What “You Only Get 18 Summers” Gets Right About Parenting
Technically speaking, August is not the last month of summer—the season officially ends on September 21. But among faithful disciples of the fun season, it prompts urgency, for it contains what seems like the final stretch before grim responsibility sets in and the self-serious soup fans come out in earnest. It is during these weeks when last-minute beach trips are summoned. When we commit ourselves to plans defined by leisure, not labor. Will it ever be this good again, we ask.
Now, the soup people like to argue that it is precisely this attitude, one they dismiss as panicked and mawkish, that informs much of their opposition to summer. There’s so much pressure, they argue, to build out action-packed days and perfect vacation photos. Let me say emphatically: This camp is wrong. And the same forces that guide them animate the hum of outrage over the sentiment, “You only get 18 summers with your kids.”
Not familiar? Well, like most sources of derision on the internet, “you only get 18 summers” is something of a Rorschach test; its meaning, as much as there is one, depends on who you ask. But lately, my algorithm is brimming with denunciations from parents who see it as just another form of “mom guilt.” As a popular Instagram account for parents wrote in May, the phrase creates “pressure to make every summer magical. Every moment meaningful. Every memory count.” Another influencer lamented similarly on Substack: “The pressure of the ‘you only have 18 summers with your child’ content [pushes] us towards trying to create core memories every summer, to try and make it unforgettable for our kids, while maintaining our jobs, cooking 3 meals a day, and making sure everyone has their basic needs met.”
Does it? I searched for the same militant instructions to build five-star memories, but they eluded me. Instead, I was surprised to find the phrase to be an oddly useful, even if corny, reminder to drop one of the worst habits I have as a parent: constantly counting down to the next activity, whatever thing that gets me closer to an imaginary finish line. To stop planning the next memory, quit all that counting, and just sit in it.
Now, finding an internet headline like “you only get 18” meaningful is a bit embarrassing to admit, like finding insight in “life’s a beach.” But for me, “you only get 18” echoes one of the most cosmic things I’ve discovered about parenting: the feeling of nostalgia for the present, even when it sucks. It’s a bittersweet yearning that defies logic, and yet, for so many of us, it’s real. As Stephanie Murray wrote in the Atlantic about why we long for difficult days of parenting:
Only with distance from the minute-to-minute anxieties of caring for a small child does its sweeping beauty come into full view. But this isn’t so much a shortcoming of youth as it is a gift of age. The experiences that follow early parenthood enrich our understanding of it, allowing us to ponder it anew. Hindsight allows us to put suffering into context and recognize the purpose it served in our lives. Hohlbaum likened it to laying bricks in a road: Only after we find out where the path leads are we able to see the purpose each brick served in getting us there. People with grown children have a deeper appreciation for the initial years of parenthood, because they are observing it from a perspective that only time can grant.
Don’t get me wrong. I relate, so acutely, to the parts of parenting that can reel the mind. (This includes the gauntlet of summer activities that, as Caitlin Murray of Big Time Adulting said in a recent video, can leave parents feeling like we are stuck in a “wet paper bag.”) Still, I can’t help but find the irritation over “you only get 18 summers” misplaced. Is it not an invitation for gentleness, to pause and consider, even mawkishly, to give grace to ourselves when we’re in the wet paper bag? Nothing about parenting will ever be perfect, just like those final weeks of August will never deliver the perfect summer. But it’s never been about the pursuit of some elusive perfect summer anyway. Summer is a season that celebrates saying fuck it: Slam those sweating hot dogs even when the meal prep is right there. Trade nice drinks in favor of cheap, ice-cold beers. Celebrate magic in the ordinary flecks of sunlight. Couldn’t we all use that reminder once in a while?
All signs point to this WNBA player becoming MAGA’s new darling
Sophie Cunningham is a mid-tier guard on the WNBA’s Indiana Fever who went viral for aggressively pointing her finger at an opposing player and hasn’t been part of the starting lineup since May. The 29-year-old hoopster can’t steal the spotlight with her game, so she’s pivoting and making her name by being MAGA trash instead. Just before the WNBA’s July 25 All-Star Game—which…
Fauci Pleads the Fifth and Kills Republicans’ Big Covid Hearing
Anthony Fauci will not testify before Congress Wednesday.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was subpoenaed to testify before a Republican-led Senate committee regarding his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But he won’t—instead, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in his opening statements.
Fauci remarked that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul—who issued the subpoena and has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest—has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.”
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to prompt me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said, adding that he is following his attorney’s advice by pleading the Fifth.
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Trump Secretly Fumes at Senate Leader Over the SAVE Act
President Donald Trump sees Senate Majority Leader John Thune as one of his “biggest headaches,” despite insisting that their relationship is “fine” publicly, according to reporting from The Atlantic.
The president’s displeasure with Thune has been brewing for some time, as the senator stands squarely in the way of Trump’s voting-rights-suppressing SAVE America Act. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last week that Trump’s patience with Thune was “running out,” and Trump himself told a Georgia rally crowd to call Thune directly regarding the SAVE America Act that same day. And on Monday, Trump strangely demanded that Thune pass a “full and deep throated” SAVE America Act.
“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of, including a full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT, the Budget, and the ever looming Debt Ceiling disaster, 1929!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Dumocrats will do it on day one, and can’t believe how lucky they got with this Senate leadership. Remember, stupidity always brings LOSING & DEATH!”
Thune has yet to flinch, making Trump’s private comments even more believable.
“If somebody can show me how we get an outcome, how we get a result, how we get an answer to this, I’m all for it.… But if we are going to be sitting here in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest,” Thune said to reporters on Monday. “We could stay here until Christmas, Democrats aren’t voting for this. I’m just telling you.… And Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.”
It’s unclear how long Thune’s resistance can last. Trump is absolutely desperate to get the SAVE America Act through, and he’ll be even more so as he approaches the end of his second (and hopefully final) term. Thune’s moderate Senate allies such as Thom Tillis and John Cornyn are outgoing, while the majority of the party willingly capitulates to whatever Trump demands, and will likely continue doing so.
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Trump Ignored Own Team on Funding for States That Didn’t Vote For Him
President Donald Trump personally intervened to block disaster aid to four Democratic-led states, overriding his own government agencies.
Politico reported Wednesday that Trump blocked aid to New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York after regional Federal Emergency Management Agency offices and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that all four states met the requirements for receiving aid due to a record-breaking blizzard in February.
The news outlet viewed emails between federal and state officials in addition to more than 150 pages of documents sent to FEMA by state officials. Presidents have the final say on granting federal disaster aid, but it’s rare to deny requests from state governors after FEMA determines that the estimated damage goes beyond preestablished levels.
“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, a former FEMA official anonymously told Politico.
There have been 69 snow assistance requests that met FEMA standards since President George W. Bush, and all but one have received presidential approval—including during Trump’s first term. The lone exception was a New Mexico request in 2016 that was under investigation for mishandling FEMA funds.
The four states who requested aid this year were seeking a total of $227 million in assistance to take on unexpected snow removal costs.
The Trump administration has denied any wrongdoing, claiming the aid denials were not political. In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that “there is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster relief.”
Trump handles disaster requests “with great care” to ensure state aid is used “to supplement—not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters,” Jackson added.
But earlier this month, Trump administration officials admitted in court that the White House has deliberately canceled clean energy funding to states that didn’t vote for him in the 2024 presidential election. The president has also withheld childcare funding to blue states. Trump doesn’t seem to believe he has an obligation to help citizens of the U.S. under his charge if he perceives a slight against him.
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Big Oil Is Getting Sued for Heat Deaths. It’s Fighting Back With an Army of Immunity Laws.
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Could the oil industry be held responsible for fueling the extreme heat that led to a woman’s death?
That’s the question at the heart of a novel lawsuit in Washington state. Misti Leon’s mother died from overheating during the hottest day in state history in June 2021, when temperatures climbed to 108 degrees F. Scientists said the unusual heat dome that descended on the Pacific Northwest would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. So last year, Leon sued Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and other oil majors for wrongful death, alleging that they had known for decades that fossil fuel emissions would lead to destructive consequences, but deceived the public about it, delaying action that could have prevented her mother’s death. An estimated 1,200 people in the region perished from the heat during that simmering week in June.
Earlier this month, a King County judge ruled against the oil companies’ motions to dismiss Leon’s lawsuit, allowing it to proceed toward trial. The ruling was a signal that this kind of case has merit, said Mike Meno, the communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit supporting climate accountability cases. “It’s the latest type of legal liability that the oil companies are absolutely terrified of and are going to fight like hell to try to escape,” he said.
“Quite simply, Big Oil is in panic mode.”
More than a decade after investigations found that Exxon Mobil had known about the dangers of global warming since the 1970s but publicly downplayed the threat, lawsuits against oil companies have proliferated. There are nearly 40 of these cases pending across the country, according to Margaret Barry, who manages a climate litigation database at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center. After years of delay tactics from the oil industry, at least five of these lawsuits—from Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, and Honolulu—have proceeded to the discovery stage, in which both sides try to uncover evidence to bolster their case in court. That’s the last major step before a trial, when oil executives would be forced to defend their actions in front of a jury.
Some cases are on hold as judges wait to hear how the Supreme Court handles a lawsuit from Boulder, Colorado, this fall. The city and county of Boulder allege that Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy violated state laws by concealing the dangers of their products and they want money to pay for the rising costs of improving infrastructure to deal with heat waves, wildfires, and floods. The outcome could affect existing climate lawsuits, or push plaintiffs to take different approaches.
In the meantime, the industry has been mobilizing a counterattack against the lawsuits with the help of the Trump administration and Republican politicians. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s biggest lobbying group, has said that one of its priorities for 2026 was to “stop extreme climate liability policy.” The industry has begun challenging “attribution science,” a rapidly developing field that seeks to quantify how climate change, and even emissions from specific companies, have intensified extreme weather.
The flurry of activity suggests that the industry feels like it’s under threat, Meno said. “Quite simply, Big Oil is in panic mode.”
Republicans are trying to pass laws to grant oil majors immunity to these kinds of lawsuits, with success in several states so far. Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have recently signed laws shielding fossil fuel companies from lawsuits related to greenhouse gas emissions, while Montana and Utah (again) reformed existing laws to narrowly define what counts as a “public nuisance,” effectively blocking lawsuits against oil companies to recover damages from climate change under that legal theory. The effort has gone national: Republicans in both chambers of Congress introduced bills this spring that would give oil companies broad immunity from lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for climate damages, with the backing of the American Petroleum Institute.
In April, an investigation from ProPublica revealed a coordinated effort behind these “liability shield” laws from conservative groups tied to the activist Leonard Leo. Evidence provided to Grist from the watchdog group Fieldnotes shows that Koch Industries and Exxon, in particular, have extensive ties to the organizations pushing for these laws, including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Tort Reform Association.
“If these companies have done nothing wrong and they think the law is on their side, why are they lobbying Congress for immunity?” Meno said.
Oil executives have also gotten help from the federal government, following an executive order from President Donald Trump last year directing the attorney general to prioritize blocking climate lawsuits by states. This May, the Justice Department responded to Minnesota’s climate lawsuit against Big Oil with a lawsuit of its own, just as the state’s case was moving into the discovery phase. It said Minnesota was undermining “American energy dominance” and attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, which should fall under the purview of federal law—echoing the oil industry’s well-known argument. In a related development, Robert Levy, a longtime Exxon lawyer, recently joined the Department of Justice in the newly dubbed “Energy and Natural Resources Division” (instead of the “Environment and Natural Resources Division”).
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This week in Santa Cruz County business: Local nonprofit partners to help veterans transition into aviation careers; rental market takes dubious top honors for most expensive in the nation
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Transcript: Trump’s Rage at Iran Takes Scary Turn—Even MAGA is Rattled
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 29 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump just unleashed a barrage of unhinged threats toward Iran in a new interview with Fox News. He threatened to bomb all Iran’s bridges and power plants, and said explicitly that the entire population of Iran might soon be without electric power.
There’s a temptation to dismiss moments like these as bluster. But we can’t let ourselves lose sight of what exactly he’s threatening to do, just how sociopathic these threats really are, and just how terrible it is that the media is now largely numb to them.
This all comes as some MAGA figures are warning against escalation in some surprising new ways as well.
So we’re trying to make sense of it all with former State Department official Emily Horne. Emily, always good to have you on.
Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.
Sargent: OK, so we’re in this weird holding pattern where Trump has held off on escalating and he just keeps making all these threats, and he keeps saying Iran is desperate to talk to him.
Yet at the same time, the reporting indicates that in reality the Iranians are not in any rush to talk to Trump at all. Emily, can you sum up the situation as of now?
Horne: The TLDR on that, to use bureaucratic terms, is that Iran has all of the leverage and all of the momentum at this moment in the conflict. I think they’ve shown that there’s a real willingness on their end to pass the cost of this war to the Iranian people, which, as terrible as that is, is a major asset for them. They are not particularly troubled by their own people’s suffering. And that, plus their control of the Strait of Hormuz, gives them a lot of incentives to maintain the status quo, and a lot of leverage over the status of negotiations.
They also continue to have a nuclear program, because Trump walked away from the JCPOA in his first term. So no matter what Trump has said at various points in Trump II about obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, again, that is something that Iran has as a bargaining chip, and they have been very clear that they’re going to control the direction of the conversation moving forward.
Sargent: Why is it that they don’t seem to fear Trump escalating, exactly?
Horne: I think part of it is that, again, they have the leverage here. As you and I have talked about before, this is an existential conflict for the IRGC. Many of them have lost family members, have already suffered greatly; they have already inflicted a great deal of suffering on the Iranian people.
And so there’s a tremendous sunk cost that has already been absorbed by the IRGC in this conflict. And from their perspective, maintenance of the status quo is fine by them—as much as that continues to put Trump in an impossible position, because again, he just doesn’t have a lot of leverage at this point.
But also, their strategy has been working for them. They don’t just control the strait, they are able to inflict a great deal of pain on the broader Middle East region, including by attacking tech infrastructure like data centers, attacking desalinization plants in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, attacking civilian infrastructure across the Middle East. And that again sends a signal that it is Iran’s momentum at this point in the conflict, not the U.S.’s.
Sargent: Well, in that context, let’s check out something Trump just said on Fox News. He starts by saying, I could knock out all the power plants, then it keeps going from there. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I could knock out the power plants within one day. All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. They say, look—people want me to do that. I think about 91 million people without power, without bridges, with that to live. And it’s a very, very delicate balance. So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal. The bridges are going to be gone. Literally, in less than a—I would say in two hours, most of the bridges, the major bridges, will all be gone. And the power plants in one day.
Sargent: Emily, I could be wrong, but I think this might be the first time that Trump has explicitly said not only that he’d knock out all the power plants, but also clarified that he really means knocking out electricity for all of Iran’s 91 million people. He said that. And that would be like a humanitarian catastrophe of unthinkable proportions. What would actually happen if he did that?
Horne: So if Trump were to follow through on his threats to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants en masse, then you would likely see an immediate and mass humanitarian crisis that would affect at minimum tens of millions of people. Remember, Iran has a population of almost 91 million people, many of whom are outside of the center capital of Tehran.
And so the power grid in Iran is already deeply stressed. Power plants and desalinization plants—which are so critical to Iran’s ability to function, with their limited access to freshwater—those are already deeply stressed as a result of this war.
You would likely see a collapse of Iran’s already stressed health system because of those effects, when you have tens of millions of people who are dangerously dehydrated, don’t have clean water to drink; diseases and waterborne illnesses will be spiking as sanitation is failing.
You would likely see supply chain disruption from all sorts of civilian infrastructure destruction, including things like damaged roads, which would probably cause a spike in food prices. There are already millions of people internally displaced within Iran. The latest estimate that I could find is from April, and that estimates 3.2 million people.
The humanitarian crisis already is so dangerous that tens of thousands of Afghan refugees—who fled Afghanistan to find safety from the Taliban and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan by going to Iran—are now returning to Afghanistan. That’s how bad the current humanitarian crisis is. And so you can only imagine how much worse it would quickly become were Trump to undertake these strikes that he is threatening.
Sargent: I just want to make one other point about this. I think in the West, in advanced democracies like ours, we think to ourselves, OK, knock out a power plant, it could just get back up and running pretty quickly. But that really isn’t the case here. It would sort of depend on what exactly Trump did. But if he really decided to make good on his threat—and again, he said this on the air on national television—if he really decided to knock out power for 91 million people and really demolish a whole lot of power plants, it would take probably months, if they were lucky, to get them back up and running. So we’re talking about a humanitarian crisis that would extend for months and months and months, right?
Horne: Absolutely. Probably years, probably generations, in fact—especially if you’re widening the aperture to talk about things like the effects of having tens of millions of people turned into refugees in their own country. I mean, that’s tens of millions of lives that are permanently disrupted. And the ripple effects of that are absolutely staggering to comprehend.
But I also want to make another point here, that what he is proposing is a war crime under both international humanitarian and human rights law, and importantly under U.S. law.
Sargent: It really would be. And I think another point to get out about this is that Trump is talking about knocking out power for all these 91 million people as if to kind of say, I’d be reluctant to take such a step. The tone is as if he’s being humane by saying that. But I really want to underscore this aspect of it.
In saying this, he actually stated straight out that knocking out power for 91 million people is something he’s giving serious consideration to. Listen to that clip. At the end, he says, I will do this if Iran doesn’t do my bidding.
Now, I think a lot of reporters hear this and say, he won’t do it, that’s a lot of bluster. But I don’t think that’s the right way to react. We should be saying, it’s unfathomably sociopathic that he’s even considering it, and an American president shouldn’t be talking this way. What do you think?
Horne: Well, as with so many things with the second Trump administration, multiple things are true simultaneously. So again, I cannot be clear enough about this: what Donald Trump is talking about here would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. Intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure like power plants—universally, human rights attorneys and organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International agree that threatening electricity, water, health care, other civilian infrastructure is a war crime. So that’s point one.
Point two, I think, yes—maybe someone on his staff got to him and made him realize that what you’re talking about is something that would be enormously disruptive to a country of 91 million souls, in addition to being outright illegal, and that that would have devastating humanitarian consequences that the United States, under your leadership, would be responsible for.
But then there’s also a third part here that I think is important to call out, which is, you know, Trump has threatened many times during this conflict—as recently as a week ago—to bomb civilian infrastructure like bridges and power plants and desalinization plants. And there have been strikes that have hit, reportedly, some Iranian civilian infrastructure, that have caused some disruptions to things like water supplies to Iranian villages, but nothing at the scale of what he’s talking about.
He hasn’t really done it. And the more that he talks about it but doesn’t do it, the more he sends a signal to the Iranians, but also to the global community, that he is all bluster—that there is no strategy here other than going on Fox and Friends and bragging about how big his bombs are. Which, I’m sorry, that’s not actually a strategy. And it’s certainly not going to be effective against the IRGC when, as we talked about before, they have most of the leverage in our current state of play.
Sargent: Even this is alarming as well, because the logic of it doesn’t lead to a good place. Donald Trump doesn’t want to end this whole thing in humiliation—that’s the big thing we know about this. It’s been reported that he’s urged his own advisors to find some way, any way at all, for him to be able to say that he got more out of Iran than Obama got during the nuclear negotiations of 2015.
And the idea that that’s what’s motivating him is just completely unthinkably loony. But putting that aside, Trump does not want this to end with him looking bad. He wants to walk out either looking incredibly strong and powerful, or with a world historical victory, or with some combination of that.
And so if he keeps opening the door to these really heinous war crimes, I fear that if Iran keeps kind of poking him and stringing him along, there may come a point at which he’s willing to do it. Is that unreasonable?
Horne: That’s the question. And I don’t know that anyone knows the answer to it, to be honest. Look, I think a week ago, this is what he was threatening to do. And the conditions were, as he wrote on social media on July 22—which, incidentally, was the day of the dignified transfer of four Americans who had been killed in the conflict, at Dover—he wrote on Truth Social that any time Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant in Iran.
And now, a week later, he’s going on Fox and Friends and saying that instead it is, we will bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran if there’s not a deal. And he’s not specifying what he wants in that deal. But if you listen to the full clip, he immediately starts talking about how Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.
Now, I’m always very reluctant to zoom in on any one particular Trump talking point and say, that’s it, that’s the new strategy—because frankly, most of the time, I don’t think he knows what the hell he’s even talking about. But it is kind of a tell to me that a week ago he was talking about Iranian missile or drone attacks on ships in Hormuz, and now he’s talking about Iran’s nuclear program and not talking about the Strait of Hormuz.
And that says to me, maybe his attention has moved on, maybe he’s gotten bored, maybe there’s a part of him that realizes that he can’t do anything meaningfully to change Iran’s dominance of the strait without incurring very serious U.S. military costs—that this war is incredibly unpopular, and it’s a real albatross around his neck as Republicans approach midterms. And he’s got to figure out a way to tie a bow on this that makes it look like there’s something he can claim as victory, to your point.
Sargent: Yes, and that’s not going to be easy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump Tuesday. Many MAGA figures are upset about this, fearing that a meeting will push Trump into escalating, and they don’t want Trump to do Israel’s bidding. Steve Bannon told Politico, “All of Trump’s most ardent non-Israel First supporters are furious.” Bannon called it a disaster for America First.
Curt Mills of The American Conservative called it “DEFCON 1” and warned that Bibi will “argue for the essential logic of escalation.” And meanwhile, new polling shows a large chunk of MAGA turning on the war. What do you make of all that, Emily?
Horne: Well, one, I think it’s really important to note that a big chunk of that strain of MAGA that you just identified is coming at this from a really virulent and ugly antisemitic place. And we need to be really precise about separating out what is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu’s approach to this conflict—versus something that does veer into a really, really ugly place that none of us should want to go. So I want to draw that distinction there.
But that aside, I think it’s really telling that there is not agreement within MAGA, within the Republican Party, on the best way out of this own goal that is Trump’s Iran war, his forever war, really. And even Trump alluded to this himself in his Fox interview this morning, where he talked about how there are elements of the Republican Party that want this to be over and done with, as midterms are approaching and everyone’s aware of how wildly unpopular this war is—how, as members of Congress are going back to their districts for August recess, they’re going to be getting an earful about gas prices and forever wars and politicians who are focused on the wrong thing.
And that there’s a continual hawkish wing that wants this war to just keep on going until, question mark, because again, there’s no strategy here. Nobody knows what Trump’s endgame is or what the strategy is. They’re clearly just making it up as they go along. And the only answer that they have for “the bombs haven’t worked so far” is more bombs.
And I’m sorry, but it’s pretty darn clear at this point that you cannot bomb your way out of this war, that Iran is not going to give up its nuclear program because of air pressure, that they’re not going to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz because they’re getting attacked from the air.
I think the only things that are ultimately going to get to a resolution on the nuclear issue are, one, what we already had—an agreement like the JCPOA that includes international monitoring and inspection to enforce its terms—or two, a big honking ground war that commits a lot of U.S. troops in perpetuity to a Trump-Iran war that I do not think anybody, even Donald Trump, has the appetite for.
So it’s really hard to see how this ends, but the best-case scenario is something like a return to the status quo that Obama had for us. You know, I was in the White House when the JCPOA was being negotiated, and we got a lot of criticism for it at the time from a lot of different voices in the Republican Party. And it’s really fascinating now to hear a lot of those same voices—maybe not in their outside voice, but in their inside voice—starting to come up with something that, boy, sounds an awful lot like the deal that we all had ten years ago.
Sargent: Yeah, that is pretty funny. To your point about how we’ve got to be precise about what MAGA is actually motivated by here—it’s worth saying that MAGA certainly doesn’t care about Iranians and whether they suffer through a humanitarian catastrophe or not. They have their own set of reasons, which you alluded to, for not wanting an escalation here.
I think there might be some elements of MAGA that are genuinely not for foreign entanglements and so forth, but a lot of it is really polluted with ugly sentiments, as you said. All that aside, when they hear Donald Trump talking about knocking out bridges and knocking out power plants, they too—meaning MAGA, again for their own reasons—I think probably say, shit, man, we’re really headed for an escalation here.
Horne: Look, and it is Americans that are paying the price for this war. I mean, obviously the Iranian people, as we have talked about at great length, are suffering tremendously. But this war has cost American taxpayers more than a hundred billion. It’s driven up energy prices. It’s contributed to global instability that is making everything more expensive. And last week the Trump administration went to Congress asking for another $350 billion to keep it going.
Meanwhile, our missile stockpiles have been massively depleted in a scarily short period of time, which leaves us incredibly vulnerable for the possible wars and conflicts of the future. And this bomb-and-hope strategy that Trump keeps on touting on Fox and Friends—it isn’t a real plan.
Iran’s already survived months of American bombing campaigns. And I see no evidence that more airstrikes, or bigger airstrikes, are going to eliminate their nuclear ambitions, or force them to surrender the Strait of Hormuz, or dislodge the new regime that is in place in Tehran. The only thing that more bombs are going to do is prolong this war, further destabilize the Middle East, and continue to drive up costs for everyday Americans.
Sargent: And paradoxically, I think that that dynamic actually points to the real possibility that he does end up bombing things like bridges and power plants. He may get it into his head that it’s the way the bombing was happening that essentially wasn’t forcing Iran’s hand. And it can’t possibly be that Iran can’t be bullied into this, for reasons that are intelligible if you actually put yourself in their heads, right? He can’t think that way. So he can only think, I need more force. And I just think we can’t really rule out the possibility that he makes good on some of these threats to start destroying infrastructure.
Horne: Unfortunately, I suspect that you may be right about that. We can’t rule it out. And one dangerous element that we haven’t talked about in this conversation is that Trump has systematically weeded out any military advisor who is capable of telling him, Mr. President, that is not going to achieve the impact that you hope it will, or, that’s not a good idea.
All of those people who are capable of speaking truth to power and speaking from their years of military experience have been forced out of our armed forces, or are essentially in hiding, because they know that to challenge the king is to end your career and possibly invite a whole host of retribution on your head. It’s an incredibly dangerous scenario where no one can tell the mad king that his decisions are not good ones.
Sargent: Boy, it’s really grim when you put it like that. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack. It’s called Spin Class. Emily, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Horne: Thanks, Greg.