MAGA Strongly Behind Trump. Supreme Leader’s Support Not Quite So Strong. Rand Paul: Call Me a Snake to My Face! Somebody Should Have Called Cesar Chavez Monster … To His Face

Supreme Leader Junior Watch: Iran’s Mojtaba Khamenei is apparently “misfunctioning” and “not in control” of Iran’s rump regime. If you find out who is in control, drop me a line.

President Trump & MAGA Watch: The MSM seems to be invested in pushing the notion that President Trump is likewise “misfunctioning” and not in control of his MAGA base, but Karl Rove pours cold water on this (“Trump Hasn’t Lost His Voters Over Iran”) today in the Wall Street Journal.

Rove highlights the resignation of counterterrorism official Joe Kent, which the left cheers as a sign of the fracturing of Trump’s MAGA armor. Not so, argues Rove:

These podcasters, YouTubers and independent journalists have decided President Trump’s actions are a betrayal of MAGA. To them, he’s an unwitting tool of the Israelis or, as some on the neoisolationist right say, the Jews.

Tuesday’s resignation of Joe Kent as National Counterterrorism Center director will enthuse the blame-it-on-the-Jews chorus. Mr. Kent blamed the “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” and a “misinformation campaign” driven by the media and “Israeli officials” for President Trump’s decision to demolish the Iranian threat. He also said the Israelis used the same tactic to “draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” (In reality, Israel was reluctant to see the U.S. go to war against Saddam Hussein’s regime.)

Much of the criticism of Operation Epic Fury comes from the likes of the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, the Israel-obsessed podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and the conspiracist Candace Owens. Do voters who identify themselves as MAGA Republicans share their opinions? Do they feel betrayed by the president?

Democratic pollster Mark Penn is definitely not MAGA, but he had an interesting X post (thanks RCP for tipping me off to it) headlined “Making the Impossible Possible.” Penn writes:

After reading so-many analyses that regime change in Iran was impossible, it seems as though the impossible is looking more and more possible. Some of the coverage is even turning as the WSJ story on the elimination of Ali Larijari documented how the leadership of Iran is being reduced to on all fronts and the security apparatus is beginning to wear thin and is systematically being frightened.

And it’s pretty clear the US is preparing to take Kharg island once all the forces needed are in place to apply next level of pressure against Iran, which is alienating all of the other Arab countries with attacks on their hotels and airports.

Writing at The Free Press, Middle East analyst Michael Doran goes out on a limb with “Trump Can Deliver a Lasting Victory in Iran. Here’s How.”

This doesn’t mean that everything is peachy keen. With the price of oil spiraling towards $120 and the Fed holding steady on interest rates yesterday, the market plummeted and it’s not certain that today will be better. Also alarming are reports that Russia is sending oil the Cuba and intelligence assistance to Iran. But the Senate did thwart Dem attempt to—well—thwart Trump’s actions in Iran.

There were several—uh—lively hearings yesterday on Capitol Hill. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate committee that the Iranian regime appeared to be “intact but largely degraded” by ongoing U.S. and Israeli strikes. But a Wall Street Journal editorial (“Tulsi Gabbard’s Resistance Shop”) highlighted what it sees as another facet of Ms. Gabbard’s work-product:

Call it the revolving door. As one top aide who despises President Trump’s foreign policy leaves Tulsi Gabbard’s office, another joins.

On Monday Joe Kent tendered his resignation as counterterrorism chief under Ms. Gabbard. The same day, news broke that Ms. Gabbard hired Dan Caldwell as an adviser to senior intelligence officials….

Mr. Caldwell did his exit interview with Mr. Carlson in April, after he was pushed out of the Pentagon in a leak investigation. He has spent the months since opposing Mr. Trump’s Iran policy, including a second time on Mr. Carlson’s show amid the 12-day war in June.

The confirmation hearing of Senator Markwayne Mullin, nominated to run the Department of Homeland Security, featured a confrontation between Senator Rand Paul and Mullin. Senator Still smarting for allegedly having been called “a snake” by Mullin Paul demanded “tell me to my face.” Nevertheless, Mullin’s nomination is expected to snake its way—I mean advance—to the full Senate.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was summoned to address the Epstein files (so called—it’s more diffuse) by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee but not surprisingly, it was the Dems who walked out on the AG’s hearing.  Also in Congress, the SAVE America Act, which outrageously seeks to ensure that only citizens vote in American elections—the horror!—is up for debate. John Tillman asks at The Hill: So why can’t Republicans pass such an obvious bill?

Mr. Tillman kindly answers his own question:

The answer is what I call “the political vise.”

The reason Republicans keep getting stifled is because they’re being pressured from three different directions. On one side, they have the public, which strongly supports what the GOP is trying to do. But on the other two sides, the pressure is working against them. The media is almost completely hostile to everything Republicans want to accomplish. So are the elites who shape our cultural, economic and educational institutions.

The combination of these forces creates the vise that restricts Republicans. It doesn’t matter how much the public supports what they’re trying to do. The other two forces work even more powerfully in the other direction. At every turn, the media and the elites pressure squishy Republicans to cave. As for Democrats, they know the opinion shapers and cocktail party hand-shakers have their backs, no matter what. With such powerful friends, why bother doing what the public demands?

Remember when immigrants were grateful to come to America? Elia Kazan celebrated this long ago in his 1960s movie “America America,” about his own family’s arrival on these shores. Victor Davis Hanson says it’s just not that way anymore in a piece headlined “Our New Ungracious Immigrants:”

[R]ecently, something has gone terribly wrong with immigration–an open border, of course, but also a change in legal immigration as well as student visitors….

Why would a rich, privileged Eileen Gu feel no discomfort competing for a murderous regime whose agenda is to displace her country from its global preeminence in favor of a communist dictatorship?

Is it because in our relativist modern America, Gu’s “truth” is just as meaningful as any other? And who, after all, is qualified to judge anything or anyone?

We are the Dr. Frankensteins who asked nothing of immigrants, in a complete break from our nation’s past.

And we got our wish for a new, quite different class of immigrants, who treated the U.S. the very way they were taught to do by the Left: as an evil entity that deserved what it got.

And we sure have gotten it.

A Blast From the Past. Migrant leader of the 1960s and liberal icon  Cesar Chavez is being accused of having committed serious abuse of women. In“The Horrible Truth Comes Out About Cesar Chavez,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes:

Everything named after Chavez is going to have to be renamed, Californians had better make plans to start going back to work on March 31, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen to the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument.

Because it turns out that Cesar Chavez was a serial rapist and sexually pursued and molested girls as young as twelve, and groomed them from the ages of eight or nine.

Chavez movement associate Dolores Huerta kept quiet so as not to hurt the movement but says “My silence ends here.” Thanks, Delores, but it doesn’t really help any alleged victims now, does it?