Trump Desperately Looks for Someone Else to Blame for Iran Failures

The Iran war has not developed according to the U.S. president’s plan, and now he’s looking for someone to blame.

Donald Trump is reportedly examining his Cabinet for a potential fall guy, according to a report published Monday by The Atlantic. At the top of the list are two of Trump’s chief advisers on the war effort: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine.

Hegseth’s saving grace—amid his tanking favor—is his ability to butter Trump up. “Hegseth is good at telling the president what he wants to hear,” an outside adviser told the magazine.

Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, refuted the characterization, telling The Atlantic in a statement that “Secretary Hegseth always provides the President and White House senior leaders the full operational picture” and that any suggestion otherwise was “dead wrong.”

In an apparent attempt to redirect blame, Hegseth has made mincemeat out of his own stable of advisers, targeting top generals for leaking details to the press—an unforgivable transgression among the MAGA elite.

Last week, Hegseth suddenly fired Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sylvia was the director of the Directorate for Strategy, Plans, and Policy, effectively serving as the Pentagon’s chief war planner, and a vital liaison between America’s armed forces and the White House.

Sylvia is at least the fifth general that Hegseth either forced out or fired since he was appointed to oversee America’s military. But the timing could not be worse, particularly as Trump weighs renewed combat against Iran after the midterms.

Hegseth, however, is not the only Cabinet official to be graced by Trump’s evil eye as the president’s popularity plummets. Last month, as Trump attempted to get out ahead of a predicted midterm bust, he reportedly called several close confidants to assess the job performance of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Trump’s former campaign manager and famed “Ice Maiden.”

President Trump’s attempt to shake down Harvard University for its admissions data was thrown out by a federal judge Monday. 

U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun in Boston dismissed the White House’s lawsuit against the university, saying that the Department of Justice did not follow all legally required steps to get a court order compelling the university to comply with its demands. 

“The ruling does not determine whether Harvard has discriminated, whether the agencies may lawfully seek appropriately defined applicant-level data, or whether Harvard may ultimately be required to provide such data,” Joun wrote in his ruling. 

In its lawsuit, the Trump administration claimed that Harvard wasn’t cooperating with a government review of its admissions policies, and “slow-walked the pace of production” of relevant documents and refused to hand over others. Those documents included application essays.

Harvard said the DOJ’s demands were excessive, calling the administration’s lawsuit “part of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against Harvard.” The institution said its admissions process was in full accordance with federal law.

Trump demanded $1 billion from the university earlier this year after it refused to sign his “compact” on education policy and send millions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury. The administration also sued Harvard for allegedly fostering a “hostile educational environment” for Jewish and Israeli students, but that lawsuit was thrown out in August.   

Trump and his far-right allies have sought to fight “far-left” influence at U.S. universities, using cuts to federal education funding and accusations of antisemitism to force these institutions to comply with right-wing policies and ideology. Harvard is the highest-profile university to be targeted and seems to be successfully fighting back. 

Vice President JD Vance is once again spreading racist lies for attention.

At a midterm elections rally for Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy in Swanton, Ohio, on Monday, Vance baselessly claimed that undocumented immigrants were engaged in a plot to steal the state’s election.

“Now, I saw a story, just in the last couple of days, that there are illegal communities of illegal immigrant Somalis who are coordinating to flood the polls and drown out your vote,” Vance said. “Well, I happen to believe that we want American elections to belong to American citizens. Send a message by voting for Vivek for governor!”

There is no evidence to support Vance’s claim, and it’s unclear what “story” he is supposedly referring to.

If you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu, that’s because this isn’t the first time the vice president has indulged in this kind of grotesque gossip. While campaigning with President Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Vance spread false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. Later, he admitted that he had absolutely no evidence to support his claims. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said at the time.

With just hours until Election Day, it seems that Vance may be back to his old tricks, turning his attention to another immigrant community that Trump has attacked with racist smears. And unlike the Somali community in Minnesota, which has broad support from the state’s Democratic-led government, right-wing lawmakers have repeatedly targeted Ohio’s Somali American community.

Instead of making a sober and succinct pitch to voters on the final day before a consequential midterm election, President Trump decided to spend most of his speech rambling about Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovations.

“Today I’m thrilled to announce the official opening of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool,” he said Monday afternoon, before making a joke that he planned on changing the name to the “Trump Reflecting Pool.”

“The pool is now better and more beautiful than it’s ever been before. And we went through a lot with vandalism. The vandalism was unprecedented,” Trump continued, again pushing the spurious claim that leftist criminals—not his own poor design decisions—were responsible for the “American flag blue” paint at the bottom of the pool peeling off.

Trump then turned to the show-and-tell portion of his speech, pulling out a series of pictures of algae, graffiti, and other issues with the renovations and analyzing them live, as if he had just seen the photos for the first time.

“These are the pipes.… You know it’s been there since 1922, I guess. It’s in bad shape.… [There were] tremendous algae problems. You have that picture with the algae?” he asked an aide. “Yeah, lemme see that. This was a picture taken just before they closed it down. And this picture, this was in the Biden era.… They just spend money after money after money. It’s not an easy thing. The algae’s brutal, it forms easily, and we have it.… That’s not grass, that’s algae.”

“I can’t believe he is actually making his closing argument speech about the reflecting pool renovations,” liberal podcaster and former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor wrote. “This is a bad resistance lib joke come to life.”

While the president eventually did get to more pressing issues, the first 15 minutes of his speech were spent talking about something the vast majority of Americans have no reason to care about at all. People across the country are reeling from Trump’s litany of broken promises, with this new forever war on Iran and the spiking cost of living. That’s nothing to say of other failures, like the DOJ’s botched release of the Epstein files. There’s more than one reason his approval rating is incredibly low, and it sure looks like it’s about to haunt Republicans on Tuesday.

Democratic Representative Haley Stevens’s endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers for the Senate in Michigan came out of nowhere, and a train-wreck interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper hours later didn’t answer anyone’s questions as to why she pulled her support from Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

Instead, she decided to offer a full explanation to Olivia Reingold of right-wing outlet The Free Press, who interviewed Stevens at her fiancé Justin Turkish’s home at 11 p.m. Sunday night in the Detroit suburbs. Stevens said she decided to endorse Rogers because she “wasn’t being honest with myself after a certain point.”

The congresswoman told Reingold that it came down to El-Sayed being “obsessive” regarding Israel, pointing to his refusal to say whether Israel or Iran was a greater threat to America in a debate with Rogers. She said his statement in late September that “it is the responsibility of the people of Iran to decide what their leadership should look like” was a refusal to condemn the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. She said that Iran is the “opposite of our friend.”

The final straw for Stevens, she told Reingold, was a Rebellion PAC TV ad supporting El-Sayed that attributed the rising price of groceries to U.S. support of Israel killing Palestinians. While El-Sayed’s campaign was not involved in the ad and has disavowed it, Stevens thinks that he is holding “anti-American” positions.

In response to Stevens’s endorsement, El-Sayed accused Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago” and urged Democrats to rally together to defeat Rogers. Stevens claimed his statement went against the wishes of Jewish voters.

“God, I wanted to vote for him, but he just kind of said ‘Forget it,’” Stevens said. “I love the Democrats. I’m not trying to take anything from anyone or judge anybody or shame anybody.”

Stevens is in no position to accuse someone else of being obsessed with Israel. Her own Senate campaign was heavily funded by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, and she has a long and loud history of vocally supporting Israel. During the Democratic primary, El-Sayed’s campaign highlighted a clip from 2023 in which Stevens shouted, “Israel comes to me in my dreams” at a Hanukkah celebration.

That Stevens betrayed the Democratic Party, spurning leading party figures who reached out to her for days hoping to keep her in the fold, and then decided to complain about it all to a right-wing outlet founded by Bari Weiss says all you need to know.