A mad king’s pointless war is where Donald Trump was always heading

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

— Donald Trump’s second inaugural address, Jan. 20

In a sense, you gotta hand it to Donald Trump. America’s 45th and 47th president — and first dictator — may have made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his first term, but he started his second term with arguably the most prescient and honest words he’s uttered since descending from his golden escalator 10 years and one week ago.

A mad king’s impulsive, unchecked decision on Saturday to send waves of U.S. B-2 bombers halfway around the globe to drop the world’s most powerful nonnuclear bombs on three targets inside Iran is indeed a perfect way to measure Trump’s success after just over five months back in the White House.

And by every measure, Trump 47 has been an abject failure.

One week after five million Americans flooded the streets for a massive “No Kings” protest, with his approval rating heading underwater faster than the next climate-fueled flash flood, with his masked secret police deportation drive starting to alienate his own voters, with gas prices and 20-something unemployment starting to soar, and almost zero legislation despite GOP control of Congress, Trump showed that even a POTUS who hates canines can still wag the dog.

It took another epic failure — the inability of any of America’s democratic institutions since World War II to constrain the war-making abilities of an “imperial president,” which is a polite euphemism for “emperor” — to give Trump this option: to try and reinvent his disastrous reign by picking up the phone and ordering death and destruction 6,500 miles away.

Let’s be clear about what just happened. This is not America’s war. Those bombs were not dropped on Iran in my name, or yours. This is Donald Trump’s war, and his alone. There is arguably no justification for waging unprovoked war, either under U.S. or international law. There is certainly no moral or logical justification. In launching an attack without consent from Congress, without public debate, and with minimal consultation with allies, Trump’s move is the 180-degree opposite of what America’s founders intended.

Rep. Ro Khanna, the California Democrat (and Bucks County native) who’s a leading critic of presidential abuse of war powers, told me Saturday night in a text interview that Trump’s Iran bombs are “unconstitutional and put our troops at risk, and create a generation of hate.” He added his concern that America’s entering the war that Israel launched just over one week ago could accelerate Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, rather than deter it.

Khanna’s Democratic House colleague, Rep. Sean Casten, went even further. “This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program,” he tweeted Saturday night. “No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense.”

It is, indeed. But — as Casten acknowledged in a subsequent post — impeachment is not a serious option as long as a zombie cult of MAGA Republicans holds sway in the House, even by the current razor-thin margin. But we won’t even start rolling back this nightmare until we can have a clear-eyed national conversation about what the bombing of Iranian nuclear-enrichment sites at Fordo, Isfahan, and Natanz was really about.

And what it wasn’t about.

The sober websites of elite mainstream news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post are already filling up with news analyses and commentary about what geopolitical strategy might have motivated this American president to bomb Iran — a strategy looked at and rejected by a half dozen predecessors — and to do so right now.

“U.S. Military Is Pulled Back Into Middle East Wars,” read the Times headline on one of the worst examples of this genre; it was as if some occult hand had dragged the United States into yet another ambiguous foreign conflict, instead of Trump’s megalomania. My advice is to read today’s foreign policy punditry with a jaundiced eye — or just not read it at all.

The irony is that almost all Americans, regardless of their politics, don’t want to see Iran — one of the world’s most repressive regimes, especially toward free speech, dissent, and women’s empowerment — get a nuclear bomb. Which is why a serious American president, Barack Obama, spent much of his two terms working on achieving that peacefully. And he did in 2015, in a deal that halted Iran’s uranium enrichment.

» READ MORE: At ‘No Kings,’ millions of Americans show the flag is mightier than the tank | Will Bunch

The current wave of death in both Iran and Israel probably could have been avoided if not for another arbitrary and pointless Trump decision: to rip up Obama’s Iran deal in 2018. Not because that made the world safer. But because Trump — who showed his true self yet again last week in failing to observe the federal Juneteenth holiday — was on a mission to undo every achievement of the first Black president.

The truth is that another foreign war is always where Trump was going to take America, no matter what horse manure about world peace he spread during his 2024 presidential campaign. That’s because starting wars is what ego-driven personalist “strongmen” do — to stake their dubious claim on both national and personal greatness, to change the focus from domestic disasters and the suffering of their own people, and to create the perfect excuse to silence dissent and a free press in “the homeland.”

The archetypical fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 with dreams of “a new Roman empire” that would consolidate his authoritarian rule at home when Italy was still reeling from the Great Depression and other failures. Il Duce was also crafting the blueprint that would be followed from Adolf Hitler in Poland to Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

In Iran — a nation whose military power often falls short of its leaders’ bluster, and which has been now weakened by days of Israeli airstrikes — a beleaguered Trump convinced himself he could do a one-and-done bombing and join some exalted pantheon of “war presidents” that only exists in this POTUS’s increasingly muddled mind.

There are many subplots here. They include the extent to which Trump was manipulated by his fellow criminally troubled right-wing authoritarian, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s wanted the United States to join him in attacking Iran for decades, and why Trump ignored our own intelligence experts who insisted Iran isn’t as close to a functional nuke as claimed by Netanyahu.

Much has already been made about Trump’s supposed stance as a “peace candidate” in the 2024 campaign, and whether he’s offended the young dude-bros who helped elect him by falsely insisting that Democrat Kamala Harris was the real warmonger. It’s typical of either Trump’s lack of any truth-telling core or maybe creeping dementia that, on Saturday morning, he embarked on a bizarre rant that he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize “four or five times.” And that Saturday night’s announcement of the bomb strike in a very Trumpian Truth Social post included the claim, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE” — a turn of phrase that would have been too ironic for George Orwell in crafting 1984.

The truth is that Trump is not, in his blackened, Big Mac-clogged heart, a warmonger. Trump is also not a peacemaker. His attitude about war and peace, life and death, and policies that reverberate for 340 million Americans, 91 million Iranians, and the rest of the world centers on One Big Idea: What’s in it for Trump? His only ideology is toxic narcissism.

I don’t know what happens next, and anyone who claims to know is lying. My strong speculation is that this is not the start of some kind of World War III. Iran is degraded and has few friends, which is why Trump thinks he can score cheap political points by bombing them. But, as Khanna and other critics have pointed out, the prospect of Iranian retaliation — either against U.S. troops in the Middle East or with a terror attack on U.S. soil — is real. Trump — who frequently criticized the botched Iraq War, not from a moral perspective but because it sounded good politically — ought to know this.

But, however what’s left of Iranian leadership decides to retaliate, or not retaliate, Trump’s rash and irrational war-making is only going to accelerate America’s slide into authoritarianism. Trump would not be the first U.S. president, unfortunately, to use the threat of a terror attack to curb the First Amendment rights of everyday Americans, but he would take it to a new level. A tyrant who called out the Marines over thrown bottles and a couple of burning Waymos in Los Angeles can claim his dubious status as “a war president” to impose much more widespread repression.

This is not a time for Americans to “rally ‘round the flag” — not for a war being waged on behalf of one American and not the other 339,999,999. This is a moment for resistance and for accountability, in whatever ways are possible today, and more forcefully once the people can take our country back. And it starts with this basic understanding: that Trump is revealing the fallacy behind “strongman” rule.

He bombed Iran because he is a weak man.

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