses of power, which range from trying to evade Senate confirmation in making high-level appointments to his attempt to simply loot the Treasury to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund to use for his own political purposes. The personal, venal corruption attending this administration is epic, and Democrats could perform a very useful public service by making it a headline issue under a new Democratic majority, if one should come to pass.

 

The case for supporting Ken Paxton, my Republican friends assert, is the case for voting for any Senate candidate with an “R” next to his name. A Democrat-controlled Congress (that the Democrats will win a majority in the House is generally taken as given as of this writing, though I’m not sure it should be) puts a stop to Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, which is a very compelling argument until you consider that Donald Trump does not have a legislative agenda to speak of. But there are other levers of power attached to a congressional majority—oversight, confirmations, etc.—as well as an opportunity for Democrats to put forward their own legislative agenda, forcing Trump either to accept their bills or veto some popular proposals. And though a small Democratic majority in the Senate would not be able, on its own strength, to remove Trump (and possibly other members of his administration) from office once the Democrat-controlled House has handed down yet another impeachment (as many observers assume it will, as a matter of course), every jackass with a Kik account and a “D” next to his name who ends up seated in the Senate puts Democrats one step closer to realizing that end.

 

That isn’t nothing.

 

There are many dangers associated with Thomas Friedman-style “China for a Day” thinking. But if I could wave a magic wand and create Democratic majorities sufficient to carry out a broad and wide act of national political hygiene by ending, via acts of Congress, the political careers of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Todd Blanche, et al., I would be sore tempted to do my best Harry Potter impersonation: “In tenebras exteriores!”

 

I expect they’d raise my taxes, too, and I suppose I could live with that, even if I am tempted to adapt H.L. Mencken: “No man is genuinely happy under a Democratic government if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when Republicans were in charge.”

 

I hear people talk about these elections as though they were attempting to channel Machiavelli, as though there were some compellingly clever strategic consideration informing their planned votes. But I often detect lurking beneath that the politics of cooties—the unspoken belief that one becomes morally contaminated by casting a vote for the other party or even by declining to cast a vote for one’s own party. “Yes, yes, x is awful”—where x = Graham Platner or Ken Paxton—“but not as awful as y” where y = the other party. I think that line of thinking often serves as a way to give oneself a moral get-out-of-jail-free card for indulging in political tribalism over decency. I write that as someone who has, as far as I can tell, precisely one thing in common politically with the great majority of my Democratic friends: the belief that the Republican Party at this moment is not only wrong on a great many questions of policy but is, more consequentially, a dangerous and depraved personality cult. I told Michael Medved on his radio show on Monday that I would find it impossible to support any Republican for any office at this time. Even if that means giving the Democrats a Senate majority? he wanted to know.

 

Medved is far from an unthinking Republican loyalist, but the assumption in the question was mistaken in a way that seems to me a little bit illuminating. I told him that my preferred electoral outcome for the immediate future is seeing Republicans “stomped into goo.” I know what that means in practical terms. I don’t know that we have a word for negative polarization that is bipartisan, but, if there is one, that is approximately what I am feeling right now. If there were a way to get Republicans stomped without the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting more power, then I’d be all for that. But there isn’t.

 

Voting is not the beginning or end of civic life, or even the most important part of democratic participation. Whatever convenient lie people tell themselves, “Vote for x” or (the one I hear more often) “Tell people they have to vote for x” usually isn’t the result of clear-eyed political calculation—it is usually a demand for an act of tribal fealty, preferably a public act. And if someone demands that you demonstrate your loyalty by pretending that Graham Platner or Ken Paxton is a different sort of man than what he is, or by insisting that you keep quiet about what kind of man he is for the sake of party cohesion, then that person does not deserve your trust or your loyalty. That kind of person will always find an excuse for doing something awful in the urgent cause of the moment, as though the greater good were composed of lesser evils.

 

You can always find a reason to pull for your team. It’s always something. But don’t go mistaking team spirit for patriotism, civic virtue, or the higher good.

Graham Platner Is the Very ‘Toxic Masculinity’ Stereotype the Left Invented

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

Transcription alone fails to convey the uniqueness of the characters who recruited Maine’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, Graham Platner, into the race.

 

The products of Yale, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley, Daniel Moraff and his fiancée, Leanne Fan, recently sat down with the Wall Street Journal — just prior to the “sexting” claims and credible allegations of assault against Graham — to explain why the self-described oysterman was just what the country needed.

 

The interview truly must be heard to be believed:

 

 

Amid mischievous chuckles, the couple dismissed their candidates’ many defects of character as though the joke were on all of us. With a pronounced laryngeal creak and grating glottal upspeak, Moraff assured his interviewer that the clearly insufficient vetting they applied to Platner’s past was sufficient. It seems like nothing could have dissuaded Moraff from concluding that Platner was the man for this moment.

 

“I think if what the voters wanted were people who were grown in vats and had never done and said anything that they might regret their entire lives, we’d have a very different country,” he squeaked. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats. They want people who are real human beings, and they want people who do not look and sound like the background people who’ve been leading this country off a cliff for the last century. And that was Graham.”

 

There are a variety of obvious rationalizations on display in these remarks. One less obvious one is the level of investment the professional left has committed over the last decade to a variety of hostile misconceptions about men. Specifically, their preternatural and heritable vileness.

 

The faddish intellectual trends around the concept of “toxic masculinity” that emerged at the end of the last decade are illustrative of those bigotries. A certain sort of progressive activist spent years marinating in and mouthing shibboleths about how everything — from car culture to athletics, from eating chicken wings and playing video games to even entirely healthy courtship rituals — was a gateway to misogyny.

 

The fashionable misandry these tropes encouraged became a fetish on the left. In the late 2010s, Hillary Clinton attended a Planned Parenthood gala in which attendees were served “toxic masculinity” cocktails. Desirable masculine traits like protectiveness, valor, and self-sacrifice, even in service to family and country, were derided and discouraged. The contours of what constitutes “toxic masculinity” were so broadly defined that they captured almost all men, to one degree or another. “For some men,” the American Psychological Association explained in 2018, “sexism may become deeply engrained in their construction of masculinity.”

 

It’s likely that the progressives who were bombarded with this campaign of negative stereotyping internalized the notion that all men are monsters. The left didn’t see this as an accusation. Men were victims, of course, just like everyone else. They subsist in the malignant American milieu, after all. How could they fail to be disfigured by their oppressive environments? The whole gender is cursed from birth.

 

Then, in the wake of the Democratic Party’s stumbles in 2024, the progressive political class concluded that they had alienated far too many men. Kamala Harris’s defeat set off a panicky scramble to address the problem with gimmicks. We just need our own Joe Rogan to compete in the “manosphere,” they’d tell themselves. If we’re a little less “wonkish,” we might break through. It was self-flattery dressed up as a critique.

 

True believers in the “toxic masculinity” construct seem to have taken a different approach: Give the bastards what they want.

 

That’s how you get Graham Platner.

 

The top of the ticket in Maine embodies all the worst traits that the progressive left assumed were present in all men. He’s a habitual liar and a provocateur. He’s crude and boorish. He glamorizes violence for its own sake. He thinks in stereotypes. He is allegedly physically and emotionally abusive to the women in his life.

 

Progressives spent the better part of a decade telling themselves and anyone willing to listen that all men were, in their own ways, Platnerian. In Maine, they’re selling the voters the vicious archetype they constructed in their own minds.

In Trump’s Second Term, Things Start to Fall Apart

By Elliott Abrams

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

 

Let’s not exaggerate: Yeats’s lines do not yet describe the Trump administration and its foreign policy. But the direction now, in the 17th month of his second term, is toward confusion and failure.

 

The achievements of the second term in foreign affairs are real. The attacks on Iran in June 2025, and now in 2026, decapitated the regime and greatly diminished Iran’s economy and its military power. Similarly bold are the decapitation of the regime in Venezuela and the squeeze on Cuba. But in Europe, where the Ukraine war continues, and in Asia, where Xi Jinping continues his threats against Taiwan, there are no achievements to list. In fact, relations with India, critical during the 21st century, have been damaged.

 

And President Trump seems poised to throw away the achievements he has made. In Venezuela, he seems completely comfortable with a Maduro regime without Maduro; every other thug and thief remains in place, hundreds of political prisoners continue to rot away, and Trump never utters the word “democracy” or imposes any political demands on Delcy Rodríguez. When will there be an election? In Cuba, which must lie close to Secretary Marco Rubio’s heart, the outcome is in doubt: Will negotiations with Raúl Castro’s grandson produce real change? Trump has the chance in the two and a half years that remain of his time in power to leave the Western Hemisphere without a single regime hostile to the United States for the first time since 1959 (assuming that if Cuba and Venezuela are liberated, Nicaragua will not survive as a lone Marxist redoubt). That would be a tremendous and historic achievement for Trump — but he seems unaware that it works only if decapitation is followed by freedom rather than more pliable cronies.

 

The graver national security problems lie outside this hemisphere. The loss of Taiwan to Communist China would be a historic disaster for the United States. It would turn U.S. allies in the region into fearful neutrals or Chinese vassals, because the failure to save Taiwan would show Asians that Chinese power was now irresistible. It would give China control of TSMC and its 70 percent of the global semiconductor foundry market. Yet during Trump’s most recent China visit, he apparently agreed not to proceed with $12 billion in arms sales to Taiwan and said this: “Looking at the situation, China is a very, very strong power, and Taiwan is a very small island. Taiwan is 59 miles away from mainland China, while the U.S. is 9,500 miles away.” Hardly reassuring — except to Xi. And subversive of our alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Singapore, which are the same distance away.

 

The situation regarding Europe is arguably worse. Trump’s susceptibility to Vladimir Putin’s “arguments” over Ukraine and his coldness to Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky cannot be explained in terms of U.S. national security interests. Trump long ago began winning his battle for more military spending by NATO allies, but he has reacted not with a victory lap but with churlishness. His treatment of our NATO allies would be incomprehensible to previous Republican presidents, including Eisenhower and Reagan. One of the most committed NATO allies, Denmark, has been threatened with the use of military force over Greenland, even as just about every stated goal regarding Greenland is obviously achievable through negotiations. As to Ukraine, even without firm U.S. support, it is holding its own; with that support, Russian adventurism would be dealt a near-mortal blow, and Putin would likely fall. Yet Trump is turning a possible historic victory against Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine into a crisis for the Western alliance. And no one can explain why.

 

There are two theories. In both the Xi and Putin cases, Trump may be adhering to his personal version of a “great man” or “great leader” version of history, where he will settle things face to face with his peers. There are many problems with such negotiations with murderous dictators. Very often those men do not keep their promises, breaking them at will in political systems where there is no parliament or press or opposition party to challenge that behavior. Moreover, there is simply no way of knowing how long the dictator or his policy will last. Xi seems secure today, but is Putin — with complaints about his costly and endless war in Ukraine growing while he is obviously unwilling to end it and unable to win it?

 

Or, Trump may be following what he thinks is “realpolitik,” and his statement above about China and Taiwan reinforces that conclusion. But this approach is not actually realistic, because it treats every country as a black box — an empty vessel with one man at the top. The Chinese people or Russian people simply do not exist in this approach — nor, as we will see in a moment, do Iranians. Only Xi, and Putin, and Delcy Rodríguez, and others like them do. That we may have common interests today with Russians who want to end the Ukraine war, or Venezuelans who want democracy, or Iranians who want a new, democratic, Western-style government does not seem to enter Trump’s mind or his policies. His kind of realism tells him to deal with those in power and forget about the populace. In the short run, that most often works. In the medium run, it sacrifices opportunities that can change world politics and undermines America’s claim to stand for democracy. Trump seems content to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of Americans’ demand for popular sovereignty by ignoring that demand by any other people.

 

In this corollary to his brand of realpolitik, Trump seems completely unaware of, even resistant to, the idea that freedom is a great asset for the United States. His relationships with tyrants are in general warmer than those with democratically elected leaders. He eschews U.S. support for democracy activists in dictatorships and has tried to gut the National Endowment for Democracy and democracy programs at the State Department, as well as U.S. broadcasting to the people of nations like China, Russia, and Iran. He has properly chided Europeans for abandoning elements of Western traditions and culture, but seems unaware that democratic government and respect for human rights are at the center of the Western political tradition he says he wants to save.

 

Style and language contribute to this picture. Anyone who thinks Eisenhower kept four-letter words out of his private vocabulary forgets his 32 years in the Army. But Trump seems to feel no responsibility to uphold standards of conduct either abroad or at home — as was demonstrated by his curses at Israel’s prime minister in a June conversation between them, or his astonishing Easter Sunday social media post that included F-bombing the American public about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. His view of how a national and a world leader should behave — or, better put, how the representative of the American people should behave — also affects the way other countries and other leaders react to him and to U.S. policy. Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” was a carefully calibrated ploy designed to make opponents unsure how far he would go — to look far more unpredictable than he was, even to look irrational. But some of Trump’s behavior and statements leave not only enemies, but friends and allies — and tens of millions of Americans — wondering whether policy is based on anything more than whim and ego.

 

So does the question of personnel. When he came to office in 2017, Trump surrounded himself primarily with experienced Republican officials and generals. There was, of course, a group of personal loyalists as well, and these groups cooperated sometimes and fought sometimes. Over four years, many of them got fed up and left the administration — some building careers on trashing or celebrating Trump in books or on TV. In this second term, the administration is staffed primarily by people who are personally loyal and often have few other virtues or qualifications. Perfect examples would be Trump’s two directors of national intelligence (DNI), former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard and home-builder Bill Pulte. Needless to say, some loyalists are also effective policymakers and bureaucrats, but that seems to be a happy accident rather than a qualification for office.

 

These days the personnel trend is downward, like the trend in Trump’s personal conduct. His own use of language and his family’s engagement in money-making schemes have changed in this term, and so has the way he explains (or fails to explain) his policies.

 

Iran is a case study of that downward trajectory. In his first term, Trump ordered the killing of Quds Force head Qasem Soleimani, and, in this term, ordered the bombing (along with Israel) of Iran’s nuclear sites and other targets. There was a clear policy: to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and to punish terrorism against Americans. But it’s apparent now, several months in, that policymaking is as sloppy as it appears from outside. The usual laborious interagency process (which is so easy to caricature, but serves to present and evaluate options and raise likely dangers) was apparently absent. The president listened to . . . whom? Some combination of foreign leaders, U.S. officials, and hangers-on at Mar-a-Lago, and it looks as if there was no point at which long-foreseen challenges such as Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz were truly understood and evaluated by the president.

 

Today, Trump is in a tight corner. He clearly does not wish to return to full-on conflict. Equally, he does not wish to agree to a deal that is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s JCPOA and will produce rounds of mockery from Democrats who remember how harshly he denounced that agreement. So the stalemate goes on, damaging every economy reliant on Gulf sources for petroleum products, including fertilizer as well as gasoline and diesel, and producing U.S. gasoline prices that threaten Republicans in November. Now, Trump has linked Lebanon to the Iran talks and tried to constrain Israeli attacks there because they may upset the Iran negotiations — linkage that is a huge Iranian victory. While negotiations between Lebanese government and Israeli officials in Washington insist on Lebanese sovereignty, Trump seems willing to ignore all that if he needs Hezbollah included to make an Iran deal. Most recently, he urged Israel not to respond when Iran shot 20 missiles at it, a request (or demand) that was doomed to failure and also very bad policy.

 

That policy is the product of a remarkable mixture of friends and officials: his old real estate friend Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as Iran negotiators; his old real estate friend Tom Barrack as ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria and Iraq; his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Lebanese-American businessman Massad Boulos, as a special envoy for the Middle East. The list goes on. And the intelligence coming in from all agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA, etc.) is supposed to be digested and presented to the president by the acting director of national intelligence, the home-building heir Bill Pulte, who has zero intelligence experience.

 

But that isn’t anarchy; the center does hold in the sense that the center is Donald Trump. Perhaps confusion or indiscipline is a better description than anarchy. Example: Most Republicans in the Senate support an extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as a key tool against terrorism (permitting warrantless collection of communications by terrorism suspects outside the United States), but that section is controversial. On June 5, seven Republicans joined all Democrats but one (Senator John Fetterman) in voting against proceeding to debate on the extension; the vote was 52–47 against. Several senators and cabinet members warned the president not to announce Pulte now for DNI because it would make the vote that much harder. Those warning him are said to include CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Yet he went ahead, refusing any delay — and no one can explain why.

 

Equally damaging to Trump’s own interests, and his party’s, was his vendetta against Senator John Cornyn of Texas, whom Trump opposed in the primary election because Cornyn had not endorsed him for reelection early enough. Cornyn was defeated. Problem: He was defeated by someone universally regarded as the weaker candidate in November. This makes it seem that personal retribution is more important to Trump than just about anything — including having a majority in the Senate that can pass legislation and lay the groundwork for the 2028 election.

 

The Cornyn episode, like the Section 702/Pulte issue, tells us a lot about Trump’s second term, which is now one-third over. The common thread is Trump’s indiscipline, his egotism, his reliance on a motley crew of advisers — who include some excellent ones, too, such as Ratcliffe at CIA and Marco Rubio at State and NSC, but who must work in an environment that’s more like a medieval court than a modern democratic government. No White House staff and no Cabinet is ever a meritocracy; there are always friends, relatives, donors, political supporters, and party stalwarts in the mix. But in the usual mix there are also many individuals of real competence whose loyalties go beyond early support of the president. There’s a lot less of that in Trump II.

 

The center is holding for now — yet things may fall apart. The loyalty of congressional Republicans is being tested by Trump’s solipsism, elevating personal fealty over party-building, and it will be tested more if Republicans lose the House and perhaps the Senate in November. The ability of Trump’s motley crew to implement and explain his policies will diminish in the second half of this term if competent officials begin to depart (as usually happens in second terms) and Trump cannot or will not find equally competent replacements. Americans’ faith in Trump will decline if he cannot bring the Iran conflict to a sensible conclusion and if he makes foreign policy errors that bury his very real achievements.

 

Second terms are almost always harder, and Donald Trump’s way of governing will exacerbate the troubles. He can turn that around, but hiring more unqualified loyalists and placing allegiance to himself above principle and competence will make that a lot harder. Donald Trump will remain at the center, but centrifugal forces are growing. The first 17 months of his second term bode poorly for success in the remaining two and a half years.

 

 

Graham Platner, the Leftist Caricature of a U.S. Marine

By Luther Ray Abel

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

An (allegedly) bloodthirsty, woman-abusing alcoholic leatherneck with an SS tattoo and a penchant for adultery, which includes trawling where high school girls seek dates, is on the ballot in Maine, and the Democrats can’t get enough of him.

 

While these allegations might matter to the well-adjusted, progressives don’t care about his personal failings because the prospect of  Susan Collins’s ouster and furtherance of far-left power is too intoxicating, and the mainline Dems are besotted with a man who fulfills their sexual and savior fantasies: a bad, bad man who just saw the light and is now a reformed crusader for *checks notes* abortion.

 

Platner’s story is Keri Lake romantasy bilge given form — ten thousand sentient Reichsland oysters in USMC dress blues with a mustache slapped on. It’s grotesque, and says a lot about what the left thinks of Marines.

 

As a sailor, I concede to the left that Marines are dull-witted and aggressive. A baboon with fourth-quintile intelligence could become a squad leader within the week. However, as a taxi driver for the Marine Corps (U.S. Navy sailor), I know the average Marine to be a far better man than Platner.

 

Which is not to say Platner-like Marines aren’t out there. Every unit has a poseur, loser E-4 who talks a big game. Maybe he comes from money, maybe he’s too eager for combat, or maybe he’s a deviant to whom the female officers give a wide berth. Sometimes a guy is all three . . .

 

Graham Platner’s continued candidacy is a reminder that the left cares not the least bit about personal conduct. This is about the accumulation of power.

 

Platner has credentials they can sell to their progressive donors and low-info base. Dressed in patriotic blue-collar drag, Platner and his handlers just need to keep those Carhartt pants on him long enough to knock off one of the most effective senators in recent history.

 

“Semper FU, America.”

Blinded by Nostalgia

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

As we approach the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America is in a pretty foul mood, and I understand why. For starters, Washington is broken, prices are high and rising, and AI is scaring the stuffing out of people.

 

Understanding, however, is not synonymous with agreement. In other words, some complaints about America in 2026 have more empirical weight than others. Crime may be too high, but it’s been going down for a while. Actually, let’s start there because crime is a good example of how perceptions don’t necessarily reflect reality.

 

Since 2000, writes Gallup’s polling guru Frank Newport, “Americans’ views of the seriousness of crime nationwide … have averaged 43 percentage points higher than their views of local crime.” People tend to think crime is much worse wherever they don’t live. While nearly half of Americans think crime is a very serious issue in America, only about 1 in 10 think it’s a big deal in their cities and towns.

 

But the “where” is often less of an issue than the “when.” I was a little kid in New York City a half-century ago during the celebration of the bicentennial. Crime there and then, was much worse than today. The homicide rate was five times higher. In 1976, the Big Apple, with a million fewer people, saw 1,622 murders (slightly down from 1,645 in 1975). In 2025, NYC saw 309 murders. So far, in 2026, murders are down about 25 percent from the same point in 2025.

 

But it’s not just crime. Surveys routinely find that Americans think the country is in much worse shape than they are personally. Even when large majorities of Americans say the nation is in a bad way, equally large majorities say they’re personally doing okay. Last year, a Federal Reserve survey found that only about a quarter of Americans thought the economy was doing well. But about three-quarters said they were personally doing okay. Education in America routinely gets a failing grade, while the same graders often say education in their community is pretty good.

 

There are understandable reasons for this disconnect. What we think about the country is often filtered through the media (mainstream, partisan, and social—all of which have a bad news bias). Also, our perceptions are shaded by ideological commitments. Meanwhile, what we think about our own life is experienced firsthand.

 

And then there’s nostalgia, which literally means homesickness, but homesickness for the past.

 

Fifty years ago, America was in many respects much more of a mess than it is today. Inflation, gas lines, crime, unemployment, political violence, race relations, geopolitical tensions—including the just concluded Vietnam War—were not the stuff of a golden age. Americans today are roughly two and half times wealthier than we were in 1976.

 

And yet, many Americans tell pollsters we were better off 50 years ago. But here’s the thing, lots of people always think things were better 50 years ago. It has been that way since the dawn of polling. What makes people think the past was better isn’t a careful study of statistics, but a lazy inventory of feelings and a lazier outsourcing to media vibes. This tendency didn’t begin with polling, the polling just made it easier to quantify the pull of nostalgia.

 

Ironically, the “system” so many people—on the left, right and in the middle—heap scorn on for failing the current generation fuels this malaise. Political demagogues, activists, journalists, and big corporations seek to exploit or monetize the natural human tendency to pine for simpler, happier times. The Roman poet Horace had a term for such people nearly 2,000 years ago: laudator temporis acti—“a praiser of times past when he was a boy.”

 

None of this is to say that Americans don’t have real problems. We obviously do (starting with the fact we have a laudator temporis acti in the White House). The problem comes when we think that the easy solutions to those problems can be found by looking in the rearview mirror.

 

Pick any era and you can find things worthy of nostalgia. But you can also find plenty of things almost no one wants restored. For instance, the infant mortality rate was three times higher in 1976 and 13 times higher in 1926.

 

I’m a conservative, so I’m the first to concede that the past is worth remembering and studying. But if all you do is cherry-pick the good—real or alleged—while blinding yourself to the bad, you’re not studying the past. You’re grading the present against a past that never was.

Five Extraordinary Developments in the Iran War

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

Since last Friday, five extraordinary things have occurred in the Middle East.

 

One: Sunday night, Iran fired “nearly 30 ballistic missiles” at Israel. Now, in the fog of war, no one knows precisely how big Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is, or how many it has remaining, or how quickly the regime can build new ones. The Congressional Research Service wrote March 5:

 

Israeli and U.S. officials have stated varying estimates of Iran’s ballistic missile production capacity. On March 1, the Israeli military estimated Iran was producing “dozens of ballistic missiles per month.” On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran had been producing “over 100” such missiles a month. U.S. officials reportedly said, prior to June 2025, Iran was producing 50 missiles per month.

 

A Turkish think-tank researcher estimated that before the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, Iran had “an industrial base capable of producing several hundred missiles per month.”

 

Obviously, the U.S. and Israel have targeted Iran’s remaining missile stockpiles, launchers, production facilities, and key places in its supply chain. In mid-May, Admiral Brad Cooper of U.S. Central Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee that more than 1,450 strikes hit weapons manufacturing facilities alone.

 

President Donald Trump sat down for his interview with NBC News’ Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker on Friday, June 5, and said of Iran’s remaining ballistic missiles:

 

I know almost to the number. And we know where they are too. And we know where their drones are. And we know where their drone factories are. Most of the drone factories have been knocked out, most of the launching pads have been knocked out and most of the missile manufacturing areas have been knocked out. But they still have capacity. They have some missiles. They have some drones. I would say, percentage-wise, maybe 21, 22 percent of their missiles. It’s a lot of missiles. But it’s not what it was when we first attacked.

 

For what it is worth, MS NOW reported in May that “Iran has restored access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it controls along the Strait of Hormuz” since the start of the “cease-fire” — pardon the scare quotes, but you probably noticed that no one has ceased firing — on April 8.

 

No doubt, the U.S. and Israel have greatly reduced Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles. But as of Sunday, Iran had “nearly 30 of them,” and launched them at Israel.

 

What’s more, Iran launched another round of attacks Tuesday night, using a combination of missiles and drones:

 

The strikes targeted 21 sites at U.S. bases across the region, Iranian semiofficial media outlet Tasnim reported, including those operated by the U.S. Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, Ali al-Salem base in Kuwait and a U.S. air base in Jordan.

 

U.S. Central Command did not immediately confirm the attacks, but Kuwait’s military reported intercepting aerial attacks and Jordan’s armed forces said they intercepted five missiles from Iran. Bahrain’s military also said it had intercepted an unspecified number of Iranian missiles and drones. No deaths were reported.

 

If some of the American objectives of this war were to eliminate the threat from Iran’s ballistic missile and drone programs, those objectives have not been achieved yet. And while those threats are no doubt reduced . . . the question is, how reduced? And how reduced does that arsenal need to be for us to feel like we’ve done what we needed to do?

 

Two, on Monday, an Iranian Shahed drone took down a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Oman. Thankfully, the two pilots* were rescued, and we’ll talk more about the rescue in a moment.

 

When communicating to the American public during a war, it does not help to have a president with a propensity for sweeping, hyperbolic statements. In the Meet the Press interview, Trump said, “We have totally destroyed their military.”

 

On March 14, Trump posted on Truth Social, “The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both Militarily, Economically, and in every other way,” On March 16, Trump said, “They have been literally obliterated. The Air Force is gone, the navy is gone. Many, many ships have been sunk, their war-fighting ships, but I guess they didn’t know how to use them. And, uh, anti-aircraft is decimated. Their radar is gone, and their leaders are gone.”

 

This morning, President Trump posted on Truth Social:

 

Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore — They have been completely defeated. Iran is all talk and no action. The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!

 

Maybe the drone that hit the Apache was a lucky shot; clearly, the U.S. and Israel have undoubtedly inflicted serious damage upon Iran’s military overall. But that does not mean the Iranian military is “totally destroyed,” that it has been “completely defeated,” or that they cannot shoot down U.S. aircraft.

 

No doubt, one of the reasons the American public feels so negatively about the war against Iran is because the president is regularly giving them assurances that turn out to be false.

 

Three: U.S. used an unmanned drone to rescue the two pilots, a first in wartime:

 

The American military deployed an autonomous Corsair maritime drone built by Saronic to find and recover two soldiers who were stranded near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday after their Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed during a patrol operation, U.S. Central Command spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told DefenseScoop.

 

In that rescue operation, he told DefenseScoop, the maritime drone picked the two pilots up “and transported them to another location on the water where they were then hoisted up to a helicopter for further transport.”

 

The Corsair is a 24-foot autonomous surface vessel (ASV) that’s designed for rugged, long-duration missions. The drones can operate at speeds greater than 35 knots and carry up to 1,000 lbs over 1,000 nautical miles, according to Saronic’s product specifications.

 

The ASVs are equipped with sensors that provide 360-degree passive sensing capabilities for day and night operations, which likely helped in locating the two soldiers off the coast of Oman after their helicopter went down.

 

Early in the film Top Gun: Maverick, the titular hero is confronted by a rear admiral who tells him that the era of manned combat aircraft is coming to an end:

 

These planes you’ve been testing, Captain, one day, sooner or later, they won’t need pilots at all. Pilots that need to sleep, eat, take a piss. Pilots that disobey orders. All you did was buy some time for those men out there. The future is coming, and you’re not in it. . . . The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.

 

Maverick confidently replies, “Maybe so, sir. But not today.” And we in the audience smile because we like Maverick, and we like fighter pilots. But the rear admiral in that scene is correct. Unmanned aircraft, seacraft, and ground drones are reaching the point where they can do everything human beings do, without risk to life and limb, and without the possibility of flag-draped caskets. It doesn’t matter whether anyone likes or dislikes this development; it’s happening either way.

 

Four: Tuesday morning, President Trump told a Wall Street Journal reporter that the Iranian downing of the Apache “wasn’t a big deal”:

 

Trump hadn’t been convinced of the need to retaliate against Iran earlier in the day, U.S. officials said. In a phone call Tuesday morning with The Wall Street Journal, he played down the incident — repeatedly saying that it “wasn’t a big deal” — and stressed that the pilots weren’t seriously injured.

 

He changed his mind after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine recommended military action during a briefing at the White House, the officials said. Hegseth and Caine provided Trump with updated information about the Iranian Shahed drone that struck the U.S. helicopter. When asked for comment, the Pentagon said in a statement that it didn’t discuss internal deliberations involving the president and his military advisers.

 

By Tuesday evening, the downing of the Apache was a big enough deal for the U.S. to launch retaliatory airstrikes at Iranian targets.

 

Five: The U.S. Central Command statement about Tuesday night’s strikes declared, “CENTCOM forces struck Iranian air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz with precision munitions from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter jets. The operation was a proportional response to recent attacks on U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”

 

They buried the lede, as they say in the news business; Iran still has or has rebuilt some “air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz” to hit in retaliation. You might think that remaining intact Iranian military targets would be few and far between by now; over the course of 38 days, the U.S. and Israel conducted “more than 10,200 sorties and over 13,500 strikes.”

 

Of course, the new Iranian air defense systems didn’t seem to work any better than the old Iranian air defense systems. But it is a reminder that the Iranian regime hasn’t been sitting on its hands during this cease-fire-in-name-only. The moment the U.S. stopped bombing, the Iranians got started on rebuilding their destroyed defense systems. A mid-May report from CNN quoted a U.S. intelligence source as saying some “estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months.” Another CNN report at the end of May examined satellite images:

 

Since the ceasefire more than seven weeks ago, Iranian efforts to excavate the bases have accelerated significantly.

 

CNN found that Iran has now unblocked 50 out of the 69 tunnel entrances struck by the US and Israel at 18 underground missile facilities.

 

Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them. Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.

 

Iran’s missile program is being rebuilt with the help of the People’s Republic of China; even during the war, China sent five ships worth of sodium perchlorate, a chemical that Iran uses to manufacture solid rocket propellant for its ballistic missile arsenal.

 

You will recall that at their summit in Beijing in May, President Trump kept emphasizing what a good friend Xi Jinping was to him.

 

There are those who would argue that starting the war was a mistake. But choosing to end the U.S. bombing and declare a “cease-fire” that the Iranians violate with metronomic regularity has compounded the mistake. Frustrated Iran hawks have tried to tell the administration that the Iranian mullahs were never going to change, and were stalling for time in the negotiations with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two specialists in Manhattan real estate. The administration had no interest in listening.

 

It is very difficult to see a path to clear and lasting victory in this war with a president this erratic and negotiators this naïve.

 

*While one crewman is the pilot and the other is the co-pilot/gunner, “both crew members are certified to fly the Apache, and there are redundant controls in both crew positions.”

 

ADDENDUM: Ruh-roh! Inflation hit 4.2 percent in May. You may recall the president claiming, erroneously, that inflation was at 1.7 percent before the war; it was not. It was 2.4 percent in February, 2.4 percent in January, 2.7 percent in December, and, if you want to go back further, 2.7 percent in November, not recorded in October because of the government shutdown, and 3 percent in September.

 

In other news, the president turns 80 years old on Sunday.

Donald Trump Has Deterred Himself

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

It was not long after the Pentagon revealed that a U.S. Apache attack helicopter that crashed near the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday was, in fact, shot down by hostile Iranian fire that the president told the Wall Street Journal that it “wasn’t a big deal.”

 

You could have fooled me. The Pentagon certainly acted as if it were a significant event. U.S. forces touted the successful first-of-its-kind rescue of the two downed airmen by an unmanned drone boat, stripping the Iranians of the opportunity to hold American service personnel hostage. What’s more, the scale of the American response to the attack on the Apache, which was itself executing retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets in response to Tehran’s cease-fire violations, sent some rather unmistakable signals.

 

In three waves, U.S. Navy and Air Force jets struck 20 targets, mostly in and around the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces targeted Iranian ground control and radar stations, as well as air defense sites. This represents the largest volley of fire the U.S. has meted out against the Iranians since the cease-fire took effect in early April, although CENTCOM called its actions a “proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”

 

But the Iranians proceeded to aggress once again without much regard for proportionality. “Iranian state media reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had targeted 21 American air and naval bases across the region,” Stars and Stripes reported, “including the Bahrain installation and Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, which has been known to house F-35 fighter jets.”

 

The Iranian attack may have been more calibrated than Iran’s previous deadly strikes on Gulf region and Israeli civilian infrastructure. Tehran might have received the message that CENTCOM’s latest barrage attempted to communicate — limiting its targets to American military installations. Donald Trump isn’t the only party to this conflict that does not want to return to high-tempo combat operations.

 

“Avoiding a return to large-scale operations is beneficial for Iran because it allows Iran to drag out the economic and political pressure on the United States and Israel,” last night’s analysis from the Institute for the Study of War read. “Iran faces its own economic pressure due to war damages and the US Navy blockade, but the Iranian regime only cares about economic damage insofar as it damages the regime’s parochial interests and threatens regime security.”

 

As of this writing, there have been no indications that Iranian strikes resulted in U.S. casualties or fatalities. That’s good news for the Islamic Republic. After all, as Trump reportedly told his subordinates, according to what they leaked to the Wall Street Journal, the president will only put the cease-fire to bed if Tehran manages to “kill American troops.” Preemption to prevent that horrible outcome is, apparently, off the table.

 

The inability of Iranian forces to inflict significant damage suggests that the president’s reluctance to return to war is not a response to conventional deterrence. He’s not intimidated by the prospect of the damage that Iran can deal out directly. Rather, the Iranian threat is indirect, and the president has been discouraged by the prospective horrors that could follow from an all-out Iranian assault on regional infrastructure relating to energy production, desalination, and the like. This dynamic should be familiar to students of Cold War-era warfighting strategy. The president is self-deterred.

 

“Rather than external adversaries threatening consequences (as in deterrence), self-deterrence consists of a distinct set of consequences articulated internally by policymakers that negatively affects their cost-benefit calculus,” reads a U.S. Army War College summary of the concept:

 

More precisely, whereas an adversary might threaten military punishment to deter an unwanted action, many other plausible or fanciful consequences that will affect the decision to take that action fall outside the purview of whatever the adversary threatens. These consequences can include reputational damage from a hostile domestic or world audience, third-party intervention, and the long-term political, economic, social, and military problems that would arise regardless of any short-term military success.

 

Of all the undesirable consequences that could result from this war, the evidence of American self-deterrence might be the worst. It raises the possibility in the minds of America’s adversaries that the United States will not respond at all to aggression if Washington can be convinced in advance that it cannot absorb the asymmetric pain the enemy can inflict.

 

America’s adversaries are almost certainly emboldened by Trump’s restraint. A deal that codifies the status quo that prevails today in the Strait of Hormuz would all but guarantee that hostile foreign powers will test America’s resolve.

 

The president is, however, still banging on the table. “The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!” he wrote with what now looks like hollow bluster. Actions speak louder than social media posts. So far, the president’s actions are the sort that will invite future aggression against American interests and allies.