Donald Trump's spelling and delivery of what should have been a comforting statement are what stood out to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Saturday night.

Maddow took over the MSNBC hosting duties following the breaking news, which saw Trump announcing the U.S. had dropped "a full payload of BOMBS" on Iran sites. One GOP lawmaker declared the action was unconstitutional, and onlookers blasted the president.

For her part, Maddow read Trump's statement, which included multiple unnecessary capitalizations, on air.

Maddow noted that Trump "said in that post, quote, 'We have completed our very successful attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran... all planes are now outside Iran airspace. A full payload of, inexplicable all capital letters, BOMBS.' It's not an acronym; he's just spelling it in all capital letters."

Maddow continued reading:

"'There is not another military in the, capital, world that could have done this.' And then he says in all capital letters, 'NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.' exclamation point. Thank you for your attention to this matter.' The president, in his quirky spelling and delivery, delivering the most sober possible message to the American people who have been largely opposed to and afraid of a potential U.S. war with Iran, again for generations."

Donald Trump's spelling and delivery of what should have been a comforting statement are what stood out to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Saturday night.

Maddow took over the MSNBC hosting duties following the breaking news, which saw Trump announcing the U.S. had dropped "a full payload of BOMBS" on Iran sites. One GOP lawmaker declared the action was unconstitutional, and onlookers blasted the president.

For her part, Maddow read Trump's statement, which included multiple unnecessary capitalizations, on air.

Maddow noted that Trump "said in that post, quote, 'We have completed our very successful attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran... all planes are now outside Iran airspace. A full payload of, inexplicable all capital letters, BOMBS.' It's not an acronym; he's just spelling it in all capital letters."

Maddow continued reading:

"'There is not another military in the, capital, world that could have done this.' And then he says in all capital letters, 'NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.' exclamation point. Thank you for your attention to this matter.' The president, in his quirky spelling and delivery, delivering the most sober possible message to the American people who have been largely opposed to and afraid of a potential U.S. war with Iran, again for generations."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the footnote in question. It came in her dissent from a decision Friday in a case called Stanley v. City of Sanford. Led by Justice Neil Gorsuch (Jackson’s sometimes-partner in certain libertarian-ish side-quests), the majority ruled against Karyn Stanley, a former firefighter who had sued a Florida city over health-insurance retirement benefits.

But disagreement over statutory interpretation prompted a heated exchange between the majority and the dissent. Gorsuch said Jackson bucked “textualism,” referring to the strict reading of statutes without regard to other considerations, like congressional intent behind the law. The Trump appointee accused the Biden appointee of doing so in an attempt to “secure the result” she sought.

That amounts to fighting words in a profession that prides itself on the narrative that judges decide cases through neutral mechanisms without regard to outcomes.

Jackson fought back in that footnote — footnote 12, to be exact. She said Gorsuch’s accusation of motivated reasoning “stems from an unfortunate misunderstanding of the judicial role.” Indeed, she said, accounting for congressional intent helps avoid injecting one’s view into the law. “By contrast,” she wrote, “pure textualism’s refusal to try to understand the text of a statute in the larger context of what Congress sought to achieve turns the interpretive task into a potent weapon for advancing judicial policy preferences.” That is, it’s the majority’s approach that lets judges reach their preferred results.

To be sure, debates over textualism and the judicial role aren’t new. Indeed, Jackson’s predecessor, Stephen Breyer, famously dueled on the subject with Gorsuch’s predecessor, Antonin Scalia.

Leavitt responded that it’s a “fact” that Iran is very close to having a nuclear weapon, adding that the U.S. government “maintains this fact that Iran has never been closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lry3dmeqjw2g
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1935756090190262779
.....As regular readers know, the international agreement with Iran did exactly what it set out to do: The policy dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy took effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.

And then Trump took office and abandoned the policy for reasons he never explained.

In broad strokes, Obama set out to use economic sanctions to get Iran to the international negotiating table. That worked and a breakthrough agreement eventually followed. Trump came to believe he could duplicate the strategy by abandoning the policy, restoring the old sanctions and adding new ones......

In fact, once the U.S. was no longer a part of the agreement, the West lost verification access to Tehran’s program. It was at that point that Iran, rather than begging the White House for attention, almost immediately became more dangerous by starting up advanced centrifuges and ending its commitment to limit enrichment of uranium.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:lib7o5clkyzbwpxnlcbpbzuc/post/3lrulqjaloc2n
https://x.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1935253188057207133

.....How Trump arrived at his decision adds insult to injury. One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s term in the White House, when the president held a lengthy meeting with top members of his team: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford. Each of the officials reportedly told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the JCPOA policy.

The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the international agreement, not how to stick with it. When his own foreign policy and national security advisers told him the policy was working, Trump reportedly “had a bit of a meltdown.”

Soon after, he abandoned the JCPOA anyway — not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success.

All Trump had to do was nothing. He could’ve simply left the policy alone and allowed it to keep working. He instead did the opposite. The Republican was convinced his strategy would work — he even boasted at one point during his term that he was prepared to be Iran’s “best friend” — but the entire gambit backfired.

Seven years later, Trump and his team want to talk about how dangerous Iran is. What they don’t want to talk about is how much the president’s own misjudgment made the Iranian threat worse.

Like so many of his claims, this wasn’t true. The Republicans’ 2017 package of tax breaks narrowed the eligibility of who would be affected by the estate tax, but GOP policymakers did not, in fact, “get rid of it.”

They are, however, getting closer to that goal. The Washington Post reported:

Under current law, estates pay tax only on transfers above $13.99 million for single filers and $27.98 million for married couples. Those thresholds, doubled by President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, are scheduled to fall by roughly half at the end of 2025. But in the tax bill before Congress, both the House and Senate versions would raise the exemption starting next year to $15 million for individuals and $30 million for couples, then set them to adjust for inflation in the future.

When policymakers, concerned about the societal impact of dynastic wealth, initially approved an estate tax nearly nine decades ago, it only affected 0.9% of American estates. As the Post’s report noted, by 2019, that figure was down to 0.08%, and GOP officials are determined to use their party’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act — to shield even more hyper-wealthy estates.

The cost of this tax cut would be roughly $210 billion, all of which would benefit no one but the very wealthy......

In recent years, I’ve lost count of how many times Republican officials, insiders, pundits and strategists have said that the GOP is undergoing a Trump-era transformation, becoming less of a corporate party and more of a blue-collar party. Indeed, I’m occasionally reminded of a claim Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas made in 2021 when he claimed, “The Republican Party is not just the party of country clubs. The Republican Party is the party of steel workers, construction workers, pipeline workers, police officers, firefighters, waiters and waitresses.”

It was nice rhetoric, I suppose, though it hardly reflects reality. The Trump-led GOP is championing legislation that would leave struggling families significantly worse off, while shielding the generational wealth of millionaires and billionaires.

To believe that Republicans have become a “working-class party” is to ignore everything the party is actually doing with their power.]

ICE's own data shows their claim of targeting the "worst of the worst" is false.

- 83.6% of people detained by ICE in FY25 were classified as "no ICE threat level."
- 4.9% were classified as low threat
- 3.9% were classified as medium threat
- 7.6% were classified as high threat