In today’s newsletter, the President’s empty prime-time address, and then:

• Ruth Marcus’s definitive profile of Pam Bondi
• The long odds of undoing birthright citizenship
• The woman who made the machine that made Zohran Mamdani

A month ago, when Donald Trump pitched the United States into a war against Iran, he announced the decision to the American people in a brief eight-minute video, which was sent out over social media, in the dead of night, on a weekend. On Wednesday evening, with the conflict he unleashed having upended the global economy and having failed to dislodge the Iranian government that he initially vowed to topple, Trump finally made his case to the public in a prime-time address to the nation.

He might as well not have bothered.

In the end, the best thing that can be said about the speech was that Trump did not follow through on his threat, made earlier that day, to withdraw the United States from NATO. But there was little news about a conflict that now seems likely to continue for at least the next few weeks. Trump provided no real indication that a ceasefire is in the offing; nor any real path toward fixing one of the major crises that the war has provoked: Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which some twenty per cent of the world’s oil and gas passes. (His suggestion: nations that rely on the energy supplied through the strait, which includes many of our NATO allies, should “build up some delayed courage . . . go to the strait, and just take it—protect it.”)