The Dictatorship

Lebanon’s president asks Trump to do what he rarely does: cross Netanyahu

Published

1 day ago

July 21, 2026

Lebanon’s president asks Trump to do what he rarely does: cross Netanyahu

Christmas. 21, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun arrives at the White House on Tuesday with a single delicate mission: to convince President Donald Trump to press Israel into honoring a U.S.-brokered agreement that would pull Israeli troops out of Lebanon and disarm Hezbollah.

It is an ask that could publicly pull Trump’s aims apart from Israel’s — pressing Israel to pull back where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has favored pressing forward.

Netanyahu will not be in the room. But his presence hangs over it. Trump has stood closely with him — on Iran, on Gaza, on the regional map. And as Netanyahu’s forces occupy southern Lebanon, with little sign of urgency to withdraw, Aoun is effectively asking Trump to push his closest partner in the region to move in a direction Israel so far has not.

The meeting marks the first visit to the White House by a Lebanese president in nearly two decades, and it comes at a fraught moment for the conflict-worn nation, with hundreds of thousands of Lebanese displaced in the aftermath of Israeli strikes.

Aoun’s immediate goal is concrete: secure U.S. military and financial aid to help Lebanon carry out a trilateral framework meant to cement peace with Israel. The agreement, signed in June, calls for a phased Israeli withdrawal in exchange for Lebanese steps to disarm Hezbollah.

“President Aoun is going to show a real willingness, a real desire to put the Lebanese Armed Forces to the test, for people to have faith,” said Hagar Chemali, co-founder of the Lebanon-Israel Peace Alliance and former National Security Council director for the Middle East. “His goal is to garner more support in terms of equipment and financial support.”

For Chemali, the visit turns on a mutual bet.

“The U.S. needs President Aoun to have the strength he needs and time and space to execute that framework agreement,” Chemali said. “And on Aoun’s side, he trusts President Trump to fulfill not just the U.S. commitments in the framework agreement — which have to do more with military support, garnering investment, stuff like that — but also to hold Israel’s feet to the fire.”

There are early signs of movement. On Monday, the State Department said the first of several “pilot zones” was underway — designated areas in southern Lebanon where Israel will ease its military control and let Lebanese forces take sole authority.

“The establishment of these initial pilot zones represents real progress on the ground,” said a U.S. official, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive planning. “It is an opportunity for the Lebanese state to begin to reassert real control in areas historically dominated by Hizballah” and would ideally create momentum needed for the Lebanese Armed Forces to expand the process and move towards peace, the official added — warning against any attempt by Hezbollah to derail the effort.

Israel signaled it is in no hurry to leave. An Israeli military official said Israel will remain “for as long as necessary to defend the communities of northern Israel” and “retain the freedom of operation to remove threats posed to the soldiers” deployed to the security zone.

Aoun has spent the last several days laying the groundwork. In a stage-setting meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised Lebanon’s “move towards peace” and “determined efforts to reclaim Lebanon’s sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure and move towards peace,” according to a State Department statement.

Now Aoun will have to prove to Trump that he can deliver. “The hurdle in general will be: Can he give enough detail on Hezbollah’s disarmament and how that will go?” Chemali said. “How it will work, whether there are deadlines and timetables, et cetera — enough for him to get the support that he wants for the LAF.”

The stakes, she said, are not only diplomatic but historic. For the first time in two decades, a Lebanese president represents a government in which Hezbollah is not merely a diminished player but one whose military and security operations the state has declared illegal — and a government willing to speak loudly against Iran at a moment when Washington is listening.

If that is the test Aoun faces, Trump faces one of his own. The larger question is whether he has the means, or the will, to lean on Netanyahu. The two remain close: Trump has hosted him six times since returning to office, though not since February, before the two men launched a joint military offensive against Tehran. Netanyahu’s plans to return to Washington remain unsettled — a conspicuous pause for a leader this central to Trump’s Middle East policy. Pressing him now would test whether Trump can hold a line Netanyahu opposes — something he has struggled to do before.

Iran is the clearest case. In June 2025, Trump said he was not ready to abandon nuclear negotiations with Tehran and publicly warned Israel against striking. “I don’t want them going in, because I think it would blow — it might help it, actually, but it also could blow it,” he said — just eight hours before Israel launched its airstrikes anyway. Ten days later, Trump ordered the U.S. military to join, bombing three major Iranian nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu went on to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. He made Trump aware of the move during a White House visit at which Trump deferred to the Israeli leader when asked by a reporter whether he believed in a two-state solution.

“I don’t know – I’ll ask Bibi that question. You have the greatest man in the world to answer that age old question: Two state? Go ahead – give him your honest answer,” Trump said, motioning to the Israeli prime minister.

“I think Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers should threaten us. That means that certain powers, like overall security, will always remain in our hands,” Netanyahu said, a demand that Palestinian leadership had long declared as a non-starter for any two-state agreement.

During his first term, Trump helped broker the Abraham Accordsthe agreements to establish diplomatic relations between Israel with the U.A.E. and Bahrain – the third and fourth Arab countries to make such peace pacts. But as part of the agreement with the U.A.E. at the time, Netanyahu publicly vowed to not formally annex the West Bank — then, months later, vowed to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel” and to legalize West Bank outposts as he fought to hold his governing coalition together in 2022. Trump’s hopes of extending the accords to Saudi Arabia have since stalled amid Israel’s continued military campaigns.

Yet the relationship has not always been frictionless. Trump seethed when Netanyahu recognized Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, telling Axios reporter Barak Ravid“F— him,” and adding: “Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.”

Years later, Trump’s old ire for Netanyahu during the end of his administration again was raised publicly just four days after Hamas’ attack on Israel in which the terrorist organization killed more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 250 others.

Trump, mentioning the attacks while in West Palm Beach, chastised Netanyahu for having previously “let us down.” “I’ll never forget, I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down – that was a very terrible thing. I will say that,” Trump said, referring to Israel’s decision to not join the U.S. ahead of its 2020 operation to launch an airstrike and kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The two men have since mended fences. But the history is a reminder that Trump’s loyalty has limits — and that, on the right issue, he has been willing to test them.

That is the wager Aoun carries into the West Wing on Tuesday: that Trump’s word to Lebanon will, this time, outweigh his deference to Israel.

Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.

Vaughn Hillyard is a senior White House reporter for MS NOW.

Jake Traylor is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.

The Dictatorship

Pressed for answers on scandals, Texas’ Ken Paxton abandons press conference

Published

4 hours ago

July 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Pressed for answers on scandals, Texas’ Ken Paxton abandons press conference

Although Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already earned a reputation as the most scandal-plagued U.S. Senate candidate in recent memory, the Republican’s troubles have managed to take a turn for the worse.

Just in the past couple of weeks, Paxton has been accused of using an address where he did not live while voting in recent elections and has faced allegations that he and his estranged wife declared three separate homes as their primary residence in mortgage documents — a practice that his party has, in other situations, characterized as an outrageous abuse.

Complicating matters, property records now suggest that the state attorney general, either in his personal capacity or through his trusts, now owns at least 15 properties, worth roughly $9 million.

The good news is, Paxton finally held a press conference Tuesday — a “rare” occurrenceas one outlet called it, for a politician who doesn’t seem to care for questions — offering journalists an opportunity to ask the Texan about his many controversies. The bad news is, Paxton didn’t want to answer any questions about his many controversies, and he then abruptly abandoned his own event when reporters treated him like a Senate candidate.

“General, I wanted to give you a chance to respond to [Democratic state Rep. James Talarico] and his campaign,” one reporter said. “They’ve made a lot about the reports that have come out, one in The New York Times about you acquiring properties worth —”

At that point, Paxton, surrounded by 22 local sheriffs who support his candidacy, interrupted and said he only wanted to field questions related to “law enforcement.”

But in the United States, politicians don’t get to limit the scope of journalists’ questions, and so another reporter asked the state attorney general why he allegedly voted in one county while living in another. A Paxton aide, seemingly eager to rescue her boss, tried to intervene as the Republican walked away from his podium.

A Talarico spokesperson said in a statement, “Ken Paxton just refused to answer basic questions about reports he committed voter fraud and expanded his real estate portfolio to 15 properties on a government salary — because he has no answers for his corruption. If Ken Paxton can’t answer these simple questions, what is he planning to do in a debate?”

For the record, Paxton hasn’t agreed to any debates. He also hasn’t offered substantive answers to the same questions ahead of Tuesday’s event.

Stepping back, the embarrassing display underscored two notable elements of the Senate race in the Lone Star State. First, Paxton genuinely seems to believe he can go the entire campaign without fielding questions from independent news organizations about the brutal list of scandals that follows him like cans tied to a bumper.

And second, Republicans invested a remarkable amount of time and energy into trying to make the Texas race a referendum on, of all things, masculinity. But watching Paxton flee his own press conference in response to predictable and reasonable questions, a variety of words came to mind. “Manly” wasn’t one of them.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The Dictatorship

Trump gutted the agency built to stop election interference

Published

4 hours ago

July 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump gutted the agency built to stop election interference

Christmas. 22, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

President Donald Trump says he is worried about foreign interference in U.S. elections. That was the reason he gave when he released declassified intelligence documents last week that ended up undercutting his own baseless claims about rigged elections.

In his primetime address on July 16, Trump said the U.S. “must take urgent action” to protect voting infrastructure against foreign actors. But shortly after taking office last year, Trump gutted a key agency designed to protect America’s elections from exactly that.

It’s called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an office created during Trump’s first term. CISA is one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick regional support.

After Trump returned to office, the cyber agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security took a major hit. Elon Musk’s DOGE fired more than 100 workers, including election security advisers. More than 600 others were placed on administrative leave, were reassigned or took buyouts.

Now the Trump administration is telling states they will only receive resources if they hand over voter rolls to be screened through a new federal database that a judge recently deemed unlawful in its current form.

That database is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which experts and a federal judge are concerned has a high error rate that could disenfranchise voters.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said CISA will release an “election infrastructure plan” in the next 30 days — barely three months out from the midterms, which will determine which party controls Congress.

“If they participate in the SAVE program, we’ll provide the resources and training to support state election integrity,” Mullin said last week. “We’re not trying to change the outcome.”

Multiple current and former senior election and national security officials told MS NOW that they could not recall a time when the federal government held back resources and money meant to secure America’s elections.

And multiple state election officials have said they are not receiving any briefings on possible foreign threats to election security from the federal government. Such briefings were once a regular occurrence, they said.

During the first Trump administration, “we were collaborative — carrots rather than sticks,” said one of the former officials, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The second Trump administration is “very much focused on sticks.”

One election official in a swing state said the difference from 2024 is stark, saying that “it’s every state for themselves.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns about retaliation from federal officials. During the last cycle, the state official said they had a regional federal cybersecurity expert “on speed dial” who could “see the whole puzzle.”

That doesn’t exist anymore, and without it, the state election official said, “we’re less informed on the pattern of the attackers and are slower to respond.”

“I’ve literally never heard anybody effectively say ‘to keep you safe, you have to give me what I want,’” said the swing state election official, referring to DHS threats to withhold resources if states don’t hand over sensitive voter data.

The risks compound at the local level, they added: “Does [a clerk’s] laptop have the IT infrastructure to defend against an attack from Iran? That’s what keeps me up at night.”

Cait Conley, a West Point graduate and combat veteran who served as the senior adviser to the director of CISA during the Biden administration, accused Trump of gutting the agency and sowing doubt about the security of U.S. elections in his speech last week.

“If Donald Trump were truly concerned about election security, he would not have fired hundreds of federal workers whose jobs were to secure our elections,” she said. Conley is now running for Congress in New York as a Democrat.

“His lies and misrepresentations are very clearly trying to lay the groundwork for calling this November’s election results into question when his party loses,” she said.

When asked about election officials telling MS NOW that they have received no intelligence briefings on possible foreign threats to election security, and have no access to regional cybersecurity advisers, DHS did not respond. DHS also did not respond directly to questions about the agency withholding resources unless states hand over voter data.

Instead, they provided a statement from acting CISA Director Nick Andersen, which said CISA “works with critical infrastructure owners and operators to assist them in securing both the physical security and cybersecurity of the systems and assets that support the nation’s elections.”

When an election infrastructure plan is done in the next 30 days, it will “offer to states the cyber resources they need, including information about available no-cost voluntary services such as the sharing of threat information, technical expertise, vulnerability scanning, and other risk mitigation support,” Andersen said.

Under Trump, CISA halted its funding of the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which provides local governments with free access to election security operations centers, election security training, technical support and threat monitoring.

Tim Harper, who leads the elections team at the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology, said teams across the FBI, the State Department and the Justice Department that worked on countering foreign influence have also been eliminated or sidelined.

But CISA was key to sharing and compiling intelligence across the federal government.

Parts of CISA’s election work, Harper explained, included granting security clearances to state election officials to give them real-time information to stop threats before they spread. His organization has direct knowledge of officials receiving no response when they have asked the federal government to provide assistance on cyber and physical security.

“Expecting local election officials to handle nation-state cyberattacks without federal support isn’t commonsense policy,” Harper said. “It’s a national security failure.”

States are trying to fill the gap with outside vendors and networks of cyber experts.

“It has taken a lot of work, and it shouldn’t have to be this hard, but the states are ensuring the 2026 election is secure despite federal withdrawal,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which works with elections officials from both parties on ways to build trust with voters in election results.

Becker said that the Trump administration’s near-weekly threats to arrest election officials have “become a running joke among election officials,” adding that they find it “laughable.”

Protecting elections

Established in 2018 during Trump’s first administration, CISA initially enjoyed sweeping bipartisan support. But Trump attacked the agency after Chris Krebs, then the director, said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.” Trump, who lost the election, immediately fired Krebs.

After Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration proposed a 17% cut — roughly $500 million — to CISA’s budget. It also proposed mass layoffs that would cut CISA staff nearly 30%, eliminating 1,083 of its 3,732 staffers. The plan was paused after almost 600 people accepted a buyout offer from the administration, Politico reported at the time.

Trump and members of his new administration have also accused CISA of undermining democracy instead of defending it. As DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, in a surprise keynote speech at a major cybersecurity conference last year, said CISA’s efforts to counter the spread of misinformation from America’s enemies, such as Russia and China, was an infringement on free speech.

“They were deciding what was truth and what was not,” she said of CISA. “And it’s not the job of CISA to be the Ministry of Truth.”

Former CISA officials called those claims patently false. And they warned that tech firms were hiring top CISA leaders, as well as CISA staffers, for their cybersecurity skills, and that the agency was being gutted.

“I’ve personally seen how CISA has lost its very best,” Jack Cable, a former CISA employee who left the agency in January, told lawmakers in a June hearing. “In the face of increasing threats, we can’t undermine the capacity of America’s cyber defense agency and its ability to attract and retain the best technical talent.”

Laura Barrón-López covers the White House for MS NOW.

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.

The Dictatorship

Why Trump’s reported attempts to minimize Iran war casualties won’t work

Published

4 hours ago

July 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Christmas. 22, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

The resumption of hostilities between the United States and Iran has caused an uptick in U.S. casualties. Last week, CENTCOM confirmed the deaths of three more U.S. service members killed in actionand the total number of troops killed during the war currently stands at 18. Meanwhile nearly 100 troops have been injured over the past two weeks as Iran escalates attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East.

President Donald Trump continues to try to cast the war as an operation of total U.S. domination against a defanged regime, but Iran is striking back, with American lives at stake, making justifications for continuing the unpopular war even harder for Trump. And with the president signaling an openness to escalating the conflict even further in the coming weeks, the human toll is likely to increase. (Iranian casualties are far worse, with at least 1,700 Iranian civilians killed, according to estimates from the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.)

It will be nearly impossible for the Trump administration to ward off the reality that casualties make wars less popular.

Already lacking in meaningful transparency, the Trump administration appears to be growing more cagey about releasing information about casualties. But efforts to delay or obscure the information are unlikely to prevent the inevitable — the war will become even more widely despised as more people die.

CNN reported on Monday that the Pentagon has been “slow to disclose injuries to U.S. troops during the ongoing war with Iran, avoiding publicly confirming the fallout from Iranian attacks and mostly reserving totals to a military website that lags events by several days or even weeks.” And its mode of communication about casualties has shifted: “While earlier in the war U.S. Central Command, the military headquarters overseeing the war effort, would provide periodic updates on injuries, it has not been regularly disclosing non-fatal attacks in recent months,” BLN reported. (The Pentagon’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, told BLN that reporting delays are necessary, saying, “Providing real-time information on non-fatal casualties to the media is the same as providing that information directly to our adversaries, which could put even more service members at risk with access to that quick information.”)

The New York Times pointed out that the Pentagon declined to divulge Iranian strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan last week, which in turn may have misled the public about why the U.S. was conducting airstrikes against Iranian military sites. And that happened amid a broader reticence to brief the public about the direction of the war: “The last major Pentagon briefing on the war was in early May.” (Parnell responded to the Times article in a statementsaying that “claims of concealment are fabrications.”)

Given the Trump administration’s dishonesty about the warthe president has long ago forfeited any right to be given the benefit of the doubt. But regardless of whether the Trump administration’s changes in its communication style has been motivated by operational security or making it harder for the public to see how much blood has been shed on its orders, the news is trickling out: The troops are being killed and injured.

Ultimately, it will be nearly impossible for the Trump administration to ward off the reality that casualties make wars less popular. In the 1970s the political scientist John Mueller found that support for the Vietnam and Korean wars “declined as a logarithmic function of American casualties.” Various scholars have since pointed out that there are nuances to how the public is affected by casualties, such as a sensitivity to a notable increase in the rate of casualties rather than just the absolute number of casualties themselves.

But there’s one particularly damning piece of scholarship out there for the Trump administration: a 2006 study by political scientists from Duke University and the Loyola University Chicago, which found that the public’s tolerance for the human costs of war is heavily shaped by the public’s “beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war” as well as “beliefs about the war’s likely success.”

That doesn’t bode well for Trump.

A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 68% of Americans said the Iran war was not “worth fighting,” and just 28% said it was. (BLN pointed out that the “negative 40-point split is worse than for either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars in Washington Post-ABC News polling.”) And in Aprila Post-ABC poll found that 61% of Americans believed the Iran war was a “mistake.” As high oil prices pinch Americans’ wallets and the Trump administration continually fails to bring Iran to heel, it’s hard to imagine that those numbers will look better for Trump.

The war with Iran has so far produced a fraction of the U.S. casualties of major U.S. wars of the past, and it is unlikely to reach comparable numbers unless Trump deploys ground troops. But widespread skepticism that this war is worthwhile or effective likely makes the administration more vulnerable to public anger over whatever casualties do emerge. It’s one thing for troops to die for a just cause or even a controversial cause, it’s another to die for no obvious reason at all.

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.