And, sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.
- Excerpt from a six-minute video statement by President Trump regarding the death of three service members in the Iran war (NPR, March 6, 2026)
Kleptocrats cloak themselves in patriotism to hide their avaricious ulterior motives, and they undertake misadventures that mobilize and distract their followers. Donald Trump has proven himself a master of moving the news cycle from crisis to crisis to avoid the reality of his self-dealing shell games and cons from sinking in.
At the start of the year, the invasion of Venezuela cost him little and bought him a news cycle. The capture of Maduro, which almost certainly violated international law, may have given him the sense that our military could be used to create distractions from the affordability, public health and well-being crises created by his failing domestic policies and from his connection to the Epstein files.
In Iran, however, Trump’s war of choice has generated geopolitical and economic shocks around the world and dire consequences for the men and women who serve our country—consequences Trump has repeatedly tried to hide.
No Truth, But Plenty of Consequences
Distorting the truth to serve their own ends is a hallmark of kleptocratic leadership — and Trump’s conduct of the Iran war fits the pattern. Heralding the war as a “tremendous success,” he consistently downplays the human, economic and geopolitical costs.
Here are just a few examples.
Civilian deaths: In response to credible reports that US bombings were responsible for the death of up to 175 school girls in Minab, Trump initially said, “It was done by Iran...they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever.” When later confronted with evidence and mounting pressure, he shifted to “I don’t think it was us,” and eventually dismissed the entire question of accountability, telling reporters, “It’s such a strange question to be asked at this date, because you’re talking about a long time ago,” before adding, “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”
Economic cost: While the Pentagon initially put the Iran War’s price tag between $25–29 billion, an independent analysis from the Center for International Policy found the real direct cost was nearly triple that figure: roughly $71.8 billion in just 60 days. Trump has repeatedly brushed off the toll on ordinary Americans, telling reporters he doesn’t factor in the war’s economic pain, even as fuel costs alone have added more than $500 per household and the Pentagon has requested over $80 billion more in supplemental war funding.
A strained military: The potential overreach in Iran has compromised US combat readiness across the globe, especially in the Pacific. The Pentagon is pulling its last aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, out of the Pacific to relieve the USS Lincoln. A retired admiral has described this move as “a national security risk” as it leaves the US dangerously exposed to China for the next year and a half. Continued combat in Iran, with no clear goals or end-game in sight, has also dangerously depleted US munitions stockpiles, which could embolden potential adversaries like Russia and China. As a result, US allies in Asia rightfully wonder if the US military strategy to deter China continues to be credible.
Underfed and Undercounted
How the Trump administration treats our soldiers fits into his broader pattern of disrespect for public service. He values personal loyalty, rather than institutional norms, and seems incapable of understanding “the non-transactional life choices” that drive public service.
When he had the chance to serve during the Vietnam war, Trump famously opted out thanks to a “bone spur diagnosis.” He also has a history of disparaging the troops, calling US prisoners of war “suckers” and those who died in World War II “losers.” And he has repeatedly insulted Gold Star families, including mocking a grieving mother, joking about a Purple Heart, and even blaming them for controversy at Arlington Cemetery.
It’s a pattern that carried straight into his wars. Emboldened by the seeming “success” of the Venezuela strike, Trump’s decision to declare war against Iran was reckless. As explained by Rex Huppke, Trump’s lack of seriousness was evident from the first moments of this conflict:
Trump was so flippant about this attack that he oversaw its launch from his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida, apparently deeming his presence in Washington, DC, unnecessary. He took time away from battle planning to glad-hand with rich friends gathered for a fundraiser in a gilded ballroom, a scene that shows precisely who our president values and who he’s willing to ship off to spill blood on foreign soil.
Nothing captures Trump’s disregard for the military more starkly than his attitude regarding the people risking their lives to carry out his orders. Earlier this month, Military Times reported on the suffering of the USS Abraham Lincoln’s crew following 250 days without a port call, which exceeds the carrier’s original seven-month schedule and is a record for a modern US carrier deployment. Family members shared accounts of dire conditions, including moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without hot water, and drastically rationed meals.
The toll on mental health is particularly alarming: multiple sailors have reportedly attempted to go overboard, including one incident on August 3 in which a sailor was rescued by a search-and-rescue helicopter after going into the water wearing a life vest. Families weren’t fully briefed on the scope of the crisis until they confronted Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and senior officers at a town hall in San Diego, where one spouse said her husband had texted her that he hoped he wouldn’t wake up the next morning. When asked if the carrier deployments were too long, President Trump responded: “No, no, no, not nearly long enough.”
The disregard and deception extends far beyond the USS Lincoln. Both the dead and the wounded have been undercounted, misclassified, and erased from the public record.
According to The New York Times, the Pentagon altered its own casualty count, dropping the official death toll from 18 to 14 in a single day by reclassifying four troops killed after Trump’s declared ceasefire. Based on reporting from The Intercept, US Central Command has refused to provide a running death count at all, and an independent analysis by the outlet put the real toll at “no less than 15,” with a defense official saying Secretary of Defense Hegseth and the White House want casualty numbers “kept under major wraps.”
The wounded have fared no better: according to CNN, the Pentagon’s public casualty tracker “lags events by several days or even weeks,” and the administration has stopped regularly disclosing non-fatal injuries and attacks in real time, leaving hundreds of wounded troops effectively invisible in official accounting. Trump has bragged that only “18” have died “in two wars,” a claim that erases both the undercounted dead and the uncounted wounded alike.
Censoring the Press
Public deceit and misdirection are a feature, not a bug, under Trump’s Pentagon. We’re seeing this play out clearly in terms of how Secretary Hegseth has attempted to block the press from reporting on Iran and other events.
As we reported earlier this year, Hegseth attempted to impose new Pentagon media rules requiring prior approval for virtually all press coverage originating from the building, prompting nearly every major news outlet to suspend their reporting. Hegseth has continued to restrict media access through a policy to escort journalists into the Pentagon only for press conferences. During the Iran campaign, Hegseth has snapped at press members and railed against what he considers to be a lack of positive coverage for the war.
Trump has taken the attacks even further by repeatedly branding objective reporting on the war as an act of betrayal. In March, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Iranian missiles had struck and damaged five US Air Force refueling planes on the ground in Saudi Arabia, Trump floated treason charges against the outlet on Truth Social, writing that it should “be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information.” In June, after a leaked intelligence assessment cast doubt on his claims that the strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, Trump escalated further, calling reporters from CNN and the New York Times “BAD PEOPLE WITH EVIL INTENTIONS” and again threatening to prosecute whoever leaked the report to them.
How War-Mongering Kleptocrats Control Information to Hide their Mistakes
To better understand how Trump’s reckless behavior and obfuscation fits a kleptocratic pattern, look no further than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s willingness to sacrifice Russian lives to sustain his war has reached staggering levels. CIA Director John Ratcliffe testified that the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit arriving at the front is now just 20 to 30 minutes. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent think tank, Russia has suffered approximately 1.4 million battlefield casualties and 450,000 fatalities. To keep his war machine staffed, Putin has been forced to raise the average age of its recruits to 38 and offer signing bonuses of up to $80,000, along with severance pay as high as $140,000. Putin’s calculus is simple: soldiers are expendable so long as the war continues to serve his political survival.
None of this reaches the Russian public in anything close to the truth. Weeks after the invasion began, Putin signed a law criminalizing the spread of “false information” about the military, threatening journalists with up to 15 years in prison simply for calling the war a “war” rather than a “special military operation.” According to the Press Gazette, more than 30 independent Russian outlets have been forced to shut down or flee the country entirely, and Russia’s own communications regulator has explicitly ordered remaining media to scrub any language describing shelling, civilian deaths, or the invasion itself in accurate terms. The result is a country where the Kremlin’s own casualty figures are unverifiable, and ordinary Russians have no reliable way to grasp the true scale of the death toll their government has inflicted on their own sons.
Kleptocrats like Putin and Trump restrict the freedom of the press that is critical for citizens to understand the true state of the hostilities beyond the propaganda designed to hide the real impacts. This, in turn, creates a media ecosystem that makes scrutiny of self-dealing and corruption less likely.
A Debt We Owe
The women and men who serve in our Armed Forces deserve leadership that values their service and safeguards them from unnecessary harm. That has not been the priority of the president or his Secretary of “War.” We don’t want to follow the path that Russia has taken that has foolishly wasted the lives of hundreds of thousands in a war with no purpose. The Iran war, which continues on without clear goals or a credible strategy for conclusion, has already taken at least 18 American lives, wounded another 600 service members, and killed up to 4,000 Iranians and another 4,000 Lebanese.
When kleptocrats create conflict to distract from their own misdeeds and incompetence, the fallen become props in someone else’s political theater. It falls to the rest of us to refuse that framing, demand real accountability, and insist that every service member who died or was wounded be remembered as a person, not a talking point.
Weekly Wins
The Business Case for Not Backing Down
Companies that stood their ground on DEI after Trump’s “go woke, go broke” threats didn’t just do the right thing. The data shows they did the smart thing, too. A new study by UC Berkeley’s Jacob Grumbach found that S&P 500 companies that maintained their DEI policies after Trump’s January 2025 executive orders performed just as well financially as competitors who caved and scaled them back. Companies including Costco, Apple, and Delta Air Lines held the line despite the pressure campaign, while Google, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, and Walmart fell in line and abandoned their commitments. Yet the market didn’t reward the retreat. The findings puncture the narrative that inclusion is a financial liability.
Climate Groups Score Major Win against Trump's EPA
A coalition of nonprofits fought back against the EPA and won a major victory when a federal appeals court blocked the agency from clawing back roughly $20 billion in climate grants. The organizations had sued after the Trump administration froze their accounts. The DC Circuit's divided ruling restored an injunction against EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's move to terminate the funds, which Congress had appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act to expand clean energy financing. Six of the ten judges found that canceling the grants over a mere "policy disagreement" likely violated federal law, and the EPA offered no guarantee it would leave the money alone if the injunction were lifted. The fight isn't over: the agency is weighing an appeal to the Supreme Court, and funds won't be released immediately. Stay tuned to see how this case plays out.
Kennedy Center's Retaliation Lawsuit Backfires
Jazz musician Chuck Redd scored a decisive win against the Kennedy Center after fighting back in court against what his lawyers called a "meritless" and politically motivated lawsuit. A DC Superior Court judge ordered the Center to pay Redd more than $250,000 to cover his legal fees after tossing out its breach-of-contract suit in June. Redd had canceled his annual Christmas Eve show, which he'd hosted for nearly 20 years, after Trump's name was added to the venue's facade, prompting the Center to threaten and pursue a million-dollar lawsuit against him. His attorney says the ruling sends a message that "no citizen should have to spend time and money fending off baseless" lawsuits, though the Kennedy Center has said it plans to appeal.
Federal Judge Halts Trump Election Order Again, Citing Constitutional Limits
A federal judge has once again blocked President Trump's executive order that sought to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the November midterms, handing a win to voting rights advocates who argued the order threatened ballot access for military members, seniors, and voters with disabilities. The Boston-based judge ruled against the order, which had sought to have the US Postal Service play a central role in deciding who could receive a mail ballot. Voting rights groups say the decision reaffirms that election administration belongs to states and Congress, not the executive branch, and pushes back on what they've called an effort to weaponize federal agencies to sow chaos into the election process. The case may still head to the Supreme Court, but for now the ruling preserves existing mail voting rules as the midterms approach.
Another Loss for Trump's Legal War on Harvard
Harvard has notched another win against the Trump administration, after a federal judge dismissed the government's multi-billion-dollar antisemitism lawsuit against the university. The ruling marks the latest setback for the administration's broader legal fight against elite universities. US District Judge Richard Stearns found the incidents cited by the government were "too isolated and episodic" to support claims that Harvard is still violating civil rights law. Harvard's attorneys had argued the suit was really "a continuation of the Government's ongoing campaign of retaliation" against the university for refusing to bow to White House demands, and for exercising its First Amendment rights. Harvard previously won a sweeping ruling in its favor over federal funding, and this decision similarly denies the government the billions in research grants it was trying to claw back. The Department of Justice says it's "assessing next steps."
Elon Musk Gets Cut Down to Size
Cards Against Humanity is trolling Elon Musk right where it hurts. The game company is crowdfunding the "Elon Musk is a Sad Little Bitch with No Friends" monument on his own turf near Starbase, Texas. The stunt is the latest chapter in a nine-year feud that began when the Cards Against Humanity bought land to block the border wall, escalated when SpaceX allegedly trespassed on that property during Starbase construction, and ended with SpaceX settling the resulting lawsuit. Now, for $10, fans can join the company's "design committee" to help shape the monument, with proceeds fueling a public jab at Musk's ego to counter a nearby statue praising him.
The Bay Area's New Weapon against ICE: City Hall
Fighting to keep ICE detention centers out of their communities, Silicon Valley officials are using an unconventional weapon: local zoning law. Rep. Sam Liccardo unveiled a policy "toolkit" this week to help Bay Area cities and counties block new detention facilities by leveraging land-use rules around fire safety, environmental review, and density restrictions rather than immigration law itself. The push comes in direct response to a planned ICE facility taking shape on a 25-acre plot east of Gilroy, which Santa Clara County and California's attorney general are already suing to stop. San Jose is moving fastest, with its city council set to vote on a 45-day moratorium on new detention facility applications, while San Mateo County has also expressed interest in adopting the model.
Nuns Join Interfaith Vigils to Support Immigrants Facing Deportation
In Ohio, Catholic sisters have taken up a visible post outside an ICE field office, standing against the Trump administration's demonization of Haitian immigrants and the end of their Temporary Protected Status. United through the Ohio Sisters Justice Network, the sisters held signs reading "Love Your Neighbor, no exceptions" and "It's so bad even the NUNS are mad!," countering false claims Trump and Vance spread about the community during the 2024 campaign. They're part of a broader interfaith response, joining rabbis, Baptist ministers, and Muslim chaplains who have organized vigils at ICE facilities nationwide, offering an alternative to the administration's divisive rhetoric. As one sister put it, showing up isn't separate from her faith, it's a form of it: "This is a type of prayer."
More Links, More Kleptocracy
Build a Protection Racket
Bribes and influence peddling
Trump-appointed regulator OKs banking license for Trump-linked crypto firm - Politico
Base Group faces scrutiny over Trump ties as aluminum affiliate fights US tariffs - The Korea Times
Trump-linked World Liberty Financial received $100 million from money laundering suspect - Benzinga
Trump has amassed staggering wealth in ‘most openly corrupt’ presidency - The Guardian
Cartoonish bribe: Did a jeweled ring buy Belgium a tariff exemption - Rolling Stone
Trump is spending nearly $1billion in taxpayer money on gaudy White House renovations - Rolling Stone
Cronyism and favoritism
Ex-ICE agent’s group awarded $158 million to represent migrant children - WaPo
The US spent $2.2 billion on immigration detention centers - NOTUS
US Forest Service chief reportedly pressed staff for more support for wildfire near his ranch - The Guardian
A mining CEO bought 74,000 shares days before Trump shrank Bears Ears - Salt Lake Tribune
How Trump allies are tied to controversial Greenland drilling project - Newsweek
How Trump and Musk Rekindled a Relationship That Seemed Beyond Repair - WSJ
Decentralized violence and surveillance
ICE plans to give officers gloves that give painful electric shock - AP
He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut - Wired
US conducted ‘mass spying campaign’ against leftwing groups and anti-ICE protestors - The Guardian
ICE Belatedly Confirms Death of Third Delaney Hall Detainee - The City Reporter
Incarcerated for life in Trump’s war on the left - Rolling Stone
Get Rid of Independent Checks on Power
Executive power grabs
Rep Ilhan Omar says federal agent was stationed outside her monthly town hall meeting - CBS News
Trump refuses to back down as Supreme Court blocks major policies - WaPo
Centralizing executive authority
White House asks Justice Department to consider new Reflecting Pool charges - WSJ
DOJ wants executive privilege to cover Trump’s advisors also - NOTUS
Trump nominates loyalists to office that would oversee the Reflecting Pool - WaPo
Navy weighs major warship redesign to match Trump’s preferences - WaPo
Prosecutors Examined Firm With Tie to Judge in Trump Hush Money Trial - NYT
Pirro berated Burgum. Interior officials have been mad at him for months. - Politico
Targeting civil society and subnational government
Ex-Southern Poverty Law Center official charged in broader criminal case - Politico
Trump Sues New York and Other States Over In-State Tuition for Migrants - NYT
Fore! Trump’s golf course is already in the rough - Mother Jones
Californians Criticize Federal Efforts to Control the State’s Coast - NYT
Colorado Was Targeted as Trump Fumed Over Election Denier, Email Shows - NYT
Scientific integrity and academic freedom
Drive Division
Driving social division
How an enslaver’s statue became the central exhibit of Freedom Plaza - WaPo
The National Park Service removed 51 historical signs - Outside
US military base schools put new emphasis on Western civilization and Christianity - AP