Iran War Mess: Live with John Aravosis

On tonight’s show I’ll be discussing Donald Trump’s Iran war turning into exactly the kind of expanding quagmire he repeatedly promised he would never start. The CIA now says additional attacks probably won’t change Iran’s willingness to make peace. Meanwhile, Iran is targeting a desalination plant in Kuwait and an Amazon data center in Bahrain, while the Houthis are threatening Saudi oil exports. Gas is already back above $4 a gallon after briefly falling to $3.71 -- and I’ll play the devastating CNN compilation of Trump repeatedly promising to end wars rather than start them.

I’ll also discuss Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky firing military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, just one week after firing Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Ukraine is simultaneously escalating its attacks inside Russia, striking one of the largest power plants in western Russia. Crimea’s largest gas-station network now says it has no gasoline to sell, while Morgan Stanley estimates that Ukrainian attacks have knocked out more than half of Russia’s oil-refining capacity. That’s not simply a Russian problem: Russia normally supplies roughly 11 percent of the world’s seaborne diesel trade.

Then there’s Trump’s extraordinary flip-flop on supposed Chinese interference in the 2020 election. Just days after demanding national television coverage for a speech portraying China as a grave threat to American elections, Trump suddenly announced that it happened a long time ago, China is different now and, besides, America interferes in other countries too. What this means is that Trump’s supposedly historic election-security crisis disappeared the moment it became politically inconvenient.

I’ll also explain the New Jersey DMV computer failure that mistakenly registered roughly 6,600 noncitizens to vote, around 400 of whom subsequently cast ballots -- even though they had explicitly indicated that they weren’t citizens. We still don’t know whether they were legal or undocumented immigrants, but we do know Trump’s proposed voting law wouldn’t have prevented the problem because this was a government computer error, not people sneaking around the registration system.

The Mitch McConnell mystery also continues. His staff refuses to say what he’s working on, when they last spoke with him or whether anyone on his staff has spoken with him since his hospital photograph was released. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear makes the obvious point: If McConnell is capable of holding multiple 20-minute policy calls, he’s capable of giving Kentucky reporters a five-minute interview.

I’ll also cover Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega effectively ending elections; Trump quietly rejecting nearly 6,000 clemency applications from ordinary people while pardoning political allies and donors who skipped the line; and Trump admitting that he doesn’t necessarily care whether New York Attorney General Letitia James is convicted -- he simply wants his Justice Department to indict her and make her life miserable.

Then there’s the $100,000 Charlie Kirk statue that apparently nobody wants; Laura Loomer’s remarkable conversion from spreading Russian propaganda to visiting Ukraine, admitting she was lied to and becoming an outspoken defender of the Ukrainian people; and the bizarre willingness of parts of the far left to excuse the Houthis’ executions, child soldiers and persecution of women and gay people while claiming to care deeply about Arab human rights.

Later in the show, I’ll discuss the administration’s highly questionable claim that the Iran war has cost only $37 billion; the growing legal problems with the Reflecting Pool prosecutions now that the government is removing and potentially destroying evidence; Trump’s strange announcement about flights to Lebanon; tornado safety and my childhood experience living near the devastating 1967 Oak Lawn tornado; and some lighter conversation about growing olive trees and learning foreign languages through social media.