This is an adapted excerpt from the March 31 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
We are over a month into President Donald Trump’s war on Iran, and we are learning more every day about how little his administration cares about the global crisis it started.
More than 4,800 have died across the region, according to figures reviewed by MS NOW, including 3,400 in Iran, 25 in Israel and 13 American service members.
On Tuesday, Iranian media reported U.S. and Israeli attacks targeted an orphanage outside of Tehran, killing two people and injuring five others. (MS NOW has not verified that report and a U.S. defense official told CNN it was not responsible for the strike.)
You may remember that on the first day of this war, a school in Iran was destroyed by U.S.-made cruise missiles in a strike that killed more than 150 children. According to new reporting from The New York Times, on the same day the school was hit, a new untested ballistic missile, also made by the United States, was used to bomb another elementary school and a nearby sports hall, killing at least 21 people.
Those are the human costs of the war. There are also economic ones. Since the war started, Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for about 20% of the world’s energy supply, which has caused gas prices to spike to $4 a gallon.
While many of us are asking what’s going on with this war, the president who started it is talking about his big, beautiful ballroom.
The situation is far more dire in much of the rest of the world. The Philippines has declared a national emergency as it contemplates major oil shortages. Sri Lanka is one of several countries that have already started rationing fuel. It also made Wednesday a holiday to keep people home.
Across the world, countries like Australia, Egypt and Thailand have made public transportation free, cutting work hours, asking people to work from home and telling them to turn off the AC, all to conserve precious energy.
When and how does this all end?
Over the weekend, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal Trump was weighing a ground operation to secure an estimated half-ton of enriched uranium in Iran, an effort that would extend the war for weeks, at least.
Then on Tuesday, Trump aides told the Journal the president said he was willing to end the war even if Iran keeps control of the Strait of Hormuz, because the U.S. believes “that forcing the waterway back open would mean extending the military mission.”
While that makes it sound like maybe things will wind down soon, it’s also worth noting the U.S. just ordered a third aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, to deploy from Virginia to the Middle East.
While many of are asking what’s going on with this war, the president who started has been talking about his big, beautiful ballroom. On Tuesday, Trump lost it on social media after a federal judge halted his ballroom plans, saying they need approval from Congress.
That outburst came minutes after the president bragged about his prowess at groundskeeping.
“Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument,” he wrote. “This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is — The President and Secretary do!”
This is how Trump has spent his time, as thousands of Americans put themselves in harm’s way at his orders.
What about other architects of this war?
On Sunday, TMZ posted photos of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., at Disney World in Florida, strolling through the Magic Kingdom with a bubble wand in his hand and getting on the Space Mountain roller coaster.
Graham told TMZ that “he was at a meeting Friday with Trump officials in South Florida, and he went to Orlando afterwards to meet up with some friends.”
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But even some right-wing podcasters were beside themselves over the irony, including Alex Jones and Megyn Kelly.
To be fair to Graham, it’s not like he is the secretary of defense, tasked with executing the war. That job falls to Pete Hegseth, who spent much of his day on Tuesday browbeating allies for not cleaning up the mess the U.S. has made in the Strait of Hormuz.
“There are countries around the world who ought be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well,” he told reporters. “It’s not just the United States Navy. Last time I checked there was supposed to be a big bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well.”
But it has not been at all clear that Hegseth himself was prepared for how this war would play out, with one big apparent exception.
According to three people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Financial Times, “A broker for [Hegseth] attempted to make a big investment in major defense companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran.”
The Financial Times reported:
Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment in the asset manager’s Defense Industrials Active ETF, the people said, shortly before the US launched military action against Tehran. The inquiry on behalf of the high-profile potential client was flagged internally at BlackRock, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Try to wrap your brain around that: A U.S. defense secretary reportedly tried to invest millions in a defense industry fund on the eve of the war he has been overseeing.
A Pentagon spokesman called the story “entirely false and fabricated,” but the trade request was reportedly serious enough that it alarmed people at BlackRock. And although it did not go through, as experts noted, attempted insider trading is also a crime.
As Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told me on Tuesday’s “All In,” this was not the first time concerns have been raised about insider trading around Trump’s actions in the Middle East, pointing to curiously timed oil trades.
“This is the most corrupt White House in the history of the country,” Murphy said, “and war seems to be giving them more opportunity to engage in corruption.”
It seems clear the people who launched this war saw it merely as an opportunity for profit and a poll bump, but the scale of the destruction and pain they have wrought is truly incredible. And every indication we have says it will get worse: More people will die or be maimed, and energy and oil shortages will kill or impoverish many more.
The architects of the war appear as if they could not care less.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).