Shifting Ground

Good afternoon. This is the Final NOTUS newsletter for March 3, 2026. You can get it in your inbox every day by signing up here — it’s free!

The Latest

Donald Trump said maybe it actually was the U.S. that pressured Israel into attacking Iran. A day after his secretary of state suggested the opposite, the president said during an Oval Office meeting today that it was his “opinion” that Iran was going to attack first, and that “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

• Marco Rubio today: “The president of the United States made a decision because this is intolerable. Iran cannot have these missiles, cannot have these drones, cannot threaten the world … If we don’t hit them now, a year from now no one will be able to touch them.”

• Trump also wrote to Congress today that the attacks were launched due to the “collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” He wrote, “It is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary.”

The State Department told U.S. citizens to evacuate 16 countries as tensions mount in the Middle East.

• Rubio said Americans should call a State Department hotline for assistance evacuating. But as of Tuesday morning, a recorded message informed callers, “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation,” NOTUS’ Torrie Herrington and Anna Kramer reported.

• The department later said in a statement that it was “actively helping” Americans book commercial flights and facilitating charter planes.

The Hill

Wow, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is so mad at Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. He had previously called on her to resign, but today he tore into her at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, calling her tenure “a disaster.”

• “I don’t know if you’ll have time to respond because I’m giving you a performance evaluation, I’m not looking for a response,” he told her.

The retiring Tillis took her to task over delays in FEMA disaster aid approval, how she has handled immigration agents killing two citizens in Minneapolis, the administration’s deportation strategy and the episode in her book where she wrote about killing a family dog.

• “You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time in training,” he said. “And then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices.”

The House and Senate are teed up to vote on war powers resolutions this week. But Rep. Josh Gottheimer and other centrist Democrats are backing a more moderate resolution that would give Trump 30 days to make the case to Congress on attacking Iran.

The Administration

An appointee to the vaccine advisory committee has a long history of publicly advocating against vaccines. NOTUS’ Margaret Manto reports that Angelina Farella, a Texas-based pediatrician, has baselessly claimed that mRNA vaccines can cause “some kind of unusual hepatitis in children,” labeled the RSV vaccine an “utter failure” and made calls on social media to “#stoptheshots.”

Lawmakers pressed top Pentagon adviser Elbridge Colby on how the Iran strikes fit into the larger National Defense Strategy memo, which says “very little about the Middle East,” per Sen. Roger Wicker.

Trump said the U.S. will offer naval escorts and political risk insurance to tankers traveling through the Strait of Hormuz.

• Tankers have stopped traversing the strait, which is an essential shipping lane for a significant portion of the world’s oil and gas supply, causing an extraordinary bottleneck and pushing up oil prices, per NOTUS’ Anna Kramer. If the U.S. does provide both insurance and naval escorts, tankers could begin traveling again, easing some of the pressure on prices.

Don’t Make Dog People Mad

Tillis has been mad about this one for a while. Throwback to 2024:

Thank you for reading! Today’s newsletter was produced by Matt Berman and Andrew Burton. If you liked it, please forward it to a friend. If someone shared it with you, please subscribe — it’s free! Got a tip or comments to share? Email us at finalnotus@notus.com.