Trump Was Always Wrong About the Trade Deficit

National Review Online

Friday, February 20, 2026

 

Talk about bad timing. On Wednesday, President Trump boasted on social media that the U.S. trade deficit had been reduced by 78 percent thanks to his comprehensive tariff regime, a claim apparently based on his cherry-picking of data between October and January. Less than twelve hours later, the Census Bureau published its annual trade report. It reveals that the U.S. trade deficit declined by just 0.2 percent in 2025 — a far cry from Trump’s figure — from $903.5 billion in 2024 to $901.5 billion last year.

 

The numbers beneath the headline are even worse for the president’s faulty narrative. The deficit in goods, which are all that tariffs apply to, hit a record high in 2025. Specifically, Americans purchased $1.2 trillion more in merchandise from foreign countries than they sold abroad. Imports were the highest on record at $4.3 trillion, as were imports of only goods at $3.4 trillion.

 

The only reason that the overall trade deficit did not widen was that the U.S. economy also saw record-high exports of both goods and services. America runs a consistent surplus in services, now worth $340 billion, which protectionists tend to ignore. Altogether, there is little evidence in the census statistics that trade was disrupted much at all in the past twelve months.

 

That is despite Trump’s best efforts. The president has been obsessed with the trade deficit for decades, driven by the erroneous conviction that it represents money lost to other countries. In reality, the balance of trade has no bearing on a country’s economic prosperity. The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world per capita, and it also runs the largest trade deficit. Several countries that are desperately poor, such as Libya and Papua New Guinea, run trade surpluses.

 

When the U.S. trade deficit declines, it’s typically because Americans have gotten poorer and can therefore afford to purchase fewer goods and services, which include imports. The year that the deficit shrank the most in recent memory was 2009, when the nation was in the throes of a financial crisis and a recession. During the Great Depression, the United States had a surplus in nine out of ten years.

 

Tariffs, on the other hand, have proven unable to meaningfully shift the full balance of trade. President Trump imposed a suite of sweeping duties last year, resulting in an average pre-substitution rate of 14.5 percent across all imported goods. Previously, the average rate hovered around 2.5 percent. Yet while this stunning increase has mangled trade in certain products and with particular countries, it has hardly put a dent in the deficit.

 

Economists anticipated just this outcome at the beginning of 2025, before Trump’s levies even took effect. They recognized that tariffs can be effective at changing the composition of international trade, but not its total volume. That is because trade balances are largely determined by macroeconomic factors that are impossible for governments to control, such as countries’ fundamental competitive advantages in various industries. When tariffs get in the way of mutually beneficial transactions, the value of currencies typically adjusts to make them worthwhile again.

 

The greatest factor determining trade deficits is the value of investment flowing in and out of the United States. Over a long enough period, net investment flows are always the perfect inverse of net trade flows, since every dollar sent abroad in an import or financial outflow will eventually return to America through either an export or a financial inflow. Because U.S. markets are so attractive relative to the rest of the world, foreigners purchase around $1 trillion more of U.S. equities and credit than Americans buy from other countries. For the trade deficit to shrink, this investment surplus would need to shrink in equal measure.

 

Trump claims that he can simultaneously reduce the trade deficit and attract trillions of dollars more in foreign investment, but that is an economic fantasy. The nation’s trade deficit continues apace because Americans are rich enough to demand lots of imported goods, and because our financial markets are desirable enough to attract far more capital to our shores than they lose. As the latest census data have shown, none of Trump’s tariffs can change that.

A Footnote on Jesse Jackson

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 20, 2026

 

I am skeptical about ineffable qualities ascribed to the high and mighty—“presence” and “star power” and such things—but the Rev. Jesse Jackson had something about him that had a lot more in common with Clint Eastwood than with Al Gore. Even in 2012, when we had a short conversation at the Democratic National Convention—when Jackson was a somewhat diminished man and one who had been thoroughly surpassed—there was a kind of aura of historical significance about him. Hillary Rodham Clinton pretentiously titled her memoir Living History, but Jesse Jackson seemed like an example of just that, like a man who should have been photographed exclusively in black-and-white wearing a skinny tie.

 

One expects that history will extend to Jesse Jackson the same indulgence it has extended to his mentor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and to such figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and (to a lesser extent) Thomas Jefferson—he was on the right side of the immensely important issue with which he was most intimately associated, and, while that is not everything, it is enough. And that is an excellent prospect for the reputation of Jesse Jackson, who, like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi and (to a lesser extent) Thomas Jefferson, had a lot of bad political ideas and some positively daft economic ideas, some of which got worse over the years. He slid into bigotry from time to time—it wasn’t just his dismissal of Jewish New York as “Hymietown”—and was less than exemplary in the conduct of his personal life, being, as the diplomats used to politely put it, a man of commendable vigor, fathering an out-of-wedlock child at the age of 57.

 

Jackson’s low-key antisemitism was, for a time, important enough to constitute a subject of New York Times headlines and Lou Reed songs. Beyond the noted business with his casual deployment of anti-Jewish slurs, Jackson—the Reverend Jackson—kept some rough company. He conducted freelance foreign policy, embracing—literally embracing—the terrorist goon Yasser Arafat and his so-called Palestinian Liberation Organization; he maintained a long and warm relationship with the antisemitic crackpot Louis Farrakhan, one that was more extensive than even Jackson-style racial realpolitik required and that lasted until the political cost became too heavy, the moral cost never having been considered; he was a mentor to the Rev. Al Sharpton, a cynical trafficker in antisemitic tropes and a man with Jewish blood on his hands in the matter of the Crown Heights riots and the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. Jesse Jackson was the second-most-notable antisemite (after the more outrageous David Duke) in the 1988 presidential race.

 

Antisemitism has been a part of radical African American politics for about as long as there has been such a thing. For the better part of a century now, survey data has chronicled strong antisemitic views among African Americans, with antisemitism being more pronounced among younger and more educated African Americans. Eunice Pollack of the University of North Texas has compiled some illuminating findings: A 1970 survey identified antisemitic attitudes among 35 percent of African Americans aged 50 and up—but 73 percent among African Americans in their 20s. A 1981 survey found antisemitic beliefs among 42 percent of African Americans, more than twice the rate of white Americans; in a 2005 report, the incidence of “strong antisemitic beliefs” among black Americans was four times that of white Americans; a 2020 study found that 15 percent of white liberals held antisemitic views—and 42 percent of black liberals. In the 1980s and 1990s, some of that antisemitism took on a patina of academic respectability (as in the work of Leonard Jeffries) and a bit of glamour thanks to its association with black celebrities. As Pollack reports:

 

Despite all the evidence of enduring Jew-hatred, few Black leaders openly condemned it, with many taking refuge behind the formula voiced by the African American novelist James Baldwin in 1972 that “the powerless, by definition, can never be ‘racists.’”… With this license, Black student activists provided the platforms from which militants/nationalists regularly delivered antisemitic harangues in arenas jammed with cheering—and a few jeering—students. At the University of Maryland in 1986, Kwame Ture (formerly, Stokely Carmichael) instructed, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist!” When Jewish students protested, the Black Student Union responded by inviting him to speak again—for an even higher honorarium. In 1989, “Professor Griff,” “minister of information” of the rap group Public Enemy, claimed in an interview that Jews were responsible for “the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe,” elaborating that Jews “have a grip on America, [and] a history of killing black men.” Ignoring Jewish groups’ protests, Columbia University’s Black Student Organization provided him a podium on campus, where he could extend his reach. Black students generally defended the speakers’ rants, one stating categorically, “Everything he said had a foundation in truth.” “Jewish people control all the money in the United States—that’s true, that’s not being prejudiced.” Having absorbed the message about the invidious Jews, one concluded in a Black students’ magazine that “Caucasian Jews” continue to “defile and trash and defecate on the rest of the world,” and warned that “Caucasian Jews … should not expect anyone to respect or protect their humanity or even shed a tear when something catastrophic happens to them.”

 

That tendency remains very much with us: It is queasily ascendent on the Palestinian-aligned left side of the political spectrum, as exemplified by the rise of Zohran Mamdani, while the online right increasingly accepts and at times champions a more familiar but substantially similar brand of antisemitism historically associated with white Christians.

 

The Rev. Jackson might have been a valuable voice confronting the rising tide of antisemitism. But he was busy with other things. In 1982 he was busy organizing a boycott of Anheuser-Busch, complaining that there were not enough racial minorities in the beer business; by 1998, a group led by two of Jackson’s sons took ownership of a lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, the terms of the sale were not disclosed, but Anheuser-Busch stock went down 75 cents. Another Jackson son, Jesse Jackson Jr., went from Congress to federal prison after diverting some $750,000 in campaign funds for personal consumption, including the purchase of a $43,350 (in 2007 dollars!) gold Rolex. (What is it with cheap politicians and expensive watches?) Jackson, a pastor without a church, grew wealthy enough for people to notice. The comedian Chris Rock opened an interview with Jackson asking archly: “What do you do?”

 

“I am a public servant, not a perfect servant,” was Jackson’s favorite reply when pressed about his shortcomings. No one demanded perfection of the Rev. Jesse Jackson–he could have been forgiven an ordinary politician’s opportunism, vanity, petty venality, or other imperfections. What the times demanded of him was to forgo undermining the important—and historic—work to which he dedicated the early part of his career, staining it with his philandering, grifting, and bigotry. Perhaps it would have been better if he had gone to law school or started selling real estate after his critical work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Instead, Jesse Jackson was a twice-haunted man: haunted by the ghost of his canonized mentor and by the ghost of the man he himself might have been.

 

History will judge him kindly, as it should. But there will be footnotes.

 

 

The Clock Ticks in Iran

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 19, 2026

 

The Americans and the Iranians are talking again, but it’s not clear why.

 

Their backs against the wall, representatives of the Iranian regime acceded in February to the Trump administration’s renewed overtures for talks centered on the future of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program. But most of that program is now entombed beneath hundreds of tons of lightly irradiated rubble. There are reportedly few signs that Iran has either the resources or capabilities to recover it.

 

Tehran signaled its willingness to put its ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist proxies on the table, but it will not abandon what it believes are two vital instruments of statecraft. Nor does the Trump administration want to merely limit those activities — not really. It wants to neutralize the threat posed by the regime, not just the tools of war at Tehran’s disposal.

 

Trump’s goal, unlike Barack Obama’s, is not to mollify and placate the Iranians but to hasten the regime’s inevitable collapse. And the Iran that America is confronting today across the negotiating table is measurably weaker than the one Obama not only failed to confront but, instead, courted and bolstered.

 

Near the end of his administration, Obama himself advocated something resembling a Richard Nixon–style détente with Iran. The talks that culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not “bet on Iran changing,” he argued. After all, “we struck agreements with the Soviet Union” — why should this deal be controversial? And yet, a modus vivendi that would preserve the status quo was not all the Obama administration was interested in.It set out to alter the status quo in Iran’s favor.

 

To facilitate the speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, Obama and his subordinates set out to empower the region’s Shiite militias, many of which were loyal to and supported by Iran. That project was of such paramount importance that Obama felt compelled to ignore the Iranian people’s demand for their own liberation, as he did when he refused to support the 2009 Green Revolution inside Iran. “And in retrospect,” Obama admitted in a rare moment of self-doubt 13 years later, “I think that was a mistake.”

 

At the time, however, Obama and his subordinates were brimming with confidence as they set out to impose their vision on the Middle East. That administration released prominent Shiite insurgents from military custody in the pursuit of what Stars and Stripes described as a “larger reconciliation” effort designed to facilitate a “peaceful integration” of those elements into Iraqi society. In fact, the militias were expected to bolster Iraqi security against the Sunni elements that formed the backbone of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. It was necessary, Obama and company concluded, to give Iran a stronger hand in Iraq and look beyond the more than 600 U.S. troops killed as a result of Iran’s support for the insurgents.

 

Ultimately, Obama’s skepticism toward the Iraqi Security Forces proved prescient. In 2014, the ISF collapsed as Islamic State militants poured over the border from Syria. But that only strengthened Obama’s reliance on Iran’s proxies. Indeed, during one battle against ISIS forces in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, Politico reported, “the U.S. halted air strikes when it became clear that Iranian commanders were on the ground directing the Shiite fighters.”

 

Obama’s short-term goal was to get the U.S. out of the Middle East, but his long-term objective was to establish a durable balance of power between Iran, together with the Shiite Muslims in its orbit, and the region’s Sunni states. In the end, Iran could become a “very successful regional power,” Obama told the New Yorker. He hoped to establish an “equilibrium” in which “there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not active or proxy warfare” in the Middle East.

 

In much the same way that Ronald Reagan and his acolytes threw off the self-limiting orthodoxies that underwrote détente, Donald Trump and his team entered office with a much different outlook toward the Islamic Republic: What if the Iranian regime weren’t an established and permanent feature of modern life? What if it could be not just contained but rolled back? What if it didn’t have to exist at all?

 

***

 

In truth, by seeking accommodation with Iran, it was Obama who deviated from America’s consistent posture toward the Iranian regime. Trump restored the status quo ante with what he called a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which manifested primarily in a more comprehensive sanctions regime targeting key sectors of the Iranian economy. But there was a diplomatic component to it, too — one that would not have been possible had Obama not tried to engineer a radical revision to the regional balance of power.

 

Throughout the Obama years, the Middle East’s Sunni powers — primarily Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — feared the power that America was granting to Iran via its terrorist proxies. In February 2017, reporting by the Wall Street Journal’s Maria Abi-Habib indicated that these Sunni states had been cultivating secret military-to-military and intelligence-sharing relations with Israel in observance of their mutual interest in containing a resurgent Iran. The Trump administration fostered those links until they flowered into the Abraham Accords.

 

All the while, Trump and company put the screws to Iran’s terrorist armies, both covertly and kinetically. He executed air strikes on Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. He degraded the chemical warfare capabilities of Iran’s ally, Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime, contributing to its ultimately fatal decline. He green-lit the operation that took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil.

 

Throughout this campaign, the Trump administration observed remarkable restraint. The White House would have been justified in exacting a greater price from Iran for its provocations.

 

In the final years of Trump’s first term, Iran waged a region-wide campaign of provocations that seemed designed to draw the U.S. into a broader conflict. It pirated foreign-flagged vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. It conducted what its victims called “sophisticated and coordinated” special-forces strikes on oil tankers. It took down a multimillion-dollar American surveillance drone in international waters. It sponsored dozens of rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq. And, in the most brazen assault of all, it mounted a drone attack on the Aramco petroleum-processing facility inside Saudi Arabia.

 

Through this series of provocations, the administration maintained a determined patience. After all, its strategic approach to Iran was working.

 

In the winter of 2017–18, Iran was crippled by paralyzing protests against the regime, many of which were fueled by the economic hardships that were the direct and desired result of Western sanctions. Iran was crippled by similar protests in the winter of 2019–20, when anti-government demonstrators clashed with security forces and set over 700 government-owned banks alight. In 2022, now out of office, Trump officials watched helplessly as Joe Biden and his administration reprised Obama’s indifference toward Iranian protesters who lashed out at their government over the murder of a young woman at the hands of Iran’s morality police. At least the Iranian people still had an appetite for their own liberation.

 

The Biden years were a contradictory period for the Iranian regime. Biden backed away from Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign and did his utmost to revive the JCPOA that Trump had scuttled. But the regime also behaved as though it understood that its time was short.

 

In the Biden administration’s own estimation, the regime intensified its efforts to break out with a fissionable nuclear device. Tehran deepened its support for hostile actors abroad, and its proxies accelerated the pace of their attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets throughout 2022 and 2023. “Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel,” the Wall Street Journal reported within hours of the October 7 massacre. That revelation explains why each of Iran’s terrorist projects — Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and the region’s various Shiite militias — all but simultaneously joined the fight that Hamas started.

 

***

 

That might have been one of the worst military blunders in modern history. Over the next two years, Israel dramatically degraded Iran’s capacity to export terrorism across its borders.

 

The Jewish state dismantled Hamas in Gaza. It devastated Hezbollah from the air and hobbled its fighters with booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies. It decimated the Houthi militia’s leadership in ways Western forces could not or would not, despite their fighting an ongoing naval battle against this ragtag group of bandits that was as intense as anything American sailors had experienced since World War II. Finally, over the course of several direct engagements between Iranian forces and their Israeli counterparts, the Israeli military destroyed dozens of Iranian ballistic-missile launchers and much of its layered air-defense network. That groundwork set the foundation for Operation Midnight Hammer, the “largest B-2 operational strike in U.S. history,” in which the Iranian nuclear program was reduced to dust.

 

It seemed then that, in its nearly 50-year history, the Iranian regime had never been weaker. But we were soon to learn that it could be made weaker still.

 

As 2025 drew to a close, the Iranian street once again descended into chaos. But from the start, this round of civil unrest looked different. It began with the bazaaris — middle-class merchants on whom the regime had previously relied for support. They rose up to protest the collapsing value of the Iranian rial, which, amid spiraling inflation, was all but worthless. Power outages became common. Public services broke down. A water-shortage crisis compelled Iranian officials to discuss permanently relocating the government from Tehran. The situation was dire, and every Iranian citizen knew it.

 

The students soon joined the protests, as did industrial and white-collar workers. Government officials, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, began chastising the mullahs for failing their people. Western media outlets were replete with reports that regime officials were moving money out of the country and even seeking out comfortable destinations for exile. The Islamic Republic seemed to be coming apart.

 

The regime faced an existential crisis. Ultimately, the clerisy at the top of the Iranian hierarchy met it with unspeakable violence.

 

Estimates of the number of Iranian civilians who were slaughtered by security forces vary. The Iranian regime acknowledges that thousands were killed. Dissident networks and human rights groups put the number of dead in the tens of thousands.

 

Trump did not ignore the slaughter. “I have let them know that if they start killing people,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt on January 8, “we’re going to hit them very hard.” This was no errant thought. Trump subsequently urged Iranian civilians to “keep protesting” and “take over your institutions” because “help is on the way.”

 

But help wasn’t on the way — not with the alacrity the moment demanded. Whether he knew it or not, Trump did not have the naval assets in place in the Persian Gulf region to make good on his threat. America’s deployed carrier groups were tied up either deterring Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific or squeezing and, ultimately, decapitating Venezuela’s Chavista regime in the Caribbean.

 

All of a sudden, Trump changed his tune. The president insisted that the Iranian regime had heeded his calls for circumspection and nonviolence, even as regime officials insisted that they had not. Trump pivoted, dispatching his preferred envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, to resume diplomatic negotiations with the theocracy’s representatives.

 

Now, however, the deficit of forward-deployed assets to the Persian Gulf that bedeviled Trump in January is no longer a problem. As of this writing, there is more than enough firepower in the region to execute what Reuters reporters claim is Trump’s ultimate goal: a “sustained, weeks-long” operation against the Islamic Republic. That operation would consist of air strikes on “Iranian state and security facilities” in what the Journal previously reported was Trump’s desire for a “decisive” showdown with the regime.

 

***

 

That brings us to where we are today: on the precipice. Trump has taken his administration’s policies to their logical conclusion. The sanctions regime was designed to weaken the regime’s hold on its people, and it has. The U.S. and Israeli operations targeting Iran’s terrorist proxies were supposed to degrade their capabilities and sap them of their resolve, and that’s what they achieved. The strikes on the Iranian nuclear program — a symptom, not the cause, of the regime’s suicidally millenarian outlook — could only mitigate the Iranian threat. So long as the Islamic Republic exists, it will wage the war against the West that it has prosecuted since its inception.

 

On many fronts, the Trump administration’s approach to geopolitics has been inconsistent. When it comes to Iran, however, Trump’s posture has not fluctuated. His administration deserves credit for logically concluding that the characterological changes we seek in the Iranian regime will come about only through its implosion. We are approaching a climax.

 

Trump has a choice now. He can act on his convictions and deliver the final blow to a regime that is one of the most, if not the most, malignant on earth — a geopolitical entity that has sacrificed whatever legitimacy it had — or he can shrink from that fraught but portentous project. Whatever he decides, Trump’s legacy hangs in the balance.

 

Will posterity remember him as just another president who missed one of many opportunities to rid ourselves of this blight on the global landscape, or as one who acted boldly in ways his predecessors would not?

 

Trump spent a decade bending the arc of history toward this point. He stands on the threshold of a new era. If the past is prologue, he will cross it.

The Iran Disaster

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, February 19, 2026

 

Tucked away yesterday amid the usual important political developments involving late-night comedy and White House ballroom construction was this headline from Axios: “Trump moves closer to a major war with Iran.”

 

Say what now?

 

Headlines are prone to hype, but not this time. Axios’ sources are whispering about “a massive, weeks-long campaign” with help from Israel that would involve multiple U.S. aircraft carriers, assorted other warships, and hundreds of jets. “I think there is [a] 90 percent chance we see kinetic action in the next few weeks,” one adviser to Donald Trump predicted.

 

If it’s a bluff, it’s a convincing one. An enormous U.S. military air fleet is in transit to the Middle East; when it arrives, according to the Wall Street Journal, it will constitute the largest array of air power that America has mustered in the region since 2003.

 

That was the year the United States invaded Iraq, setting in motion a backlash that would eventually elect an “America First” president who promised to end the endless wars that hawks in his party found so enthralling. Fast forward to 2026 and that same president “is now considering what would be at least the seventh American military attack in another country in the past year, and his second on Iran,” the New York Times reported.

 

His first raid on Iran, you may recall, supposedly “obliterated” that nation’s nuclear facilities. Eight months later, the White House is back to negotiating with Iran about … ending its nuclear program.

 

Even that doesn’t do justice to the absurdity of the moment. It wasn’t nuclear brinkmanship that triggered this latest round of antagonism, after all, it was the president’s enthusiasm for the popular uprising that shook the country last month. “If Iran [shoots] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” he vowed on January 2. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

 

The regime did end up “violently killing” protesters—thousands of them, possibly tens of thousands. America did not come to their rescue; the demonstrations were ruthlessly crushed. Trump was made to look weak by the mullahs’ defiance and probably feels obliged to punish them for it belatedly, an especially risky form of retribution for a presidency that’s obsessed with the concept.

 

And so here we are, on the precipice of the largest war that the United States will have waged in nearly 25 years without any clear objective for the mission. “President Trump hasn’t decided … whether the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its missile force, or try to topple the regime,” the Journal noted surreally in its report on America’s military build-up. War as Mad Libs: We must attack Iran because [casus belli TBD].

 

It’s a disaster in the making for the United States, if not strategically then civically. And certainly politically for Donald Trump and his party.

 

Tell me how this ends.

 

We wouldn’t be in this predicament, I suspect, if the president hadn’t rashly posted his ultimatum on January 2, causing him to lose face when it wasn’t heeded. Those who minimize his habit of popping off online by sighing about “mean tweets” should consider that America is poised to launch a major conflict partly because of a social media post.

 

What would a “good outcome” to that conflict look like for our country?

 

The best I can do to imagine one is that Iran ends up surrendering before it begins. Spooked by the U.S. armada amassing offshore, the mullahs blink and agree to the White House’s terms on denuclearization. No bombs fall; the president gets a major foreign policy win. The art of the deal, we might call it.

 

That’s the optimal outcome—but not a likely one, per Axios, and it wouldn’t solve America’s long-term challenge with Iran. If anything, it would entrench the clerical regime in power in the same way that the remnant of Nicolás Maduro’s regime now seems comfortably entrenched in Venezuela. Having turned a hostile government into a compliant one, the Trump administration would be in no rush to see its new partner deposed. The mullahs’ capitulation could open the door to normalizing relations and the White House easing sanctions.

 

They might even talk the president into letting them keep their ballistic missile program in the spirit of friendship, a matter of concern to Israel for obvious reasons.

 

Trump would declare (for a second time) that Iran’s nuclear program was kaput. But the same people who developed that program and slaughtered protesters by the truckload would remain in charge, biding their time until the political winds in America shifted and made it possible for them to resume building their nuclear deterrent.

 

That’s the best outcome, as I say: The regime survives, murdered Iranians go unavenged despite Trump’s pledge, and the nuclear program ends up on hold for a few years. At least there’s no war, though.

 

What if there is a war?

 

Destroying what’s left of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would be useful but would leave us in essentially the same situation I just described except with American servicemen potentially wounded or killed. Targeting members of the regime like Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would change that, but it’s anyone’s guess what would follow the current government or how much friendlier it might be to the United States.

 

“Many analysts believe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader would likely take control” if Khamenei were killed, the Journal notes, which is a bit like replacing Hitler with the head of the SS. It’s probably an improvement? Maybe? I guess?

 

Maybe no one takes control. The country descends, à la Iraq, into civil strife and warlordism as a fledgling central government struggles to keep the peace. The economy collapses and refugees head for the border en masse. The White House ends up facing precisely the sort of dilemma it sought to avoid in Venezuela by keeping Maduro’s deputies in charge, forced to decide whether to insert American soldiers to impose order or sit back and be blamed for the chaos and misery it has unleashed.

 

Things could go the other way. Once the U.S. air campaign concludes and our forces leave the region, Revolutionary Guard forces that had gone to ground might reemerge and lay waste to the population to snuff any nascent efforts at deposing the regime that had been rekindled by America’s offensive. The bloodletting might be worse than it was last month as Islamist goons set about defiantly showing Iranians—and the White House—that they’re still in charge. What does Trump do then?

 

The basic problem in all of this is, well, basic: Real enduring change in Iran requires ending the Khomeinists’ grip on power but there’s no way realistically to do that through the air. Even if our campaign disarms them temporarily, we’ll likely need to do it again in a few years. That’s an “endless war.”

 

And an expensive one for America and the president.

 

The end of the republic, and of Trump.

 

If Trump orders an attack on Iran without lifting a finger to build political support for it, it will be the end of the United States as a republic in any meaningful sense.

 

Never has America fought a war this substantial without some form of buy-in from Congress and the general public. We’ve all grown numb to watching presidents unilaterally order lesser interventions, from Trump’s bombing run on Iran last year to Barack Obama joining the international air campaign in Libya to the first George Bush sending U.S. troops to Panama to seize Manuel Noriega. But the longer a conflict looks likely to last, the more servicemen it might potentially involve, and the greater the repercussions of the outcome for the United States, the more we expect the president to seek legislative authorization.

 

That’s how representative democracy is supposed to work. There’s no graver act of government than ordering citizens to kill and be killed on a grand scale, so there’s no act of government that requires the consent of the governed as urgently. That’s why Article I reserves the power to declare war to Congress, and why the War Powers Act of 1973 limits the president’s power to initiate hostilities on his own authority to “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

 

Not only has Trump not sought the consent of the governed through their congressional representatives for this potentially “massive, weeks-long campaign,” he hasn’t said a word to try to convince Americans that it’s necessary. Scratch that: Unless I missed it, he hasn’t alerted Americans to the likelihood of war at all. The United States might be involved in a major conflict in the Middle East as soon as this weekend, and news of it will come as a complete surprise to much of the population.

 

In no real way is a country that functions like that a republic. It’s Caesarism, the total unmooring of executive accountability from law in matters of life and death. When the president can launch major conflicts with impunity, when Congress’ power is reduced to trying—futilely—to stop a war that he started without so much as warning lawmakers what was coming, we’re in a full-blown autocratic perversion of the constitutional order. That’s the catastrophic civic price that the United States will pay for an Iran attack on the scale that Axios envisions.

 

Which is not to imply that that conflict would be good for Caesar. On the contrary.

 

As noted a few weeks ago, there’s a silver-bullet explanation for why Trump is growing less popular. It’s not the state of the economy or the way he’s enforcing immigration law—or at least, not directly. It’s his priorities. In poll after poll, Americans complain that he’s focused on the wrong things. They reelected him to ease the cost-of-living crisis that began under Joe Biden and not only hasn’t he done it, he seems disinterested in the subject.

 

The president is like a cat chasing whichever shiny object happens to be in his field of view at a given moment, one Dispatch colleague told me this morning: “Two weeks ago it was immigration enforcement. Two weeks before that it was Greenland. Now it’s back to Iran.” It’s one thing for Americans to feel disappointed by the White House’s record on affordability, it’s quite another for them to feel like Trump isn’t trying.

 

How do you suppose they’ll feel when he greets their latest pleas for kitchen-table relief with a big new war in the Middle East that they didn’t even know was in the works?

 

I’ll answer my own question: It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which Trump becomes more popular after attacking Iran and easy to imagine him becoming less popular, potentially ruinously so. A Quinnipiac poll taken early last month, at a moment of maximum sympathy for Iranian demonstrators, nonetheless found 70 percent of Americans believed the U.S. shouldn’t get involved there militarily. The same percentage said that presidents should seek approval from Congress before taking military action against another country.

 

Among independents, 80 percent and 78 percent, respectively, agreed with those propositions. That alone should make war with Iran, especially one without congressional authorization, politically radioactive for the White House eight and a half months out from a midterm election.

 

But when combined with the public’s existing exasperation with Trump for losing focus on affordability, I think the conflict could incinerate much of what’s left of his political capital. If you thought Americans were angry with him for getting distracted before, imagine how they’ll feel when his latest distraction turns out to be the last thing they expected when they reelected a guy who spent the final weeks of the 2024 campaign complaining about the “warmongers” on the other side.

 

His approval might sink below 40 percent under the weight of disaffection among MAGA doves and right-wing Israel skeptics and never recover—and that’s assuming the military campaign goes reasonably well. If it goes poorly, with America taking casualties while blowing up a bunch of Iranians to no obvious end, Trump might grow unpopular enough to loosen his decade-long grip on congressional Republicans at last.

 

Caesarism begets Caesarism.

 

To put that another way, by next week many voters who haven’t yet grasped our national predicament might suddenly be shocked into recognition.

 

It will dawn on them that they elected a man who believes he’s entitled to do anything he likes, up to and including starting major wars, without asking anyone’s permission or even letting the public know beforehand. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Given the cultish tribal realities of Republican politics, even a weakened Trump will easily fend off any effort in Congress to remove him.

 

Americans are at his mercy and will remain so for just shy of three more years. I can’t imagine they’ll take the news well.

 

His polling will slip further. Anxiety about the midterms will spike inside an already anxious White House. The president’s frenetic campaign to pre-spin a November election disaster as the product of Democratic cheating will suffer a setback: If he’s polling at 33 percent on Election Day, good luck convincing Americans that a liberal landslide was due to a vast conspiracy among illegal immigrants to vote unlawfully rather than earnest public discontent.

 

Faced with an electoral debacle, Trump will decide that he needs to be proactive about “stopping the steal” this time and will connive to tamper with the midterms directly rather than stick to selling his sore-loser fans a soothing narrative to rationalize defeat. He already hinted at doing so last week, in fact, but a severe popular backlash to war with Iran will increase his urgency.

 

As unlikely as it seems right now that Republicans will still control both chambers of Congress next year, it’s not impossible. If the president’s approval takes a sharp war-related hit, to the point that it does seem impossible—and, especially, if the Senate suddenly looks like it’s in play—Trump will give up on the half-measures he’s taken so far to influence the election process and connive to intervene directly. What that looks like specifically I don’t know, as I’m not a fascist. But some sort of overweening, illegal executive ploy to seize control of vote-counting in swing states is a fait accompli.

 

Caesarism in how America wages war will lead to Caesarism in lieu of fair elections, or at least a determined attempt at it. Soon voters will realize what they’ve done to themselves and their country.

Has Contrived Coarseness Jumped the Shark?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 19, 2026

 

I’ve been fighting a losing battle on this front for years. There comes a point at which any act gets stale, and the shtick loses its audience. Hopefully, the tactical deployment of profanity by our politicians is one of those phenomena that has reached the terminal phase.

 

In her bid for the U.S. Senate, Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton may have done the country a great service. Her debut campaign ad is so gratuitously obscene that it may push past its breaking point a trend in which politicians attempt to convey authenticity via the liberal use of four-letter words.

 

If you’re inclined to watch the spot, I’d recommend doing so with headphones:

 

 

There is nothing authentic about this. It is so obvious that the consultancy class is coaching its clients to be as crass as possible that the only people who could see any sincerity in it are either tricking themselves or performing for their political tribe.

 

I can hear it now: Oh, but you’re talking about the spot, aren’t you? Mission accomplished.

 

Yes, overpaid consultant — you’ve earned your check. Perhaps you don’t care that you’ve contributed mightily to the coarsening of the political culture in the process, but you’ve exposed your belief that progressive primary voters (the only segment of the electorate that matters in a race for the U.S. Senate in Illinois) think and talk like semiliterate boors. That’s how you think you have to approach these people. It’s an expression of your contempt for the voters to whom you’re appealing.

 

Social fads come and go, and this one is rapidly approaching the point of saturation. We can expect that it will fade as performative swearing looks ever more jejune. Even if voters don’t catch onto the condescension implicit in the tactic, its ubiquity will sap it of its only virtue: shock value.

 

If the shock hasn’t faded yet, it will. It’s ugly and crass, and candidates for high office with an ounce of respect for themselves or their voters should reject it.

Contrived Coarseness Like Juliana Stratton’s Is Here to Stay

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, February 19, 2026

 

This post is in response to Has Contrived Coarseness Jumped the Shark?

By Noah Rothman

 

For those unaware, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is a famous maxim of media interpretation that posits that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It’s a pretty useful heuristic, and I’ll confess it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw my colleague Noah Rothman ask “Has Contrived Coarseness Jumped the Shark?” Answer: No! Of course not! In fact, we’ll only get more of it as primary season heats up (and beyond that, as we head into 2028). Why, contrived hysteria is practically the coin of the realm by this point.

 

Noah is referring in this specific case to the appallingly vulgar primary advertisement that dropped today from Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, running for Senate to replace the retiring Dick Durbin — so this touches on me quite personally, as I get to observe the form of the destructor Illinois is about to choose. Anyway, her big ad is literally just a parade of people shouting “F*** Trump!” That’s it. That’s the ad. No particular arguments — though slogans like “ABOLISH ICE” flash on-screen silently as a legion of Chicagoans all incant the same slogan. (On Twitter, her account writes “someone had to say it” — okay, but this many people, all in a row?)

 

Noah rather reasonably asks: Are we not better than this? Aren’t people tired of this ridiculous pantomime of anger and vulgarity? Absolutely not. Your average working stiff doesn’t care about any of this rhetoric; then again your average working stiff isn’t surfing the internet for Juliana Stratton campaign ads. This is directed at the base, and in the context of a primary.

 

And it will work. This is what the left wants to hear right now, especially in ultra-blue Illinois, where the only defense that Democrats have left for their own disastrous mismanagement of every level of state government is to point to Trump as a shiny distraction. However dishonest a strategy that might be, it works in Illinois. Stratton is running on a predictably ultra-left platform (“ABOLISH ICE” is right there in the advertisement) with the explicit endorsement of Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Democratic establishment. And she will win. Both of her races — the primary and the general alike — might as well be over already, in fact. (Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown.)

 

So no, contrived coarseness has not hit its sell-by date just yet. In fact, I predict we will see new lows in the months to come, as we head toward November.

The Age of Dangerous Idiots

By Abe Greenwald

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

One of the most disorienting aspects of our current national moment is the mismatch between the heinous deeds inflicted on us and the pathetic people doing the inflicting. Americans are being preyed upon either by a legion of freaks or an army of imbeciles.

 

As an example of the former, consider the man who just opened fire at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, hockey game. A transgender Nazi fan, he looked like a football player in drag for a comedy sketch. But he nonetheless killed his ex-wife and son and wounded several others. These trans shooters always have pitiable online lives and look like passed-over circus performers—and they kill a lot of innocent people.

 

The line between the freaks and the imbeciles isn’t always clear. Streaming hate-peddlers like Andrew Tate are a bit of both. Tate has been charged with rape and human trafficking, and he brags about why reading books is for people with slow brains. He’s a goon and a moron, and he’s also a leading figure in the online promotion of Jew-hatred and misogyny. Another former fighter, Jake Shields uses his prominent platform to deny or minimize the Holocaust, yet he can’t pronounce “Auschwitz” for his life.   

 

Speaking of trouble with words, Candace Owens, the queen of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, struggles mightily with basic English. To note just a few of her lost battles with her native tongue, in Owens’s nutty rants, “grandiose” becomes “grandoys,” “bureau” is “burrow,” “satiating” is “saychayting,” “napalm” is “nahpalm,” “beret” is “barrette,” “reminiscent” is “remnishent,” “posthumous” is “post-humous,” and “compartmentalize” is “comprementalize.” She’s like a child learning words for the first time—every time. And she makes powerful observations, noting that “truth,” for example, “is way stranger in fiction.” Owens is the unwitting Yogi Berra of Jew-hatred. And there she is, driving basement-dwellers into Nazism. Like her friend Kanye West, who once announced he was going “death con 3” on the Jews (the term he was looking for is “defcon”), she sells anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism to the illiterate.

 

There’s a lot of that going around. Beyond the straightforwardly illiterate, we’re menaced by the historically and religiously illiterate as well. There are the self-appointed revisionist historians who’ve never read a single work of serious history. There are people like Carrie Prejean Boller, the disgraced former beauty queen who converted to Catholicism last year, just in time to lecture Catholic clergy and scholars about the religion’s incompatibility with Zionism. Tucker Carlson, who only recently read the Bible cover to cover and wrestles demons in his bedroom, does the same.

 

We also have lesser imbeciles who enjoy greater public standing. Over the weekend, AOC attended the Munich Security Conference, where she asked whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan were it attacked by China. Her answer: “Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, um, this is of course a very long-standing, um, policy of the United States. Uh and I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.” Yet, she didn’t hesitate or stammer in telling European leaders that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. 

 

When hard and serious men are the villains, it’s obvious what must be done. We must be hard and serious in fighting them. But it’s more confounding when we have to respond to the horrific deeds of gamer screwballs and the malicious words of morons. Some of them seem barely to take themselves seriously. So you find yourself tempted to swat them away. Or you hang on to a thin hope that they’ll be undone by their own eccentricities and deficiencies. But they seem, instead, to be multiplying and doing ever greater damage. 

 

Decades ago, I was in a video arcade in Penn Station when a small group of children demanded I give them money. I started to laugh at the scenario—but then I noticed that at least one of them had a crude weapon. All decent Americans are now facing something like that situation. The new enemies of civilization are at once dangerous and ridiculous. But they’re not children, so we must still be hard and serious in defeating them.