Late News: Trump just fired Pam Bondi. Pete Hegseth should be aware that the President takes the blame for nothing whatsoever, and always seeks a fall guy to take the hit. That's whay Kristi Noem was canned from the Department of Homeland Security and now, Attorney General Bondi bites the dust. Loyalty to the Boss is no guarantee of surival.
JL
* * *An Analysis of the War in Iran by the BBC
This should be required reading for every American and every member of Congress. It is a very objective analysis of the war in Iran by the BBC and how it might conclude.
Donald Trump thinks like an eight-year-old educated by comic books and his supporters don’t deter him from doing so. He is blind to the lessons of the past, of facts that his predecessors in the White House were well aware, and reasons why they never bombed the sites he has attacked.
It’s all there in plain English for all to read.
Everyone seemed to know that Iran had the power to close off the Strait of Hormuz, their likelihood of doing so, and the international ramifications of their doing so. That is, everyone except Donald Trump and his pathetic boot licking advisers.
You might even disagree with this, but read it first. Click here or copy and paste https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y969pnxgvo on your device’’s browser line to see the facts that Trump is incapable of seeing and understanding.
You might even send copies to your Senators and House Representative to embolden them to carry out their Constitutional duties and put an end to the President’s idiocy, something which can do lasting damage to the future international role of our nation.
JL
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Presidential Gibberish
Here’s an excerpt from Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ posting dated March 30:
‘At 7:26 this morning (Monday), about two hours before the stock market opened, Trump’s social media account posted: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP."
It is hard to even imagine any President of the United States sending out such gibberish. Iran’s ‘regime’ denies any ongoing discussions (why should they confirm them. even if they exist?) and Trump’s threatened actions against water supply and electric power needed by civilians are in violation of international laws. That doesn’t bother him since he has no qualms about violating his own nation’s laws. Click here or copy and paste https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
on your device’s browser line (up at the top of your screen) to read her full posting, touching many related areas as well.
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Those who expected some clarity from the President in his Wednesday night TV address were disappointed. T’was just more senseless gibberish as described above. Details can be found in Simon Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles dated April 2. Click here or copy and paste https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/ on your browser line and realize why even Republicans are now beginning to disassociate themselves from the real estate peddler they put in the White House.
And economist Paul Krugman’s summed up Trump’s remarks this morning by writing ‘There is clearly no strategy here. There’s no endgame. There’s nothing. It’s hard to tell, as always, whether Trump is delusional or just completely unable to admit something that he actually knows.’
JL
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Another Letter Published
Tuesday’s South Florida SunSentinel published another letter from me, slightly edited by them from a grammatical aspect. Here’s what they printed:
‘The SunSentinel's March 27 editorial on the war in Iran correctly pointed out that the First Amendment's freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. Just as the President's unspoken recognition of ex-Homeland Security
Secretary Kristi Noem's' illegal actions led to her removal, there’s similar reason to remove Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from office for violating the First Amendment – as your editorial described. Hegseth is entitled to his religious beliefs. But in no way should he use his office to promulgate them.’
JL
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Trump’s Unsurpassbble Ignorance of Historical Facts
The internet is filling up with critical commentary on the occupant of our White House. Followers of Jackspotpourri have known much of it for some time now. But for more information about it, check out ‘Here be Dragons’ from UCSD Professor Barabara Walter at https://barbarafwalter.substack.com/ and the latest from Boston College Professor Heather Cox Richardson at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/.
And this bit on Trump’s unbelievable lack of historical knowledge came from the Borowitz Report at https://www.borowitzreport.com/ :
‘Donald Trump keeps telling us that his war in Iran is “on schedule.” In one sense, he’s right: it’s on schedule to be dumber, more chaotic, and more expensive than George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. No one with a sense of history would have launched such an idiotic war—which perfectly explains why Trump did it.
The depths of Trump’s historical ignorance became painfully obvious during his first term, when he presided over the worst pandemic since 1918—or, as he insisted on calling it, the worst pandemic since 1917. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say, the great pandemic,” he said. “It certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people, probably ended the Second World War.” Probably not: the pandemic was over by 1920, and the Second World War didn’t begin until 1939.
When it comes to history, Trump’s most common errors involve (1) when events happened, and (2) what happened. On only his twelfth day as president, during a breakfast to kick off Black History Month, Trump gave Americans a sense that they hadn’t elected Robert Caro. With his only Black cabinet member, Dr. Ben Carson, at his side, he said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Given what an amazing job Fred is doing these days, it seemed a glaring omission that Trump hadn’t invited him to the breakfast.
Three months later, when Trump spoke about the president he claimed was his favorite, Andrew Jackson, he revealed confusion about when Jackson was alive. “He was really angry that—he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War,” Trump said of Old Hickory, who, for sixteen years before the Civil War began, had been Dead Hickory.
Trump’s most surreal mash-up of historical periods, however, occurred during a Fourth of July speech in 2019, when he offered this time-bending narrative of the Revolutionary War: “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.” People were so distracted by the image of eighteenth-century airports—did they have Sbarro back then, too?—that most overlooked the fact that the battle of Fort McHenry occurred during the War of 1812.
In his first term, Trump sometimes placed himself at the center of events in which he’d played no role, or which never happened at all. He claimed repeatedly that he’d been named Michigan’s Man of the Year; no such award exists. On more than 150 occasions he took credit for signing a health-care law called Veterans Choice. Such a law does exist, but it was signed, in 2014, by Barack Obama.
Just as Trump supported moving the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he seemed to believe that the birthplace of the American Revolution should be relocated from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. “You know how famous Concord is? Concord—that’s the same Concord that we read about all the time, right? Concord,” he informed puzzled members of a Granite State audience.
Trump’s ignorance of geography, however, makes Sarah Palin look like a “Jeopardy” champion. “After I had won, everybody was calling me from all over the world,” he said in 2017. “I never knew we had so many countries.”
That’s not all he didn’t know. He didn’t know the difference between England and Great Britain. He didn’t know that the Republic of Ireland wasn’t part of the UK.
As for non-geographical facts about the country whose airports we seized in the 1700s, he didn’t know that Britain possessed nuclear weapons, nor did his White House know how to spell the first name of Prime Minister Theresa May. Trump staffers misspelled it “Teresa” three times before someone must have checked Wikipedia.
I
It’s often been said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In Trump’s case, those who didn’t learn history that’s taught in second grade should be forced to repeat second grade.’
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The real tragedy is that millions of Americans still voted for this dumbkopf and will continue to vote for those who support him in State and Congressional elections. What motivates them is highly suspect, and dangerous to us all.
JL
* * *
The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth
The cruellest irony is that of a President who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation and then threatens freedom of the press back home.
By David Remnick - March 21, 2026
(included in ‘Talk of the Town’ in New Yorker magazine’s print edition dated March 30 with the headline of ‘The First Casualty.’) David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of seven books; the most recent is “Holding the Note,” a collection of his profiles of musicians.
“In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.
On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?)
Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”
For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”
The President, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could soon be heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.”
The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.
Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.)
When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all the President’s men followed his lead: they blamed the media.
With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.
But, while the President has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever.
Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?
His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too. Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst.
On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”
Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”
The cruellest irony is that the President who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience.
Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does.in their name.”
* *
Remick’s closing sentence was realized on Saturday when about eight million Americans spoke out in ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, calling ‘on their government to answer for what it does in their name.’
Of course, the government had no answer.
Meanwhile Trump remains busy flailing about seeking a non-humilitating off-ramp from his war against Iran, his efforts to do away with ‘birthright citiznship,’ and his latest attack on voting by mail, despite all election laws being assigned to the States according to the Constitution.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
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More on the Sources of Information in Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered local daily ‘printed’ newspaper (now the South Florida Sun Sentinel) and what appears in my daily email; that includes the views of many contributors, including the New York Times and other respected journals.
Be aware that when I open that email, I first quickly glance at and screen out those sent to my very old former email address and those considered ‘promotional’ by Gmail’s system as no more than advertisements or requests for donations.
Besides these sources, I also utilize the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
Following such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search. Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than any AI summary.
It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence. Always!
JL
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