By any rational measure, Donald Trump is the last person on Earth who should be handed the authority to start a war. He’s a man whose greatest hits include multiple bankruptcies, the collapse of Trump University, the farcical failure of a “beautiful” health care plan that never materialized during his first term, and the catastrophic mismanagement of a pandemic that killed over a million Americans.
And now, somehow, this man, who couldn’t manage a casino in Atlantic City, or an airline, or a professional football team, among other gigantic failures was at the helm of a military strike against Iran, a nation of nearly 90 million people, with a vast and powerful network of allies and proxies.
Yesterday, Iran fired their first strike, reportedly on a U.S. military base in Qatar. However, after a ceasefire was announced last night, Iran and Israel have accused the other of violating it. This morning, using a harsh expletive, Trump went after both countries.
Could Trump have gotten in the way of this ceasefire? He rushed to Truth Social yesterday all but assuring the world that there was an agreement, boasting about it, not as a step toward peace, but about his own deal-making abilities. As he usually does, he let his impulsive and unpredictable nature bend the truth, without thinking about the ramifications.
Trump is a man who once floated the idea of nuking hurricanes, putting Clorox in our bodies, and said he’d end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on his first day back in office, and now he has just decided to bomb a nuclear-ambitious country.
There was no robust congressional debate, no coalition-building with allies, no clear-eyed strategic plan.
It was just Trump, a man who views global affairs as another episode of The Apprentice, deciding that it’s time to “send a message” by launching airstrikes that could ignite a regional or even global war. And make him look like a warrior, to quote Pete Hegseth.
Trump and his advisers claim the strikes are not about regime change. That’s what they say. But Trump, ever the chaos agent, is already publicly musing about regime change anyway, undermining his own team and throwing fuel on the fire. As Politico reported this week, even as top aides like J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio insist regime change is off the table, Trump is already talking like a would-be kingmaker. Or worse: a wartime emperor.
The result? Confusion, chaos, and a chilling sense of déjà vu.
We’ve been here before. We were told Iraqis would shower our troops with flowers by George W. Bush and his errant neoconservatives. We were told Afghanistan would become a beacon of democracy, over several administrations. We were told surgical strikes could topple evil without consequences.
And we believed it, until thousands of Americans came home in body bags and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans were killed. We believed it until we spent untold billions and left nations in ruins. You just never go in and bomb and think it will be one and done.
And now here we are again, under the leadership of a man who doesn't read briefings, who mocks generals, who brags about not listening to experts, and who operates entirely in a bravado of impulse, ego, and misinformation.
And yet Trump thinks this is a “one-and-done.” A quick airstrike and mission accomplished. Remember “Mission Accomplished”? It’s laughable, if it weren’t so lethal.
It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the world is being gambled away by a man who treats nuclear diplomacy the way, well, Trump treats one of his so-called “deals.” This is not a careful, calculated use of military force. This is a man playing at war because he wants to look strong, because the headlines were bad last week, because the rally crowd needed a hit of jingoistic adrenaline.
Or, dare I say, he’s trying to make up for the disaster of his “military parade.”
Let’s not forget this, and that’s Trump isn’t just an impulsive warmonger, he’s a losing impulsive decisionmaker and dealmaker. He’s lost in the courts. He’s lost at the ballot box. He’s lost credibility with every Western ally. His only consistent “victory” is creating chaos, and then pretending the fire he started proves he’s the only one who can put it out.
In other words, he bizarrely creates a problem, then swoops in and says he’s the only man who can fix it.
The truly terrifying part is that the American public has become desensitized to Trump’s recklessness. After so many years of corruption, incompetence, and lies, a decision to bomb another country barely registers as a news flash. But we must resist the normalization of this madness.
War isn’t a distraction. It’s not a PR move. It’s not a tool to raise his polling numbers. It is life and death, for Americans, for Iranians, for Israelis, and for countless others who will be caught in the ripple effects, and in the middle, of this blundering foreign policy disaster.
The confluence of Trump’s ignorance, arrogance, and the danger of an unpredictable Iran, should chill all of us. He has never made a good decision in his life. And we’re trusting him with one of the biggest?
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