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Financial Times: ‘Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 20, 2026

Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.

The journalists describe an erratic president who entered the war after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him the Iranian people would support such strikes and after his successful extraction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores convinced him the military could pull off another quick victory. He seemed to believe that if his gamble worked, he would be saving the world.

But while the strikes did indeed kill Iran’s top leaders and badly damage its military, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump did not foresee this outcome, although he was warned of it. He told his team that the Iranian government would give up before it closed the strait and, if it did manage to close the strait, the U.S. military would handle it. The journalists report Trump has “marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed.”

Once the strait was closed, the president flipped back and forth between demanding other countries help reopen it and insisting the U.S. didn’t need any help, between wanting to fight and calling for negotiations. On April 5, Easter morning, after the recovery of the second airman, he turned to trying to scare Iranian leaders into reopening the strait and ending the conflict, warning: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” was “improvisational,” officials told Dawsey and Linskey.

Seemingly unable to figure out how to find a way out of the war, Trump has told aides he wants to focus on other topics, and shifted his attention to fundraising events for the midterms or details for his ballroom. Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post offered proof of Trump’s growing enthusiasm for his ballroom, noting that he has called public attention to it on about a third of the days this year, mentioning it less than tariffs or Iran but more than healthcare insurance or affordability. And his focus on it has increased as the year has progressed.

On Friday, April 17, after Israel and the government of Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial—but not military—vessels. Trump declared the strait was “completely open and ready for business” and that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including “never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” But Iran’s chief negotiator posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour and that all seven of them were false. Iranians said that if the U.S. continued its blockade of Iranian ports, as Trump said it would, they would close the strait again.

On Saturday, they did, firing on a tanker and two other vessels, all of which left the encounters safely. Yesterday Trump announced on social media that the USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, as it tried to pass the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. According to Trump, the U.S. Navy “stopped them right in the tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom” and then took control of the vessel. Trump posted: “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”

The two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, begun on April 7, expires on Wednesday, April 22. On Friday, Trump said: “Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain. But maybe I won’t extend it, so you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

Today Nick March of the BBC explained the fact pattern behind the general suspicion that someone is engaging in insider trading over Trump’s war announcements. After matching the president’s market-moving statements to the trade volume on a number of financial markets, March found “a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” Marsh notes a similar spike over Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs of last April.

A new NBC News Decision Desk Poll out yesterday showed that 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while only 37% approve. Fifty percent say they disapprove strongly, a sign that they will be highly motivated to vote in the midterms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, including 54% who strongly disapprove.

This morning, Trump’s social media account responded to the bad news of the weekend, including the Wall Street Journal story, by dismissing it. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” the account posted. “[T]he results of Oct[ober] 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn’t like talking about, the results in Iran will be amazing—And if Iran’s new leaders (Regime Change!) are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future! President DJT”

Over the weekend, David S. Cloud, Alexander Saeedy, and Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials if the U.S. will provide a financial backstop for the UAE if the Iran war continues to damage its economy.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) reminded an audience that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion,” a reference to the $2 billion a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has invested in Kushner’s private equity firm.

“And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East. Apparently, while at the very same time, asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. If you’re watching this online, don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.

“Can you imagine…a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting up Saudi Grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump. A royal. A princeling. The rules are for us, not for them.

“And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. A company owned in part by Eric and Don Jr. has been pitching Gulf kingdoms on its drone interceptors during this war. The Financial Times reported: ‘Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’

“I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”

This afternoon, Trump’s account posted: “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well.”

But things were not going very well. On Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick published an article in The Atlantic that portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endanger our national security.

After Patel’s behavior in the locker room of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, during which he was filmed shouting and chugging a beer, Ryan J. Reilly, Gordon Lubold, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News reported that Trump was unhappy with Patel over the incident. Shortly afterward, Patel directed the FBI to fire at least half a dozen FBI employees who had been connected to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization’s property in Florida, where Trump was storing classified documents he retained after his first term.

Over the weekend, Patel seemed to try again to curry favor with the president. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is about to make arrests related to the 2020 presidential election that Trump insists—falsely—was rigged. “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim,” Patel said.

This morning, Patel sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for $250 million for publishing “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece,” full of “obviously fabricated allegations.” The suit says “Director Patel does not drink to excess…, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government.”

The Atlantic says: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the discovery phase of this defamation lawsuit, during which parties testify under oath, “could be quite something.”

And yet at the end of the day, it was Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who abruptly resigned after accusations that she has abused her position, drinks on the job, and has had an affair with a subordinate. An investigation into her conduct was nearing its completion. She is the third person to leave Trump’s cabinet: all are women.

When asked about Patel’s fitness for office, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Kash Patel is deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and his behavior is deeply un-American. And he should no longer be the FBI director. That shouldn’t surprise anyone that I hold that view because he never should have been confirmed to begin with. And we have to stop putting all the blame on the people who nominated this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual. What about the people who confirmed him? And it’s extraordinary to me that Senate Republicans confirmed people like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel. All of them. Deeply unserious and deeply unqualified. And now the country is paying the price because of the individuals that Donald Trump chose to nominate as part of the Trump cartel that’s now doing great damage to the nation, and the fact that Senate Republicans, like helpless sheep, went along with it all.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Why attack Iran?

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Our Authoritarianism and Our Corruption

By Timothy Snyder 2/28/26

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

How do understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts that we do know.

These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.

From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies. Given that we have multiple examples of this from both modern and ancient democracy, and given the behavior of Trump and his allies in general, this must be an interpretive method for these attacks.

The relationship between foreign war and domestic authoritarianism can take two basic forms: 1) we must all rally because there is a war and everyone who oppose the war is a traitor; 2) we must hold elections under specific conditions favorable to the party in power. This is utterly predictable and should be easy to halt and indeed to reverse.

The American propaganda about our foreign policy motivations is impossible to believe as such. But it does lead us, indirectly, to the second possible interpretive framework: personal corruption.

a black and white photo of a ceiling

The claim that Iran was about to build a nuclear weapon has not been established. It is all the odder as a justification for war given that this administration has already claimed many times to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The second American propaganda point is that the regime must be changed. This too is very strange, since opposition to regime change wars was supposed to be a core tenet of MAGA.

But who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.

The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?

It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.

Gulf Arab states who oppose Iranian power have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family. The United Arab Emirates invested in a family firm. The Saudis have provided numerous de facto gifts. And sometimes the gifts have been simply gifts. The Qataris gave Trump a jet. The list is very long.

And now — we are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family. This backdrop must at the very least be stated in the reporting of the war. Along with the subversion of democracy, personal corruption provides a second interpretive framework.

None of this is a defense of the murderous regime in Teheran. The Iranian government has been engaged in the mass murder of peaceful protestors. The scale of that slaughter has not really sunk in. One can certainly imagine ways of addressing Iranian authoritarianism and corruption. We could combine a patient campaign of pressure and sanctions with support for the opposition and proposals to help address growing ecological problems such as the horrifying lack of water that stands behind much of political opposition in the country. Unfortunately, nothing like this is on offer, or could be on offer, from the Trump administration. All that it has to offer is its own authoritarianism and corruption.

A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war.

War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us.

Trump should be impeached and convicted, and ICE disbanded

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By Timothy Snyder 1/25/26

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

It is not just the moral horror. It is the political logic.

People are dying in American concentration camps, unseen. And people are being executed on American streets, seen by all of us.
This is enough. The radical is the pragmatic.

The president should be impeached and convicted, as should everyone responsible for these outrages. ICE should be disbanded. So should the Department of Homeland Security. The other agencies within it should be redistributed across other departments. And the people who have killed should be investigated and brought before judges and juries.

But we have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.
It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness.

In a constitutional regime, such as ours, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic, such as ours, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for openings, for cracks to pry open.

One of these is the border. The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border. And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply.

Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border.

And just what is Trump doing now? By his own admission, as well as by the admission of cabinet members, he is using ICE, nominally a border authority, to enforce his own whims on an American state of his choosing. It is not legal to attack a city because its policies work. It is not legal to threaten a state to gain information about its voters.

The border becomes the pretext to undo the law everywhere, at all times, and against anyone. It is the crack that can be opened. The wedge is the lie.

The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.

One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.

And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.

They are violating it.

It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”

The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.

This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.

Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.

Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.

Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.

The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.

Venezuela: The Precedents

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And America: The Future

By Timothy Snyder 1/4/26

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

Now that the United States has extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, it might help to consider four precedents. No event of the moment is exactly like any episode in the past. But in recalling history, we can see elements of the present that will otherwise be shrouded by propaganda or emotion.

1. American intervention in Latin America. Throughout the cold war, and indeed long before, the United States has intervened in Central and South America, asserting an implicit right to choose leaders. Sometimes these interventions were designed to reverse the outcome of elections, replacing the elected leader or government with people favored in Washington.

During the cold war, such operations were covered by a pro-democracy propaganda cloak, the logic being that whatever the United States did must have been to stop communism, and communism was anti-democratic.

This time around, there is no pretense that the goal is democracy. Nicolás Maduro and his allies stole the 2024 Venezuelan election, but that very real crime is not what the Trump people are punishing: the Trumpists prefer the essentially fictional concept of “narco-terrorism.” Venezuela has a legitimately elected president: Edmundo González. There is no sign that he figures in Trump’s plans Trump dismisses the courageous activist María Machado, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, as “a nice woman” who lacks popular support. (This is after she dedicated the Prize to him — it is important to remember the golden rule of dealing with Trump: he will always disappoint you.)

In light of the open US extraction of Maduro in January 2026, it is also worth revisiting the American-backed extraction of María Machado herself in December 2025, just four weeks ago. At the time this appeared to be a move designed to help her appear in Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. At the moment, it looks much more like an American attempt to remove a rival for power and clear the way for an American imperialism directed not so much against Maduro as against Venezuelans as a people.

Yet the imperialism does not seem to be very well considered. In the past, American governments chose leaders in Latin America who would support the interests of American companies. On the surface, the same thing appears to be happening here. Trump is offering Venezuela’s oil to American companies, and the money to be made as an explanation for the whole operation. But there is little profit in Venezuelan oil in the short run; huge investments would be necessary in the long run. This would in turn require political stability. It does seem, at first glance, that the oil companies believe in this.

There is much to be said for democracy. One of the powerful arguments in its favor is continuity: that it offers a chance to move on from a calamity. The obvious thing to do now in Venezuela would be to hold elections.

2. The Second Iraq War. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a turning point for American power and principle. It killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It was based upon lies, which undermined American credibility and weakened American influence. It absorbed huge amounts of American money and attention, creating a window of opportunity for China ro climb to global prominence.

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