The Worst Person at the Worst Time
Donald’s unilateral, unprovoked, and illegal war
The last thing I thought before I fell asleep last night was, “We are at war.” The first thing I thought when I woke up this morning was, “We are at war.” I didn’t distance myself from it because there are some acts nations take for which we all will bear the burden of collective responsibility no matter how vehemently individual citizens might disagree with them.
As a country, we are at war and the man who led us into this war is a corrupt, degraded, ignorant know-nothing who acted illegally to plunge us into a potentially catastrophic situation without the consent of Congress because, despite the fact that he is president of the United States of America and arguably the most recognized figure on the planet, he wasn’t getting enough attention.
It is long past time that we stop imputing some deeper or reasonable motives to Donald Trump. Despite being depraved and cruel, much like his cohort Benjamin Netanyahu, he is driven by the most primitive impulses that center almost solely around protecting his fragile ego from humiliation (about which he has a pathological terror) and himself from the reality that he is a complete fraud.
Donald is still no doubt stinging from the acronym recently coined to mock his inability to follow through on anything—TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out. In the wake of Israeli strikes against Iran, Donald spent a few days saber-rattling only to back off (chicken out, if you will) in the wake of searing criticism by some of the most reliably sycophantic members of his cult—e.g. Rep. Marjorie Green (R-GA), Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon). He announced at a bizarre press conference that his decision to address the ostensibly urgent crisis regarding Iran would be put off for two weeks.
Only two days later, he ordered the attack on Iran. His allies would have us believe that Donald, a brilliant strategist, was faking us out. Sure. An infinitely more plausible explanation is that, on the one hand, he hates being challenged or contradicted, especially from those who almost always fall in line; therefore, he felt the need to double-down on his threats by carrying them out. On the other hand, Donald is a desperate black hole of need—by changing the narrative, he could make sure the spotlight turned back on him.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Donald wrote this on his failing social media site:
We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
“Thank you for your attention to this matter?” It’s worth reminding ourselves that the United States is currently in thrall to an insane person. Also, you do not engage in unilateral, unprovoked bombings of another country, declare victory, and then just walk away. J.D. Vance can claim as much as he wants that the United States is “at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” but I’m fairly certain Iranians won’t see it that way.
In another post, Donald wrote:
This is an HISTORIC MOMENT FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ISRAEL, AND THE WORLD. IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR.” That’s not how it works. Israel and America are the aggressors here. In his remarks, Abbas Araghchi, foreign minister of Iran, remarked that Donald has “betrayed Iran” and “betrayed diplomacy” while the two countries were in the midst of negotiations as well as deceiving “his own voters” after promising to stay out of foreign wars. He also said that Iran would respond in the name of “self-defense.
This does not bode well for the thousands of American troops in the Middle East who are in close proximity to Iran, many of whom are within minutes of a potential missile strike.
By defying very clear international law in order to bomb Iran, Donald has put this country on the wrong side of this issue. I am not at all an expert in these matters, but I doubt Iran will choose to engage in an all-out war with the United States. At the moment, it is a considerably weakened nation and its allies, the other so-called “axis of resistance states” which include Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen, are much weaker now than they were eighteen months ago. But there are other potential dangers to our having engaged in this conflict—again, without our having faced an immediate threat from the country we attacked: for example, our vulnerability to terrorist attacks has increased exponentially.
In a press conference announcing the strikes, Donald claimed that Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities were “completely and totally obliterated” by American strikes, but that is far from clear. During a joint press conference this morning, neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could make that determination. In other words, Iran may continue to have the ability to produce nuclear weapons.
When you consider that Fordow, one of the three nuclear sites targeted, was built inside a mountain and that, according to The New York Times, experts have determined “the enrichment facilities were impervious to all but a repeated assault from American ‘bunker buster’ bombs,” it is highly unlikely Iran’s program has been “obliterated.”
As to the degree to which Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons was imminent, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) wrote on social media, “Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” Murphy says he was briefed last week by our own intelligence agencies and, according to them, “Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States.” Donald disagreed, claiming that our intelligence is “wrong.” After Tulsi Gabbard, his own Director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, Donald’s response was, “I don’t care what she said.”
As for Iran’s nuclear capabilities, it’s worth remembering that during Barack Obama’s second term, the United States—along with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, and China—came up with and implemented a solution. Known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran Nuclear Deal, this “blocked every possible pathway Iran could use to build a nuclear bomb while ensuring . . . through a comprehensive, intrusive, and unprecedented verification and transparency regime -- that Iran’s nuclear program remains exclusively peaceful moving forward.” By signing on to this agreement, Iran "significantly reduced its nuclear program and accepted strict monitoring and verification safeguards to ensure its program is solely for peaceful purposes.”
Despite his professed concerns about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Donald unilaterally pulled the United States out of the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018. Despite his professed concerns about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Netanyahu objected to the deal from the start in large part because it removed one of his clearest excuses to attack Iran. Keep in mind, Netanyahu has been saying for years that Iran’s having nuclear capability was imminent.
At last night’s press conference, Donald made yet more threats:
There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left…if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill.
This isn’t over—not by a long-shot. The president of the United State authorized an unprovoked military strike without Congressional authorization in an egregious violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers.
There are four potential outcomes here that are not mutually exclusive: the political rehabilitation of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu; attacks on American soldiers in close proximity to Iran; terrorist attacks on American soil; and increased executive power as the Republican Congress cedes yet more of its Constitutional authority to Donald fucking Trump.
For me, this is the most important line of this important piece: "It is long past time that we stop imputing some deeper or reasonable motives to Donald Trump." I am beginning to lose my mind listening to news programs blindly, cowardly, or cluelessly try to ascribe adult or reasonable motives to Donald's actions. Everything he does is just a spasm coming from his desperate pathology, astonishing stupidity, and the quick rotting of the 2 or 3 brain cells he might have once had. I feel like every newscast should have a chyron across the bottom of the screen that says "Today, noises came out of the hole at the bottom of Trump's face" because that's the level of meaning they have. In fact, the only real meaning his words have is an endless revealing of his pathology, stupidity, and senility.
I wonder what the allies and the Hague are thinking of this and maybe tgey will proceed with charges against trump. He must have broken dozens of international laws.