“Let’s Just Do It”: How Netanyahu Convinced Trump to Bomb Iran

In contrast to President Donald Trump’s vacillating rationale, it appears the United States did not go to war with Iran to wipe out its nonexistent nuclear program, respond to a nonsensical threat to American elections, or implement a poorly conceived regime change.

We did it because Israel asked us to.

In retracing Trump’s unilateral (and illegal) decision to go to war, it’s clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent months lobbying the White House, and Trump’s aides did little to dissuade the president from joining in on the attack, The New York Times reported Monday.

Netanyahu knows a lot about illegal wars. The Israeli military’s American-backed genocide in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 Palestinians. Now the two superpowers have launched a new campaign that has already killed more than 550 people in Iran, including dozens of school-age girls.

Discussion about a military strike on Iran began in December, when Netanyahu visited the president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. Netanuyahu asked Trump’s permission to launch strikes on Iran’s missile sites in the coming months.

In January, Trump threatened to strike Iran in order to stop the government’s massacre of protesters, promising that help was “on the way!” But Netanyahu reached out to Trump asking him to delay the strike until the end of the month. He argued that the U.S. wasn’t ready to go to war, and Trump agreed.

As January crept on, Netanyahu kept regular contact with the White House, including Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Eventually, the U.S. military presented an expansive list of options for military action.

Netanyahu visited Trump again on February 11, as the U.S. was set to resume negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. But the prime minister was there to ensure the president was ready to go to war, the Times reported.

There was little pushback among White House officials.

During a meeting in the situation room on February 18, Vance—who had previously spoken against U.S. intervention—said that if the U.S. did launch a military campaign in Iran, it should “go big and go fast,” people familiar with his remarks told the Times. The same day, Israel raised its alert level, indicating that a joint attack was imminent.

In that same meeting, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that a larger effort to topple the regime could lead to significant American casualties, an argument that was widely circulated to the press. Trump claimed that reports of Caine’s reluctance were “100 percent incorrect.”

Diplomacy, it seems, was never really an option. Negotiations spearheaded by Witkoff and Jared Kushner presented a kind of ruse to give Trump time to oversee a massive military buildup in the Middle East.

Speaking to Times Sunday, Trump said, “Toward the end of the negotiation, I realized that these guys weren’t going to get there. I said, ‘Let’s just do it.’”

After the U.S. and Israel launched their initial volley of strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, Netanyahu gushed that Trump had helped him realize his dream: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” he said.

The Justice Department filed an emergency motion to the 6th District Court that was rife with basic spelling errors, including spelling voters as “votors,” United States as “United Staes,” and emergency as “emeregency.”

The DOJ filed an emergency appeal Friday after a Michigan judge refused to force the state of Michigan to hand over access to sensitive voting records that includes each voter’s date of birth, address, and more. The DOJ has now sued 30 states seeking access to voter rolls.

This isn’t the first time the DOJ has displayed basic incompetence in court. Last April, DOJ lawyers misspelled United States  in their case against the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In October, former prosecutor Lindsey Halligan listed New York Attorney General Letitia James’s address as “Brooklyn, New Jersey” instead of New York in a court filing. And just last week, the DOJ sued New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, but misspelled her name over and over again.

“These are the people who want access to your voting records and who my team fights in court every day,” Democracy Docket’s Marc E. Elias wrote.

President Donald Trump appeared to have a large red rash on the back of his neck Monday.

While speaking at the White House about his illegal war with Iran, Trump was spotted with a dark red patch of skin peeking out from under his collar. In a photograph taken by AFP photographer Saul Loeb, a large scab is visible.

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the red mark. Possible causes of a red rash could include contact or atopic dermatitis—also known as eczema—psoriasis, or heat rash. It could also be caused by shingles.

A statement from Captain Sean Barbarella, a Navy emergency physician serving as the president’s doctor, claimed that Trump was using a “very common cream on the right side of his neck, which is a preventative skin treatment prescribed by the White House doctor.”

“The president is using this treatment for one week, and the redness is expected to last for a few weeks,” he said.

Trump’s right hand also appeared discolored in another photograph by Loeb.

Since July, Trump has been repeatedly spotted with a large bruise on the back of his right hand—except for a few instances when it inexplicably switched to his left hand. The president has gotten good at hiding it from the public—either with makeup or careful hand placement—but the 79-year-old president can’t hide everything, and cameras don’t lie.

The White House has claimed that his seemingly permanent injuries are the result of Trump shaking too many hands and taking too much aspirin. But doctors have theorized that the president’s discolored hands could be a sign of something much worse.

Now it seems the president is suffering from yet another physical ailment.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump began raving about curtains and his new ballroom while talking about his war plans for Iran on Monday.

At a ceremony to award the Congressional Medal of Honor to three U.S. military service members, Trump discussed how his attacks on Iran are going, saying that he doesn’t “get bored.” But then the president quickly went off topic to talk about the curtains and his ballroom project in the White House, making it the second time in one day he’s pivoted from Iran to renovations.

“See that nice drape? When that comes down right now you see a very, very deep hole, but in about a year and half from now, you’re gonna see a very, very beautiful building. And there’s your entrance to it right there,” Trump said, pointing to gold curtains behind him. “In fact, I think I’ll even, I’ll save money on the doors because you can’t get more beautiful than that. I picked those drapes in my first term. I always liked gold, but I think we can save a lot of money. I just saved, I just saved curtains.

“It’ll be spectacular, it’ll be the most beautiful ballroom. I believe it’s because I’ve built many a ballroom. I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world,” Trump said, before going on to rant about how his wife, Melania, doesn’t like the construction.

It’s clear that Trump doesn’t take his job seriously, even after countless Iranian civilians and at least three U.S. service members have been killed in this war he decided to start, with many more likely to follow. Somehow, he still is devoting a ton of attention and energy to the pointless ballroom that he demolished the White House’s East Wing to build. Meanwhile, there appears to be no plan for what to do with Iran after killing its leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and no clear end to the war in sight. But hey, at least we’re getting a nice questionably funded ballroom, right?

Iran had to be attacked because the U.S. was “very nearly under threat” by its advanced weapons systems, according to the president.

Addressing the war for the first time during a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, Donald Trump claimed that Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons” posed an immediate threat to the American public—even though he declared last year that his June attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities had “completely and totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.

“The United States military continues to carry out large-scale combat operations in Iran to eliminate the grave threats posed to America by this terrible, terrorist regime,” Trump said Monday.

“In addition, the regime’s conventional ballistic missile program was growing rapidly and dramatically, and this posed a very clear, colossal threat to America and our forces stationed overseas. The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.

“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people,” Trump continued. “Our country itself would be under threat, and it was very nearly under threat.”

So far, four American soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Trump has yet to formally speak to the American people about the war—a major departure from his predecessors, who almost universally recognized the need to justify the need for military intervention with an immediate speech to the public. Woodrow Wilson did so the same day he asked Congress to declare war against Germany during World War I, while Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a national address hours before the country declared war during World War II.

Even Harry Truman, who proceeded with the Korean War without the authorization of Congress—much like Trump—delivered a radio address to the American public shortly after he ordered U.S. air and naval forces to assist South Korea.

The current Middle East mobilization is the Trump administration’s second attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, which the White House has claimed is for weapons development. The first attack took place on June 22.

At the time, Trump celebrated that the strike had eviscerated Iran’s nuclear program, publicly rejecting a battle damage assessment by the Pentagon that determined that the impact of the missile barrage on the larger program was minimal and had only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months. The White House has thus far failed to explain the discrepancy, or why it needs to spend more taxpayer funds attacking a site that purportedly has already been demolished.

Before the June attack, Iran had argued that it was seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The nation has undergone years of nuclear site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and mere weeks before the U.S. bomb strike had allowed the agency’s inspectors to remain in the country, according to the U.N. entity.

Trump scrapped a potential nuclear deal with Iran during his first term, pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018.