Trump’s Iran War Is Already Weakening Military Operations Elsewhere

Donald Trump’s war in Iran is weakening U.S. military resources and weapons surpluses around the world.

The Washington Post reports that military assets are being rerouted to the Middle East, including from East Asia, where high-end weapons systems are typically kept to defend against possible action from China and North Korea. Parts of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system are now being moved from South Korea, and Patriot missile interceptors are also being moved from East Asia to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.

An unnamed official told the Post that the moves were precautionary to defend against a possible increase in Iranian retaliatory attacks, and not due to an immediate weapons shortage in the Middle East. But this puts the U.S. at risk in the places now missing these air defense systems, which are considered the most advanced in the world.

“The more THAADs and Patriots you shoot, the more risk you assume in the Indo-Pacific and in Ukraine,” Mark Cancian, who monitors American weapons inventories at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Post.

Last year, during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, the U.S. used about 25 percent of its THAAD interceptors, as well as large amounts of ship-borne interceptors. A THAAD battery usually needs 95 soldiers, six truck-mounted launchers, 48 interceptors (eight for each launcher), one radar system, and a fire control and communications component. As of the middle of last year, there were only nine active THAAD batteries worldwide. One of them costs anywhere from $1 billion to $1.8 billion.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned the president last month that a protracted war with Iran could deplete U.S. weapons stockpiles, especially considering other U.S. military actions in at least seven countries, as well as U.S. support for Ukraine. If the U.S. runs low on these systems and needs to buy more, it will cost taxpayers billions of dollars and put national security at risk. It’s abundantly clear that Trump didn’t factor this into his decision to go to war.

Yet another massive piece of anti-Epstein class protest art has appeared on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall—this time depicting President Donald Trump and disgraced sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein embracing in the Jack and Rose pose from the movie Titanic.

The statue is titled “The King of the World.” Trump stands right up behind Epstein, holding out his outstretched arms while slightly nuzzling his cheek. The accompanying plaque reads, “The tragic love story between Jack and Rose was built on luxurious travel, raucous parties, and secret nude sketches. This monument honors the bond between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, a friendship seemingly built on luxurious travel, raucous parties, and secret nude sketches.”

This is at least the fourth piece of protest art placed by a group called the Secret Handshake, whose members choose to remain anonymous. They also placed a poop statue in critique of the January 6 insurrectionists, a statue of Trump and Epstein holding hands, and most recently a giant replica of Trump’s unsettling birthday letter to Epstein.

This statue comes as questions swirl around an FBI interview mentioned in the Justice Department’s Epstein files, in which a woman says she was assaulted by Trump when she was around 13 years old. The DOJ has withheld some files related to the allegation and removed other documents that also mention Trump.

The installation will be on the Mall until Friday, March 13.

Florida gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback is a hero of the Republican Party’s growing sect of young white nationalists. He’s also a laughingstock among his own staffers, according to a series of text messages obtained by The Bulwark.

Fishback is $200,000 in debt due to a legal battle with his former employer Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund at which he was reportedly a low-achieving junior “research analyst.” When he started his own firm, that title was mysteriously bumped to “head of macro”—a promotion his former employer evidently did not appreciate. Fishback’s legal bills could balloon to nearly $2 million, and his staffers are concerned about their boss’s ability to pay.

Bryant Fulgham served as Fishback’s county outreach chair before departing the campaign on February 18 after being threatened with what he believed was a demotion. Now he’s sent The Bulwark texts and photographs from his time at the campaign.

“Jesus Christ,” Fulgham told The Bulwark, “I’ve created Frankenstein.” (He likely meant Frankenstein’s monster.)

In a conversation over text in February, campaign manager Emma Wright claimed that Fishback’s couch had been repossessed by debt collectors.

“Oh my god shit. We’re gonna be sleeping on the floor soon up there,” Fulgham wrote, adding two weeping emojis.

Wright joked that Fishback’s Tesla would be next. “Telsa (also being seized): STAY STRONG COUCH,” she wrote, adding a black fist-up emoji.

Last week, Greenlight Capital asked a judge to determine that the Tesla which Fishback drives on the campaign trail belongs to him and not his father. If the judge concurs, the car could be repossessed.

In another conversation in February, Wright lamented that her boss should “just give [Greenlight] the Rolex and call it a day.” Fishback denied ever owning a Rolex.

“He claims he lost it or something idk,” Wright added.

“Yeah I lost it in my safety deposit box,” Fulgham joked.

The text messages are not particularly flattering toward Fishback. In other messages to Fulgham, Wright complained that Fishback gave her an “ass blasting” over campaign plans. Whatever that means, Fishback did it twice, Wright said.

The texts revealed that staffers also used racial epithets and homophobic rhetoric. At another point, Wright dismissed holding events for college students—who provide a lot of enthusiasm for Fishback’s campaign—because they’re too “broke.”

Yet more evidence has emerged from the Epstein files suggesting that Donald Trump was well aware of the child sex trafficker’s criminal empire.

The Justice Department has slow-rolled the congressionally mandated release of the Epstein files, only releasing a fraction of the sweeping investigation to the public despite the December deadline. The agency held onto one particularly disturbing allegation until last week, when it released an FBI memo detailing an interview with a victim of Epstein’s who accused Trump of practically being in the same room while she was abused.

Epstein assaulted the Chilean-born Jane Doe on several occasions. In 2004, the pedophilic financier took her—then a 16-year-old girl—up the elevator of his seven-story Manhattan townhome, into the massage parlor, where he forced her to strip and rub his body as he spoke to Trump on speaker phone, the victim told federal investigators.

The victim claimed that she was a high school junior at the time. The FBI interview, which took place July 15, 2020, records the unidentified woman’s birth year as 1986.

“EPSTEIN got on the massage table and was on a speakerphone call with DONALD TRUMP,” the FBI memo reads. “[The victim] started getting undressed, and they started massaging him. (The victim) started massaging EPSTEIN’s feet and pointed to his back.”

The White House vehemently denied that Trump had any involvement with Epstein’s criminal activities, claiming that the unnamed woman was mentally unwell.

“These are completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

It’s far from the only time Trump appears in the Epstein files. Trump is mentioned more than 38,000 times in the document cache, according to a New York Times review. All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.

In another nauseating victim interview, the FBI noted allegations from a victim who claimed that Trump attempted to force her into giving him oral sex.

She remembered that Trump didn’t like the fact that she was a tomboy, and told her something to the effect of, “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.” He then unzipped his pants and put her head “down to his penis.” She “bit the shit out of it,” and Trump “struck her,” saying something to the effect of “Get this little bitch the hell out of here,” according to the interview. She was between 13 and 15 years old at the time.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding onto upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

One of Donald Trump’s most outspoken attorneys is facing discipline over ethics violations. 

Ed Martin, an employee at the Justice Department, is in trouble with Washington, D.C.’s professional conduct investigator for sending a letter to the dean of the Georgetown University Law Center last year saying his DOJ office wouldn’t hire any graduates from the law school due to its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. 

A complaint was filed by Hamilton Fox, who serves as disciplinary counsel for the district, giving him prosecutor-like powers on disciplining attorneys. Professional conduct proceedings will now begin for Martin, where he could face sanctions or even lose his law license. It’s the first such action against a lawyer in the Trump administration. 

“Acting in his official capacity and speaking on behalf of the government, he used coercion to punish or suppress a disfavored viewpoint, the teaching and promotion of ‘DEI,’” said Fox in the complaint. “He demanded that Georgetown Law relinquish its free speech and religious rights in order to continue to obtain a benefit, employment opportunities for its students.”

Trump tried to name Martin as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia early in his second term, only for him to be removed after it became apparent that the Senate would not confirm his appointment. Martin, a former political operative in Missouri, right-wing talk show host, and January 6 apologist, has had a rocky tenure in the Trump administration. 

Martin threatened anyone who criticized Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in its early days with legal action, and the methods he used to target prominent Democrats for criminal charges worried Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche so much that he reportedly “encouraged” a federal grand jury to investigate Martin for potential misconduct.  

Now it appears his attacks on DEI in service of the Trump administration have led to legal trouble. It would be quite the story if Martin ends up facing sanctions or losing his law license for attacking DEI, something every Republican, led by Trump, is doing these days. It might even end up protecting DEI initiatives. 

The Pentagon spent an estimated $5.6 billion on munitions alone during the first two days of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran, three U.S. officials told The Washington Post. And every dollar of that was spent without congressional approval.

This figure, which was delivered to Congress Monday, significantly dwarfs the Pentagon’s preliminary cost estimate of $1 billion per day. Some GOP lawmakers told Politico they’d received estimates that were closer to $2 billion.

The Post report comes as Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Tuesday “will be the most intense day of strikes,” just hours after Trump claimed the war “was very complete.”

The officials who spoke to the Post did not disclose what kinds of munitions were fired in the U.S. military’s opening salvo, but U.S. Central Command confirmed that the U.S. has fired more than 2,000 munitions and struck more than 5,000 targets.

Multiple outlets have reported the use of precision weapons including Tomahawk cruise missiles, which cost $2.2 million each. Reports indicate that the U.S. may have used one of these missiles in a deadly strike at a girls’ primary school that killed 175 people, many of whom were children.

But munitions aren’t the only costs, according to the Center for American Progress. Elaine McCusker, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense during the first Trump administration, estimated that it cost $630 million to assemble the largest force of U.S. military assets to the Middle East in decades before the first shot was even fired. Only days into the fighting, a friendly fire incident downed three F-15 fighter jets, costing roughly $351 million.

Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told reporters last week they would transition away from precision munitions in favor of laser-guided bombs, which are far less expensive. Still, as the fighting drags on, the cost to U.S. taxpayers continues to balloon.

The Trump administration is expected to submit a supplemental defense budget in the coming days—asking for billions more to keep dropping bombs.

The Democratic National Committee is suing the Trump administration for some clarification on any plans to send armed federal agents to polling places amid the president’s threats to “nationalize” elections.

“To ensure that the American people obtain timely knowledge of potential threats to free and fair elections and to enable the D.N.C. to take appropriate action to ensure voting rights are protected, the D.N.C. now seeks this Court’s aid to enforce” Freedom of Information Act requirements, reads the lawsuit, filed on Tuesday.

While President Trump himself hasn’t made public plans to send agents to ballot boxes, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have both refused to rule it out. And Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to nationalize voting. This lawsuit would compel the administration to confirm or deny under oath any “plans” to send federal agents to the polls this election.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We wanna take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places’; the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast last month. “We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win … like the 2020 election, I won the election by so much. Everybody knows it.”

Donald Trump opted not to attend the dignified transfer for the seventh U.S. service member killed during the war with Iran.

Several prominent Trump officials attended Sergeant Benjamin N. Pennington’s funeral procession at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Monday, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. But Trump—who earlier this week was lambasted for wearing a self-aggrandizing baseball cap to another dignified transfer—was noticeably absent.

Instead, Trump was at his golf club in Doral, Florida, with lawmakers for the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat. His schedule indicated that he was flying back to Washington at the time of the procession.

Pennington died Sunday after sustaining injuries earlier this month at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. He was the seventh U.S. military member to die amid the current Middle East conflict. Six other slain troops were transferred to U.S. soil on Sunday, though the honorary service was overshadowed by Trump’s fashion choices, which included wearing a Trump-branded, white-and-gold baseball cap that he kept on even as the flag-covered coffins passed by.

The president has not been shy about his casual and callous disregard for America’s troops. He has requested that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades; refused to visit a World War II graveyard; derided deceased soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”; and claimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. Trump doesn’t have any military experience of his own thanks to a conveniently timed bone spur diagnosis that helped him skirt the Vietnam War draft in 1968.

Meanwhile, the president is privately warming to the idea of deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran, showing “serious interest” in the possibility of keeping a small contingent there for “specific strategic purposes,” NBC News reported. Trump’s vision for Iran involves controlling the government, securing its uranium, and leeching off its oil supply, similar to how the White House infiltrated Venezuela in January, according to internal sources that spoke with NBC.

The U.S. could have had the schematics for Iran’s Shahed drones, but the Trump administration said no.

Roughly seven months ago, Ukrainian officials tried to sell the White House the technology to destroy Iran’s inexpensive, low-flying drones, going so far as to compile a PowerPoint presentation to sway the admin. The intel was battle-proven: Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”).

The decision to snub the offer is now being discussed as one of the biggest miscalculations thus far in the Iran war.

“If there’s a tactical error or a mistake we made leading up to this [war in Iran], this was it,” a U.S. official told Axios Tuesday.

Ukraine developed its own home-grown, low-cost interceptor drone to combat the design, along with air defense systems and sensors. At a closed-door White House meeting on August 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy offered the defense tech to Donald Trump. It was extended in an act of good will—an attempt to strengthen ties with the U.S. amid increasing tension over Russia’s invasion. Trump was reportedly interested and “asked his team to work on it, but they have done nothing,” an unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios.

The Shahed drones are capable of flying low and slow, a facet of their design that has made them difficult targets for U.S. air defenses, particularly as the U.S. and its allies run low on interceptor munitions.

Military officials have stressed since last weekend that fighting Iran has drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

In the days since, European Union defense officials have warned that the U.S. is no longer capable of supplying missiles to its allies amid its war with Iran, stressing that the continent would need to develop its own missile manufacturing sector in order to adequately fill its supply without Washington’s help.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles in order to fend off the drones.

President Donald Trump was caught in an obvious lie about the military strike on a girls’ primary school in Iran that killed 175 people, many of them children. 

Speaking at a news conference Monday evening, Trump floundered when asked whether the United States would accept responsibility for the deadly strike after it was reported that the strike was conducted with a Tomahawk missile—a weapon primarily used by the U.S. military. 

Trump said that Tomahawk missiles were “one of the most powerful weapons around” but were also a “generic” weapon that the U.S. sold to many countries. Iran was in possession of some, and an investigation would reveal “whether it’s Iran, or somebody else,” he said.  

“Mr. President, you just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war,” asked New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh. “You’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?”

The president struggled to back up his claim for even a moment. 

“Because I just don’t know enough about it,” Trump said. “I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks, they buy ’em from us. But I will, certainly whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”

Trump said Saturday that it was his “opinion” that the strike was done by Iran. “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stood lurking behind the president, had done his best to dodge the question, saying that the strike was under investigation, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”

Jen Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, said Monday it was “highly unlikely” that Iran fired at its own school. Tomahawks have to be fired by submarines or warships, she explained. Other militaries in possession of Tomahawk missiles are the British, Australian, and Japanese militaries. Not Iran.

“I think the president knows that, he just knows that this is a, certainly a mistake, a big mistake. And it’s being investigated, but he’s trying to muddy the waters by talking about the Tomahawks,” Griffin said.