May 30: A MAGA Majority Favors Military Strikes on Iran

"Liberation Day" tariffs reinstated; Trump attacks the Federalist Society; Trade deficit falls

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The Big Story

Three senior Iranians poured cold water on the notion that a nuclear deal with the United States was close to being agreed upon, in an article Thursday in the Associated Press. Abbas Araghchi, the country’s foreign minister, wrote in a post on X that any agreement that doesn’t remove all economic sanctions placed on Iran and doesn’t allow the country’s nuclear program to continue would be unacceptable. The comments come a day after President Donald Trump said he’d asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on launching strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

This news was released amid a poll from Rasmussen Reports showing 57% of Americans support military action to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions, with 84% of voters who strongly approve of Trump backing strikes. Given Trump’s sensitivity toward his polling, the Rasmussen numbers beg the question of why the administration is breaking such sweats trying to engineer a new Iran deal. After weeks of negotiations, Iran still isn’t budging from its aforementioned red lines. Former National Security Adviser and current nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said any Trump Iran deal must address all open issues, including the total dismantling of Iran’s vast nuclear facilities. If the administration managed to completely wipe out its nuclear program through negotiation, that’d be one thing, but with Iran refusing to back down from uranium enrichment, why continue pursuing a deal that seemingly can’t get past the failed framework of Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action?

One imagines that the pressure applied on Trump and the administration by the likes of Tucker Carlson and others may be one reason. Carlson has repeatedly warned against launching direct military action on Iran, making the claim in an April X post that a war with Iran would cause “thousands of Americans to die” and that the United States would lose the war. He then, of course, blamed the proverbial “neocons” for stoking the flames of war, accusing them of being “enemies” of the United States--which, at least according to the Rasmussen poll, pits him at direct odds with most of the core of the MAGA base. (Or, as one Tablet contributor puts it: “MAGA influencers seem to really hate MAGA.”) All of which comes against a backdrop this week of a bombshell intelligence report issued by Austria’s Directorate State Protection and Intelligence Service (effectively the country’s version of the FBI) claiming that Iran’s nuclear program is not just ongoing but “advanced,” and in possession of a “growing arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads over long distances.” “Iran is striving for comprehensive rearmament,” the report stated plainly, “with nuclear weapons to make the regime immune to attack and to expand and consolidate its dominance in the Middle East and beyond.”

For those keeping track at home, the sourcing here is quite interesting: As Benjamin Weinthal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reports, these days Vienna is “full of Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security agents” due to the “continuous good relationship between Iran and Austria since the revolution.” Tablet contributor Lee Smith, who was in Vienna in 2015 to cover the negotiations leading up to the JCPOA, concurs with Weinthal’s assessment.

The city was flooded with Iranian spies walking in and out of bars. It became a running joke among some of the reporters there. An Iranian journalist would start to speak with you and they had to cut you off when they saw someone that looked like an intelligence officer.

In other words, if anyone is going to have solid intelligence on the Iranians, it would be the Austrians.

The intelligence negates a recent assessment by Tulsi Gabbard, director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who told a Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the intelligence community believes Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Conversely, the United Nations’ atomic watchdog said “the jury is out” on Tehran’s advancing nuclear program. With all these contradictory statements and information, at the very least something seems seriously off here.

On the bright side, our senior policy analyst remains skeptical that Iran actually has the ability to launch nuclear weapons. “I’m sure they have ballistic missiles with ‘warhead capabilities,’ and I’m sure they have the material and capacity to build a nuclear bomb,” but:

Melding those parts together into a deliverable package and being reasonably sure it will work, especially considering Israeli penetration of all levels of their nuclear program, is several orders of magnitude more difficult and, I estimate, beyond their capacities.

—Adam Lehrer

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The Rest

→The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reinstated Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs Thursday, which we reported yesterday had been blocked by the U.S. Court of International Trade, according to Reuters. The decision allows the tariffs to stay in effect while an appeal is ongoing. While the judiciary does have the power to review and potentially overturn tariffs when they believe the executive branch has exceeded its legal authority, many analysts and politicians alike are stunned by what they see as judges overstepping boundaries to thwart the president’s agenda:

→Quote of the Day:

I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real “sleazebag” named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. He openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court. In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own “thing.” I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.

That’s an excerpt from a particularly lengthy Truth Social post published by President Trump Thursday trying to answer the question, “Why is the administration facing so many problems with the judiciary despite the fact that he personally appointed so many of the judges in his first term?” As Trump says, he attacks the conservative and legal organization the Federalist Society, which advocates for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The man that Trump credits for advising him on his bad judicial decisions, Leonard Leo, was the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society and currently serves as co-chair of its board of directors and has been described as the man who “built the machine that remade the Supreme Court” (per ProPublica). Leo was measured in his response to Trump’s criticisms: “​​I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the Federal Courts, and it was a privilege being involved,” he said in a statement.

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→Sum of the Day: $34 Billion

That’s the total sum in sales and higher costs that companies have lost since President Trump launched the “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to a Reuters analysis of corporate disclosures.

→Percentage of the Day: 20%

On the bright side, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that goods imports plummeted 20% in April to $276.1 billion, the biggest one-month drop ever recorded. A falling goods trade deficit generally suggests a strengthening economy, according to most analysts. Goods exports, on the other hand, rose 3.4% to $188.5 billion. Overall, the trade deficit shrank considerably—a positive sign for Trump’s tariffs policy.

→The attorney and right-wing political commentator Paul Ingrassia, who has been serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security since the beginning of the year, has been tapped by President Trump to be the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent corruption-fighting agency safeguarding whistleblowers and enforcing some ethics laws, according to The New York Times. There are some details in his biography that seem, at the very least, concerning. In 2023 he published a Substack article called “Free Nick Fuentes”, and also posted this on X following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel:

→Video of the Day:

Canadian comedian and conceptual artist Nathan Fielder went on CNN to discuss the the second season of his series The Rehearsal, where he uses sets and hired actors to “rehearse” for difficult life situations. In the season’s third episode, Fielder uses the memoirs of famed commercial pilot Sully Sullenberger to recreate Sullenberger’s experiences and channel the pilot’s humble personality that, Fielder argues, allowed Sullenberger to successfully land a US Airways flight in the Hudson River, saving all passengers. Fielder argues that what allowed Sullenberger to pull off such a feat was being able to ask his first mate for advice during the crisis. Fielder and National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia are now using the show to push the Federal Aviation Administration to adopt more training encouraging healthy communication among pilots (per the Washington Examiner), arguing communication breakdowns resulting from power imbalances cause disasters (in the clip, Fielder says that such a dynamic likely exists between the more prominent anchor Wolf Blitzer and his co-host Pamela Brown, making both visibly uncomfortable.) The FAA has pushed back, saying in a statement that they don’t see the evidence suggesting communication breakdown as the cause of plane crashes. The agency’s resistance is interesting given that the January crash over the Potomac River caused by an Army Blackhawk helicopter colliding with an American Airlines flight, claiming the lives of 67 people, may have been caused by the captain failing to heed the instructions of her co-pilot and flight instructor just 15 seconds before the accident (per New York Post).

→Former Assistant New York Solicitor General Brian Ginsberg, who reported to New York Attorney General Letitia James from 2019 and 2022, is now echoing the Trump administration’s assessment of her as an opportunist prone to corruption, according to The Washington Free Beacon. In a May 12 filing, Ginsberg warned the Supreme Court that James is abusing her prosecutorial powers in an ongoing Title IX case against a western New York school district over four disparate sexual misconduct allegations between its students, reminding the Supreme Court about James’ “history of allegedly abusing her powers.”

→Rest in Peace to “America’s Cop”: Former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, famed for leading New York law enforcement through the turbulent period following 9/11, died Thursday after being hospitalized for cardiac arrest. Kerik was appointed to lead the NYPD in 2000 by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and presided over a 63% decline in violent crime, according to the New York Post. His life in public wasn’t without controversy, however, and he withdrew his nomination by President George W. Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security when it was revealed he hired an illegal immigrant to work as a nanny, leading him to take a guilty plea for ethics violations in 2006. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to eight federal felonies, including tax evasion.

FBI Director and longtime Kerik friend Kash Patel said the former commissioner was “one of the most courageous public servants, guiding the NYPD through one of the darkest chapters this country has ever known.” Kerik is survived by his wife and three children.

Image originally published by The New York Post

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