Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.
An Iran war that was already proving quite unpopular with the American people has entered a new, more problematic phase. That comes with the news that a US fighter jet was shot down over Iran.
There remains a lot we don’t know, including the status of the two crew members. While CNN has reported one of them has been rescued and is receiving medical treatment, we don’t know the fate of the other.
And that was followed by news that Iran hit a second US combat aircraft on Friday. The pilot was able to navigate the plane out of Iranian territory before ejecting from the aircraft and was subsequently rescued, a US official told CNN.
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President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have suggested the United States and Israel had something amounting to free rein to fly over Iran. They cast Tehran as having no ability to counteract that.
At a March 4 briefing — nearly a full month ago — Hegseth said that such dominance was just around the corner.
“Starting last night, and to be completed in a few days in under a week, the two most powerful air forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies,” Hegseth said. He called it “uncontested airspace.”
“And Iran will be able to do nothing about it,” he added.
Trump has also played up this air dominance over the past two weeks.
“And we literally have planes flying over Tehran and other parts of their country; they can’t do a thing about it,” he said on March 24. He added that the United States could strike a power plant, and “they can’t do a thing about it.”
The president has said for weeks that Iran had “no navy,” “no military,” “no air force” and “no anti-aircraft systems.” In a White House address Wednesday night, he said he could hit Iran’s oil facilities, “and there’s not a thing they could do about it.
“They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated,” Trump said. “We are unstoppable as a military force.”