Tuesday, March 31, 2026

The Snapshot

Tuesday, March 31, 2026.  Chump talks of possibly ending war on Iran, Pete Hegseth apparently tried to profit from the war, and much more. 



President Donald Trump’s second term hit a dubious new milestone this weekend. No, it wasn’t his war in Iran entering a fifth week, nor was it the shutdown grinding on after Trump personally killed a deal to partially fund DHS. It wasn’t even the president hitting new levels of unpopularity in public polling, or a third “No Kings” day drawing thousands of protesters. Instead, HuffPost can report that the president’s golf habit has crossed the $100 million mark, costing taxpayers at least $101.2 million in travel and security expenses since his return to office.
When Trump arrived at his West Palm Beach golf course on Saturday morning, it marked his 56th visit there since his 2025 inauguration. It was his 110th day on a golf course that he owns — meaning he has played golf on more than one-quarter of his days since returning to the presidency. Per our analysis, Trump is now on track to spend $300 million on his golf habit by the end of his term. 

While the president golfs, the country is at war. Troops describe overwhelming stress and a disillusionment so deep that some are walking away from military service altogether. Gas prices are climbing, and workers are already feeling the pain. Americans are already skipping meals or rationing prescriptions to cover health care costs — and Republicans are plotting further health care cuts to pay for Trump’s war.


Poor Donnie,  The war might distract him from golfing.  


Chump and Netanyahu's war on Iran might wind down, might not.  Yesterday, Chump spoke and was -- as usual -- all over the place.  Aaron Boxerman,Erika Solomon and Sanam Mahoozi (NEW YORK TIMES) report:


President Trump zigzagged from claims of diplomatic progress to renewed threats of destruction on Monday, sending new shocks through oil markets as he sought to pressure Iran to make a deal to end the monthlong war.

Mr. Trump said in a Truth Social post that there had been “great progress” in talks with Tehran but warned that if they failed to produce an agreement, he would order the bombardment of Iranian power plants, oil infrastructure and potentially desalination plants. The president has repeatedly threatened such attacks in recent weeks, only to back down, as the global economy reels from the risk to energy supplies.

Despite Mr. Trump’s claim that the United States is in talks with “a new, and more reasonable, regime” in Iran, however, there has been little apparent progress in the negotiations. Iran has denied holding substantive talks with the United States and has rejected the Trump administration’s conditions as unreasonable. The war has raged on, drawing in much of the Middle East, sending oil and gas prices skyrocketing and fracturing Mr. Trump’s political support at home.

As Mr. Trump strains to find an end to a conflict he originally mused would last four to five weeks, he has alternately narrowed his aims — arguing on Sunday that “regime change” in Iran had already been achieved — and raised the prospect of escalation, ordering thousands more U.S. troops to the Middle East, including Marines and Special Operations Forces.


He has no plans because he has no established goals.  He never did.  He started a war with on end goals.  He was encouraged in this by the yes-people who surround him. They started a war and, even now, can't point to any accomplishments.  They just continue it and hope at some point they'll discover a way to say, "It's over!"


Ellie Cook (NEWSWEEK) reports,  "The White House told Newsweek on Monday that the United States does not need 'help from Spain or anyone else' after Madrid closed its airspace to U.S. aircraft involved in the Iran war, a move that underscores Spain’s opposition to U.S. and Israeli military operations in the Middle East."  They don't need help from anyone else?  Well that will be interesting to see. 



Trump’s threats: Trump claimed the US was in “serious discussions” with a “new” regime in Iran and threatened to “completely obliterate” the country’s energy sources if “a deal is not shortly reached.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio later claimed there were “fractures” within Iran’s leadership but declined to name the specific people the US is negotiating with. Trump’s former national security adviser dismissed claims the White House is negotiating with a more moderate regime as “just delusional.”
Tehran’s rebuttal: Contradicting both Trump and Rubio, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said there are currently no direct negotiations between the US and Iran. Messages have only been relayed through intermediaries, he claimed. The White House says Tehran’s pessimistic public comments do not reflect private messages being passed between the two sides.


Chump lies about conversations all the time.  And what happens when you lie all the time?  No one believes you.  So people don't believe Chump's talking to anyone in the Iranian government.  And they don't believe that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would be sitting out press briefings if he had anything worth sharing.  



Once mobilization begins and the war industry is activated, it is difficult to turn back. The war machine is too vast and complex to stop. Now the war against Iran is escalating and seems out of control. This is evident, to begin with, in the words: Iran issued a harsh warning to the United States yesterday that any ground operation against the country will end with the "humiliating capture" of its troops, who will be "food for the sharks of the Persian Gulf".

In this context, the Pentagon has offered, as confessed yesterday by Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, "several intervention options in Iran and the president has not yet made a decision." In the Middle East region, the United States already has over 8,000 deployed ground forces, including paratroopers, marines, and special forces, but Trump has not yet made a decision on the plans presented to him, which include taking one or more islands and even an incursion beyond enemy lines. At the moment, we do not know if Trump will choose one, several at once, or none.
What we do know is that he is not satisfied with that deployment and has asked for more. Another ship for amphibious operations, the USS Boxer, set sail from Hawaii two days ago to head to the Gulf region with thousands of marines on board. It will be the second of its kind, as the USS Tripoli already arrived here on Friday.

Some recall these days that U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War began in 1960 with 900 military advisors, then with 3,500 marines to secure Da Nang airport, and from there to half a million soldiers fighting in 1969.

To replace the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford, which is undergoing repairs in Greek waters, the USS George Bush will also be deployed. Some claim that in reality, the Gerald Ford was damaged by an Iranian missile attack, while the United States maintains that there was a massive fire in the laundry room.

Many journalists covering Defense affairs in Washington have complained about the lack of transparency: it has been 10 days since the last appearance of Hegseth and Caine before the press regarding Iran. There has been no CENTCOM press briefing since March 10, nor any daily Pentagon press conference.



Questions arise over US targets in Iran.  There have been two schools bombed.  ALJAZEERA looks at other targets:

In the densely populated neighbourhoods of southern Tehran, the 11th Criminal Investigation Base once stood as a mundane symbol of local law enforcement. Its detectives investigated economic crimes, fraud and petty thefts.

The building housed no ballistic missiles, no uranium centrifuges and no military command centres. Today, it is a crater. In the opening wave of the United States-Israel war on Iran, warplanes wiped the local police station off the map.
It was not an isolated incident. An investigation by Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations unit has verified that at least 75 internal security sites were destroyed or damaged in bombardments by Israel and the US from February 28 to March 10. The targeted facilities included local police stations, criminal investigation headquarters, public security offices and checkpoints operated by the Basij paramilitary force.
[. . .]
The spatial distribution of the 75 verified strikes revealed a clear and deliberate strategy. Warplanes bypassed isolated military installations to hit the infrastructure Tehran uses to police its citizens.
The capital alone absorbed 31 strikes, more than 40 percent of the total targets. Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province, suffered eight strikes. The remaining targets were clustered tightly in major western and central cities, including Isfahan, Kermanshah and Hamedan. Meanwhile, Iran’s sprawling eastern and southeastern provinces remained largely untouched by this campaign.

By overlaying the strike coordinates with demographic maps, the investigation shows a near-perfect alignment with urban density. More than 70 percent of Iran’s population lives in these targeted western urban areas.


At THE HILL, James Durso points out, "The ghosts of Baghdad and Kabul should be enough to silence any serious talk of sending American troops into Iran. Yet here we are again, with voices in Washington and Tel Aviv whispering that only boots on the ground can neutralize Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its local allies and its regional mischief.


On this morning's MEIDASTOUCH NEWS, Ben explains that Chump may, in fact, be abandoning the war. 





Trump’s job-approval ratio at Silver Bulletin on March 4 was at minus-12.5 percent. As of March 30, it’s at minus-17.4 percent, more than 2 percent below the previous second-term low. His average job-approval number stands at 39.7 percent, another second-term low, while his average job-disapproval number is 57.1 percent, a second-term high. On average, 47.2 percent of Americans strongly disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, still another second-term high. Only 22.4 percent strongly approve of Trump’s job performance, another second-term low. That’s an intensity gap of nearly 25 percent, or if you prefer, a ratio of more than two to one.

,

Individual polling trends mostly tell the same story. Fox News polls show Trump’s net job approval sliding from minus-14 percent at the beginning of March to minus-18 percent on March 23. Quantus Insights had him at minus-9 percent at the beginning of March and minus-15 percent on March 26. Reuters-Ipsos showed him sliding from minus-22 percent at the beginning of March to minus-26 percent on March 23. A new UMass survey on March 25 set his job approval at 33 percent, around the same level he was registering after the Capitol Riot. Polls that break out partisan self-identification show the president’s job approval among independents dropping into the 20s (25 percent at Quinnipiac, 29 percent at Economist/YouGov).

It’s tempting to attribute this sudden downward lurch to the Iran war. As Silver Bulletin documents in its polling averages, Trump’s war of choice is quite unpopular: Currently 38.5 percent of Americans support it and 53.9 percent are opposed. But the president is bleeding support on other crucial issues as well. According to Silver Bulletin, on “the economy” Trump’s net approval averages have dropped to a second-term low of minus-22.5 percent, and on “inflation,” he’s hit a really shocking second-term low of minus-35.9 percent.

,

In terms of the rapidly approaching midterm elections, there’s a pretty clear trend as well: The Democratic advantage in the generic congressional ballot has hit 2025–2026 highs of 5.9 percent at RealClearPolitics and 5.4 percent at Silver Bulletin.

,

If the war in Iran continues, along with elevated gas prices and other bad economic news, there’s no reason to think the current free fall in Trump’s popularity will do anything other than persist, at least until the irreducible minimum of hardcore party-base support is reached. There’s a reason prediction markets strongly favor a Democratic takeover of the U.S. House (84.5 percent at Kalshi and 85 percent at Polymarket) and give even odds of the Senate flipping as well.




President Trump’s approval rating dipped to a new low, and even fewer people surveyed in a new poll said they support his administration’s war efforts against Iran.

In a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released Monday, 33 percent of respondents said they approve of the president’s job performance. Of the 62 percent who said they disapprove of his work in office, 53 percent expressed “strong” disapproval. 
Exactly 33 percent of the poll’s respondents said they either “somewhat” or “very much” associated themselves with Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, including 77 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats polled. 

On the issue of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, only 29 percent of respondents said they supported Trump’s handling of strikes against Iran. Sixty-three percent disapproved of his job on this issue. 


Today on MORNING JOE, they addressed Chump's talk that he might be willing to walk away and they addressed his threat of War Crimes. 



Audra D. S. Burch, Andy Newman, Edgar Sandoval, Anna Griffin and Pooja Salhotra (NEW YORK TIMES) note the American people:

As Americans pumped gas into their cars Monday, pennies were getting pumped right out of their pockets. A lot of pennies.

As the Iran conflict entered its fifth week, gas prices had increased about 35 percent since Feb. 28, with the national average hitting $4.02 per gallon on Tuesday. It was the largest increase in decades. The conflict has threatened oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which previously carried a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil.

Motorists in every corner of the country are watching the numbers tick up and — rarely — down. On Monday, New York Times reporters followed along as they made their calculations. 

At a Mobil station on Atlantic Avenue along a popular route to Kennedy International Airport, Mohammed Razzak, an Uber driver, paid $70 on Monday to top up his Chevrolet Suburban, a purchase that would have cost about $53 earlier this year.

“This is too much,” Mr. Razzak, 48, said. “Since the beginning of the war, it’s gone up almost $1 a gallon” — to $3.69, from $2.79.

Uber has offered drivers increased discounts on gas, but Mr. Razzak, who has been driving for 14 years, said his bottom line has gotten steadily worse.

“Every week, I’m spending $100 extra,” he said. “It’s not like my fare is going up every day. We are suffering, all the drivers, all the people — not the government. There’s nothing I can do. No choice.”

Many mornings, Penelope Cepeda drives her mother to work and in the afternoon picks up her sister from school. And she commutes to her own job or to college classes.

She drives a relatively fuel-efficient Kia K4, but the skyrocketing gas prices caused by the Iran war — more than a $1 hike per gallon in Florida over the last month — have cut into an already tight budget. Before the increases, Ms. Cepeda paid about $35 for a tank of gas. That price is now more than $45. For Ms. Cepeda, who earns $12 an hour as in-home caregiver, every penny counts.

“If you’re counting on the dollars that you’re earning by the hour, it’s like, ‘Damn, 80 cents?’” said Ms. Cepeda, a student at Valencia College who fills her tank two or three times a month. “That’s money that I’m losing for my car bill. That’s money that I’m losing for my water bill or my phone bill.”

Ms. Cepeda, 20, gave up on plans to travel for spring break, but hopes gas prices will stabilize by the summer so she can take a vacation.

“Maybe a cruise. Maybe something cheap. If cruises go up, then maybe we’re just going to stay here.”



Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens penned an article that captured the rah-rah-ness of the pro-war crowd and was breathtaking in its short-sighted triumphalism. Headlined “The War Is Going Better Than You Think,” Stephens called for “perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East” and scolded critics who depict the Iran war as “an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest” that is “already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame.” Not so, he cried.

His evidence? Comparisons to the past. In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein, the US-led forces lost 75 aircraft. So far not a single piloted plane has been shot down over Iran. At the start of the invasion of Iraq 12 years later, President George W. Bush tried but failed to mount a strike to decapitate Saddam’s regime. This time around, Donald Trump killed Iran’s supreme leader and many high-ranking officials in the initial bombing. And in 2012, when Barack Obama was president, the price of Brent crude oil hit $123 a barrel ($175 in 2026 dollars). So the price of $108 a barrel this past week shouldn’t be such a bother.

Stephens presents a couple of other markers to suggest this war is proceeding just fine, while acknowledging the Trump administration’s “failures in planning, particularly its unwillingness to make a stronger public case for war and get more allies on our side before the campaign began”—which are hardly quibbles. Overall, his advice is to buck up and not be Debbie Downers: “If past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.”

Stephens is grasping at tactical straws. Perhaps the US military is putting its hundreds of billions to effective use in terms of the prosecution of the war, though we probably won’t know for certain until there are after-action reports and investigations (if there are any). We do already know that a missile strike that was attributed to US military forces hit a girls’ school and killed about 175 Iranian civilians, most of them students. But looking at the number of bombs dropped or Iranian leaders killed or the fluctuation in the price of oil is not the best way to evaluate this war—especially in these first weeks of the conflict.

Wars are often not easy to judge because the chaos, conflict, and disruption they trigger will yield consequences that last for years, if not decades. It’s easy to gawk at Pentagon videos of Tomahawks raining “death and destruction from above,” as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calls it, and hail the war machine. Much tougher is perceiving the ripples. We have no idea where all this violence will lead. It’s theoretically possible we might end up with a less threatening regime in Tehran and more stability in the Middle East, though that does seem close to magical thinking. However, cheerleading the early stats and proclaiming they bode well for the long run seems purposefully naive.



Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling (THE NEW REPUBLIC) notes coutnries helping Iran target the US:

More than one major U.S. adversary is assisting Iran.

China has been sharing intelligence with Iran since roughly two weeks into the war, a “well-placed,” unidentified source “with knowledge” of the situation told HUMINT’s Sasha Ingber. The military cooperation has been ongoing since at least March 10.

[. . .]

Several military officials told The Washington Post on March 6 that Russia shared targeting details with Iran, offering the locations of U.S. military assets such as warships and aircraft across the Middle East. Over the weekend, European allies warned that Russia was aiding Iran more than U.S. officials had let on. They underscored that America’s latest Middle East conflict is intertwined with Russia’s war against Ukraine, reported CBS News.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted Monday that the conflict would be resolved in the coming weeks, though military officials have indicated that the war could rage for months.


And in the US, the greedy have dirty hands. Catherine Bouris (DAILY BEAST) notes:


A broker for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly sought to invest in major defense companies just weeks prior to the commencement of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, a new report has alleged. According to three people familiar with the matter who spoke to the Financial Times, a Morgan Stanley broker representing Hegseth contacted investment firm BlackRock in February about a potential multimillion-dollar investment in its Defense Industrials Active ETF. On Feb. 28, Trump began conducting joint strikes with Israel on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and starting a new war in the Middle East.


Some video coverage of the war.







Let's wind down with this from Senator Elizabeth Warren's office:

ICE Director intent on building warehouse system like “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings” 

“Cramming tens of thousands of people into warehouses meant for packages, without the ventilation, temperature control, plumbing, or sanitation systems necessary for human habitation, would almost certainly exacerbate…deaths in custody, assaults, and infectious disease outbreaks.”

Letter to CoreCivic (PDF) | Letter to GEO Group (PDF) | Letter to GardaWorld Federal Services (PDF)

Letter to Newmark Group (PDF) | Letter to KVG LLC (PDF) | Letter to PNK Group (PDF)

Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, led 52 members of Congress in a new investigation into whether government contractors, real estate brokers, and property owners are corruptly profiting from the White House’s fast-tracked expansion of inhumane warehouse-based immigration detention facilities. The lawmakers wrote to six companies, pressing them to explain how much they expect to earn from the new detention warehouses, their lobbying efforts to land these lucrative government contracts, and more.

“These warehouses were built to hold products, not people…Given the public’s grave concerns about this warehouse system, we request prompt answers to questions about your involvement in the system,” wrote the lawmakers.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is working at breakneck speed to implement its “Detention Reengineering Initiative,” a warehouse system to hold nearly 100,000 people by November 2026. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has described the vision as “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

Experts have warned that because of the speed of the operation, it will be nearly impossible for ICE to build the infrastructure necessary for human habitation in warehouses. Immigrants in existing detention centers suffer from inhumane conditions, including lack of access to adequate medical care and poor-quality food.

“Placing thousands of people in warehouses that were never intended to house human beings will only exacerbate these problems,” wrote the lawmakers.

With the Trump administration planning to spend $38.3 billion on the warehouse system, the project promises to be extremely profitable for vendors, property owners, and real estate brokers. And for many of the warehouse contracts, ICE appears to be circumventing the normal competitive bidding processes.

ICE is using a Navy’s contracting program, diverting DoD resources to avoid a competitive bidding process and avoid disclosing contract details that would typically be made public, triggering concerns of unnecessary costs and corruption.

For example, ICE paid $129 million for a facility in Georgia — nearly five times the amount it was assessed for last year. The details of some of these transactions have been kept secret, including through the use of non-disclosure agreements.

Additionally, some senior Trump officials have close ties to immigration contractors that could profit from the warehouse system. For example, David Venturella, who recently joined ICE after leaving the GEO Group — a top ICE detention contractor — is leading the ICE division that oversees detention contracts even though his former employer is competing for lucrative warehouse contracts. Attorney General Pam Bondi is also a former lobbyist for the GEO Group. Tom Homan, the “Border Czar,” and Corey Lewandowski, a former Homeland Security official, have reportedly helped contractors secure contracts to line their own pockets.

The lawmakers asked the contractors and real estate firms to provide clarity on: their roles in the warehouse expansions; their expected profit margins from the project; whether they’ve donated to the Trump campaign or cabinet officials; and whether they will commit to not allowing their work to be used to facilitate inhumane conditions at these detention centers, by April 13, 2026.

Senators Edward Markey (D-MA), Bernard Sanders (D-VT), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) joined in signing the letters.

Representatives Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Julia Brownley (D-Calif.), Sean Casten (D-Ill.), Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.), Judy Chu (D-Calif.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Jesus García (D-Ill.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), April McClain Delaney (D-Md.), Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Ilhan Omar (D-M.N.), Deborah Ross (D-N.C.), Patrick Ryan (D-N.Y.), Andrea Salinas (D-Ore.), Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), Jan Shakowsky (D-Ill.), Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill), Donald Beyer (D-V.A.), and James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) joined in signing the letter.

###





The following sites updated:





Posted by at