MAGAts GO TO WAR

 

Kash Patel’s Girlfriend Seeks Fame and Fortune, Escorted by an F.B.I. SWAT Team

 

Kash Patel’s Girlfriend Seeks Fame and Fortune, Escorted by an F.B.I. SWAT Team

Former F.B.I. officials say Mr. Patel beefed up field office staffing near his girlfriend in Nashville and ordered a team to ferry her on errands and to events.

 

By Elizabeth Williamson

Reporting from Washington and Dixon, Ill.

Feb. 28, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

You may never have heard of Alexis Wilkins, but she is one of the best-protected country music singers in the United States. F.B.I. tactical agents have ferried her to a resort in Britain before a dinner at Windsor Castle and to an appointment at a hair salon in Nashville. Last April, agents in two SUVs stood guard outside a senior center in Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home of Dixon, Ill., while she sang for a few dozen young conservatives.

Ms. Wilkins, 27, is the girlfriend of Kash Patel, President Trump’s 46-year-old F.B.I. director, whose personal use of government jets and F.B.I. agents for himself and Ms. Wilkins has led to growing questions even inside the Trump administration.

“When Kash got confirmed, life changed for her,” said Dianna Muller, the founder of the group Women for Gun Rights, which briefly employed Ms. Wilkins as a spokeswoman.

To an extent not previously reported, Ms. Wilkins is escorted in her travels by Special Weapons and Tactics team members drawn from F.B.I. field offices around the country. SWAT teams are chiefly trained to arrest violent criminals, free hostages and thwart terrorists. But Mr. Patel’s demand that rotating SWAT teams provide his girlfriend with security for singing appearances, personal engagements and errands is unprecedented in the F.B.I., former agents said.

Ben Williamson, an F.B.I. spokesman, said in a statement that Ms. Wilkins needed full-time SWAT protection because “as a direct result of her relationship with Director Patel, she is facing more than a dozen active death threats,” including some of a graphically violent nature. Last November, he told The Times that the death threats numbered in the “hundreds.”

Cabinet and congressional spouses do not routinely receive full-time government security details. After Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a position second in line to the presidency, was attacked in the couple’s California home, it emerged that the Capitol Police had placed security cameras at the house, but no personnel.

Soon after becoming F.B.I. director last February, Mr. Patel beefed up staffing in Nashville, where Ms. Wilkins lives, then assigned a SWAT team composed of four agents and two vehicles to protect her full-time, said an F.B.I. official briefed on the plans. Mr. Patel overrode F.B.I. advice that such an unprecedented arrangement first undergo a legal review, the official said.

Past directors’ spouses were protected while traveling with them, but did not get a personal government detail. .

Christopher O’Leary, a former senior executive in the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division, said that while threats could temporarily change that posture, it was unheard-of for the F.B.I. to provide open-ended, around-the-clock SWAT coverage for a girlfriend living in another city. “If you want to be a celebrity or a social media star, get your own security,” he said in an interview. “The inappropriateness of this cannot be overstated.”

 

Mr. O’Leary said Ms. Wilkins’s detail was emblematic of what he characterized as Mr. Patel’s abuse of government resources intended to keep agency officials safe: his use of F.B.I. jets for vacations, dates and hybrid business and leisure trips, like his visit to Italy last week, where he partied with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team.

 

Last month, a three-man SWAT team fanned out at a fund-raiser at the Chaparral Country Club in Palm Desert, Calif., where Ms. Wilkins sang the national anthem and posed for red carpet photos with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Cheryl Hines. Afterward, agents drove Ms. Wilkins 135 miles to Los Angeles International Airport, according to a person briefed on the arrangements.

Last May, Mr. Patel attended a secret national security conference at an exclusive resort outside London, and invited Ms. Wilkins to join him at a group dinner with King Charles III at Windsor Castle. The Royalty and Specialist Protection service balked at fetching her from the airport, so the F.B.I. scrambled tactical agents and an embassy vehicle, according to a person with knowledge of the plan.

Ms. Wilkins declined to be interviewed on the record for this article and criticized reporting for it on her X account. But Mr. Patel has defended their travel arrangements.

“If I was actually abusing it, I would go see every one of her shows,” Mr. Patel said on a podcast with Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deportation mastermind, as Ms. Wilkins smiled alongside him.

Last fall, he defended Ms. Wilkins after critics highlighted his use of a government jet on a trip to a wrestling event at Penn State University, where she sang the national anthem, and then to Nashville. “She is a rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes,” Mr. Patel wrote on X.

A MAGA First Meeting

Ms. Wilkins met Mr. Patel in the fall of 2022 at a party in the Nashville home of the country music artist John Rich. The event was to celebrate the release of Mr. Rich’s “Progress” on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social platform.

Mr. Patel, who had been a Trump aide in the president’s first term, was at the time a Truth Social consultant opining on conservative podcasts and selling “K$H” branded merchandise and children’s books praising “King Donald.”

Ms. Wilkins, who was struggling to start a country music career, lived in Nashville and was brought to the party by a publicist in an effort to make new contacts, according to a person who was there.

Mr. Patel complimented Ms. Wilkins on the jacket she was wearing that night, he told Ms. Miller on her podcast. By early 2023, he and Ms. Wilkins were dating.

Ms. Wilkins, the daughter of a financial specialist in the aerospace industry (her mother) and a global consumer products executive for Gillette (her father), had lived in London and Switzerland, and for a time attended elementary school at Collège du Léman in Geneva. She is originally from the Boston suburb of Weymouth, but likes to emphasize her time living in Arkansas.

“There are just some things the limousine liberal will never understand from the coasts,” she recently wrote.

As a child, she sought work as an actor in Los Angeles, where a high point was appearing in small parts in two episodes of the sitcom “Modern Family.”

She began her music career in earnest after her 2020 graduation from Belmont University, a private Christian school in Nashville. Her 2020 debut single, “Holdin’ On,” was a ballad about family and the love of “true friends who really know who I am.” She wrote the song with the country singer-songwriter Mitch Rossell, who went on to open for Garth Brooks, the country music superstar. These days, Ms. Wilkins’s country music website says “NO UPCOMING SHOWS,” but she does a brisk business singing patriotic songs at conservative gatherings.

“I would say she is an amateur, maybe an aspiring country music artist,” said the longtime country music critic Kyle Coroneos, of SavingCountryMusic.com. On the national anthem, “I’d probably give her a 7.5 on a 10 scale,” he said.

A Star-Spangled Planner

Ms. Wilkins’s and Mr. Patel’s relationship became better known in Washington in early 2025, when she sat in the gallery during Mr. Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing. She held the copy of the Bhagavad Gita he used when he was sworn in.

Within weeks of Mr. Trump’s re-election, Ms. Wilkins got a job as press secretary for Representative Abraham Hamadeh, a friend of Mr. Patel’s and a conservative freshman congressman from Arizona who supported Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. She left after a month.

Last April, she went to work for Women for Gun Rights as the director of strategic communications, but lasted only three months.

“She didn’t have the bandwidth,” said the group’s founder, Ms. Muller, who is under a nondisclosure agreement and declined to elaborate, except to say, “I’m too busy to think much about her.”

Newly styling herself as a “political commentator, country music artist and consultant,” Ms. Wilkins has increasingly used her social media accounts to criticize undocumented immigrants, their defenders, college liberals, “leftist” media and Alex Pretti, the V.A. nurse killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. Beginning a day after Mr. Pretti’s killing, Ms. Wilkins referred to him on X as a “domestic terrorist,” an “idiot” and a “vigilante.”

Ms. Wilkins told Megyn Kelly that she is an online proxy target for people angry at Mr. Patel for, among other things, delays and redactions in releasing the F.B.I. files on Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.

She is suing three conservative influencers for defamation, seeking at least $5 million from each for airing what she calls lies that she is a “honey pot” spy, paid by Israeli intelligence to extract state secrets from Mr. Patel.

On recent podcasts she has complained about both the country music industry and Belmont University for being too woke, which is not a typical critique of either institution.

But in a post on X on Super Bowl Sunday, she portrayed marketing materials for the Bad Bunny halftime show as “fantastic” and “super aesthetic” branding for Democrats. After harsh pushback from the right, she said she had been misunderstood.

“I didn’t watch Bad Bunny’s performance at all,” she wrote on X the next morning. “My point was that we can’t give the left an inch of the ground we gained in the last election.”

HEATHER

 

February 27, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 28, 2026

On Monday, February 23, Daniel Ruetenik, Pat Milton, and Cara Tabachnick of CBS News reported a newly uncovered document in the Epstein files shows that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was running an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and fourteen other people for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.

This investigation—which is different from the sex trafficking case under way when he died—began on December 17, 2010, under the Obama administration and was still operating in 2015. A heavily redacted document in the Epstein files from the director of the DEA’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) said “DEA reporting indicates the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.” The investigation was named “Chain Reaction.”

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, described OCDETF as “a premier task force set up to identify, disrupt and dismantle major organized crime and drug trafficking operations.” It “worked with partners across federal agencies to conduct sophisticated investigations into transnational organized crime and money laundering. OCDETF frequently targeted dangerous drug cartels , the Russian mafia and violent gangs moving fentanyl and weapons.” The Trump administration dismantled OCDETF.

The document is 69 pages long and is heavily redacted. It comes from a request by the DEA to an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center in Virginia for information from other agencies related to Epstein and the other targets. A law enforcement source told the reporters that a request to the Fusion Center is not routine, which suggests the investigation was a “significant” one.

Wyden has been investigating the finances behind Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking organization. His investigation has turned up the information that JPMorgan Chase neglected to report more than $4 billion in suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to produce the records to the Senate Finance Committee, and in September, Wyden introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to get access to them. In November, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but it did not cover Treasury financial records.

“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes,” Wyden said, “and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records…. From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

When the CBS News reporters broke the story about the DEA investigation, Wyden said: “It appears Epstein was involved in criminal activity that went way beyond pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes it even more outrageous that [Attorney General] Pam Bondi is sitting on several million unreleased files.”

On Wednesday, February 23, Wyden wrote to Terrance C. Cole, administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s OCDETF task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”

He noted that Epstein and the fourteen co-conspirators were never charged for drug trafficking or financial crimes, and wrote: “I am concerned that the DEA and DOJ during the first Trump Administration moved to terminate this investigation in order to protect pedophiles.” He also noted that the heavy redactions in the document appear to go far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and since the document was not classified, “there is no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.

Wyden asked Cole to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, two weeks away. Wyden asked for an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, information about what triggered the investigation, what types of drugs Epstein and his fourteen associates were buying or selling, when operation “Chain Reaction” concluded and what was its result, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.

Asked by a reporter about Epstein today, Trump said: “I don’t know anything about the Epstein files. I’ve been fully exonerated.”

Trump’s name is, in fact, all through the Epstein files, and the DOJ’s clumsy attempt to hide files that discuss him has only called attention to them. The recent news that the DOJ withheld files about allegations that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl has raised suggestions of an illegal coverup, whether the allegations are true or not. Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says he will open an investigation.

Now the DOJ says it will review whether the files about Trump were improperly withheld, although the fact that the administration has hung a giant image of Trump’s face on the outside of its building undermines confidence that the DOJ is, in fact, following the law impartially.

Led by chair James Comer (R-KY), the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee required former first lady Hillary Clinton to testify before it yesterday, despite her testimony under oath that she had never met Epstein and knew Maxwell only as an acquaintance and despite the fact that she is not mentioned in the Epstein files.

As Kaivan Shroff noted in the Daily Beast, the Republicans are working to “revive as much Hillary hate as they can,” but they are likely going to regret dragging Clinton back into the spotlight. She is embracing her role as a public figure who can stand up to Trump, appearing both in the U.S. and internationally to engage on a range of issues. As Shroff notes, Clinton has been “one of the Democratic Party’s most battle-tested figures, and she is speaking up once again—not for a campaign, not for validation, but with the clarity that comes from having nothing left to lose.”

By going after Clinton, Republicans have also opened the way for the Democrats to demand that the Trumps testify. On MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” panelists noted that while Clinton didn’t know Epstein, there are many photos of First Lady Melania Trump with him, along with her husband and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Host Joe Scarborough said “Comer got the wrong first lady.” And, he added, “today he’s got the wrong president.”

Today former president Bill Clinton testified for more than six hours under oath before the committee at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center in Chappaqua, New York. He is the first president to be compelled to testify before Congress under threat of criminal contempt charges. In his opening statement, Clinton appeared to be referencing Trump when he said: “I’m here today for two reasons. The first is that I love my country. And America was built upon the idea that no person is above the law, even Presidents—especially Presidents.” In contrast to Trump and Bondi, both of whom have refused to acknowledge Epstein’s victims—now survivors—Clinton highlighted them: “The second reason I’m here is that the girls and women whose lives Jeffrey Epstein destroyed deserve not only justice, but healing. They’ve been waiting too long for both.”

In calling out the committee for forcing his wife to testify, Clinton alluded to the Republicans’ attempt to spin the testimony for political points. Clinton noted that even though he was the only one sworn in that morning, “everyone has a responsibility to be honest with those they represent. Whether you raised your right hand or not, each and every one of us owes nothing less than truth and accuracy to the American people.”

Clinton told the committee he “had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing…. I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong. As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing—I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals.”

Clinton also told the committee he would often tell it he didn’t recall. “This was all a long time ago. And I am bound by my oath not to speculate, or to guess.”

Like Trump, Clinton is named in the Epstein files; unlike Trump, he is not accused of crimes in any public files. But Clinton had a relationship with both Epstein and Maxwell, and as part of his work with the Clinton Global Initiative after he left office, he traveled on Epstein’s plane about two dozen times, to Europe, Africa, Asia, Russia, Miami, and New York. Clinton reiterated today that he never traveled to Epstein’s island in the Caribbean, where much of the sexual abuse of children took place. Although Trump has repeatedly accused Clinton of visiting the island, Trump’s own White House chief of staff Susie Wiles says Trump is wrong about that, and has confirmed that Clinton was never there.

Kayla Epstein of the BBC recalled that in his memoir, Clinton wrote: “The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him.”

Tonight, former president Clinton posted a video message reiterating the main points of his opening statement and concluding: “When the video of my testimony today is released, I hope it will motivate everyone to go in front of Congress to say what they know. I hope it will motivate the Justice Department to finally release all the files and to ensure that this never happens again. The survivors deserve that.”

During a break in Clinton’s deposition, Comer told reporters that “the president went on to say that [Trump] has never said anything to me to make me think he was involved. And he meant with Epstein.” Comer has used closed-door hearings to salt the media with unfounded stories for years now, and as he undoubtedly intended, the media has run with this characterization as an accurate description of what Clinton said.

But Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, later told reporters that Comer’s comment didn’t accurately reflect Clinton’s answer. “I think the best response to that would be to view the complete record of what actually he said,” Garcia suggested. “We’re not going to disclose what was said because that’s not in the rules. The Republicans keep breaking the rules…. Let’s release the full transcript, so you can all get a full record of what was actually said.”

Donald Trump Launches a War of “Epic Fury” on Iran

 

Donald Trump Launches a War of “Epic Fury” on Iran

The U.S. and Israel have ignited a campaign to topple the Islamic Republic—with little thought to what comes after.

By Robin Wright

February 28, 2026

A banner depicting President Donald Trump hangs outside the Department of Justice building, on Saturday.Photograph by Kylie Cooper / Reuters

 

President Donald Trump has launched a capricious and personal war on Iran that is more ambitious, politically and militarily, than any past U.S. campaign in the perpetually volatile Middle East. In an eight-minute video released in the wee hours of Saturday morning, while most Americans were still asleep, he announced that his goals are the abolishment of the theocratic regime, total capitulation by its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—or else the death of its members at U.S. hands—and an end to the country’s controversial nuclear program.

Trump called for Iran’s ninety-two million people to rise up in popular resistance and form a new government. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it,” he told the Iranian people. “Now you have a President who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.” It is an audacious gambit, undertaken in coördination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of Israel, that has no clear outcome. For a man who hungers for the Nobel Peace Prize, this war of choice borders on delusion.

Ali Vaez, who heads the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told me, “The idea in Washington and Tel Aviv that bombing Iran will somehow trigger a popular uprising is not strategy—it’s wishful thinking.” He noted that there is no modern precedent for forcing regime change by airpower alone. “Bombs can degrade infrastructure. They can weaken capabilities,” he said. “But they do not manufacture organized political alternatives.”

The U.S. and Israeli operations have reportedly targeted Iran’s leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and struck at least nine cities, from the northern mountains to the southern desert, and a port on the Persian Gulf. According to multiple news outlets, Israeli officials have said that Khamenei was killed. The war—dubbed Operation Epic Fury by the U.S. and Roaring Lion by Israel—has escalated quickly, sucking in seven other countries as Iran responded by firing on Israeli and American interests in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. U.S. officials have indicated that the war is likely to continue for days, even weeks. Trump acknowledged there may be American casualties as the conflict unfolds.

Recent polls have shown that Trump does not have broad support for this war, which arrives at a time when Americans are focussed most on their own economic woes. There are also growing questions about the war’s legality—whether it violates international laws, the U.N. Charter, or the U.S. Constitution. The founding document of the U.N. stipulates that its members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” And the U.S. Constitution says that only Congress has the power to declare war. In a statement on Saturday, the Arms Control Association said that American lawmakers and other countries around the world “have a solemn moral and legal duty to oppose this rogue aggression.”

Smoke rises in the sky after blasts were heard in Manama, Bahrain, on Saturday.Photograph by stringer / Reuters

This war on Iran need not have happened—at least not now. As was the case in the run-up to the Twelve-Day War, in June, when the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, the Trump Administration has been in the midst of diplomatic negotiations with the Islamic Republic. They were due to hold further talks, among their respective nuclear experts, early next week. Once again, diplomacy has been aborted in favor of violence. Just hours before the war erupted, the Omani Foreign Minister, Badr Albusaidi, who has been the intermediary in the negotiations, reported that “substantial progress” had been made toward a lasting and verifiable deal. “Really, I can see that the peace deal is within our reach,” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

This is also a war that could have been avoided if Trump had not abandoned the hard-won nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., in 2018, during his first term, which had taken two years of intense negotiations by the Obama Administration. Trump’s subsequent campaign of maximum pressure, including the imposition of fifteen hundred new economic sanctions on Iran and its business partners, led Tehran to respond with its own maximum pressure. It escalated the enrichment of uranium, the fuel that can be used for a nuclear weapon—and for nuclear energy—to far higher than the limits set under the J.C.P.O.A., and created more advanced centrifuges to do that. On Saturday, Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said, “Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East? Is he too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check, until he ripped it up during his first term?”

Trump recently claimed that a new nuclear deal could be reached if Iran only said the “magic words”—that it would not produce a nuclear weapon. Iran has used those magic words several times in recent years, including this past week. On Tuesday, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted on X, “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon; neither will we Iranians ever forgo our right to harness the dividends of peaceful nuclear technology for our people.” Under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which went into effect in 1970, Iran has the right to produce nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Like the war on Iraq, launched by the George W. Bush Administration in 2003, today’s war on Iran is based on a lie about weapons of mass destruction. This week, President Trump claimed that Tehran posed “imminent threats” to American soil. Washington is rightly concerned about Iran’s ballistic missiles, many hidden underground in so-called missile cities. Their longest range is two thousand kilometres, far enough to hit Israel and U.S. personnel or facilities across the Middle East. That is, indeed, deeply worrisome. But Iran has no ability to hit anywhere close to the United States.

Alan Eyre, a longtime Iran watcher at the State Department, now at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told me that Trump’s “stated objective for these attacks—imminent threat—is not believable, and his real objective—regime incapacitation if not regime change—is unlikely.” Operation Epic Fury, he went on, may not be able to destroy by air “the myriad interlinked institutions and infrastructures that constitute the basis of regime power. Even if that were to happen, it is even more unlikely there would be a spontaneous generation of new organic institutions that would underpin a viable alternative government. What is more likely once the guns stop is a degraded regime and an increasingly immiserated Iranian populace.” Eyre added that there’s no guarantee that the U.S. military can stifle an Iranian response, which could destabilize the region.

The war has triggered global alarm. The U.N. scheduled an emergency meeting for Saturday afternoon. Long-standing U.S. allies called for an end to the air campaign. On X, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, wrote that the “outbreak of war between the United States, Israel, and Iran carries grave consequences for international peace and security.” The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, said, “We cannot afford another prolonged and devastating war in the Middle East.” The Swiss government called for “full respect for international law.” In a joint statement, the top two leaders of the European Union urged against “any actions that could further escalate tensions or undermine the global nonproliferation regime.”

At home, many Democratic leaders and at least two Republicans challenged Trump’s decision—or right—to go to war. In a post on X, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, said, “This is not ‘America First.’ ” Senator Rand Paul, another Kentucky Republican, quoted James Madison, a Founding Father and the fourth U.S. President, who said that the executive branch was “most prone to war,” which is why declaring it is a right reserved for Congress.

Others noted Iranian support for extremist movements, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, that have killed hundreds of Americans in the past four decades, and the thousands of Iranians the regime has killed in recent protests. “No one will be sad to see them go,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted. But she said that Trump “has shown a disappointingly cavalier approach towards the use of force, even when it risks the lives of the tens of thousands of U.S. service members and diplomats in the region as well as our allies and partners, who are already under attack.”

The President has still not outlined the U.S. exit strategy. Will it be after a hypothetical uprising has held elections and formed a new government? The Bush Administration tried that in Afghanistan in 2001, and in Iraq in 2003—and was stuck in each country for years, at the cost of thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Senator Andy Kim, of New Jersey, called Trump’s decision “foolish” for putting Americans in harm’s way without an imminent threat and putting Iranian dissidents in danger without a coalition to protect them. Trump has talked about both a limited mission against Iran and, overnight, a “massive” operation. The specifics of his calculations remain unclear—to other elected officials as well as to the rest of us. ♦

CLOWNS, MORONS AND FOOLS IN THE CABINET