How Did the World Get to Be Held Hostage by Two Malevolent Cretins?

Today is the six-month anniversary of President Trump’s war in Iran, which as any non-brainwashed human can see has been a failure in every sense. Meanwhile, with diplomacy stalled, Russian insiders tell Bloomberg News that Vladimir Putin is frustrated (poor thing!) and is weighing an escalation in Ukraine that could ultimately include the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

These next few months will be extremely dangerous ones for the world. We have two old men whose purchase on reality is slipping by the week—that’s obviously true in Trump’s case, and it sure seems to be accurate with respect to Putin too. But they have something else in common that’s much more ominous: Both will do anything to maintain their corrupt hold on power, which makes both nations a threat to global peace. Sadder still: I never thought I’d see the day when we’d be saying that the United States and Russia were more or less equally malevolent forces in the world.

Here in the U.S., Trump retreats more and more into a fantasyland of denial. He posts a grotesque, tacky, fascistic, AI-generated poster of himself proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” trying to compare his Iran misadventure favorably to George W. Bush’s own misadventure in Iraq. He insists the Iranian regime is weakened. He brags about controlling the Strait of Hormuz.

In reality, Iran has almost total control of the strait. Right now, says Reuters, 10 or 15 ships are getting through the strait every day. That’s down from 100 or more. As I write these words Friday morning, the Strait of Hormuz traffic tracker has three ships transiting and 319 vessels waiting.

Trump’s latest policy solution, to the extent that he has any, involves the “D-Day sanctions” announced earlier this week by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent said his department was going to isolate business done with Iran in five economic sectors and sanction 60 businesses, individuals, and vessels. But he didn’t say which countries that do business with Iran would be targeted (that is—China, most notably). He said Trump would be calling world leaders “with specific requests to cease their interactions with the regime.”

Mr. Art of the Deal at work again. Donald Trump is the last person in the world who still believes that Donald Trump has any leverage whatsoever over Xi Jinping and can cajole him into doing what Trump wants him to do. To everyone else (well, not everyone—Bessent, Natalie Harp, and so on), the idea is ludicrous.

And a lot of experts think that these sanctions, as announced anyway, won’t bring Iran to its knees. The Financial Times’ Gillian Tett quoted one sanctions expert as saying: “Unless they sanction a Chinese bank everyone has heard of, this will fall flat.”

Trump lives in this cocoon where he thinks he can bend people to his will because he’s Trump. Facts about leverage and how the world actually works—he just ignores them. And the fact is that China has all kinds of leverage. Most conspicuously, it could decide to stop exporting rare earth minerals. It already did so in 2025 in response to Trump’s tariffs. Then, write two experts, “a wave of turbulent Chinese export restrictions on rare earth elements and magnets—triggered by the Trump administration’s tariffs and semiconductor controls—laid bare a critical choke point across defense, semiconductor, and automotive supply chains.” Worse could happen if that’s what China wants.

It’s a disaster, entirely of Trump’s making. The Washington Post reports today that six months into the Iran war, while Americans aren’t dying in large numbers, this is still a conflict with no plausible end in sight. Trump has boxed himself in: “His fierce aversion to becoming a twenty-first-century Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Great Depression, limits the economic moves available to him. His decision, at least so far, to hold back from the riskiest and most extreme military moves against Iran similarly limits his war options.”

“At least so far.” That’s the scary part. What happens six months from now, if Trump hasn’t managed to sue for peace, i.e., capitulate, and hand over hundred of billions of dollars to Iran? This war will never become “Trump’s Ukraine,” in the sense of the massive number of casualties—in the half a million range—Putin has racked up in his war. There is no check whatever on Putin in Russia, whereas the U.S. is at least enough of a democracy that Trump has to pay some attention to public opinion, which obviously would not tolerate such losses.

Still … Putin is, in a sense, Trump’s unfiltered id. Imagine no Constitution, no First Amendment, no vast network of civil society–oriented nonprofits, no 250-year history of democratic habit; without those guardrails, Trump would be Putin. So what Putin does, arguably, is what Trump might do if he feels desperate or reckless enough.

So Putin is contemplating a tactical nuke. It would be a fraction of the size of the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in kiloton terms. It wouldn’t wipe out Kyiv; just a neighborhood or two. And it might just get Trump thinking. We are living in a new age of nuclear proliferation, which is to say that our longtime consensus around extreme nuclear caution has been waning. And also bear in mind: The U.S. stockpile of conventional weapons is depleting to the point that the Council on Foreign Relations calls it a “munitions crisis.”

It probably won’t come to that. But even if it doesn’t, we’re left with the fact that we have two wars that are inflicting upon the world and its people a tremendous amount of pain, both started by delusional men who live in bubbles where everyone told them victory would be easy, a matter of days.

We’re accustomed to things working that way in an autocratic state like Russia. In the United States, they’re supposed to happen differently. But the United States is no longer so different from those places.

The question has popped up frequently in this election cycle. Even in the wins notched by left-leaning and socialist candidates, those candidates appear to have fared comparatively poorly among voters of the actual working class.

There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges.

Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why.

These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are.

Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here. In 1848, there were revolutions across Europe as citizens finally became restive enough about all those inbred monarchies to demand change. Initially, students and workers in Vienna, Prague, and other cities marched side by side. Before too long, however, divisions began to emerge. The students wanted things like political rights. The workers just wanted better factory conditions and more bread. Things didn’t end well in most places—like Paris, for example, where Napoleon’s nephew seized power and held it for more than two decades until he started a dumb war and the radical Paris Commune took over.

Today, we see the split in, say, certain aspects of the platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America. A national DSA co-chair has recently done two hugely embarrassing interviews, one with Fox News and the other with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which she touted prison abolition and border elimination and so on (and incredibly had no idea at what rate she would tax rich people). These are, to be sure, not ideas working-class people would get behind. They’re purely campus-left positions that aren’t going to get you very far in electoral politics.

The local DSA chapters, in contrast, are far more pragmatic. They emphasize housing and health care and economic things that actually matter in people’s lives. The difference between the more ideological national DSA and the more grounded local chapters was well and knowledgeably laid out by Nathan Newman in
a Substack post in early July.

But even that isn’t really the main reason why progressive candidates have trouble getting working-class votes. The main reason, in my view, is this.

Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. I say that not to praise or damn one group or the other. It’s just, I think, the reality. It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people. Working-class people’s lives in these last couple of decades have just gotten much harder, inching ever closer to the precipice of job loss, default, indignity. Working-class people live in regular if not constant fear of these things. Educated people, in an economy that leans more and more toward rewarding them, do not.

Therefore, educated voters and non-college voters hear politicians’ promises through very different ears. To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds. They hear promises about free health care for all, and they think yeah, right, that’s never gonna happen in this country. Their experience has taught them not to believe, and for the most part, you can’t blame them.

It’s true that it’s not fair that social democrats—and again, most of these candidates are really social democrats, not democratic socialists—should pay the electoral price for this. After all, it wasn’t they who’ve been screwing over the working class for four decades. But they’re stuck with the reality that the screwing has made working-class people extremely suspicious of those promising them big things.

So what’s the solution? Well, the only real solution is to win office in sufficient numbers to deliver on the promises to the point that working people do see genuine improvement in their material conditions. But that’s going to take a lot of time. A decade, maybe more.

In the meantime, I think the best progressive candidates can do is first and obviously, stay away from topics like prison abolition; but second and more importantly, really just explain things to working-class voters in a way that understands and assumes their skepticism. Aspirational rhetoric appeals to educated voters. To non-college voters, it just sounds like more fluff. Tell them, specifically and concretely, why their rent keeps going up, who’s doing it to them, and how you’re going to go after the people doing it. And explain clearly and specifically how your Republican opponent is on the side of the rent-raisers. Dot-connecting of that sort seems to me more likely to win working-class votes than lofty rhetoric and big promises.

The reaction so far among establishment Democrats to Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary has been surprisingly encouraging. Almost instantly after the race was called Wednesday morning, Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed El-Sayed, saying in a video, “Congratulations to [gubernatorial nominee] Jocelyn Benson, Abdul El-Sayed, and every Democrat who won up and down the ballot. They’ve got my support as we fight like hell together to win in November.” Centrist Senator Elissa Slotkin wrote a Facebook post expressing unequivocal support. Primary foe Haley Stevens backed El-Sayed instantly, and he spoke graciously of her at his first post-win speech, calling her a “friend.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had supported Stevens, praised El-Sayed’s “very, very strong campaign” and said, “I’m not looking back, I’m looking forward.”

This is good. It also may end up posing a challenge to El-Sayed over the course of this election, as he walks the tightrope between a progressive base that brought him to this point and the establishment that he’ll need to make peace with to win in November. But right now, we need to speed through some recent history and examine the conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party that, if unchecked, may be a bigger problem for El-Sayed than anything Republican Mike Rogers throws at him.

That conventional wisdom, for about 40 years, ever since the Reagan realignment that left liberalism discredited in the eyes of many Americans, has been simply that only centrist candidates can win general elections in swing states. Has it been right? Mostly, yes. It’s hard to think of many proud progressives who’ve won Senate seats in swing states in recent history. Paul Wellstone pops to mind. He was elected narrowly in 1990, when Minnesota was much swingier than it is now.

Interestingly, Schumer himself sort of qualifies in this category. He first won his New York Senate seat in 1998, in a race I covered closely. There were three candidates in that Democratic primary fighting for the right to challenge incumbent Al D’Amato. Mark Green was definitely the most liberal. But Geraldine Ferraro was without question the moderate candidate. Schumer was in-between, but, as a Jewish Brooklyn congressman whose big issue at the time was gun violence, he coded more liberal than not. I remember people laughing at me when I told them that summer that I thought Schumer would win the primary and could beat D’Amato. A gun-confiscating Brooklyn Jew, winning votes in Rochester and Schenectady? You’re nuts.

But it happened. Things change.

Things have been changing in the Democratic Party since, really, the wake of the 2008-09 Great Meltdown. First up was Occupy Wall Street. Then the Fight for 15. Then Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president in 2016, and his groundswell of ferocious support that surprised a lot of people, me very much included. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s House win in 2018, along with a few others. Then Sanders’s second run. Then Joe Biden’s 2020 pivot to the left on economics, when he started speaking of the need for a new New Deal. And most of all, of course, the election, twice—the second time narrowly but unequivocally—of Donald Trump, which is about as much evidence of a furious electorate as one could ask for.

So the Democratic Party has been moving “to the left.” But it isn’t doing so because people are enraged about the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s because average, hardworking people are furious at a system that isn’t doing enough to keep them from falling behind. I could insert here a raft of statistics about wage stagnation, the explosion in economic inequality, and so on. Moderates and progressives argue about all that too, but what cannot be denied is what poll after poll after poll, and interview after interview after interview, tell us about what working people themselves feel. They feel screwed, and they feel no one is listening.

And today, this election cycle, rank-and-file Democrats are veritably crying out: We want you to do something about these billionaires getting obscenely richer and amassing all this power. We want reinvestment in us. We’re sick of getting nickel-and-dimed by corporations with all their hidden fees and price-gouging. We’re kind of freaked out that AI is going to further destroy our lives and towns. We hate these data centers the size of the Pentagon. We want people, goddammit, who’ll fight for us.

That’s why El-Sayed won Tuesday’s primary. Yes, Israel was a factor. El-Sayed spoke, again, graciously on Wednesday morning about fighting antisemitism arm in arm with his Jewish “sisters and brothers.” But he’s made other statements over the course of the campaign that have worried some Jews, even some whose politics are close to his, like his statement after a thwarted terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue in March. El-Sayed noted that the assailant’s niece and nephew had died recently in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, adding, “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” El-Sayed had to know at the time that some would interpret this contextualization as an attempt to justify the assailant’s motivations. But when people—your would-be constituents, no less—almost get mass-murdered, just express sympathy.

It’s also a little demagogic to say things like, “Rather than sending your money somewhere else to drop bombs on other people and their kids, we can keep that money here at home.” Historically, that’s how right-wing nativists talk. He needs to do better. Everyone expects him to criticize AIPAC and the Israeli government. He should just do so on the basis of the things they say and do. Lord knows there’s plenty to criticize, and I’d imagine most Michigan Democrats and independents would agree with him most of the time.

But Israel isn’t why he’s the Democratic nominee. He’s the Democratic nominee because he compellingly speaks the language of economic populism (why he, and all these lefties, don’t get more working-class votes is a question to which I have an answer, but that’s for a future column). And I cannot understand why anyone who calls themselves a Democrat or a liberal would oppose this.

We’ve sat here for decades watching the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent mushroom from 22 percent in 1990 to 32 percent now. We’ve seen CEO pay over roughly the same time go from 50 times the salary of the average worker to 300; we’ve seen employers try to (mostly successfully) get away with calling people “contractors” who are obviously employees; we’ve sat here powerless as free trade deals and mega-mergers have destroyed jobs, killed communities, and concentrated economic and political power to levels way beyond the Gilded Age.

If you’re a Democrat or a liberal (or a leftist), you’re against those things. So why would you be against a candidate who is himself against those things?

In any case, opposing all this at this point in history is like opposing the tides. Even if you sincerely and devoutly believe that this is a bad direction for the Democratic Party, it’s very hard to deny that this is happening. After a very long and dormant period, the left in the United States is awake again—as it was for most of the twentieth century. FDR and LBJ had to consider the leverage of the left. Roosevelt brought a number of socialists into his administration, and Johnson put the socialist Mike Harrington on his War on Poverty task force. It’s a pretty normal thing in American history, actually.

I have my own reservations about aspects of the left’s renaissance. “Defund the police” and “eliminate the border”—and sure, throw in “cancel Thanksgiving”—are disastrous stands for anyone seeking office to take. Big-D Democrats shouldn’t come within a mile of some of those national DSA platform positions.

But overall? Far and away the most important thing politicians can do in this country over the next 10 or 20 years is reverse the concentration of wealth and political power that has characterized this polity’s last four decades and make working people’s lives better and more hopeful. Any ally in that fight, however they want to fight it (within obvious lawful and constitutional limits) and under whatever label, should be welcomed.

So it’s dismaying, to put it mildly, to see Third Way announce in the wake of El-Sayed’s victory that they’re going to spend $15 million over the next two years to wage a “war” on democratic socialism. Guys: You are not going to win this war. Each coming decade will bring more and more young people into the electorate, and each of these cohorts will be more and more supportive of socialism, until such theoretical time as the socialists have had their chance to govern and have screwed things up on their own. But that’s a good ways away.

In the meantime, with respect to any Democrats or liberals who are against El-Sayed: Is securing the general-election defeat of El-Sayed—who, by the way, isn’t even a socialist and has been, in fact, extremely thoughtful and well-spoken about why he is a capitalist and what’s wrong with American capitalism today—a “win”? Really? Electing yet another Republican election denier to the Senate is victory? This I do not get. People can fight for a vision of the party they believe in without aiding and abetting the party of fascism. And I can imagine the righteous howls if the left submarined a moderate candidate in such a fashion.

Maybe you sincerely believe El-Sayed can’t win. I think that’s wrong. I think that if he’s skillful enough, he can keep the base energized, spend loads of time at Black churches, and maintain a cordial-enough relationship with the party establishment that he can win. He couldn’t have six or eight years ago. But as I saw as a young(er) reporter in New York in 1998, there comes a moment when things change.

But even if you’re a Democrat who doesn’t think El-Sayed can win—well, it’s one thing to express your honest opinion, but it’s quite another to say provocative things that help will his defeat into being. Schumer, Whitmer, and Stevens get the stakes. Their response to El-Sayed’s win was mature and big-picture. I wish Beltway moderates would just follow their cue.

The Todd Blanche nomination mess in the Senate is truly one of those pass-the-popcorn moments for Democrats and liberals. One can sense that John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, the two outgoing Republican senators who have suddenly developed the backbone to maybe vote against the attorney general nominee now that they’re not facing their voters again, represent a far more broadly (if privately) held view in the Senate GOP that the man is manifestly unqualified.

But this fracas is more than mere entertainment. It’s a full-blown scandal, as President Trump’s real interests here have become clearer, notably via a Truth Social message he posted late Thursday morning. It’s raw sewage even by his standards, and if the Democrats retake the House, this matter has now jumped to the top of my list of grounds for impeachment. It should provide the basis for the first article Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and his Judiciary Committee draw up.

It all has to do with the slush fund. The fund, you’ll recall, was the result of a settlement in a mind-bending legal proceeding in which Trump sued himself: That is, the president of the United States sued the Internal Revenue Service, seeking $10 billion for the (admittedly illegal) leak of some of his tax returns back in 2019. In May, Trump’s Justice Department, led at the time by Blanche as the acting attorney general, settled the suit between Trump the president and Trump’s IRS by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, whose moneys were to go to parties Trump deemed to have been wronged by the deep state—starting of course with Trump himself. It also included a shocking clause granting Trump, his family members, and his companies immunity from prosecution for any tax-related crimes they may have committed before the date of deal.

In other words: Blanche created a nearly $2 billion slush fund for Trump to steer money to anyone he wants—and granted him and his kids broad immunity from potential federal prosecution. One observer called it “a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.” Raskin put out a 10-point memo on why the deal is “unconstitutional, illegal, and a fraud on the court.” In June, a federal judge blocked the fund’s creation, so it’s on hold for now and probably headed, one supposes, to the Supreme Court.

Around that time, amid the public outcry, Blanche said that the fund would not go forward. He told Congress that the department would put that in writing. But it never has. That’s the holdup with Cornyn and Tillis. If they get it in writing, presumably they would still vote for Blanche.

So that’s when Trump stepped in Thursday morning, when it looked like Blanche’s nomination might be dead, and “truthed” (and boy, it was the truth for once, all right): “Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it! He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time. However, John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, both of whom I refused to Endorse, and whose political careers have been ended by my action, are refusing to vote for this Great Nominee, who will remain, in any event, as Acting. Remember, both Cornyn and Tillis voted for Merrick Garland, and others, too numerous to mention. I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

What Trump is saying here is obvious. The slush fund and probably especially the immunity are far more important to him than Blanche is. And anyway, Blanche, whose servile lickspittleism makes predecessor Pam Bondi look like a paragon of independence, can stay in the job more or less indefinitely as acting A.G.

This morning, around 7 a.m., Trump “truthed” again. The fund isn’t for me, he insisted. Rather, it’s for the people who raided the Capitol and banged cops’ heads in; it’s for “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration.… Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.” He’s almost surely lying about himself. But even if he’s not, sending $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars, received in the corrupt manner this money was received, to convicted January 6 insurrectionists is without question a high crime in and of itself.

Once again, as with so many other things Trump has done, it’s inconceivable to imagine any other modern American president even thinking this up, let alone doing it. Suing himself; then installing a spineless yes-man—his former personal lawyer, no less—as acting attorney general, who then agrees to a settlement including nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money plus an immunity grant; then being willing to sacrifice said A.G.’s confirmation in order to preserve the fund and the immunity claim. It defies belief.

It’s hard to say how many articles of impeachment the Democratic House might come up with. Indeed, Raskin and his committee’s biggest challenge will be deciding which high crimes and misdemeanors not to pursue. There’ve been dozens, hundreds, and they just can’t plausibly bring an indictment of 100-plus counts. They’re going to have to keep it to some number that the public can digest and buy into.

But the slush fund and immunity grant sure look like count number one to me. Unless of course five members of the you-know-what decide it’s all legal. If that happens, the House Judiciary Committee might look at impeaching them, too.

Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.

One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Some wars start big. World War I is the paradigmatic example. Europe was more or less at peace, the Balkans excepted, all those inbred cousins lolling in their palaces as various ethnic and proletarian resentments built among their people. Then, boom, one event—the assassination of a Hapsburg potentate—exploded the powder keg, and within weeks, millions were mobilized into a war that said cousins blithely thought would last a few weeks but ended up leaving an entire generation of young European men physically and psychologically strafed.

But most wars start small. They’re incremental. Even the most destructive war in human history started this way. Of course, Adolf Hitler was lying to the world about his ultimate aims, when he kept saying—after the Alsace, after Austria, after the Sudetenland—that he had no further territorial claims on Europe. But chronologically, the war proceeded in small, incremental steps, and even if Neville Chamberlain has gone down in historical shame, it’s also true that the broader public could have been forgiven for thinking, even after Munich, that world war was hardly inevitable.

In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States.

But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing. The neocons were imploring him to march on to Baghdad. He said no, you people are crazy. Then his dumb son got to the White House, and he put the crazies (led by Dick Cheney) in charge, and they launched a war based not on one specific goal but on a theory—that regime change in Iraq would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East.

Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.

So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get tired of that, and he’ll need to teach those “scumbags and lunatics” a real lesson.

And that’s how little wars grow. There’s a chance that he has enough sense to know that if he doesn’t get out of this soon, it could crescendo into a disaster that will spin out of his control. That’s what happened to LBJ—he knew every step of the way as he asked Congress for more money and troops that he was marching the country to defeat and destroying his own legacy, but he did it anyway. And he was much smarter than Trump will ever be.

I remember well when Syria’s Bashar Al Assad was massacring his own people by the thousands, dropping those cluster bombs on his own people. Some were screaming at Barack Obama: Do something! We’re the United States, how can we allow this to happen?

I think it would have been good if we’d been able to do something. On the other hand, I’m sure Obama thought that the last thing in the world he wanted was to go into a country we don’t really know with a sanguinary tyrant and ancient enmities and think we can smooth it all out before Americans lose their patience; Syria was not going to be his legacy. All those deaths were horribly tragic. But at least, against the charge of typical American hubris, Obama can plead not guilty.

Whatever happens in Iran, Trump is already guilty on that count. The launching of this completely unnecessary and unjustified war was an act of supreme hubris. Now it’s starting to really hit home with him that he may have been wrong. But he’s never wrong; incapable of shouldering blame, he will transfer it onto someone else. If that doesn’t worry you, you aren’t paying attention.

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