Hi all, Ben here. It’s Tuesday, April 1st. And yes, April Fools’ Day feels entirely appropriate given who’s running the country right now. Let’s get into it.
Here are some of the stories we’re tracking today:
Trump threatens to withdraw the U.S. from NATO
Trump fabricates an Iranian ceasefire request on Truth Social; Iran’s Foreign Ministry immediately denies it
Iran strikes Amazon’s cloud facility in Bahrain, hits a QatarEnergy oil tanker, and continues striking Gulf neighbors and Tel Aviv
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer refuses to join the war and moves to deepen EU ties
Australian PM Anthony Albanese addresses the nation on incoming economic shocks
Trump’s approval hits 35% in new CNN poll; economy approval craters to 31%
Supreme Court hears birthright citizenship arguments; things go poorly for Trump — who shows up, gets bored, and leaves
U.S. military negotiating expanded presence in Greenland
So where do we begin? Let’s start with NATO, because Donald Trump apparently woke up this morning and decided the best thing he could do, while actively presiding over a catastrophic war nobody asked for, is threaten to blow up the most successful military alliance in human history.
Trump told The Telegraph that he is “strongly considering” pulling the United States out of NATO because NATO didn’t join his war on Iran. The war, mind you, that he launched without telling NATO allies in advance, without consulting partners in the Middle East, and without any clear plan. He just went in, with Netanyahu, and now the Gulf is on fire. And his complaint is that the alliance he never warned didn’t immediately fall in line behind him. He called NATO a “paper tiger” and said Vladimir Putin agrees with him. Putin tells him NATO is useless, so naturally, Trump agrees with Putin. That’s where we are.
Here’s the reminder worth repeating, because Trump is banking on people forgetting: NATO is a defensive alliance. Article 5, the collective defense clause, has been invoked exactly once in the alliance’s history. Once. After September 11, 2001. When the United States was attacked. And our allies showed up for us. They shared intelligence, they ran air patrols, they went to Afghanistan. NATO was there for us. So when Trump says NATO “wasn’t there for us” because they didn’t join an offensive war he started unilaterally, that’s not a misunderstanding of NATO. That’s a lie.
And there’s also the small matter of a law, signed by President Biden, originally sponsored by then-Senator Marco Rubio, bipartisan — that says a president cannot unilaterally withdraw from NATO without a two-thirds Senate vote. The same Marco Rubio who sponsored that law is now working alongside Trump to dismantle it.
Trump also took time this morning to attack British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, saying — and I want to make sure I capture the full diplomatic sophistication here — that all Starmer cares about is “costly windmills.” He also told reporters that the UK doesn’t “even have a navy,” and that their aircraft carriers “didn’t work.”
Starmer, to his credit, is not taking the bait. He held a press conference today and made clear: this is not Britain’s war. He’s not getting dragged in. He said he’s faced enormous pressure to change his position and he’s not going to, and then, in what is either a very elegant pivot or a very pointed message to Washington, he announced a new push to deepen economic and security cooperation with the European Union. There’s going to be a UK-EU summit soon on a “more ambitious” relationship. When Trump treats you like garbage, you find better partners. Simple as that. We’ve seen this pattern play out across the world.
Now, let’s talk about the fake ceasefire.
This morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran’s president — whom he described as “much less radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors” — had asked the United States for a ceasefire. He said the U.S. would consider it once the Strait of Hormuz is open, and until then, he’s “blasting Iran into oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages.” Very statesman-like stuff.
There are two problems with this. First: there is no new Iranian regime president. It’s the same government. Same president. Trump either doesn’t know this or doesn’t care. Second: Iran did not ask for a ceasefire. Iran’s Foreign Ministry came out within hours and said Trump’s claim was “false and baseless.” Full stop. He made it up. He posted it on social media, almost certainly to move markets, and it was a lie before the day was half over. Yet again, like clockwork, so many in the corporate media fell for it. Trump got the headlines he wanted. And so did the markets. Can we stop falling for this crap already, mainstream media?
Meanwhile, in the actual real world, Iran is still very much fighting. They hit an Amazon cloud computing facility in Bahrain, exactly the kind of American corporate infrastructure they’d been threatening to target. Qatar’s Defense Ministry confirmed that three Iranian missiles were launched, two were intercepted, and one hit an oil tanker leased by QatarEnergy in Qatari waters. QatarEnergy had already declared force majeure, with around 20% of its LNG operations shut down. Iran also launched missiles at Tel Aviv as Israel prepares for Passover. The Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control.
Iran’s Foreign Minister made the situation pretty clear in an interview with Al Jazeera: they’re not accepting U.S.-imposed deadlines, they’re not entering negotiations under threat, and any post-war arrangement for the strait will be decided by Iran and Oman — not Washington. He also noted the strait lies within Iranian and Omani waters, not international waters, and that during wartime, Iran won’t allow ships from enemy nations to transit through.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addressed his nation today in a rare televised address — the kind of somber, prepare-yourselves speech that has an unsettling early-COVID energy to it. He told Australians that economic shocks are coming, that fuel prices will be rough for months, and to switch to public transport where possible. Fill up normally over Easter, help each other out, and brace for a difficult stretch.
The Economist’s cover today pretty much captures the global mood. It shows Xi Jinping smiling broadly behind a blurry, yelling Trump, with the headline: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” The magazine spoke to diplomats, scholars, and current and former officials in China — nearly all of them view Trump’s war on Iran as a serious American error that is significantly benefiting China, Russia, and Iran simultaneously. When your foreign policy has unified your adversaries while alienating your allies, something has gone badly wrong.
On the polling front: a new CNN/SSRS poll has Trump’s overall job approval at 35%, with 64% disapproving. His handling of the economy? 31% approve, 69% disapprove. For context, his economic approval was 39% back in January. In roughly two months of war and tariff chaos, he’s lost eight points on the economy alone. His numbers are in free fall.
On the legal front, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning on Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship and it did not go well for the administration. Justice Kagan was direct: the text of the 14th Amendment does not support Trump’s position, and the administration was leaning on “pretty obscure sources” to get there. Justice Kavanaugh acknowledged that other countries don’t have birthright citizenship but said he wasn’t seeing how that was relevant as a constitutional matter. Even Gorsuch was skeptical, raising Wong Kim Ark — the landmark precedent protecting birthright citizenship — in a way that wasn’t exactly flattering to the government’s argument.
Oh, and Trump himself showed up to watch the oral arguments. He became the first sitting president in history to attend a Supreme Court oral argument. He made a spectacle and sat in the front row of the public gallery. And then, apparently finding the whole thing not to his liking, he left.
We’ll keep monitoring the news throughout the day. Trump is delivering an address to the nation tonight at 9pm ET where he is reportedly planning to air his “disgust” for NATO. A Trump address about an out-of-control war on April Fools’ Day. What could go wrong?
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