The News You Need on Monday, April 6th, 2026.
The news you need today from Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser. How Pete Hegseth made war crimes possible, Marjorie Taylor Greene criticizes Trump's war on Iran and more.
On Easter Sunday, Americans Learned That Their President is a Mentally Impaired Buffoon Committed to War Crimes
New York Times
Scott: Americans woke up on Easter morning to learn that their president continues to rage internally over the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Although the Strait of Hormuz isn’t actually closed, as vessels are passing through it. However, it’s closed to the US and Israel, which he finds infuriating. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” The mocking or sarcastic invocation of the name of God, in Arabic, on the holiest day in the Christian calendar was an unusual flourish for Trump. It appears designed to show his contempt for Islam, but more generally it reflects his contempt for religions of all sort. NYT first fretted over actually reproducing the full test of Trump’s profanity-laced text. Then, much to its credit, it published a straight-forward discussion of Trump’s threats of war crimes by Edward Wong:
No other recent American president has talked so openly about committing potential war crimes, legal experts, historians and former U.S. officials say. Wartime American presidents and their aides have usually insisted they were trying to follow international and U.S. military law, even if they violated it in some cases.
International laws aimed at preventing the horrors of total war are codified in a series of agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principlesand the United Nations Charter. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure violate those. So does pillaging a country, which Mr. Trump has suggested he might do by taking Iran’s oil.
The Trump administration’s language and actions could have far-reaching consequences. Within Iran, it is likely to galvanize opposition to the United States, including among some ordinary Iranians who have protested their own government.
How Pete Hegseth Made Gigantic War Crimes Possible
Paul Krugman
Charles: Paul Krugman doing what he does best: focusing on what really matters:
If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.
But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting, dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare. and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes…
It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening.
Macron Reframes a World in Which the US is Nobody’s Leader
Le Monde
Scott: Traveling across East Asia, French President Emmanuel Macron had urgent but confidential discussions with leaders of erstwhile important US allies like Japan and South Korea. The discussions focused on the crisis Trump had ignited in the Gulf, steps which might be taken to free up the movement of oil and gas tankers through the Strait of Hormuz without becoming enmeshed in Trump’s pointless war, and generally what to do about America’s abdication of its leadership role.
Emmanuel Macron: “In today’s world, I discern a third way. A way that brings together Korea, Europe, Canada, Japan, India, Brazil, and Australia. This is a format for countries that wish neither to depend on China nor to automatically align themselves with the United States. It is about sovereignty, not submission.”
If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears
Charles: Marjorie Taylor Greene was Sunday’s Voice of Reason
Enjoy two weeks of The Horton-Kaiser Report on us.
Israel Has a Plan to Bomb Iran Back Into the Stone Age; Trump is Actually Implementing It
Israel Hayom
Scott: Israel Hayom is a central player in the pro-Netanyahu media. It is owned by one of Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s biggest campaign donors, Miriam Adelson. Here it reveals in some detail exactly what Netanyahu and his government intend to do in Iran. Put simply, the goal is to destroy Iran’s petrochemical industry and its transportation network, reducing it to a chaotic pre-industrial state
As part of the escalating attacks, the targets expected to come under fire include additional bridges and major railway lines, especially those leading to the capital, Tehran. The expanded target bank also includes various sectors of the oil industry, both in extraction and in related products, including petrochemical industries.
The main reason is that these industries are controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and serve as a primary source of income for it.
“At a not-so-distant stage, the economic issue will begin to have an impact. Remember what brought down the Soviet Union: economic collapse. Already today, most public-sector workers in Iran are not being paid, including large parts of the regular army. That is in contrast to the forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its various affiliated mechanisms, where payments are continuing,” a diplomatic source involved in analyzing war scenarios explained. “Many factories have shut down or been taken out of operation, entire sectors of the economy have ceased to function, and that economic burden is having an impact. Even if the war ended now, the regime would not be able to begin reconstruction without a full lifting of sanctions,” the source added.
And that leads to the next phase of the economic war: a complete halt to Iran’s oil exports, its oxygen pipeline, which has already been hit hard since the start of the war. This economic move, which over the past year has deepened the crisis as sanctions enforcement intensified, is ultimately expected to bring about economic collapse. According to the source, no ideology, however fanatical, will be able to prevent that.
How does it FEEL—Life on the Ground in Iran
Charles: New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi covers Iran and the United Nations from New York. She was born in the United States to Iranian parents and grew up in Tehran and Portland, Oregon. She has been a bureau chief in Kabul, Baghdad, Beirut and Tehran. She is the author of “Waiting for an Ordinary Day” about the impact of the Iraq war on Iraqis. When the current war broke out in Iran she reached out to two sources, one supporter of the current regime and one an opponent. Their diaries of their lives during the first three weeks of conflict bring you to ground zero in ways no reporter could.
Mehrdad: In the late morning, when I went to get some medicine for my stomach problems, I heard a fighter jet over Tehran, where I live. For a brief moment, I thought it was one of our own planes flying low for security reasons. It sounded so close that I checked our group chat for information.
Then I heard a distant but loud explosion. Someone in the group chat wrote, “They attacked.”
Yassi: My phone kept ringing and woke me up. I picked it up when it rang again, and my friend asked me, “You know Israel has attacked?”
Mehrdad: I called my family to tell them I was all right. I then called my sister, who was traveling to the countryside, and urged her to return home to Ahvaz immediately. She was traveling with her children.
Yassi: There is a school two houses away from us. When I went down to the street, it was total commotion. Cars were jammed — parents had left them to run to the school. There were schoolchildren everywhere.
I packed and went over to my sister’s house. My husband works in another city, so I was alone. We decided before the war that my parents and I would move to an empty apartment in my sister’s building so we could all shelter together.
That night, the airstrikes became more intense. We ran to the rooftop, staring at the sky and the rising smoke.
What Israel and America have Wrought on the Ground
The Guardian
Charles: One day of images of war reaching The Guardian’s newsroom.
How Donald Trump Has Turned the White House into a Private Cash Machine
Le Point
Scott: Le Point charts the government of Donald Trump: a triumph of kleptocracy, and the most corrupt regime that has ever come to power in America, or in any other developed democracy in human history. It is a monument to the atrophying of American institutions produced by the MAGA movement.
We know that America has long been a plutocracy where the wealthiest finance, with billions of dollars, the campaigns of candidates for the supreme office. But is it becoming a kleptocracy, in other words a state based on conflicts of interest, if not corruption? For political scientists Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, professors at Barnard College and Georgetown, the answer is yes: “Donald Trump has used the foreign policy of the United States to increase his personal fortune, establish his prestige and favor a restricted circle of relatives, friends and associates. American diplomacy is now largely subordinated to the private interests of the president and his subordinates.”
Le Point marshals a great deal of detail, particularly focusing on crypto ventures, paid grants of pardons, and defense-sector investments of the Trump twins.
A Starburst Spiral Galaxy
Scott: The party is still going on in spiral galaxy NGC 3310. Roughly 100 million years ago, NGC 3310 likely collided with a smaller galaxy causing the large spiral galaxy to light up with a tremendous burst of star formation. The changing gravity during the collision created density waves that compressed existing clouds of gas and triggered the star-forming party. The featured image from the Gemini North Telescope shows the galaxy in great detail, color-coded so that pink highlights gas while white and blue highlight stars. Some of the star clusters in the galaxy are quite young, indicating that starburst galaxies may remain in star-burst mode for quite some time. NGC 3310 spans about 50,000 light years, lies about 50 million light years away, and is visible with a small telescope towards the constellation of Great Bear Ursa Major.
Suggested Use of Atomic Weapon Provokes Laughter
Scott: Yesterday evening on Israeli Channel 14, an Israeli minister laughingly discusses dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran so as to maximize civilian casualties...
Your Online Moments of Zen
Charles: When the fourth day of Passover is also Easter…
You Need Two!
Camille Monet In the Garden at the House in Argenteuil
Edited by Imogen Sayers.