THE WAR ROOM: President Trump said yesterday that he doesn’t care whether the US ever signs a nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran because he believes the US bombing “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability. 

  The US and Iran are scheduled to talk next week. “To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary,” Trump said. “I mean, they had a war they fought. Now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

  Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a video today in which he congratulated Iranians for what he described as a victory over Israel and the United States in his first public statement since the US raid and subsequent ceasefire.

  Backing up his case for “obliteration” Trump cited an Israeli assessment that Iran had been set back by up to three years. He downplayed the leaked preliminary report from the Defense Intelligence Agency that says Iran is set back by six months at the most.   Trump also said US intelligence has received reports of total destruction from people on the ground in Iran … a claim that is highly questionable. 

  Now the CIA says the strikes “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there’s evidence that a “conversion facility” used to convert nuclear fuel from a gas into the form needed to produce a nuclear weapon has been destroyed.

  What’s impossible to know is whether everyone is just falling in line to please Trump, who doesn’t tolerate contrary opinions. 

  The administration also denies that Iran had moved its stockpile of near-bomb-grade nuclear fuel from storage areas in the ancient city of Isfahan and at other locations. Trump said he doesn’t know where the supply is. “We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move,” he told reporters, without citing evidence. “It’s covered with granite, concrete and steel.” 

SHOOT THE MESSENGER: Sometimes it’s who hates you that’s a measure of success. President Trump called for the firing of CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, who reported on the Defense Intelligence assessment that the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites may not have been as devastating as Trump claims.  He posted on Truth Social accusing Bertrand of  “attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad when, in fact, they did a GREAT job and hit ‘pay dirt.’ — TOTAL OBLITERATION!”

  Trump is condemning reports as if they delivered their own opinion on the attack, rather than an intelligence report. The reporters, unlike Trump, also say it’s too early to know the damage, if ever.

  But Trump posted, “We just caught the Failing New York Times, working with Fake News CNN, cheating again! They tried to demean the great work our B-2 pilots did, and they were wrong in doing so.”

  No one demeaned the bomber pilots. Strategic bombing has had varied and imperfect results since World War II, but in Trump’s mind there’s nothing less than perfection with anything that has his hand in it. Neither Trump nor Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denied the reported content of the Defense Intelligence assessment, yet Hegseth said at a press conference,  “The instinct of CNN. The instinct of the New Times is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country.”

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE:

— In what’s considered to be an unprecedented move, the Justice Department sued all 15 federal district court judges in Maryland over an order that pauses deportations under legal challenge in the state for 48 hours. The DOJ usually represents judges when necessary but claims the orders are “unlawful, antidemocratic.”

— Testifying for his nomination to a spot on a federal appeals court, Justice department official and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove III denied having told DOJ employees that he contemplated ignoring court orders against the administration. A whistle-blower complaint filed by Erez Reuveni, a former lawyer in the department’s immigration division, said that’s exactly what Bove did, shocking subordinates in a March 14^th meeting. 

  Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he believes the news media and Democrats were trying to torpedo Trump’s pick for a lifetime judicial position just one level below the Supreme Court.

— Trump campaigned on Truth Social for Congress to kill the Voice of America, which since World War II has broadcast news around the world to countries that do not have a free press or unfettered internet. He posted on his social media feed, “Why would a Republican want Democrat “mouthpiece,” Voice of America (VOA), to continue? It’s a TOTAL, LEFTWING DISASTER — No Republican should vote for its survival. KILL IT!”

  Trump’s problem is that VOA broadcasts good and bad, and he considers anything bad reported about him to be left wing propaganda. Closure of VOA is likely to leave a news vacuum to be filled by Russia and China.

THE MUSLIM CANDIDATE: The defeat of Andrew Cuomo by political upstart Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral primary is a shock to old school Democrats and a sign of change for the politics of Jewish voters.

  Mamdani is a Muslim loudly critical of Israel in a city with the world’s largest Jewish population that is traditionally courted by Democrats. Support for Israel is fading in the wake of its war in Gaza that has killed 55,000 people. Mamdani’s candidacy has fed debate about when criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism, but there’s an element of the Jewish population that also has become critical of Israel.   

THE SPIN RACK:  A federal jury held January 6^th rioter David Walls-Kaufman liable for assaulting police officer Jeffrey Smith and ordered him to pay $500,000 to Smith’s widow. Smith died by suicide nine days after the insurrection. 

BELOW THE FOLD:  President Trump yesterday called Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell “an average mentally person.”

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