Let’s Hope America’s Dumbest War Doesn’t Become Its Most Tragic

As we barrel toward the ninth week of this two- or three-week war, virtually all of the reporting and most of the commentary is focused on the strategery of the moment: who really controls the Strait of Hormuz, when the ceasefire might actually end, what Donald Trump might do next. That’s all understandable. But it also means that this is a good time to take a step back and summarize exactly what Trump has done here, because if we look at it from 30,000 feet, we see exactly what so many of us knew was dangerous about putting this unstable and petty and frankly stupid man back in the Oval Office.

To put it in a phrase: He and he alone created the conditions that made war possible. He and he alone created the chaos that, he then told the American people and the world, made war necessary. Imagine the mayor of a town where there were acute ethnic or racial tensions taking office and inheriting a fragile but holding truce between the antagonistic parties. He then annuls that truce, calling it weak and fraudulent. Tensions, predictably, flare up again. And the mayor sends in armed agents to disarm the minority. And while he’s doing it, he threatens to destroy their entire culture and compares himself to Jesus, while the man in charge of the military operations constantly invokes God and Jesus as being on his side.

That’s what has happened here. Trump backed out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Barack Obama and five other nations had negotiated with Iran. Was it perfect? Of course not. It was a compromise, with an enemy that hates the United States. But it capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent—far, far short of the level required to make nuclear arms—until 2030. Most provisions expired in 10 years (2025). Still, that’s not nothing. Experts agreed that it was working, and Iran was abiding by its terms, and it left it for a future administration to pick up the baton.

Trump, far from picking the baton up, threw it in the incinerator. The JCPOA ran to around 160 pages. The chance that Trump actually read it is zero. In fact, the agreement, minus the annexes, was only 18 pages. And still, we know to a 99.55 percent certainty that the chance Trump read even those 18 pages is zero. Those 18 pages were agreed to by Obama. That was all Trump needed to know. So he withdrew from the agreement in May 2018. He imposed stricter sanctions and announced a policy of “maximum pressure.” Oooh, tough! Amurka, baby!

But what happened? The other signatory nations tried to hold things together, but without the United States, everyone knew that was a joke. Iran very quickly increased its enrichment. By 2020, outlets were reporting that “Iran is now enriching more uranium than it did before it agreed to the landmark nuclear deal with world powers in 2015, President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday.” It went from 3.67 percent to 60 percent.

In other words: Trump made this problem. Entirely and solely. By pulling out of the JCPOA in 2018, he ensured that Iran would start breaking the terms of the deal. He’s the one who made Iran strong. Then, eight years later, he comes back to us and says, Bad Iran! They broke the terms of the deal! They’re too strong. We must invade them.

But it’s actually even worse than that. Because we didn’t invade Iran because they broke the terms of the deal. We invaded Iran because Trump, having conquered (in his mind) America, needed to conquer farther reaches. Venezuela got him thinking, Hey, this war stuff is kinda fun. So he figured he’d be the guy who toppled the hated regime. A few bombs. Easy-peasy.

It was only when it became clear that it wasn’t easy that Trump settled on his current rationale for the war (that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon). Because at first, the rationale was regime change. And we took out the supreme leader, and Trump probably thought well, that was that. But that just handed everything to the supreme leader’s son, who is more radical, and whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. bombs. So when it became clear even to Trump that the regime wasn’t going to change, he settled on the rationale about nuclear weapons. And he’s actually been reasonably consistent about it over the last, oh, three weeks or so; shown far more discipline on this one point than he’s ever shown on anything.

It’s a fine rationale. I agree with it, in fact. But there’s a little problem with it. Namely, that Iran is today a hell of a lot closer to nuclear weapons than it was in 2015, after Obama’s deal. So Trump, who created this problem, now tells us that he may have to solve it by eliminating Persian civilization, one of the great civilizations in the history of humanity (these last 47 years, not even a blink of an eye in human history, notwithstanding).

The United States has fought a lot of dumb and unnecessary wars. And it’s fought a lot of wars that cost more lives than this one has so far. But this one has to be the most unnecessary war of all. And now here we sit, the whole world nervously watching the president of the United States, whom everyone in every capital around the globe knows to be impulsive and ignorant and concerned mainly with his vanity, wondering what he’ll do next—hoping that America’s most unnecessary war doesn’t also become its most tragic.

The Great Sphinx of Giza stands 66 feet tall. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is around 180 feet. Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, 164 feet. The Sydney Opera House soars to 220 feet. But all would be dwarfed by the Arc de Trump, whose golden (of course) statues would rise to 250 feet above the entrance to the Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for 430,000 soldiers who gave their lives for this country. You know them; they’re the ones Donald Trump called “suckers.”

Trump says the arch will commemorate America’s 250th birthday, but let’s be honest: It will commemorate Donald Trump. If this monstrosity ever gets built, no one driving or cycling by it along the George Washington Memorial Parkway will look at it and think of the Declaration of Independence or Ben Franklin or John Hancock. They’ll think of one man. And that’s exactly how he wants it.

The federal Commission of Fine Arts officially gave its approval to the project on Thursday. We’ll come back to that commission—who they are, and the testimony they took before casting their votes. But first, for those of you who live outside Washington, I want to describe this place physically so people understand why this arch would land in Memorial Circle with all the grace of a walrus hogging an ice floe.

On many warm-weather weekends, I go for longish bike rides. Washington is one of America’s great bike-riding cities—it has copious bike lanes and the downtown area is mostly flat and incredibly scenic, with the monuments and all the lovely waterfront parks. (Trump also, by the way, wants to steal East Potomac Park, home to an admittedly down-at-heel but historic public golf course as well as gorgeous picnic and fishing areas, from the people and convert it into, you guessed it, a “world-class” private country club.) Most times, I drive down from my home in Maryland and park (for free, and there’s always a space) at the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, better known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, which is right next to Arlington Cemetery. I circle the memorial and go past the Netherlands Carillon, the modernist bell tower (127 feet high, incidentally) given by the people of that country to the United States for the latter’s role in liberating them from the Nazis.

I then zip across the Memorial Bridge, generally regarded as the city’s most beautiful, with its neoclassical arches, its martial yet tasteful statuary, and its wide pebbled sidewalks, and find myself face to face with the glorious Lincoln Memorial, the reflecting pool, and all the rest. I never, ever do this without feeling grateful to live here and to be able to do something so pedestrian (so to speak) as take a bike ride while being among these and so many other treasures.

I should add a few words about the graceful entrance to Arlington Cemetery. The National Park Service, which owns the land, calls this the Memorial Avenue Corridor. It was designed in the early twentieth century by none other than America’s most famous architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, under project architect William Mitchell Kendall, who also worked on the Washington Square Arch (75 feet tall), the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, and the main New York post office building, now in use as the wonderful Moynihan Station.

When you cross Memorial Bridge from Washington into Virginia, the traffic merges into the GW Parkway via a traffic circle, which is the Memorial Circle where Trump wants to plant his arch. It sits on an island, Columbia Island, which, though closer to Virginia, is actually part of the District of Columbia. Behind the circle, in a straight line from the bridge, is Memorial Avenue, a broad boulevard about 500 feet long that leads to the cemetery entrance. Its distinguishing feature is something the NPS calls the Hemicycle, a half-circle, Beaux-Arts style retaining wall designed in the early 1930s by the McKim firm. It’s all graceful and understated; it announces itself with a humility that is appropriate to so solemn a space. In the words of a 2004 NPS document I fished out: “Arlington Memorial Bridge and its features were intended to be both a monumental entry to the federal city and a formal, processional route to Arlington National Cemetery.”

I should add a word or two on the size of Memorial Circle, which in the coverage I’ve read has gone largely undiscussed. Trump’s arch, at 250 feet (the arch itself would be 190 feet, topped by a 60-foot golden statue of an angel, alongside two shorter statues of golden eagles), would be about as tall as a 20-story office or residential building. For perspective, there is in D.C. no such thing because of its stringent height restrictions. The city’s tallest commercial building is Franklin Square at 13th and K Streets, which is 12 stories and, with its spires, rises to 210 feet. (Its tallest residential building is The Cairo near Dupont Circle, at 164 feet, which was completed in 1894—and caused public backlash that led to the height restrictions that are still in place today.)

A 20-story building requires a certain footprint for the scale to be right. I searched the web in vain to find the exact square footage of Memorial Circle, but it’s small. If you go to Google Maps and move your cursor around, you’ll see that it’s clearly smaller than Dupont Circle; smaller than the circle that surrounds the Lincoln Memorial (99 feet high); much smaller than The Ellipse on the White House grounds; and not large enough to fit, say, the National Air and Space Museum, or the National Gallery of Art.

So to summarize, what Trump wants: would be far too large for the space; would undoubtedly tangle traffic because its mere overwhelming presence would force motorists to slow down; would dwarf everything around it; and would utterly disrupt the “formal, processional route” to the national cemetery.

Those are undoubtedly some of the reasons why the 1,000-odd comments received by the Commission of Fine Arts ran literally 100 percent against the arch, according to The Washington Post. This did not prevent the seven commissioners—all appointed by Trump back in January—from approving the project and heaping the usual sycophantic praise on it (one commissioner did suggest ditching the statues). Here, for the record, are their names. Only one is known to me: Roger Kimball, the longtime editor of The New Criterion. An intelligent and literary fellow, but stridently right wing and MAGA to his core.

It’s a disgrace. Again—whatever they’re billing it as, it’s a monument to Trump, just like he’s trying to turn the Kennedy Center into a monument to Trump (just wait: Today, he shares billing with JFK; there’s no doubt in my mind that plans are afoot to erase JFK from the center entirely). On that now-sad venue, read the blistering piece posted this week at The Atlantic by a former curator there.

God willing, the next president is a Democrat. He or she will have a lot of work to do and much damage to undo. But he or she absolutely must say on day one: We’re tearing down this arch; we’re razing Trump’s ballroom and rebuilding the East Wing mostly as it was; and the Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center. Any Democratic president who fails to do these things deserves the nation’s scorn. Washington ceremonial architecture, like the government itself, must be returned to the purpose for which it exists—to promote democracy, not the demented, bruised ego of one sick man.

Hey, Donald Trump, you just launched a war that you’re losing, that’s costing you millions of supporters, that’s tanking your standing among even Republicans, that has the likes of Alex Jones accusing you of contemplating “genocide” and Tucker Carlson labeling your comments “vile on every level.” What are you going to do for an encore?

Hey, I know. How about breaking up NATO and trying for regime change in Cuba?

He may, he may not. Who ever knows with this guy? But both are live possibilities. Trump threw a tantrum about NATO this week, issuing an “ultimatum” to European countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bellyaching about their general lack of support for his war. Cuba is largely under a U.S. blockade that has resulted in massive energy shortages. A month ago, before the reality of Iran had quite set in, Trump bragged that Cuba was next, saying, “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon, by the way.” Just yesterday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said he wasn’t going anywhere.

Here’s the important thing to understand about Trump at this particular point in time. He does not think like a democrat (small d). He thinks like a dictator. A democrat who understood his obligations in a democratic system to the voters who put him in office would stop and think: Gee, the people don’t approve of what I’m doing. Maybe I should pull back a little. And who knows—maybe he will. There are peace talks with Iran this weekend in Pakistan, even though Iran is walking into them with a 10-point plan that Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu) want no part of. But there actually is precedent for Trump seeing that what he was doing was unpopular—the ICE disaster in Minneapolis, most notably—and making a course correction.

Granted, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of other situations in which he’s responded to public opinion. America doesn’t like anything he’s doing, except on sealing the border. Otherwise, he’s in the tank. And by the way, I alluded above to his weak numbers among Republicans: In one recent poll, he’s down to 81 percent among Republicans. That may sound high, but in fact, for that particular category, it’s low. A president’s support within his own party ought to be close to or above 90. Here’s a little context. The 1988 presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was a blowout, right? Right. Dukakis got 83 percent of Democrats’ votes. And he got shellacked. That’s what 80-ish percent among your party leads to.

But even as the walls close in on him, Trump is no more likely to think like a democrat. He will think like the dictator he imagines himself to be. He will think, as dictators do, about three things: To the extent that he cares what the public thinks, he will focus his thoughts on how best to distract their attention and get them thinking about something else; he will think about ways to clamp down on dissent (and more specifically in this case, leakers); and finally, and never to be forgotten with this grubby mountebank, how to make a buck off the current mess.

Let’s break these down. The first thought is the one that will carry Trump to try something with Cuba, or to try to bust out of NATO. He needs headlines that aren’t about Iran. But he also needs headlines that start “Trump moves to” and “Trump declares.”

That’s what matters. It scarcely makes any difference whether these moves are popular. Busting up NATO would of course be monstrously unpopular (and the president cannot simply leave NATO, though laws haven’t stopped him before). Toppling the Cuban regime might in fact be somewhat popular, depending on how it goes. But again, we’ll need to see what China and Russia have to say about that before the final verdict is in. It is liable to be more complicated than Trump imagines, simply because these things usually are.

The second thought is one to take very seriously right now. Zeteo’s Asawin Subsaeng reported this week that Trump is directing a furious hunt for people who leaked info to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for that huge piece about how Trump decided to start this war. The piece is actually an excerpt from their upcoming book, which is expected to contain still more embarrassing details about the Trump regime. “In conversations with close aides and advisers, President Trump has loudly demanded to know who in his Cabinet or his team blabbed” to the reporters, Swin wrote. This is the sort of thing that obsesses dictators.

And finally, never forget that Trump is always on the lookout for his next swindle. Coming up on April 25 is a luncheon at Mar-a-Lago billed as “the most exclusive crypto & business conference in the world.” The announcement of the luncheon jacked up the price of the $Trump meme coin for a minute. It’s not 100 percent certain Trump will be there. But where else would he be? Maybe the golf course.

Consider this week in full. The abominable Easter Sunday social media post that dropped the f-bomb and mocked Islam. The far more abominable post two days later about destroying one of history’s most accomplished civilizations. The complete and utter backing down from it hours later. The phantom ceasefire, which Netanyahu obviously intentionally wrecked. The phony peace plan, on which the belligerent nations are miles apart. Anemic economic growth (0.5 percent, and yes, that’s point-five). Inflation above 3 percent.

And perhaps most of all, Trump’s wife appearing to throw him under the bus. Not that she’s any hero. But she’s pretty clearly preparing for the day when the Epstein files are made public and she may have to cut bait, depending on what’s in them.

To any other president, this would be the time to straighten up and fly right. To this one, it’s the perfect time to blow up the most important and durable military alliance in the history of the human race.

In every age, there are moments large and small that somehow manage to capture the regnant ideology in all its proud and decadent vulgarity. You know these moments when you see them because your first reaction is not intellectual but physical—you feel that involuntary revulsion not in your brain but somewhere down around what they call in the Yiddish language your kishkes. I believe the modern word for it is cringey. It’s like watching the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office, except it’s not played for laughs. Those involved couldn’t possibly be more serious—and oblivious to how they look to the rest of the world.

A lot of important and appalling things happened this week that ought to be preoccupying me, but somehow, I have not been able to free myself from thinking about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s presentation to President Trump of the first annual “America First” award on Wednesday night. Future historians will ask, as many of us have asked in our own time, how this ridiculous cult could have grown around this ridiculous fraud of a man—how these Republicans could have decided that their pride, their virtue, their consciences are so worthless to them that they willingly participate in such staged exercises in hollow flattery.

There are longer clips floating around of Johnson discussing this award and praising Trump, but in the interest of sparing your mental health, I’ll expose you only to the brief, 30-second version here. Trust me, it’s enough to make the point.

“The president has done so much for the American people, and we want to honor him in some small way, some token of our appreciation for his leadership,” Johnson beamed at the fundraising dinner of the National Republican Campaign Committee in Washington. “And so tonight, we have created a new award. We’re going to do something we’ve never done before. We are going to honor him with a new award that we will present annually from this point forward. But he is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first ever America First Award. We can think of no better title for what that is. That’s this beautiful golden statue here; appropriate, for the new golden era in America.”

Disappointingly, the golden statue was not a calf. But these people lack the sense of humor and self-knowledge to have done that. It was, predictably, an eagle—wings spread, talons exposed, prey about to meet its fate. Kind of like Trump imagines himself vis-à-vis Iran, with the difference that eagles have been known to stalk prey for hours, whereas Trump can’t keep any single thought in his head for longer than 10 minutes and has, in the month since the war started, announced about four different rationales for the war and changed strategy roughly every half hour. Any eagle with Trump’s attention span would starve to death in a matter of days.

That aside, there are two points to make about this. The first concerns Johnson’s oleaginous sycophancy. The quote above in print doesn’t quite do it justice. You have to watch it, experience his self-satisfied smarminess, his bottomless self-abasement. Remember, this is a man who has compared himself to Moses. If Moses had behaved toward Pharaoh the way Johnson does toward Trump, his people would have needed to wait for another deliverer.

The second concerns the need to treat Trump like a 5-year-old. It’s a need the corrupt FIFA head Gianni Infantino recognized when he awarded Trump the preposterous FIFA Peace Prize in December, and that Trump’s Cabinet members intuit at those laughable meetings where they try to top one another in offering him false and flatulent praise. It’s hard to know, of course, whether these people have no idea how pathetic they look to the rest of the world, or they do know and just don’t care.

Either way, it’s a sight to behold: the awarding to the president of the United States a series of participation trophies. I thought conservatives hated participation trophies, which derive from that oh-so-liberal instinct to protect children’s feelings. This is one point on which I actually kind of agree with the conservative position. No, every child who participated in the swim meet didn’t win. Someone won. The others lost. The winner should be recognized. And kids are smart; they pretty quickly cotton on to the fact that if everyone is getting the same trophy, the trophy is worthless. Trump is either too vain or too dumb to understand what most 7-year-olds grok after about three swim meets.

We also learned this week that Trump will add his signature to our currency. This comes on the heels of last week’s news that the United States will mint a Trump coin, which the Commission on Fine Arts, a seven-member panel appointed by the president, recommended be made “as large as possible.” Said Vice Chairman James McCrery II: “In terms of the diameter, I think the president likes big things. Generally, I do too.” I’ll let that one pass.

All this is happening, of course, while Trump’s poll numbers are tanking—even over at Fox News—and the country is in collapse. This war is a mess. You’d hardly know it from most news coverage, but Iran’s attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East have been successful enough that many troops have had to evacuate, working remotely from nearby hotels and office buildings. Trump thought the war would be over by now, but it isn’t, and he’s at sea—tugged in one direction by Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman to level Iran, and in the other by his desire not to go down in history as the man who brought the world economy to its knees. And then there’s the airports, inflation, immigration, and everything else on which the American people are giving him failing grades.

What a perfect time for a new award! Actually, by fascist logic, it is: As material conditions for the people worsen, the leader must be praised all the more fulsomely, the make-believe enforced all the more vigorously. Will anyone come along to shatter the myth—to be the Jan at the dinner party, throwing Michael’s Dundie against the plasma TV screen? Not likely, anytime soon. Cults only intensify until the moment they explode.

I don’t understand why everyone is so upset about Donald Trump’s invocation of Pearl Harbor during his tête-à-tête with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. I mean, we learned that Trump actually knows who bombed Pearl Harbor. Shouldn’t we just take that W?

All right. Yes, it was a mortifying moment on so many different levels. A Japanese reporter asked him why he didn’t inform U.S. allies before starting the Iran war. Trump muttered a couple sentences about the element of surprise and then said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

First, of course, is how deeply offensive this was to an ally of 80 years—an ally that lived under American occupation, albeit in a comparatively benign form, for seven years. Takaichi said nothing, and indeed later in the day she flattered Trump in the appallingly fulsome way world leaders have learned they need to do, as with a small child. Reaction in Japan seems to be what we’ve come to expect: a combination of outrage and resignation that the president of the United States is both an idiot and a moral eunuch, from whom such simultaneously tedious and offensive bilge is expected.

For my money, one word in particular jumped out: “me.” Really? On December 7, 1941, Trump was four and a half years short of being born. But that small detail didn’t prevent him from conflating himself with the state. Someone else once did that. The Parlement of Paris contested certain royal edicts in 1655, and that’s when Louis XIV supposedly delivered his famous “L’état, c’est moi”; we knew that Trump believes he is the state, but he’s never expressed it quite so nakedly.

Then there’s the fact that the United States wasn’t an ally of Japan in 1941. Kind of an important difference. But most of all, in likening the U.S. attack on Iran to the Japanese attack on Hawaii, Trump was saying it was a good thing that the United States emulated the actions of a fascist regime that had killed millions and raped infants in China. Still, the details of history mean nothing to Trump. History is only about great men, and whether they win or lose.

Speaking of which: Trump’s reliably windy and adipose rhetoric notwithstanding, this war is not going amazingly well. The American and Israeli militaries are good at what they do. We know that. But what, exactly, are they doing? And are they actually seeking the same objective? Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does, and it likely involves occupying big chunks of southern Lebanon and toppling the Iranian regime, which will almost surely require the ground troops Trump has gingerly begun to mention.

The potential lack of coordination between these two armies and their governments opens the way for some huge problems ahead. Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field provoked a rare rebuke from Trump because Iran responded to the strike by hitting Qatari natural gas facilities. The attack wiped out 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas export capacity for the next five years. Experts say this is likely to impact many kinds of energy-related expenses, and for a lot longer than three months.

Look: For the sake of the people of Iran, I hope Trump’s gamble ends up paying off. But history tells us that all kinds of unexpected things happen in war. That’s why democratically accountable leaders generally don’t launch them without having really thought matters through (that the United States has defied this dictum twice in this century will linger as a dark stain on this country’s reputation for many decades to come).

Trump doesn’t think of himself as democratically accountable (and we can thank the Supreme Court for furnishing jurisprudential backing for that belief). The state, it is he. Any hope that he might learn something from history is of course delusional; to learn from history, he’d have to care about it. So he believed, or was convinced—and with the flattery that undoubtedly accompanied the advice he was getting in mid-February, it surely didn’t take much convincing—that he, the mighty Trump, the god-king, the Jesus-touched general in the Armageddon war against lunatic Peter Thiel’s Antichrist, could topple a government by sheer dint of his will.

That’s precisely the kind of thing you come to believe when you’ve cheated your way through life and never been caught; when you’ve fleeced hundreds of people and gotten away with it, with prosecutors deciding, as longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did, that you’re too powerful to indict; when you’ve lied habitually and seen that lying, far from imposing any price of social ostracism, actually works to your benefit virtually every time; when your social world consists solely of flatterers who marvel over your tacky taste and congratulate you when you insist your triple bogey was a par; when the founder of a leading network in a multibillion-dollar media apparatus essentially acknowledged under oath that said network’s stars lied on your behalf about a matter as consequential as a presidential election result; and when you and this armada of sycophants have duped millions of people who checked their common sense at the door that you have the unilateral power to lower gas and beef prices.

Am I overstating things? Do I suffer—gasp—from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Elsewhere today on this site, Simon Lazarus issues a sharp and necessary reminder to liberals not to get overly obsessed with Trump himself—to bear in mind the movement and the intellectuals that support him.

He’s right about that. At the same time, though, I’d say that we shouldn’t even accept the presumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome applies to people like us. It does not. The people who suffer from TDS in this country are the ones who support him. And it’s getting worse: This week, Nate Silver found Trump’s approval slipping into uncharted territory, and approval of the war generally polls in the 30s—but at the same time, an NBC News poll discovered that among self-identified MAGAs, Trump’s approval stood literally at 100 percent to zero.

They’re the ones with TDS. You and I have Trump Awareness Syndrome. We see his un-thought-out war—and by the way, if it’s almost over, why is he asking Congress for $200 billion?—and we hear him utter vacuous and offensive statements like the Pearl Harbor remark, and we know all too well what he’s doing to this country. Awareness is a far heavier burden than derangement.