The Real Reason Trump Keeps Getting Away With This

The disastrous impacts of the Iran War just keep coming. An exclusive excerpt from my upcoming book that explains how we got here.

Trump launched the war on a whim, based on his “feelings” that “it will all work out.”

But he didn’t get there alone. Congressional Republicans let him do it.

This was a decision he made unilaterally, sure. He sent us to war without congressional approval, which is - to be clear - illegal. But in the many, many weeks since he started this, Congress hasn't lifted a finger to stop him. By laying down and letting Trump walk all over them, Congress enabled this situation. And I’d put money on the fact that it’ll only empower him to do it again.

I wrote this book months ago expecting it to be analysis, but instead, it reads like a prediction.

Trump wants you to believe everything he does is chaotic, and that this “unpredictability” is a strength. Believe me, it isn’t. Trump is nothing if not predictable - you can count on him being self-serving, erratic, and - in the end - cowardly. Case in point, this week’s flaccid ceasefire with Iran that left the US worse off than it was before the war.

When I sat down to write this book, The Day After, I was trying to make sense of the last decade so we could understand what comes after Trump. What I didn’t expect is that we’d still be living through it in real time.

If you’ve been trying to make sense of how we got to this place, here’s an excerpt from my book that breaks it down.

Don’t get it twisted. Donald Trump could not dismantle democracy on his own; he needs the obedience of an almost entirely spineless Congress to rip up the Constitution. And its members have happily obliged, no matter how much humiliation he heaps upon them.

The founders of our democratic republic made it crystal clear where power should reside. They did not start the Constitution with the presidency. Article I, Section 1, is about Congress, stating specifically and clearly that “all legislative Powers” rest in the Senate and House.

Section 8 defines those powers more clearly: “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations . . . To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . . . to define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas . . . To declare War.”

You get the picture: the power to set the federal budget; the power to impose tariffs; the power to decide who should be a citizen; the power to abolish organizations supporting science and the arts; the power to blow up ships off the coast of Venezuela; the power to bomb Iran.

None of these powers rests with the presidency or Donald Trump, unless Congress has decided to contract every ounce of its autonomy to another coequal branch of government.

That was not a scenario the founders imagined, as they strongly believed that human nature would never willingly surrender power.

I guess they weren’t quite capable of grasping the servility of Mike Johnson.

This is essentially the origin story of this war, if you set aside the scene where Trump gets mercilessly bullied by Netanyahu into doing it. He jumped into something everyone knew was a bad idea, launched into action in the middle of the night one Saturday at the end of February, and let Congress wake up in the morning and find out about it on Truth Social like the rest of us.

And on that “everyone knew it was a bad idea” point - they all knew, but no one had the spine to tell him. They may have hinted at it, they may have presented him with overwhelming evidence this would be a disaster, but not one single person had the integrity to step up and tell him outright, “don’t do this.” Not one of these sycophants is capable of putting the good of the country over their blind deference to the Godking.

Trump may have claimed victory with a decidedly pathetic ceasefire in a war that no one wanted, but make no mistake, this is decidedly not a win.

Trump’s achievements after six weeks of war include: upending the world economy, killing thousands of civilians, empowering the Iranian regime, freezing 20% of the global oil supply, spiking gas prices at home, decimating entire swaths of the Middle East, and completely destroying our credibility on the world stage.

Oh, and going on record threatening a nuclear holocaust.

And even after that, even after casually threatening war crimes on social media, Republicans and the sycophants in Trumps inner circle have so fully ceded power to him that they can’t even bring themselves to act against him when he threatens outright genocide.

That’s just how completely neutered this Congress has become. In just over a year, they’ve contracted every ounce of their power over to the presidency with one cowardly vote after another and destroyed their ability to serve as a check on his corruption. They’ve turned themselves into the vestigial tail hanging off the back of the U.S. government.

And now Trump knows they won’t stop him.

The full book goes much deeper into how we got here and what comes next.

It’s out July 14. Please consider pre-ordering your here: