Welcome to the beat.

Everyone, as we begin this week, Monday evening, we're tracking a lot of stories, including

the increasing problems with Donald Trump's Iran war, the way he started it, the way he's running it,

risks multiplying, oil prices are up, as everybody knows, and as we begin the third week of a unilateral war,

end game, very unclear.

Andrew Weissman will also be here later tonight as Trump tries to gut the First Amendment as

we know it. That's a story related to the war because they are trying to censor the right of

the free press from the Wall Street Journal and the Murdoch Empire all the way to other

outlets as well. And we're going to cover that without fear or favor here. We are not going to be

censored. So I have that report, which is part legal and part just the freedom to do war reporting

coming up. We begin, though, with how Donald Trump started this war alone, wanted to basically

go it alone. This was an operation that did not involve consulting Congress, other countries,

Europe, NATO. It was essentially a U.S. operation with one other country involved Israel,

but not any of the traditional allies that Republican and Democratic administrations have relied on in the

Middle East and in general throughout really the last, say, 60 years of post-World War II

foreign policy. And so going it alone was a choice, just as starting the war was a choice.

And we are seeing very quickly how that choice is working. I'm going to show you the evidence,

not opinion,

not saying that the news has some monopoly on how to do foreign policy, but just what we're

learning about that choice. I can tell you off top as we start the third week of the war,

that 13 American service members have been killed here. Another 200 have been injured.

Some of those

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