What I'm Hearing, April 20th 2026
Iran war. . . again. Roberts and Kushner are corrupt. Trump's approval rating plummets.
This is “What I’m Hearing.” A somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.
The Ceasefire Expires Wednesday. Iran’s Military Already Killed It.
The two-week ceasefire expires this Wednesday, and a Wall Street Journal report published Monday reveals the detail that explains why it was never going to hold: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps overruled its own civilian government’s decision to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s president wanted peace. Iran’s military vetoed it.
That split changes everything. It means even a diplomatic agreement between Washington and Tehran may be unenforceable if the IRGC refuses to comply. No peace envoy can negotiate away a military that doesn’t answer to its own government. The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger documented how Trump doesn’t seem to grasp any of this — declaring last Friday that “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” hours before the ceasefire collapsed. A Defense Intelligence Agency memo quietly acknowledged that Iran “retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs,” directly contradicting Hegseth’s repeated claims that Iran’s stockpiles are depleted.
Meanwhile, Trump’s own Energy Secretary Chris Wright told reporters Monday that gas may not drop below $3 per gallon until next year. Trump publicly contradicted him in a phone interview with The Hill: “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong.” Senior Republican senators are privately alarmed. Sen. John Kennedy warned Fox News that if Republicans lose the midterms, it will be because they didn’t talk about cost-of-living and because of “this new holy war with the pope.” Multiple GOP lawmakers have told reporters they fear the Iran war will cost them in November.
Vance is heading back to Islamabad for another round of talks. Tehran hasn’t even confirmed it will attend. The pattern holds: announce talks, claim progress, watch it collapse, blame Iran, repeat.
Read more: The Bulwark, The Parnas Perspective
The Trumps Are Getting Rich Off This War. 97% of Media Coverage Ignores It.
Judd Legum at Popular Information dropped a methodical, damning analysis: of 202 articles published by major outlets covering Jared Kushner’s role as Iran peace negotiator, only 6, fewer than 3%, mentioned his financial conflict of interest with Saudi Arabia.
Here’s what those 196 articles left out: Kushner raised $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince’s sovereign wealth fund after leaving the White House, over the objections of the fund’s own advisors, who cited his inexperience and called his operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” MBS personally overruled them. Kushner has since collected over $110 million in management fees. He’s now seeking billions more from Saudi investors, while sitting at the negotiating table in Islamabad. And MBS, the man who controls that fund, reportedly lobbied Trump both to start and to continue the Iran war. Saudi Arabia and Iran are enemies. Kushner’s financial patron has a direct interest in this war continuing.
Aaron Parnas adds that Trump’s sons are simultaneously trying to sell military drone interceptors to Gulf states facing Iranian attack, raising money from the very countries the U.S. is supposedly negotiating on behalf of. BBC analysis flagged repeated spikes in trading activity, including in oil markets, minutes before Trump’s major policy announcements. Rep. Jamie Raskin launched a formal congressional investigation, writing that Kushner “cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.”
The big question has been, why did Trump start the war in Iran? The administration’s arguments have been inconsistent and nonsensical. Reports suggest Israel and Saudi Arabia convinced him. That could be true. It’s also possible that Trump determined war was good for business. And at the end of the day, Trump will always do what is good for his pocket.
Read more: Popular Information, The Parnas Perspective
Roberts Rigged the Court. Now We Have the Receipts.
This one flew under the radar over the weekend, and it shouldn’t have.
The New York Times published 16 pages of leaked internal Supreme Court memos from 2016, revealing how Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Court’s unprecedented decision to halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan before any lower court had even ruled on its legality. That had never been done before. Roberts acknowledged in the memos that “the posture of this stay request is not typical,” but argued the plan was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector” and too consequential for the Court not to act immediately.
Roberts circulated an aggressive memo during the Court’s winter recess, insisting that the justices halt the president’s plan and confidently predicting that the Court would eventually overturn it. Justice Alito backed him with a stark argument: if the Court failed to act, regulated companies would be forced to comply before judicial review could matter, threatening to render the Court’s “institutional legitimacy a nullity.” Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor pushed back, but Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and swing Justice Kennedy ruled against the Obama regulation just two weeks after West Virginia filed its emergency request.
That night, legal experts now believe, was the birth of the modern “shadow docket” — the secretive track the Court has used ever since to issue major rulings without full briefing, oral argument, or signed opinions. The shadow docket has widely helped Trump push through his agenda throughout his second term, allowing the administration to cut the federal workforce while litigation continued in lower courts and keeping a ban on transgender military service in effect while cases were pending.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson devoted a lecture at Yale Law School last week to the topic, calling herself “very troubled by the institutional costs” the Court’s emergency actions impose on its relationships with lower courts and the American people. Her point is devastating when paired with the memos: Roberts claimed in 2016 that he had to act to protect industry from irreparable harm. A decade later, the Court treats the Trump administration’s desire to implement its preferred policies with the same deference on the shadow docket, but with no similar concern for the Americans harmed by those policies.
The distance between Roberts’ famous “balls and strikes” confirmation pledge and his actual conduct is, the memos show, exactly as vast as anyone suspected.
Robert Hubbell provides the essential takeaway: Roberts established that bending procedural rules to reach ideological outcomes is acceptable when “legitimacy” is at stake. When Democrats regain Congress and the presidency, they should accept that precedent — and use it. Reform Citizens United. Reform Shelby County. Reform Dobbs. Reform Trump v. United States. The leaked memos provide exactly the political and legal ammunition to make the case that this Court abandoned neutrality a decade ago, and democratic reform isn’t radicalism — it’s a response to what the Chief Justice already did.
Read more: Robert Hubbell, NYT, SCOTUSblog
Trump’s Floor Is Falling Out. And the Numbers Are Historic
The NBC News poll released Sunday deserves its own section, because these aren’t normal bad numbers. They’re structural collapse.
Trump’s approval is at 37% — a second-term low. Sixty-three percent disapprove, with 50% disapproving strongly. Two-thirds disapprove of his handling of Iran. Two-thirds say gas prices are a personal hardship. He’s down 4 points even among Republicans. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index hit 47.6, the worst reading in 70 years, down nearly 11% from March alone.
But the number that should keep the White House up at night is this one: “strong approval” has fallen from 26% to 20% over the past year, a nearly 25% drop. That’s not soft supporters drifting away. That’s the true believers losing faith. Brian Beutler at Off Message makes the structural case: MAGA isn’t just losing support, it’s cannibalizing itself. The MAGA identity is shrinking — down to 53% of Republicans in the latest NBC poll. Beutler’s line: “Invasive species eventually exhaust their food supply.”
And Trump keeps opening new fronts. He’s at war with Catholics over Pope Leo. He’s at war with his own business community over the economy. He’s at war with Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens, the media apparatus that built him, over Iran. Every new fight further splinters the coalition. At 37% approval with the midterms 197 days away, there is no cavalry coming. The floor is falling out.
Read more: Off Message
That’s your Monday. The ceasefire expires on Wednesday. Kushner is getting rich while negotiating peace. MAGA is shrinking. Roberts got caught. And the midterms are 197 days away.