Donald Trump’s legal apparatchiks at the Justice Department have insisted for months that the criminal indictment against former FBI Director James Comey—one of the personal enemies Trump most longs to see punished—goes beyond the “86 47” Instagram post they ludicrously insist constituted an imminent threat on the president’s life.

“Rest assured that it’s not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Meet the Press in May. There had been a full investigation by “the career FBI agents, the career Secret Service agents,” and who knows what damning evidence they might have found?

Now, thanks to a series of court filings last night from Comey’s lawyers, we finally know what that investigation entailed: a ludicrous snipe hunt in which federal officials sought high and low to find people who would testify that “86” is an old mob threat, interviewing old mobsters and Comey associates to prove he should have known as much—because after all, hadn’t he prosecuted organized crime? They’ve got him on the ropes now! Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker—with special guest Rear Adm. John Kirby—for Command Post at 10:00 a.m. EDT today. Watch on Substack or YouTube.

Bomb, Rinse, Repeat

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday morning, after Donald Trump called in to Fox & Friends to show off his latest peacenik turn—insisting implausibly that the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s dying wish was a peace deal with Iran, grousing at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for stating publicly that Iran seemed ready to start rebuilding its nuclear facilities—I messaged the Morning Shots editors that I had a headline for today’s newsletter: “Trump, Iran, and the Definition of Insanity.”

Ben Parker wrote back, confused: Hadn’t we used that exact phrase before? And yeah, pretty much:

Such is life for the poor put-upon newsletter grinder in the dog days of Donald Trump’s endless Iran war. While Iran presents a steady, ironclad negotiating front—your sanctions must go, your troops must go, your nuclear demands must go, and we get the Strait of Hormuz—Trump finds himself trapped in an endless reboot loop, orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want. And we find ourselves scrabbling for something new to say about the same old grotesque status quo of America’s slow-motion pantsing on the world stage.

This morning, the New York Times wrote up a short history of Trump’s “Whiplash War” in Iran, laying out in stark data-viz form just how erratically Trump has toggled between his two strategic modes. In late March, just weeks after the war began, he was already threatening to blow up Iranian power plants. By early April, he was threatening genocide. Those threats gave way to a two-week ceasefire—which fell apart nearly at once after Iran continued to fire on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, leading Trump to declare an economic blockade of his own.

After a May marked by periodic bursts of attacks, June brought the vague “Memorandum of Understanding” that led Trump to declare the mission accomplished: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” he exulted on June 14. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Days later, missiles were flying again. The ceasefire was momentarily resumed on June 28—before Trump declared it truly dead July 8, leading to the heaviest period of bombardment since the opening days of the war. Then came the brief respite beginning this past weekend, which now appears to be over after Iran launched missiles at a U.S. base last night: “We are going to beat the fucking shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News this morning. “We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.”

The definition of insanity, per the bumper sticker, is supposed to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. But I’m worried that watching Trump do the same thing over and over, fully aware the outcome will be no different, is a recipe for insanity, too.

“I could knock out the power plants within one day,” Trump said yesterday, reiterating a threat he first made on March 21, more than four months ago. “All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. . . . So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal.”

I challenge anyone to spend so many months submerged in this sort of suspended reality without feeling like they’re losing their mind.

The basic problem is that while Trump’s approach to the war is cyclical, its damage is cumulative. Petroleum reserves, missile stockpiles, global trust in the U.S.-led world order—these are finite resources that are all being spent down at alarming rates.

More happily, American confidence in this utterly incompetent con artist turns out to be a finite resource too. Trump continues to plumb new depths in his popularity at home. And as Republicans grimly pivot their political messaging from fantasies about a Trump GOLDEN AGE to trite rabble-rousing about the threat of Democratic communism, it’s plain they too are losing hope that Trump will pull off some unexpected miracle to win the war—much less restore Americans’ confidence in his leadership.

Somehow, someday, I believe that the war will come to some sort of end. It’s all but guaranteed to be a bad end for America, but at least we can look forward to getting off the interminable psychic treadmill. It is extremely unlikely, I keep telling myself, that—as I keep suffering in dreams—I will wind down my last days on this earth decades hence hearing regular updates on President Barron Trump’s insistence that the Sixty Years’ War will be over any day now—because, after all, Iran knows we could just knock out their power plants. Forever wars only happen to stupid presidents.