🇮🇷🇺🇸 The White House subpoenaed the journalists who reported the Air Force One switch, and that tells you how seriously the assassination threat is being taken...
That detail reframed the whole story for me.
It would be easy to dismiss the Israeli intelligence as narrative-building, and Axios itself walked the report back to Iranian figures merely discussing the matter.
But Trump flew home from Ankara on the OLD Air Force One at the Secret Service's urging, and when the New York Times reported why, the administration went after the reporters.
You don't subpoena over a story you consider theater.
David Gibbs, stressing repeatedly that he endorses none of it, laid out the cold analysis: a war that opened with the successful assassination of Iran's leadership class set a precedent its authors now live under.
What goes around comes around isn't a threat, in his framing, it's how spirals of violence work.
And the new Supreme Leader's statement this week reads as explicit as it gets: revenge "will certainly be carried out," whether he's here or not.
On the strait, Gibbs sees the same dead end.
Oman floated reopening the southern route without permits; Iran didn't approve it.
An ultimatum demanding a toll-free Hormuz, he argues, asks Tehran to surrender the leverage that won it the war, and no faction in Iran can sell that now.
His closing worry: not that Trump wins a resumed war, but that nobody does, and a depression arrives instead.
