Post #2010757
2026-03-01 15:16 UTC
🧵 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
Replies (1)
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@orrickle@sfba.social 2026-03-01 15:16
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