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 we 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.

You’ve surely seen or read about the video the White House put out last week that interspersed bombing footage from Iran with punishing hits from NFL and college football games, over AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” You can see it here. You will also see that it was posted on X from the official White House account, which added one word to the visuals: “Touchdown.”

Football can be an ugly business, but it does not as yet involve the bombing of schools and the killing of innocent schoolgirls. Fortunately, several of the players highlighted in the White House post have decried the use of their images in this way. Former Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis told HuffPost: “I did not approve my image or football highlights being used to compare football to war. The game I love is about discipline, brotherhood, and respect. War is something entirely different. Lives are at stake. God bless our troops and their families.” His old teammate Ed Reed, after being alerted to the use of his image by journalist and Ravens fan Ben Jacobs, wrote on X: “I do not approve this message.” And former Nebraska Cornhusker Kenny Bell told The Washington Post: “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick. I don’t want anything to do with images like that.” The cowardly NFL has yet to speak.

You may say it’s just a 30-second video and it’s about what we’d expect from these people. And you’d be right on both counts. But it seems to me this video is worth a little more exploration than that because it reveals a lot about what these apes are doing to our country. Actually, that’s insulting to apes, who live in quite sophisticated and empathetic societies. Let’s just call them vermin, although that’s probably insulting to rats too, but since it’s one of their favorite insults, let’s just turn it around on them.

Imagine being the juvenile White House staffer who came up with this idea. Imagine thinking that that was cool. How can that even happen? You have to have a love of gladiatorial violence. You have to believe that the lives of the people you’re killing have no value whatsoever. You have to revel in causing death. You have to see it all as a big joke. And you have to subscribe to a view of the world in which power, the ability to dominate and to rain down violence in extreme cases, is the only thing that really matters. And then you run it up the flagpole for approval, and everyone else thinks it’s cool too. How did we get here?

This has been the Trump ethos from the start. It would be funny, coming from such a weak and sad man: a draft dodger, a serial abuser of women (and maybe girls), a nonstop liar who’s spent 40 years hiding behind slick lawyers. But this weak and sad man, who probably couldn’t do five pushups if he had a gun held to his head, has convinced a third of the country that he’s a tough guy, and his propaganda outlets and the even weaker and sadder men in his party (the disgraceful Senator Lindsey Graham) have reinforced this hideous image.

Democracy is supposed to exist in conjunction with certain moral values. One core idea is that might does not make right. This is an old, old notion that goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The Sophist Thrasymachus argues that justice is nothing more than “the advantage of the stronger.” Plato has Socrates responding that this is wrong and defining justice in the ways most of us understand the word today—as believing and doing the right thing, irrespective of power relationships. Remember: This is the foundational text of Western philosophy. Thrasymachus was the bad guy. There’s a reason history has chosen to venerate Plato and Socrates, and not him.

You don’t need me to tell you which regimes in the history of the world have subscribed to Thrasymachus’s definition. It’s an ugly roster—to which we must now add the government of the United States of America.

The Trump regime has proven over and over that this is its morality. The DOGE cuts that have resulted in the deaths of poor children in Africa (as many as 700,000 a year). The repulsive cruelty that Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan and ex–Border Patrol head Gregory Bovino have imposed upon people living law-abiding lives. The lawless and amoral murders of the people on those boats in the Caribbean.

And now, the prosecution of this war. It’s not that so far, we’ve killed “that many” civilians—around 1,300, although the killing of those schoolgirls will be a historic blot on this country’s escutcheon for the ages. It’s the certain knowledge that this crew will do anything it decides it needs or wants to do because, for them, justice is exactly the advantage of the stronger; nothing more and nothing less. And that’s how people can decide that war has no more gravity to it than a football game, and that equating the two is funny. What a sick bunch of people.

Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague, so if she or any Democrat tried to say, for example, that there was a very real threat that once in office, Trump might try to cancel elections, most people kind of tuned that out.

I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off?

Well, we’re now beginning to see. Let’s start with elections. The Washington Post—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.

The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump and his people often said so, the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.

None of it was true. Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China, but nothing that reached his father. The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

In fact, the report found—and isn’t this a surprise?—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia, trying to help Trump: “The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.

With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday: “Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.” That is true. But remember: Between tariff “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed.

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election.

Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.

As for the media takeover: What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, in trying to take over both CBS and CNN. But he wouldn’t stop. Netflix bid $83 billion. Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion, and Netflix dropped out.

And somewhere in there, Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address, and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board. I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships, or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.

So picture this. It’s October. The mystery Trump accuser, the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing, has come forward. Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and, to most of the country, credible. Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls. The economy is still limping. The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing. Democrats are favored to win the House and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.

And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election. The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay, saying he can’t do that. But the court has no army, and Trump does, along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.

That, not to mince words, is a coup d’état. Will he get away with it? I don’t know, but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN, and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post, to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest, will certainly make it easier.

That’s how fascism descends. And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.

At moments of massive social breakdown, when we are in the process of discovering to our horror that something evil has been going on in our society that much of the elite class was in on and that regular people were not told about—and this is surely such a moment—it’s a first and natural reflex among the people who are paid to ponder these things to ask where “we” went wrong. How can “we” have allowed this? And more importantly, how, knowing what we know today, can “we” be anything less than zealous in our pursuit of the whole truth?

Well, I say, excuse me, but who is this “we”? I’m not part of that “we.” You’re not part of that “we.” That “we” is a very specific “they”: It’s elites who believe they live in some atmospheric level beneath which the law and morality evaporate. With respect to Jeffrey Epstein, this elite, so perfectly dubbed “the Epstein class” by Senator Jon Ossoff, included representatives of both political parties: You had Bill Clinton and Larry Summers along with Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick. We don’t know exactly what these men did and did not do, and we need to be careful about such speculation, even with respect to Trump. But at bottom, they and many others consorted with someone they had to know was evil.

Now, finally, we are in the phase where we’re searching for answers. But again, with that last sentence, the “we” problem arises again. What “we” is searching for answers? That “we” includes me; and, I presume, you; and most of the media; and a sizable majority of the American people; and it includes Ro Khanna and a number of congressional Democrats and one admirable congressional Republican, Thomas Massie.

But by and large, it does not include the people who lead the Republican Party. It does include—credit where it’s due—many rank-and-file conservatives, who kept this issue bubbling on right-wing podcasts and in chat rooms. But it doesn’t include their leaders. In fact, their leaders—following their infallible Dear Leader—are actively blocking the search for answers. So, no—“we” haven’t lost our sense of shame. Trump and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and James Comer and dozens of other Republicans who have the power to dig for answers have lost theirs.

Trump, obviously, wants the issue to go away so badly that he now may even start a war to distract us from anything Epstein-related. Bondi, the most cowardly and corrupt attorney general in modern history (yes, worse than John Mitchell!), presumably knows the truth and obviously doesn’t want it out. Ditto Patel.

And as for Comer, neither he nor any other Republican member of the House Oversight Committee bothered to show up for former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner’s closed-door testimony this week. Comer topped that by telling Sean Hannity Thursday night: “What we have seen from the millions of documents that have been released is that Donald Trump is completely exonerated in the whole Epstein saga.” And although nearly all GOP House members voted for that Epstein transparency act, no Republican in either the House or the Senate besides Massie has shown the slightest interest in unearthing the facts.

So that’s the “we” here who have no sense of shame. Not us. It’s just Republicans, who obviously are either terrified that there’s something appalling in those files about their president or know it already.

I remember when Republicans used to lecture us all the time about the disappearance of shame in our culture. Newt Gingrich did it, while he was cheating on his second wife. Reagan education secretary and national scold Bill Bennett did it constantly, pumping out bestselling books about how liberalism had destroyed shame through its pernicious celebration of individual difference. Then we learned that the quality of shame completely eluded him every time he walked through the doors of a gambling casino, and that kind of finished him off as an arbiter of social morality.

Today? They’re the ones with no shame. Many have observed, in the wake of the amazing arrest in the U.K. of the sybarite formerly known as Prince (Andrew), that accountability seems to exist everywhere except the United States. Some observers also point to the sentencing this week in South Korea of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose demise Americans would do well to pay attention to.

On December 3, 2024, accusing the opposition party of engaging in “anti-state activities,” Yoon declared martial law. He suspended political activities, including convenings of the national and local legislatures, and he placed restrictions on the press. Fortunately for South Korea, it was all over within days: Yoon was impeached on December 14, arrested the next January 15, and on Thursday he was sentenced to life in prison.

How did South Korea manage to deliver justice so swiftly? Because a number of members of his own party opposed him. On the night Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the National Assembly called an emergency session; a quorum quickly gathered, and the assembly voted to condemn Yoon’s declaration. The vote of 190 members that night was unanimous, and it included 18 members of Yoon’s own party.

Once upon a sweet old time, it was utterly impossible to imagine such a political crisis in the United States. Today? Alas, the only part of the South Korea story that’s hard to imagine in the United States is 18 members of Trump’s Republican Party opposing him.

That’s the “we” that those of us who love this country—in the only meaningful sense, of wanting it to live up to its potential and its highest ideals, including holding everyone equal before the law—need to be wary of. They will always put Trump before country. And certainly before the girls, now women, so viciously violated by Epstein and whatever members of his “class.” Shameful indeed.

During and right after Pam Bondi’s House testimony Wednesday, I flipped on Fox News and Newsmax to see how they were covering it. I was expecting to see a celebration of how the attorney general really put those America-hating libs in their place. To my surprise, I did not. I saw mostly ads, to be honest, but the little programming I did catch was devoted entirely to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story.

Disappointed, I flipped back to MS NOW and didn’t think much of it. But Wednesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that my experience was not aberrational: Bondi testified for about five hours, and Fox News ran roughly 10 minutes of it live.

It’s an old, old Murdochian ploy: When there’s news that doesn’t suit the agenda, just ignore it. I’ve seen this movie many times. Back in a different era, Rupert’s favorite politician was Al D’Amato, the hacky and corrupt Republican senator from New York. Whenever there was a new allegation about D’Amato’s ethics, or a Senate report reviewing same, it would be on the front page of The New York Times and get prominent play in the Daily News—and in the New York Post, there usually wasn’t a word.

Fox’s near silence on Bondi is an admission that the hearing was an indefensible horror show. And it gets worse if you really think about it for a few minutes. Think of all the planning and strategizing that went into that performance. Employees of the Department of Justice, working on our dime, spent hours prepping Bondi on exactly how to insult each and every Democratic member of the committee. They came up with the idea of requiring each House member to have an individual log-in to peruse the Epstein files so the DOJ could spy on them. They spent hours assembling Bondi’s little burn book. She had to have been coached for hours about exactly how to ignore the questions and try to turn the tables on her interrogators. In other words: Her aides, whose salaries we pay, probably thought this would be great. That she’d walk away with a catalog of sound-bite knockout punches.

Instead, Bondi walked away with the image that will haunt her for the rest of her life: her back turned to those Jeffrey Epstein victims as Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands “if you have still not been able to meet with the DOJ”—and they all raised their hands. That image looked horrible Wednesday; as more and more details about the Epstein story leak out in the coming weeks and months, it’s only going to look worse.

And yet, for all this? In substantive terms, her performance at that hearing may not even have been the worst thing Bondi did this week! The morning after the hearing, she fired Gail Slater, the head of the department’s antitrust division. Slater actually had a decent reputation—she was part of the populist-MAGA anti-monopoly movement, and she brought a high-profile case against Google over its monopolization of the ad tech market.

Many progressive anti-monopolists were cheering for Slater. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren upon hearing this news: “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder. Every antitrust case in front of the Trump Justice Department now reeks of double-dealing—Ticketmaster’s stock is already surging.” That last sentence is true. If you’re interested, you can read here about why this is so bad. The bottom line is that Bondi’s firing of Slater is a big nail in the coffin of the idea that Trumpian right-wing populism is willing to take on powerful interests. It may—but only as long as they’re designated enemies of Trump.

To circle back to Fox News: If they’re going to follow the old Murdoch edict of ignoring all bad news, pretty soon they’re going to be reduced to airing nothing but scare stories about woke Olympic athletes and Spanish-speaking superstars.

It’s not even clear Bondi had the worst week among Trump Cabinet officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got seriously pulverized twice this week. First, when a grand jury refused to indict six Democrats for their earlier video reminding soldiers that they had a duty to disobey illegal orders; as Chesa Boudin and Eric Fish point out in a Times op-ed today, grand juries convened by the mighty Justice Department almost never fail to return an indictment. Second, when a federal judge blocked Hegseth from punishing one of the six, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, writing that Hegseth had grossly violated Kelly’s First Amendment rights. “Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years,” Judge Richard Leon wrote. “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!”

And Kristi Noem had to endure the indignity of seeing rival Tom Homan, the border czar, make her ICE-men goeth out of Minneapolis. Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal posted a long and devastating story about the mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security under Noem and her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski. It’s the kind of Washington story that appears only when inside sources decide to start running to reporters to spill saucy details they once sat on—a clear sign that no one is scared of her anymore.

None of these people, of course, belongs in a high position in the federal government. They’re psychopathic monsters. There’s no doubt Bondi and her advisers think she knocked a home run on Wednesday. But one day, we’ll all learn what she’s hiding about the Epstein story. Can’t wait for that hearing.

By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at The New Republic is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.

I wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”

Here we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has The Washington Post, whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year.

And this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Post has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current Forbes-estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.

So why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.

So the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants The Washington Post not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.

I note here, as others have, that the Post still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the Post’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.

And I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually wants this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.

Rich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save The Washington Post. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do some intelligent modernizing around video and podcasts and are willing to be an unapologetically liberal newspaper, you’ll find an audience again.

You’ll be doing a lot more than saving some jobs. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend in 1786. A news outlet isn’t a shoe store. It’s a guardrail against tyranny. It shouldn’t surprise us that a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars, whose wealth has increased tenfold in the last decade, doesn’t care about this. Democracy, tyranny … makes no difference to him. In fact, to the extent that democracy makes room for his employees to try to join unions and so forth, democracy is an inconvenience. So is a free press.

So take it off his hands. Make Bezos the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He may actually refuse to sell to a liberal consortium—his preference for tyranny may now be that stark. But it can’t hurt to try. Your accountants might grouse, but there is no question that history will reward you.