March 31: Bombs Like They’ve Never Seen Before
Trump 'pissed' at Putin; Le Pen banned from politics; The $9 million 'Brat' influence campaign
The Big Story
Over the weekend, leaks began to appear in the press suggesting that top “Trump allies” and “Trump aides” were encouraging the president to fire his national security advisor, Mike Waltz, over the “Signalgate” scandal from last week. According to a report in Politico, at a White House meeting on Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and White House personnel chief Sergio Gor all urged Trump to get rid of Waltz—ostensibly due to his contacts with Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, however, the conflict is as much ideological as it is personal:
Even before the Signal leak, Mr. Waltz was on shaky footing, viewed as too hawkish by some of the president’s advisers and too eager to advocate for military action against Iran when the president himself has made clear he prefers to make a deal.
An association with Mr. Goldberg, however hazy, gave Mr. Waltz’s opponents more fuel to feed the skepticism.
Some of Mr. Trump’s closest allies have questioned whether Mr. Waltz, a former George W. Bush administration official, was compatible with the president’s foreign policy. Mr. Waltz had gotten crosswise with Mr. Vance and Ms. Wiles in policy discussions, particularly regarding Iran and their desire to hew to Mr. Trump’s preference, according to several people briefed on the matter.
We won’t repeat what we said last week, except to note that this seems a strange reading of Trump’s preferences. Trump has made clear that he is open to both military action (Waltz’s position) and diplomacy, but that he is not interested in giving free rein to Tehran and its proxies under the guise of “restraint.” Thus far, Trump’s second-term policy has been to combine offers of diplomacy with sanctions, military action against Iranian proxies like the Houthis, backing for Israeli operations against other elements of the Axis, and direct threats to Tehran. Consider, as an example, how he has been making his “preference” for a deal with Iran known over the past few days. Here was the president in an interview on Friday:
My big preference—and I don’t say this through strength or weakness—my big preference is, we work it out with Iran. But if we don’t work it out, bad, bad things are going to happen to Iran.
In a Sunday telephone interview with NBC News, Trump said, “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. There will be bombs like they’ve never seen before.”
Those “bombs like they’ve never seen before” are likely 30,000-pound GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), the “most powerful and deeply burrowing non-nuclear bunker buster on earth” (per The War Zone), designed to take out fortified underground nuclear facilities. This past week, the United States stationed at least five B-2 stealth bombers—one of the few U.S. aircraft capable of delivering MOPs—on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean within flying range of Iran. Given that the bombers have been left exposed on the tarmac to be captured by open-source satellite photography, we can assume that they are meant to send a message.
Also over the weekend, Sky News Arabic published excerpts from what it said was Trump’s March letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, laying out a two-month deadline for a deal and presenting U.S. negotiating conditions. Trump offered a “clean slate” for U.S.-Iranian relations and said his administration was “ready to take a significant step toward peace and de-escalation.” But the letter went on to warn Khamenei:
If you reject this extended hand, if the Iranian regime chooses the path of escalation, continued support for terrorist organizations, and military adventures, the response will be swift and decisive. We will not stand idly by in the face of threats from your regime against our people or our allies.
The Iranians have responded with their usual mix of saber-rattling and vague promises of negotiation. Last week, the Iranians delivered their formal response to Trump via Oman. According to a Qatari report picked up in Iran International, the Iranians ruled out any negotiations on their ballistic missile program and their support for terrorist proxies throughout the region. Iran said it would negotiate only on the nuclear file, and that nuclear negotiations would have to be based on Obama’s 2015 Iran deal, aka the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Trump withdrew from in 2018. That response was paired with threats from Khamenei—who said in a speech Monday that the United States will receive a “strong reciprocal blow” if it attacks Iran—and from other senior Iranian officials. In a clip shared widely on social media, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Air Force Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh told a journalist, “If you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones. The Americans have at least 10 bases with 50,000 troops in the region, meaning they are sitting in a glass house.”
It’s certainly possible that Trump could ignore this, appoint Steve Witkoff to negotiate “JCPOA 2.0: Art of the Deal,” and declare victory while moving on to other issues of more concern to him. But our guess is that if the Iranians insist on returning to the Obama deal while threatening to kill Americans, they may end up getting the “swift and decisive” response they’re looking for.
—Park MacDougald
The Rest
→In the same NBC News interview in which he dropped the phrase “bombs like they’ve never seen before,” Trump made two other headlines. First, he refused to rule out running for a third term and said there are “methods” for him to serve a third time despite the the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit on presidents. Asked if he meant that Vance could become the elected president and then hand the reins back to him, Trump said “that’s one” method, but “there are others, too.” Second, Trump said he was “very angry” and “pissed off” at Russian President Vladimir Putin over Putin’s Friday call for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be deposed and replaced with a “transitional administration.” Trump, whose administration has become frustrated with the Russians over their reluctance to enter a U.S.-negotiated maritime cease-fire in the Black Sea, added that if “Russia and I are unable to make a deal,” “I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia.” The president clarified, “That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States.”
→Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally (RN) Party, has been sentenced to prison and banned from running in the next election for “embezzling EU funds.” Le Pen, who has finished second in France’s last two presidential elections, was convicted by a French court of paying RN staffers using $4.8 million in EU funds that was earmarked for use by party staffers … but only for work related to the European Parliament. Le Pen, the court found, had used the money to pay party staffers whose work had nothing to do with the parliament and in the process had helped enrich a “circle of senior party members,” though she didn’t personally benefit, according to The Wall Street Journal. The court sentenced Le Pen to four years in prison (two of them suspended), a 100,000-euro fine, and a five-year ban on running for political office.
→Image of the Day:
That’s Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy (right) speaking to Gen Z Axis of Resistance X personality Jackson Hinkle (left) on Hinkle’s “Legitimate Targets” livestream, in an interview Hinkle promoted with the tagline “BREAKING: NETANYAHU’S ZIONIST REGIME IS CRUMBLING.”
Hinkle, who reinvented himself as an anti-Zionist influencer after a failed career as a David Hogg clone (Teen Vogue profiled him in a 2017 listicle on “8 Young Environmentalists Working to Clean Up the Earth”), has been heavily boosted online by Chinese botnets, according to an April 2024 investigation in The New York Times. He has also enjoyed preferential access to, and support from, hostile foreign governments and terrorist organizations. He attended Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Beirut in February, and last week, he traveled to Sanaa, Yemen, to speak at the Houthis’ “Quds Day” rally. The former teen environmentalist told the crowd, “As the United States drops bombs on the people of Yemen and Gaza, we know that the U.S. and the Zionist entity are waging a war against God.”
→In other hard-to-parody Israel news, Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed a new head of the Shin Bet to replace Ronen Bar (despite being legally barred from doing so) … and is already regretting the decision less than a day in, according to Amit Segal. It turns out that the new Shin Bet chief, Vice Admiral Eli Sharvit, who served as the head of Israel’s Navy from 2016 to 2021, took part in anti-Netanyahu protests during the judicial reform protests in early 2023. Sharvit has also, recently, insulted Netanyahu’s biggest international ally: Donald Trump. In an article published in an environmental journal shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January, YNet reports, Sharvit warned that “Trump is pushing the Earth into the abyss” and “accelerating the destruction” of the world by backing away from the United Nations’ program to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. “I believe that this policy is not only wrong,” Sharvit wrote, “but dangerous.” According to the Monday edition of Segal’s newsletter, “It’s Noon in Israel,” Sharvit emerged as a last-second compromise candidate after Bibi grew frustrated with Bar and the security establishment’s backing of his first choice, a former Bar deputy identified in the press only as “M.” Which means that, incredibly enough, Sharvit was the man Bibi picked to stick it to the deep state.
→Watch this video:
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That video, from last July, shows the “progressive Gen-Z content creator” Amelia Montooth “lez[zing] out,” searching for porn on her phone, scheduling an abortion, and using her credit card while “Girl, So Confusing” by Charli XCX—a track on the Brat album—plays in the background. The point being that all of these activities (except, presumably, listening to Brat) would become illegal if Trump won in November.
As it turns out, Montooth’s video was not organic but was “quietly funded by an elusive group of Democratic billionaires and major donors in an arrangement designed to conceal the payments from voters,” Lee Fang reports for RealClearInvestigations. The money came from a Democratic “influencer campaign” called Way to Win, which spent more than $9.1 million on digital content from “creators” such as Montooth, Harry Sisson, Kat Abughazaleh (“Kat Abu”), Dash Dobrofsky, and former Broad City star Ilana Glazer. The payments, Fang notes, were routed through several layers of nonprofits, which in turn paid the influencers through third-party talent agencies—an arrangement that ducked both Federal Election Commission reporting requirements and donor disclosures (representatives of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations attended Way to Win donor-only events in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.). Way to Win also sponsored YouTube discussions for Black voters about “the ‘through line’ from the Black Panthers to the Nation of Islam to Harris’ nomination.” Fewer than 1,000 people watched.
While the Way to Win influencers failed to influence the electorate, they have since been making their mark in other ways. The 26-year-old Kat Abu, a former Media Matters for America researcher, announced last week that she was running for Congress in Illinois—almost certainly making her the first congressional candidate to have announced “I AM a sexy pokemon” on social media. On the other hand, the 23-year-old Sisson was recently “canceled” for having solicited nude photos from dozens of female fans, texting at least one of them “I’d fuck you after wine tasting,” and apparently leading all of them to believe they were his exclusive girlfriend. The experience seems to have prompted a change of heart in young Mr. Sisson. “We, as Democrats, have to stop with the ‘cancel culture’ crap,” he wrote on X on Saturday. “The Republicans won!”
Read the full article here: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/03/31/revealed_pro-kamala_social-media_millions_that_couldnt_make_brat_rhyme_with_democrat_1100324.html
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The nominees to head Shin Bet should be withdrawn and Haaretz is read solely by the far left of Israel
The Signalgate kerfuffle maps very well with the Democrat- and media-constructed “scandal” that led a naive Trump to fire Mike Flynn in early 2017. The NY Times now leaking that internal forces are pushing for Trump to remove Waltz reinforces that resemblance. I will be very disappointed if Trump falls for it.