Donald Trump unilateraly declared a cruel World War in Iran causing international chaos without any definable purpose.

'This excellent essay published in the New York Review of Books by Fintan O'Toole is a brilliant review about how Donald Trump unilaterally decided to put Americans into another unwinnable and unjustified Middle East war.  It is like Mr. O'Toole is able to sit inside of Donald Trump's demented unconsciousness.  A brutal review about the horrible decisions (like a "crazy historical pageant") made by past administrations reminds us about how this Trump World War in Iran is doomed to fail. Nevertheless, even in failure, Israel is achieving the goal to disable its enemies while the United States is paying the bills, with U.S. military blood, to fund an unwinnable war. 

Signifying Absolutely Nothing

Mr. O'Toole writes:  In Donald Trump’s World War against Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But, up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.

It is apt that Trump’s declaration of war was disembodied: a prerecorded video message announcing a major combat operation that had yet to begin. Time in that video is completely distorted; events that are about to happen are referred to in the past tense. Throughout it gives the feeling of being in a time warp: Trump cited as a casus belli “the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel” in 1983. The forty-three-year gap between provocation and retaliation is a void between cause and effect into which all temporal logic vanishes.

In that eight-minute video, Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.

Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

To say that these are reruns is not to deny the novel elements in Trump’s warmongering. His boldest innovation is to invoke not past glories but past disasters, summoning the ghosts of the United States’ catastrophic interventions in Iraq. In the Republican primary debate in December 2015, Trump declared American and Iraqi deaths in that conflict to have been pointless:

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East [sic], we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away [sic], and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It is hard to think of any precedent for a leader stirring the memories of a war he regards as a colossal waste in order to justify starting a new one.

More profoundly, Trump’s rhetoric diverges from its Iraq War templates in signifying absolutely nothing. It is in itself (though of course not in its consequences) entirely free of external referents in the real world. Trump, with that strange honesty of his, indicated this himself by the manner of his declaration of war. Such announcements have an established visual language of solemnity and moral magnitude: the live address to the nation and the world from the White House, the rows of five-star generals in the Situation Room, the military briefings, the sense of historic moment. Trump’s video and his schmoozing of guests at Mar-a-Lago on the night of Friday, February 27 (“Have a good time, everybody…. I gotta go to work,” he told the attendees), seemed as deliberately flippant as his dismissal of the likely deaths of Americans: “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.” (“That’s the way it is,” he said later, after the first US soldiers were killed.)

The word “important” was used the following evening: Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the MAGA fundraiser that Trump attended on Saturday night as “more important than ever.” It was certainly more important than providing any rationale to the American people for their embarkation on another war. This is a war of choice, but it was presented to the American people more as a war of caprice, initiated in the festive atmosphere of a Florida resort and announced in cut-and-paste phrases from half-remembered conflicts.

The casual nature of the declaration of war matched the unmoored nature of Trump’s imperial cosplay. The rhetoric he seemed vaguely to be recalling had relationships to actual events. The “imminent threat” motif was, in 2003, a reckless and dishonest exaggeration. But there was at least the truth that Saddam had previously developed and used chemical weapons. The idea of enemy soldiers surrendering en masse was not fanciful—it happened in both Gulf Wars. The call for the people to rise up against their oppressors in 1991, had some substance: Kurdish and Shia opponents of Saddam had rebelled in the recent past and did so again.

But, what recurs now is pure linguistic gesture—the second time as empty effigy. The idea that Iran poses an imminent threat to the US is not merely not credible—credibility is entirely irrelevant. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration went through the motions of presenting a case that Saddam might have weapons of mass destruction and might wish to use them against the US. It was a bad case, concocted to provide the pretext for putting into action a preconceived plan: violent regime change in Iraq. But, some people in the American and British administrations at least half believed it, and more importantly, they wanted other people—their own citizens and foreign governments—to believe it too. Some effort at persuasion seemed to be an accepted precondition for war.

This time, Trump can’t be bothered to lie, if by lying we mean stating a claim that is intended to deceive. No one in his administration believes in the imminent threat, and no one outside it is expected to believe in it either. “Imminent threats” here functions like a TV trope, a corny catchphrase—it might as well be “Follow that car!” or (in words Trump has actually used, in his belligerent demands that Greenland be ceded to him) “The easy way” or “the hard way!” It signals only that Trump is going through the motions of wartime leadership and that, at best, his followers should likewise go through the motions of being led into war.

Even while declaring war, Trump made a mockery of the supposed Iranian threat: “We obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.” Now its missile industry will “be totally again obliterated”—the “again” suggesting that he believes he had wiped it out before. And his characterization of Iran’s alleged intentions to rebuild its nuclear weapons program dissolved into bathos:

We warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.

The imminent threat, then, comes from Bond movie villains who love doing evil but are crippled by chronic indecision, less Dr. No than Dr. Maybe. Trump made the ayatollahs sound risibly inept and hopelessly out of touch. The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying. Compared with the hair-raising language Trump has habitually used about immigrants in the US, his evocation of the Iranian menace was notably underpowered. He is good at conjuring monsters—this time he barely tried.

The idea that the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian armed forces should surrender their weapons in return for immunity is equally free of any objective correlative. It harks back to 1991 and 2003, when there were huge numbers of American and allied forces on the ground, in Kuwait and Iraq, to whom Iraqis could surrender. Whom now are they supposed to surrender to? A bomber pilot 50,000 feet above them? And who has the authority to grant members of the regime’s forces, who have committed atrocities against Iranians and foreign civilians, immunity from future prosecution? Trump told the Iranian people that their country is “yours to take.” How could they possibly take it without being free to act against those who have murdered and tortured with impunity, and how could it be theirs if crucial decisions about their future have already been made by Trump himself?

The most cynical of Trump’s retreads of the neoimperial past is his incitement of the Iranian people to rise up against the Islamic Republic. In echoing Bush’s call to the Iraqis in 1991, Trump was recycling a moment of great betrayal. Those Iraqis who believed America’s implied promise of support against Saddam paid for their naiveté with their blood. The US refused to give the rebels arms captured from the Iraqi regime’s forces, instead opting to destroy the weapons, return them to the regime, or (in a grotesque irony) give them to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. 

Although the Americans had total dominance over Iraqi airspace, the decision was to stand back as Saddam unleashed helicopter gunships on the rebels. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Shias were killed, along with some 20,000 Kurds.

Even if young Iranians don’t remember what happened in Iraq thirty-five years ago, they certainly remember what happened in their own country earlier this year. On January 13 Trump posted a message to those engaged in mass protests against the regime in Tehran: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He warned that there would be “very strong action” if the regime executed protesters. There was no action, and help was not on its way. The government massacred an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 protesters. This is the most gaping vacancy of all—Trump gestures toward two American incitements, one historic, one extremely recent. Both deployed words that were fatally empty of meaning.

These vacuities are part of a greater absence: there is no story. America’s wars beyond the Western Hemisphere have always been underpinned by grand narratives: making the world safe for democracy (World War I), defeating fascism (World War II), saving civilization from communism (Korea and Vietnam), upholding international law and the sovereignty of nations (Kuwait), responding to the atrocities of September 11 through the “war on terror” (Afghanistan and Iraq). Each of these stories had sufficient purchase on reality to command widespread initial (if by no means universal) consent. There seemed to be a cause large enough in its historic import to be worth killing and dying for. Even when, as with the invasion of Iraq, the stated rationale was quickly exposed as fraudulent, the drama of retaliation for September 11 and the reassertion of American power after the exposure of terrible vulnerability held their grip.

Insofar as Trump’s imperial posturing has a story line, it is supposed to be written in the National Security Strategy published in November. The tale it wants to tell is one of hemispheric hegemony: the US must control all of the Americas.
Where does Iran fit into that script? Nowhere. Its significance is, in fact, dismissed in a few lines:

Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.

Given that Trump never knowingly engages in understatement, this is a rare example of verbal deflation. The fake news to be discounted is those hyped-up headlines portraying Iran as anything other than a decisively weakened foe. Not only, moreover, is Iran less troublesome, but the whole region is becoming steadily less important to the US: “As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” The broad scenario is one in which Iran is, at best, a minor blot in the rearview mirror as America’s interests move elsewhere.

There is no American narrative for this war because it is not primarily an American story. It belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu. He has long sought to frame the Iranian regime in the most extreme terms imaginable—as the successor to the Nazis. “As the Nazis strived to trample civilization and replace it with a ‘master race’ while destroying the Jewish people,” he said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in 2015, “so is Iran striving to take over the region and expand further with a declared goal of destroying the Jewish state.”

As a political fable this is potent stuff. Doing a deal with a Nazi-like state in which it promises not to develop nuclear weapons—as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, together with Germany and the European Union, did that year—is delusional, since the supposed purpose of the Iranian state is, like Hitler’s Germany, the mass extermination of Jews. That deal had to be torn up, and in 2018 Trump duly withdrew the US from it.

But vile as the Islamic Republic may be, it is not remotely like Nazi Germany. The allegory serves a specific purpose: to preserve Israel’s monopoly on the possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Trump clearly doesn’t believe it, since his stated goal has been to make precisely the kind of bargain with Iran that the Nazi analogy is meant to preclude. The incoherence of Trump’s war aims is rooted in this gross discrepancy between his desire for a settlement with Iran—“We sought repeatedly to make a deal”—and Netanyahu’s vision of an apocalyptic battle in which the only possible outcomes are the binary opposites of absolute triumph or utter extinction. Trump’s playbook is The Art of the Deal; Netanyahu’s is the Book of Joshua.

There are, as a result, two different endgames for this war, one ultimately bureaucratic and diplomatic, the other existential. Trump started to threaten Iran again in recent months as a tactic for achieving the first. He has collapsed into the second, adapting Netanyahu’s existential dread as if it applied to the United States as much as to Israel. This means getting into a much more unbounded conflict than he seems to have imagined.

This is, in a sense, a proxy war, but one in which America is the proxy. It manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness. Marco Rubio’s admission that the US attacked Iran because it knew that Israel was about to do so—and thus feared that America would be a target of Iranian retaliation—depicts Trump not as a mighty leader but as a helpless follower. Instead of leaning on a rival boss, he is being led by Netanyahu into a generational conflict to remake the entire Middle East.

The dramatic first act of the war—the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and (according to Trump) another forty-seven senior officials “in one shot”—is a spectacular success that also exemplifies these contradictions. From an Israeli point of view, the more Iranian leaders killed, the better. Yet, Trump told Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent, that his administration had identified possible leaders to replace Khamenei, but “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” 

On March 3, Trump’s account tipped further into morbid farce: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead…. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

In this telling, the war’s opening act was a literal overkill. Combined with self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s bizarre statement that “this is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change,” it suggests that from the very beginning America’s war stumbled over its intended limits. It was supposed to be a Venezuela-style operation in which the enemy leader was eliminated and replaced by a more compliant figure within the same regime. This new leader (of another oil-rich nation) would have been placed on notice that the US could and would kill him at any time if he disobeyed. Essentially, the Islamic Republic was to remain intact, except that now it would operate on license from Trump.

The terms and conditions of such a license most definitely do not include democracy or human rights. Hegseth has insisted that the objective of the war “doesn’t include nation-building or democracy building goals.” A free Iran is no part of the envisaged outcome. If the people were to rise up at the risk of being slaughtered, they would be doing so merely to put in place a government that would be free to maintain the same levels of internal repression and theocratic control, so long as its foreign policy remained acceptable to Washington. That is hardly a cause worthy of martyrdom.

Yet even this contradictory approach seems to have unraveled as soon as the war started. The old adage that no military plan survives first contact with the enemy has been given a new twist: first contact was not chastening but excessively efficacious. From the American point of view the almost instant wiping out of so much of the senior Iranian leadership raised the stakes beyond what Trump initially wanted. The limited goal of bringing the regime to heel expanded immediately into its unconditional surrender and potential annihilation. And this escalation occurred without the administration giving any prior thought to what the implosion of Iran might mean, either for its own citizens or for the wider region. Or what an unchecked air war directed by Netanyahu looks like: Gaza.

Here we see how the current problem of American military power lies not in its limits but in its virtual limitlessness. It is not just that the US military is vastly superior to that of any immediate battlefield opponent. It is that it’s untethered from the need to place a set of actions within a comprehensible story. For the first time in US history, American physical dominance is being fused with American political anarchy. Freed from all the entanglements that come with having to launch a ground invasion, air war can overfly not just morality and law but arguments, rationales, the calibration of risks to rewards and of suffering to satisfaction. Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification.

This cutting of the bonds that tie war making to grand geopolitical narratives is a kind of liberation. The agony of America’s post-1945 wars has been their gradual inducement of a sense of futility. The wars stop making sense, and thus the human and financial sacrifices come to seem pointless. What’s happening now under Trump is one sort of answer to the anguish and humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan in his first term. Wars can stop making sense only when they are supposed to make sense in the first place. They become pointless only when there is meant to be a clear point. Futility arises only when a stated goal is not being achieved in spite of all the anguish and effort. If there is no goal—or if, as now, there are so many contradictory objectives that they cancel one another out—nothing can be futile.

This negative logic is reinforced by Trump’s own psychological condition. The attack on Iran is what war making looks like in an authoritarian state: not politics by other means but the absence of politics by other means. It is another stage in the working through of a disinhibition that is both institutional (the Republican-dominated Congress refusing to fulfill its constitutional obligation to restrain executive power) and personal (the president’s combination of inherent narcissism with the effects of old age). As Trump told The New York Times in January, he regards himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

One constraint that used to operate within Trump’s own mind was a squeamish reluctance to get blood on his hands, a fastidiousness about actual killing somewhat akin to his notorious germophobia. We know that this extended in his first term to the idea of bombing Iran. After the Iranians shot down an unmanned American surveillance drone in June 2019, he ordered retaliatory strikes. But when he was told there would likely be 150 casualties, he called the planes back. As he posted on what was then Twitter, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die.” Now the specifics of how many will die are no longer of concern to him: unnumbered deaths often happen in war.

It is obvious that making war is a useful distraction—for himself as well as for the world—from the Epstein scandal. But it is also now the purest form of self-pleasuring. Usually a president going to war is taking on burdens. Trump is shrugging them off, entering a state of weightlessness where all thought of consequences and all concern for mundane irritants like inflation and affordability are left behind. He declares war from his vacation home at Mar-a-Lago because it is a kind of leisure activity. Strikingly, in rebutting allegations that he will lose interest if the Iran adventure goes on too long, he used a term from his favorite hobby, golf. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told the New York Post. The yips are a sudden onset of nerves that cause a golfer to miss an easy putt.

What is weightless for Trump lies very heavy on the American republic. The anarchic nature of his war does not make it merely aberrant. The lurch from declaring fears about Iran to be mere media exaggerations to invoking imminent threat, from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize to luxuriating in lethality, is the essence of the autocrat’s monopoly on unpredictability.
Self-contradiction is a test of loyalty: the sycophants will fall over themselves to justify the leader’s wisdom even when it is the opposite of yesterday’s wisdom. When the leader can make up a war as it goes along, his whims have become law.

Extreme violence is now a large part of this repertoire of arbitrariness. Trump has pushed domestic terror to the point where his agents can murder American citizens on the street without accountability. He is now pushing the use of overwhelming force abroad into a terrain where accountability becomes impossible because there are no clear objectives by which to distinguish purpose from pointlessness, right from wrong, success from failure. But what happens abroad does not stay abroad: one of the things Trump has never lied about is that for him the real war is on the home front. He is showing that he can declare it however and whenever he feels like it. 💢❗😡😢

—March 12, 2026

Donald Trump is incapable of expressing empathy does not heed Scripture "Vengence is mine, says the Lord"

"Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord" is a Biblical phrase appearing in Romans 12:19, citing Deuteronomy 32:35. It commands believers not to seek personal revenge, but to trust in God’s perfect timing and justice to handle wrongs.

Spiteful Donald Trump: Cannot even keep his mouth shut our of respect for the dead. Echo opinion letter published in the Virginian Pilot newspaper.

Robert Mueller (b. 1944 - d. 2026): A graduate of Princeton University and New York University, Mueller served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam War, receiving a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart. He later attended the University of Virginia School of Law. Mueller was a registered Republican in Washington, D.C., and was appointed or reappointed to Senate-confirmed positions by presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

When decorated war veteran and former FBI Director Robert Mueller died earlier this month, President Donald Trump responded on social media within hours by saying, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

This declaration was made by the same man who said that people who he claimed celebrated the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk should be under federal investigation for using hate speech and be designated as domestic terrorists.

I would think that a person as narcissistic as Trump would be more concerned about his own legacy and what people will be saying about him after he is gone. The spiteful, inappropriate language he constantly uses to attack anyone who gets in his way won’t be the worst of what there will be to say about him and his presidency postmortem — not by a long shot. 

From Paul Kotarides, in Norfolk, Virginia

Donald Trump gave a failed April Fool's speech. It was no joke. Obviously Trump is lost and cannot find a way out of the mess he created,

Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech. His messed up "speech" raised more questions than it answered about the war in Iran. By Tom Nichols. Americans have been waiting for Donald Trump to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. 

Echo opinion about Donald Trump's failed April Fool's Day stupidity speech about Iran. 

Published by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic magazine. 

For weeks, Donald Trump offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, might as well have been a sick April Fool's joke, His (so called) speech was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. (IOW, Trump was a "Fool", for trying when he is not capable of explaining anything, much less trying to describe a reason to go to war.)

Trump’s critics (including me) castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation about the war to the American people. But, given his April Fool's performance  his address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

A speech that should have been a clear explanation about why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began, instead, in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. 

Trump then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.

Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. 

Nevertheless, he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.

But, back to the war Trump illegally launched: What is America fighting for❓ Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. 

Instead, Trump simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.

Trump, however, then undercut his own point by assuring the country that Iran’s “nuclear dust” was buried under mountains of rubble, inaccessible since the great success of last June’s joint Israeli-American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranians would never be allowed to excavate any of it, he said.

So, then, perhaps the war was about regime change, which would be the surest way to stop every evil plan gestating in Tehran, including nuclear weapons and terrorist plots. Well, no, it turns out, the war is not about that either. 🙄Trump explicitly denied that the goal was to bring down the Iranian theocracy—a staggering claim given his exhortations to the Iranian people on the first night of the war that their hour of liberation was at hand. 

After denying that the U.S. goal was regime change, he then claimed that regime change had now already happened because so many Iranian leaders have been killed.

In addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump laid out three other goals that he said were now within reach: neutralizing Iran’s ability to project power anywhere through terrorism, destroying the Iranian navy, and eliminating Iran’s missile stocks and production capabilities. As with so many other Trump promises, he said that  these goals would be accomplished in two to three weeks. 

How he will do all of this was left unclear, other than that he will hit Iran “extremely hard.”

Meanwhile, Tehran still controls the important Strait of Hormuz. Trump said only that other nations should go in, clear the strait, and take Iran’s oil. He chided Americans for their impatience; the two world wars, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq took longer than the current war, he said. (BTW, the outcomes of all three of those wars were disasters. Korea war is still not settled, Vietnam collapsed, Iraq was based on a lie, to destroy "weapons of mass destruction" that did not exist.)

Trump He also lied when he waved away any economic concerns. Everything will get better, he promised, telling viewers that only a year ago America was a “dead and crippled country” that he personally rescued. 

Oddly, Trump claimed that the United States has never been more economically prepared for a conflict—the “little journey,” as he called it—like the one he has led against Iran.

Trump also said things that might come back to haunt him. He vowed not to let Israel or America’s friends in the Persian Gulf “get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,” as if Iran were not already inflicting damage on them. 

And, Trump assured Americans that gas prices would come down. (They might, but not anytime soon.) He threatened, yet again, to bomb all of Iran’s electrical plants, a likely war crime if carried out with the completeness that Trump promised, should Iran refuse to … well, do whatever it is he thinks they should do. “We are unstoppable,” he said, noting that U.S. forces were in combat against “one of the most powerful countries.” (This, too, is nonsense: It takes nothing away from U.S.-military valor to admit that Iran was at best a second-tier power even before the war.) 

America might be unstoppable, but Donald Trump is obviously at loose ends now that the Iranians have a chokehold on a major part of the world’s energy supply.

Maybe the only bright spots in the speech were in the things the president did not say. He did not, as many observers expected, prepare Americans for the introduction of ground forces into Iran. (If he now goes ahead with such an operation, he will have betrayed the public by misleading them about the course of the war.) And he did not eviscerate

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and threaten to pull out of the alliance, as some expected him to do because of his ongoing anger at major European powers’ unwillingness to join a war they did not start.

If Donald Trump meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or (the failed) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)

Donald Trump is looking like he is lost and downtrodden. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.

Donald Trump and maga Evangelicals never quote Scripture when making excuses for Trumpzism: Try Matthew 19:24

Pope Leo celebrated a God of peace, not war. 

Trump should listen to him.
Pope Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday sermon warned against invoking God to justify violence.  Opinion echo published in the Boston Globe by Joan Vennochi. 

If Donald Trump really hopes to be “knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door,” in Bob Dylan’s famous words, he should pay more attention to Pope Leo XIV — and less to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25

In his first Palm Sunday sermon, Pope Leo XIV had a message for those who wage war in God’s name. Don’t do it❗

To the tens of thousands who gathered in St. Peter’s Square, the pope said: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Quoting scripture, Pope Leo added, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.”

While Pope Leo didn’t name names, his words seemed aimed at Pete Hegseth, who recently prayed for US troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

Perhaps coincidentally, on Palm Sunday, Trump posted a letter on Truth Social from Franklin Graham, the son of the late legendary televangelist Billy Graham, which assured him that his “soul is secure” and he is “bound for heaven.” (Maine Writer- Franklin Graham did not bother to quote Scripture.....he was clearly being politically solicitous. Surely Mr. Graham knows this Scripture passage: Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25, states: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." This uses extreme hyperbole to highlight that human salvation is impossible through wealth alone.)

Trump spends a considerable amount of time musing about his soul’s final destination, and it’s not for me to say where that might be. While Pope Leo certainly didn’t address it, reading between the lines of his sermon, it does seem that the leader of the Catholic Church has concerns about an administration that casts the cruelty and violence of war as some higher calling for this country and its military.

Good for Pope Leo. As contributing Globe Opinion columnist Alex Beam recently wrote about the role of the Catholic Church in debating the Iran war, “I admire anyone willing to speak for moral authority in a time of rampant dissembling and ‘relative’ truths.” So do I.

Some see Pope Leo, the first American-born pope, as too cautious and diplomatic. He is certainly choosing his words carefully and avoiding direct attacks that call out Trump by name. 

Still, Pope Leo's Palm Sunday message comes across. He has spoken out against Trump’s immigration policies, and suggested that Trump’s treatment of migrants should not be considered pro-life. He now seems to be speaking out more strongly against the war with Iran, moving from a “heartfelt” wish that “diplomacy” would prevail to Palm Sunday’s more overt rhetoric.

Certainly, there’s dissension within the church regarding Trump’s policies, just as there is in the country. The sharpest example is Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, and who backs Trump policies on immigration and war.

But, to revel in the suffering of others and to call for more of it in the name of religion, as Hegseth has done, is chilling, especially as it applies to war.  As an Army civilian who spoke on the condition of anonymity told The Washington Post, if troops are trained to believe that “God is on our side, what precludes us from doing anything we want to win?” To that I would add, what stops the other side from doing the same❓

Hegseth has injected religion into the Pentagon by holding monthly evangelical worship services, the Post reported. Under his leadership, is the United States now fighting a holy war with a Muslim country or one based on goals that have nothing to do with Hegseth’s personal religious beliefs and everything to do with America’s tactical interests❓

Those are questions that Trump should be asking himself, both as commander-in-chief and hopeful candidate for heaven.

Pick your muse, Donald❗ (Assuming Trump knows how to "muse", a big emotional leap, where he cannot create the outcome.)

Is it the blood-thirsty Hegseth, who at a recent prayer service read a passage from the Book of Psalms that said, “I pursued my enemies and overtook them. I did not turn back [till] they were consumed. I thrust them through so that they were not able to rise. They fell under my feet.”

Or is it the pope, who in his sermon on Sunday reminded Christians that when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus, “He revealed the gentle face of God, who always rejects violence. Rather than saving himself, he allowed himself to be nailed to the cross, embracing every cross borne in every time and place throughout human history.”

In making his choice, Trump should reread the letter from Graham that he posted on social media. Dated Oct. 15, 2025, Graham praised Trump not for waging war but for overseeing a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and for the return of hostages. “This is an answer to much prayer,” Graham wrote. “Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ (Matthew 5:9) — and Mr. President, that is what you are.”

Agree with that assessment of Trump or not — when you’re knockin’ on heaven’s door, the key of peacemaker is the one I would choose to try to open it.

Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist.

"Dangerous demagogues once again threatening even some of our oldest democracies," Evil Donald Trump déjà vu

Life in Hitler’s Capital- Berlin Germany

In a new book about everyday existence in wartime Berlin, students, musicians, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are allowed to speak for themselves. Book review by Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker magazine.

"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews." Martha Gellhorn.

My grandmother’s childhood in Weimar Germany was, at least as she described it, idyllic. She grew up in Grunewald, a leafy section of Berlin, swimming and boating in the district’s many lovely lakes. Her parents, though Jewish, threw elaborate Christmas parties and hosted birthday celebrations at which their three daughters were expected to recite poetry. They sent the girls to summer camp and private school and considered themselves assimilated into the city’s haute bourgeoisie. Even after the Reichstag fire, which occurred when my grandmother was twenty, there was, she insisted, still plenty of fun to be had. She liked to tell the story of a friend, nicknamed Bummel, who, after one particularly debauched New Year’s Eve, took off his tuxedo, carefully folded it up next to him, and fell asleep in the gutter.

Not long before Kristallnacht, in 1938, my grandmother—by this point married, with a daughter of her own—immigrated to New York. After I, the daughter of that daughter, came along, she used to tell me, “We were the lucky ones.” My grandmother had managed to get her immediate family out of Germany thanks to a wealthy uncle in Chicago. This, however, was not what she meant. She and my grandfather had been “lucky” because the only difficult choice that they’d had to make was to flee, and that choice had, in effect, been made for them. History had taken a host of fraught decisions out of their hands.

Over the years, I’ve often been reminded of my grandmother’s words. Recently, while I was reading Ian Buruma’s new book, “Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945” (Penguin Press), they played on repeat. Buruma is a writer who grew up in the Netherlands. In the opening pages of “Stay Alive,” he recounts the story of his father, Leo, whose experience was, in key ways, the mirror image of my grandmother’s. Leo didn’t flee Berlin to escape the Nazis; he arrived there to work for them.

Leo was attending law school in the occupied Netherlands when the Germans demanded that Dutch students sign a loyalty oath. Instead of complying, he went into hiding. For reasons that he was never able to discover, another student, who had also gone underground, advised Leo to return to his home town of Nijmegen. Leo’s father came to meet him at the train station, and both men were immediately surrounded by police. Leo had to make an agonizing call: either he could coöperate with the Nazis or both he and his father would be arrested. He opted for the former and was sent to a labor camp in Lichtenberg, a neighborhood in east Berlin.

Leo was one of those who managed to stay alive, though how, exactly, is unclear. At some point, he met a Frau Lehnhardt, the widow of a Jewish lawyer, who lived on the opposite side of the city. Lehnhardt had an elegant, well-heated home, and Leo seems to have spent a good deal of time there, accompanying the widow on the piano. By the end of the war, he had moved into Lehnhardt’s house. In April, 1945, Russian soldiers knocked on the door. When they found a gun, which belonged to another Lehnhardt hanger-on, the Russians very nearly shot everyone in the place.

Leo’s time in Berlin, Buruma reports, “haunted him” until his death, in 2020. He knew that some of his contemporaries, who had remained in hiding, regarded him as “morally compromised.” Was he? Was this true, as my grandmother’s formulation suggests, of everyone in the capital, including the many Berliners who despised the Nazis and spent the war years just trying to get by? “I wanted to know more about life in the city that marked my father’s life,” Buruma writes.

On September 1, 1939, the day that the Germans invaded Poland, Hitler made a speech in Berlin, at the Kroll Opera House. It was broadcast on the radio and also piped, via loudspeaker, out into the streets. Two days later, France and Britain declared war. Again, the news was blared across the capital. William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for CBS Radio, heard it announced from the speakers in the Wilhelmplatz. Some two hundred and fifty Berliners were standing around him in the sunny square. “They listened attentively to the announcement,” Shirer reported. “When it was finished there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before.”

Berlin was, at that point, continental Europe’s largest city, with a population of nearly four and a half million. What its typical—or, for that matter, atypical—resident was thinking at the start of the Second World War would have been impossible to ascertain. Since the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933, Germany had been a one-party state, and only Nazis were free to speak their minds.

Following the war, it would have been almost as difficult to get an honest account of Berliners’ experiences. The city’s population had shrunk by a million and a half, and Allied bombing had reduced many neighborhoods to rubble. Few people wanted to dwell on what they’d seen, or to reckon with their role in the catastrophe. The German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger described the collective response as a “form of moral insanity.” 

American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who travelled to the Rhineland shortly before V-E Day, wrote a famous dispatch that read, in part:

"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews."

Eighty years later, the task that Buruma has set himself—learning what life was like in wartime Berlin—has, in obvious ways, become even tougher. The vast majority of people who actually experienced the period have, like Leo, taken their memories to the grave. In some ways, though, the job has grown easier. As the so-called Tätergeneration, the perpetrator generation, has died off, Germany as a nation has become more open about its past. This is especially true in Berlin, where it’s hard to walk more than a few blocks without encountering a sign or plaque or monument devoted to some horror that occurred there. In the last few decades, the diaries of a number of Berliners who lived through the war have been published, along with a variety of memoirs and collections of letters.

Buruma relies heavily on works like “Das Blaue Buch” (“The Blue Book”), a wartime diary kept by the author Erich Kästner, which was not published in its entirety until 2006. (Kästner, who’s best known for his children’s story “Emil and the Detectives,” hid the volume among the thousands of others that he owned, and, as an additional precaution, he wrote in it in shorthand.) Kästner appears and reappears in “Stay Alive” like a restless ghost.

So does a half-Jewish guitarist named Coco Schumann, who wrote a memoir that appeared in German in 1997. (An English translation came out in 2016.) Schumann was part of a group of jazz-loving teens who liked to greet one another with an insouciant “Swing Heil!” He and his friends spent the night after the invasion of Poland listening to music at a bar on the Kurfürstendamm. Three years later, Schumann was still performing at jazz clubs, even though jazz was verboten, and flouting the Nazi regulation that all Jews wear a yellow star. One evening, he had just completed a set when an S.S. man approached.

“You should arrest me,” Schumann says he called out. “I’m a minor, and a Jew to boot.” The S.S. man at first looked puzzled, then started to laugh. Clearly, Schumann must be joking.

“Stay Alive” is itself organized like a diary, with a section devoted to each year of the war. This structure lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints; in addition to diaries, memoirs, and letters, he draws on advertisements, fashion magazines, propaganda leaflets, and interviews with aged Berliners. Students, musicians, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are all allowed to speak for themselves—to judge their own behavior, or not to.

According to Buruma’s sources, life in 1939, proceeded much as before for most Berliners, albeit with less illumination (the street lights were turned off) and less food (beer, milk, and meat were rationed). Attendance at the city’s cinemas went up. Goethe’s play “Iphigenia in Tauris” was performed at the Volksbühne, and “Tosca” played at the Volksoper. Buruma quotes a woman named Hilde Korseck, who was studying medicine in Berlin when the war began. “We had a lot of fun,” Korseck told a television interviewer. “It was a wonderful time, especially at night when we danced with small groups of friends.” Buruma himself interviews a Berliner named Jörg Sonnabend, who was in elementary school when the war broke out. “As a boy I must confess I loved uniforms,” Sonnabend tells him. “But otherwise, things were entirely normal.”

That some Berliners would be having a normal, even wonderful, time of it as others “were being tortured in the Gestapo cellars on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and murdered or worked to death at Sachsenhausen, is disturbing but should not surprise anyone,” Buruma writes. “Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don’t wish to hear or see.”

Soon, it became more difficult for Berliners to remain quite so oblivious. In August, 1940, the British started bombing the city; practically every night, the air-raid sirens screamed. The Nazis, who seem not to have anticipated that the war they had unleashed would come to their own capital, belatedly ordered the construction of massive bunkers. (After the war, one of these, designed under the direction of Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, was transformed into a Soviet prison, then a fruit storehouse, then a rave space. It now houses a collection of contemporary art.)

Most of the eighty thousand or so Jews who had stayed in Berlin or become stranded there were, initially, herded into Judenhäuser (Jewish houses). Among them was a relative of Buruma’s, on his mother’s side, Hedwig Ems. In 1941, when the deportation of the city’s Jews began in earnest, Ems was in her early seventies. “Whenever you met an acquaintance, the first question was bound to be: ‘Are you going to commit suicide, or will you let them deport you,’ ” Ems wrote in an unpublished memoir. Trains bound for the concentration camps left from Platform 17 at the Grunewald station, today the site of another grim memorial. In her memoir, Ems lists twelve of her family members who killed themselves and one who was revived from an attempt, only to die later in Theresienstadt. Ems herself managed to survive Theresienstadt, an outcome she attributed to her decision to wear fourteen layers of clothes when she was rounded up.

In the summer of 1941, Germany justified its invasion of the Soviet Union as a preëmptive strike against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks.” 

The following spring, with the Wehrmacht bogged down outside Moscow, the Nazis staged a carnival next to the Berlin Cathedral, sarcastically titled “The Soviet Paradise.” Inside a series of tents, visitors could gawk at photographs that purportedly showed Soviet slave-labor camps and tour what was supposed to be a replica of a Russian village—one where people lived in holes in the ground. The macabre spectacle was a big hit: in just six weeks, more than a million Berliners flocked to see it. The propaganda photos, Buruma reports, were fakes; many of the laborers pictured were actually prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of the city, where at least thirty thousand people were killed.

The Battle of Stalingrad, often described as the turning point of the war, drew to its bloody close in February, 1943. German casualties ran to something like a million. (Soviet losses were even greater.) “The mood in Germany has become very grave,” Erich Kästner recorded in his diary. Toward the end of the month, the authorities moved to round up Berlin’s remaining Jews, most of whom were performing forced labor in munitions factories. Some went underground. So-called Taucher, or “divers,” kept themselves alive by staying on the move, sleeping wherever they thought they could avoid detection, including in the Berlin Zoo.

Meanwhile, the British renewed their bombing of the city, after a lull during which they had focussed on destroying Germany’s ports.

When Leo Buruma arrived in the capital, in May, he was assigned to work for Knorr Brakes, a concern that, in addition to brakes, manufactured light machine guns. The guns were so shoddy that the S.S. handed them off to allies in places like Latvia. Perhaps because he spoke German, Leo was soon relieved of manual labor and sent to work in Knorr’s accounts department. He can’t have been paid very much; nevertheless, Buruma writes, he “was able to attend classical concerts at the Berlin Philharmonic, watch soccer matches, take walks around the many lakes on the outskirts of Berlin, and go to the movies.” He ate his first Chinese meal, at a restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm; attended a dance party at another labor camp; and struck up a romance, or perhaps just a flirtation, with a Ukrainian worker named Nadja. She “is a married woman and chaste,” Leo wrote in a letter to his parents.

The Dutch workers at Knorr were housed together in drafty barracks. Nearby were more heavily guarded quarters for Russian workers. In November, bombs destroyed the Russian camp. “Things did get a little scary last night,” Leo wrote home. “But don’t worry too much about me.”

Buruma likes jokes, and offers several that made the rounds in Berlin as the bombs rained down. One went like this:
Man in an air-raid shelter: “Where would we be without our Führer?”
A calm voice behind him: “In bed.”

And, another went: The Nazi regime has ended. Judgment has been passed. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels are suspended from the gallows. Goering, always the know-it-all, turns to Goebbels one last time and moans, “As I’ve always told you: the whole thing will be decided in the air.”

Buruma’s title comes from another joke of sorts, the humor of which is difficult to convey in English. “The new greeting in Berlin now is: Bleiben Sie übrig,” Kästner noted. The phrase übrig bleiben, which Buruma renders as “stay alive,” usually refers to something left over: a last piece of cake, for example, or some odd change.

By 1944, much of Berlin was a ruined hulk. A member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ version of the Hitler Youth, confided to her diary, “I’m a disgusting traitor. . . . I wish for peace, precisely for the sake of the soldiers. Is this the proper attitude for a Prussian, a German woman? No, and no again.”

The more that signs pointed to defeat, the more furiously the Nazis tried to stamp out “defeatism.” They formed a special task force to spy on people sitting in cafés (and even air-raid shelters) and report back negative comments. One Berliner who was overheard mocking the Führer was a cartoonist named Erich Ohser. In the Weimar years, Ohser had worked for a leftist newspaper; as a consequence, he’d been banned by the Nazis from practicing his trade. Under a pseudonym, he had gone on to publish a popular comic strip and then, amazingly enough, to work for Goebbels’s propaganda sheet, Das Reich, drawing caricatures of Allied leaders. Ohser was arrested for expressing anti-Nazi opinions. He hanged himself in his cell the day before his trial was set to begin. A journalist friend who was arrested with him was beheaded.

In early 1945, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, prisoners of war were forced to dig tank traps in the city’s rubble-strewn streets. These were referred to—privately, at least— as Lachsperren, or “comic traps,” because it seemed that the only use they would serve was to give the Soviets a laugh. The hunt for defeatists continued, ever more gruesomely. S.S. men and military police went around searching for deserters and “cowards.” When they found someone they thought fit the bill, they hanged him from a lamppost.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a German journalist who was part of a resistance group called Uncle Emil, wrote in her diary about encountering one such corpse. Passersby tried not to look at the body, which was swaying in the wind. “There are so many lampposts in Berlin, thousands of them,” Andreas-Friedrich noted.

Every so often, “Stay Alive” provides a glimpse of Berliners facing the kinds of hard choices that my grandmother felt lucky to have avoided. Marie Jalowicz was one of about fifteen hundred Berlin Jews who survived the war as “divers.” In 1942, she was hiding out with a distant relative when she found the relative’s husband standing by her bed. “He indistinctly muttered a few revolting obscenities,” Jalowicz would later recall. “You can guess the rest of it. I could neither kick up a fuss nor send him back, so I just let him have his way.” In 1945, Jalowicz was raped by Soviet soldiers. She allowed one of her rapists to become her “fiancé,” thus securing his protection.

More common are the evasions. “We never encountered any Jews,” Dorrit Sonnabend, the wife of the man who as a child loved uniforms, tells Buruma—a line that could easily have been dreamed up by Martha Gellhorn. A Lutheran pastor named Kurt Rasenberger writes encouragingly to his son, “Even if you are not a Nazi . . . you must be true to the Germans. God will reward loyalty. Even with tears in our eyes, we should remain loyal to our blood.”

Leo Buruma, too, seems to be seeking exoneration. He may have been haunted by his experience, but in his letters home, which his parents saved, he comes across as a young man intent on sparing his family and also himself pain. “Even in these times I have doubts whether we should demand of every Dutch person that they put themselves in serious danger,” he tells his sister in 1943. “I used to take a different view, but I’m no longer so zealous.” In July, 1944, with much of the city in ashes, Leo reports that he has gone to see a highly entertaining operetta called “The Golden Cage.” The jokes, he writes, “were very daring.”

Is Leo’s self-protectiveness justified? How about that of the many, many other Berliners who made ugly accommodations to stay alive? I confess that I’m not sure, and I don’t know that Buruma is, either. At the end of the book, Buruma characterizes his project as “partly a love letter to Berlin.” This, he acknowledges, may sound perverse; the book is, explicitly and unrelentingly, about the Berlin of the war years, when, in his words, “unspeakable crimes were planned and perpetrated there.” Buruma explains that his affection is for the city of the present and “the way the scars of its worst crimes are openly on display.” Elsewhere in the book’s final pages, Buruma offers a different account of his purpose, more along the lines of a warning. “Dangerous demagogues are once again threatening even some of our oldest democracies,” he writes. This is, or should be, the book’s claim to relevance, in which case not love but shame and terror would seem the pertinent emotions.

(Maine Writer- Excellent question here....)
What historians of the future will do with all of our diaries and blog posts and TikToks is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime, as they used to say in Berlin, Bleiben Sie übrig❗ (Stay Behind!). In other words, "hold that thought", ensure this idea is not forgotten .)