#heatherCoxRichardson Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder noted in Thinking About… that Trump’s personal corruption is another interpretive framework for thinking about his decision to go to war. Trump’s sudden foray into regime change after years of attacking other presidents who tried it raises the question of whether he is acting for other countries in the Middle East he considers his allies.

“Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration,” Snyder wrote, “one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.” Snyder noted that Gulf Arab states eager to curb Iran’s power “have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family.”

🧵 Last week, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, both of whom have deep financial ties to the Middle East, would guide the decision of whether to strike Iran. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for U.S. strikes on Iran for a long time, and hours after Snyder wrote, Washington Post journalists Birnbaum, Hudson, DeYoung, Allison, and Mekhennet reported that Trump decided to attack Iran after Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman made “multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack” while at the same time publicly calling for a diplomatic solution./2

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall pointed out that as his power diminishes, Trump “is leaning heavily into the presidential prerogative powers where his power is most untrammeled, where the loss of political power doesn’t really matter. Almost no presidential power is more clearly in that character [than] the president’s control over the military.”

And that is the crux of the matter. For all the vagueness of Trump’s justifications and goals in attacking Iran, he has launched a war—his word—on his own, assuming the powers of a dictator./3

Trump launched his attack while lawmakers were not scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., for a week, but Democrats are demanding Congress return immediately to vote on whether to continue military action against Iran. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) said in an interview: “This is one of the most dangerous efforts that Trump is undertaking in the second term: trying to normalize war without Congress, trying to normalize the idea that a president can just do whatever they want when it comes to foreign policy.” Huge though this is, there is a larger issue behind it: Since taking office again, Trump has gone out of his way to define tariffs, deportations, and so on as part of national security policy./4

The president is supposed to get Congress’s buy-in to go to war in part because that requirement forces an executive to convince the American people that a contemplated military action is worth their tax dollars and their lives. But Trump made little effort to explain his Iran attack to the American people, and they oppose it. Morris notes that support for attacking Iran has held fairly steady for months and remained so after the strikes, with 34% in favor of them and 44% opposed. This is “incredibly low” support for a foreign war, Morris writes, and support for military action tends to be highest at the start of a war./5

The president is supposed to get Congress’s buy-in to go to war in part because that requirement forces an executive to convince the American people that a contemplated military action is worth their tax dollars and their lives. But Trump made little effort to explain his Iran attack to the American people, and they oppose it. Morris notes that support for attacking Iran has held fairly steady for months and remained so after the strikes, with 34% in favor of them and 44% opposed. This is “incredibly low” support for a foreign war, Morris writes, and support for military action tends to be highest at the start of a war./5

@orrickle Why would he bother with any of that when nobody stopped the last guy who did it the same way