Donald Trump's Caligula Trap- How to get out of Iran without admitting he surrendered and failed

In Iran, Trump’s victory claims only deepened a self-made catastrophe published in The Guardian by Sidney Blumenthal

Before Donald Trump finally surrendered in his Iran war, he declared victory several dozen times, including on day eight– “We’ve already won!” – day 10 – “The war is very complete”– day 12, proclaiming he had won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won.

You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, ❗we won won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, we won the bet in the first hour it was over”– and day 39 –“Total and complete victory, 100%. No question about it”– and claimed a deal to end the war was just around the corner 38 times. The first time he raised the prospect of peace, on day 24, he said the two sides had reached “almost all points of agreement”.

Trump boldly affixed his signature with a sharpie to the Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU surrender) on day 110, the 17th of June, at the Palace of Versailles, where the ruinous treaty concluding the first world war was signed. He seemed oblivious to the historical symbolism of the place, but bedazzled by its gold. “Versailles is not gold leaf – Versailles is the real deal,” he remarked.

At a press conference beforehand, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, stood stone-faced as an Easter Island statue, perhaps hoping nobody would notice him, but still tainted with the war by his presence. Trump said about his absent vice-president, who was queasy about the whole venture but has now been assigned the task of defending it: “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

The next day, Vance insisted🙄 🤥the war was a “win” and falsely stated that lifting oil sanctions was “not a new benefit” for Iran. Trump, who invariably chooses a fall guy for his own failures, apparently does not wish to have anyone become his successor. Vance, for his part, promptly pointed at Israel, where Trump’s MOU is universally excoriated, as the fall guy. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance said, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Vance has been delegated to drink from the poisoned chalice. Welcome to Jonestown.

That day, 18 June, Israel Hayom, the rightwing newspaper that is a mouthpiece for the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and is published by Miriam Adelson, who gave more than $100m to the 2024, Trump campaign, ran a lead editorial addressed to Trump: “...you have gravely harmed the human interests of the enlightened world, and you may be remembered forever as the president who brought about America’s humiliation. You betrayed us, the Israelis. And in a single moment, the contempt you once faced suddenly seems so justified and logical.” Netanyahu, who delivered his fate into Trump’s hands, forgot that Trump abandoned even his mentor, the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, in the end.

Trump lost his war on day one. In fact, Iran first effectively closed the strait of Hormuz following US and Israeli airstrikes that day and formally closed it two days later, achieving asymmetric strategic superiority through control over a crucial spigot of the global economy. On day 43, 11 April, Trump tweeted: “The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else.” Trump could not distinguish between tactics and strategy. He confused bombs and bombast with the mission, which eluded him. The more he bombed, the more he lost the plot.

Without any strategic comprehension, Trump’s triumphalism only deepened the bitterness and anger that has followed his eventual loss. In brief, he elevated the Iranian regime into a regional hegemon and a power in the world economy; persuaded the Gulf states that the US is an unreliable ally that could not shield them; increased the influence everywhere of China; condemned Israel after
Netanyahu hustled Trump into a fiasco that other presidents had carefully avoided; further alienated our European allies that prudently distanced themselves; drastically wasted US military power; and shattered US prestige. By the time he had finished, nobody on any side believed Trump should be taken at his word.

In fact, the exercise of Trump exposing himself yet again as a mountebank* is redundant, but now catastrophic with the whole world watching.

What Trump succeeded in obliterating was any rationale he offered for going to war in the first place. He had claimed he already accomplished regime change in Iran amid his dire threats. On day 39, 7 April, he tweeted: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”

Trump provided his own refutation on day 110, 16 June, piling on praise for the Iranian regime that had consolidated as a theocratic military dictatorship: “You talk about regime change. I never cared about regime change. It [was] never a part … And we’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. I think actually they’re smarter than the first and second group, but they’re not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

Trump is in a class of his own as an American president in launching a war of aggression without a casus belli, a direct offensive provocation, and losing it in short order.

Other presidents haunted by the shadow of defeat in war knew it would discredit them. Two days after John F Kennedy’s assassination, on 24 November 1963, Lyndon Johnson told the US ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr: “I am not going to lose Vietnam.” Three years later, Johnson confessed privately: “I just can’t be the architect of surrender.” “I won’t be the first American president to lose a war,” he told the undersecretary of state George Ball.

President Richard Nixon uttered virtually the same words. “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war,” he told his aides in October 1969. Both Johnson and Nixon were undone as they struggled with their inability to end a war they did not begin but which they escalated, as the Pentagon Papers revealed, through vain attempts to achieve what Nixon called “peace with honor”.

Leaders in democracies that lose wars inevitably lose office. There is no case anywhere of a democratic leader politically surviving the loss of a war.

(George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, before the defeat materialized in Iraq and Afghanistan, which by 2016, had broken the Reagan-Bush era of the Republican party and greatly contributed to the rise of Trump.) Despots historically have retained power in the aftermath of defeat only through ruthless repression, coercive control of media and scapegoating, which makes the revolt against them more explosive when it comes.

On day 107, 14 June, Trump’s birthday, Trump had announced the sketchy MOU as “complete”. “Congratulations to all!” he crowed.

In a boon to Iran, Trump waived oil export sanctions, opened access to tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets, and committed to a mysteriously funded $300bn “Reconstruction Plan” that might have unspecified side deals, while entering into 60 days of negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program more than eight years after he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated under President Obama in which Iran pledged not to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump called it a “horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made”.

On that day, his 80th birthday, Trump staged matches of the UltimateFighting Championship on the South Lawn of the White House in a cage under his gargantuan “claw” as though he had won the war and the fighters victorious in the ring represented his strength. His circus was the opening act of his culture of defeat and its denial.

When asked on day 111, 18 June, by an Axios reporter what insight the war had revealed to him about “the limits of his ability to exert power”, Trump replied: “There are no limits. I haven’t learned that lesson yet. I know there are, but there are no limits.” He claimed that the Iranian signing of the MOU was “probably unconditional surrender”. Trump had called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” on day seven, 6 March.

On 18 June, Trump also declared victory over the algae blooms in the Reflecting Pool that had turned it green after he granted two no-bid contracts for $16m to a firm that previously performed pool work at a Trump golf club but had no history of federal contracting and a campaign contributor and Mar-a-Lago club member who was twice criminally convicted. The interior department tweeted: “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear,🤥 and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool – just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”  🙄

Trump said the pool would “probably” have to be drained again and accused “Radical Left Lunatics” of sabotaging his project with a knife and chemicals, though he presented no evidence. He tweeted about “terrible vandals” and “serious crimes… Years in jail!” On 19 June, the Park police arrested a 67-year-old former Olympic cyclist on a misdemeanor charge of destroying government property for reaching into the pool to touch the “American flag blue” peeling paint. He was released within hours – day 113, another quagmire, another defeat.

In 40AD, the Emperor Caligula, notorious for his inability to “control his natural cruelty and viciousness”, as well as his “gluttony and adultery”. according to the historian Suetonius, marched his legions to the shore of the English Channel to invade Britain, where he suddenly ordered his soldiers to gather seashells as the “spoils” of war. “As a monument of his victory he erected a lofty tower, from which lights were to shine at night to guide the course of ships,” and staged a return to Rome “on his birthday in an ovation”.

Trump is now caught in his miserable Caligula Trap** from which he cannot extract himself. Mocking his self-congratulatory language, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican member of Congress and Maga queen, posted on the day Trump signed the MOU: “Congratulations to all for almost achieving peace to the war that is not a war, spending hundreds of billions of US tax dollars again for another foreign war after we voted no … This, apparently, is what winning looks like.”

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln:

*a person who deceives others, especially in order to trick them out of their money

**Caligula Trap is a rhetorical or political concept describing a situation where someone makes self-congratulatory claims or declares false victories that they cannot extract themselves from without admitting the deception.

Question to Donald Trump and maga Republicans? Has Iran surrendered yet? Multiple choice answers are "yes" or "no".

An opinion essay published in the New Yorker magazine, by David Remnick.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, two months into Trump's illegal war of choice, the chief offender of truth is Donald Trump himself.

Donald Trump's war on truth. Who knew? 

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, Dpma;d Trump announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could soon be heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all the President’s men followed his lead: they blamed
the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while the President has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the Donald Trump's cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. Trump loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The most cruel irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦

Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans dug themselves into a shithole war and they cannot get out unless they lie about it

Echo opinion letter to the letter of the Columbian news:

Trump digs a hole for U.S.❗

Donald Trump buried himself in a big hole at the behest of the Israelis and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Now, the Republicans are spinning that the military Marines on Kharg Island, located off the coast of Iran, are not “boots on the ground.” ❓A dangerous typical Republican lie 🤥😔❗ .

Trump is whining loudly that “nobody will help me❗” Those he insulted in Europe told him it’s “his war.” I love that!

Yesterday, I paid 💲67 to fill my Subaru — 💲5.20 a gallon 💲❗at Shell. Republicans also state that doesn’t matter. ❓ 

Midterm elections this year will surely stick it to Republicans. (Maine Writer- if voters will be allowed to get to our polling places....❗❗) For the GOP, the only hope is to rig the election, cheat in other words. Cheating is a one-way street with Trump and Republicans —😟 only they get to do it. 

From Bill Kelley in Yacolt, Washington State, published in the Columbian 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must call for the impeachment of Donald Trump. Senator Susan Collins, where are you?

Where Is the Iran War Headed❓ 

Senator Susan Collins, where are you❓

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are over their heads in illegal wars.

Donald Trump has both called for Iranians to rise up and oust the ruthless theocracy and said that he’s fully prepared to deal with a new religious leader.  Echo article published in The New Yorker Magazine by Robin Wright. 

Since 1979, Iran’s revolutionary regime has been the nemesis of eight American Presidents. None could tame its political furies; its covert operations, which killed more than a thousand Americans in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan; or its expansion, through the creation of like-minded extremist movements, across the Middle East. The Islamic Republic considered its mini-realm a defensive buffer against U.S. and Israeli intervention. The U.S. and Israel viewed Iran as the most persistent threat in the world’s most volatile region. Donald Trump and Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu have now set out to destroy the regime, militarily and politically, in a reckless war of choice with no visible or thoughtful endgame—and, in Trump’s case, no advance approval by Congress or warning to American taxpayers.💢❗

For Operation Epic Fury, the Trump Administration has so far deployed nearly half the United States’ air power and roughly a third of its naval assets. The cost is nearly nine hundred million dollars a day, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated. Much like the initial “shock and awe” campaign during Operation Iraqi Freedom, in 2003, the first week of the war was militarily stunning. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of senior officials were killed. Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles was seriously depleted and its strategic installations left in rubble. Its navy was devastated; a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, the first such strike since the Second World War. Pete Hegseth (Whiskey Pete), the Secretary of Defense, boasted, “More and larger waves are coming. We are just getting started.” Iran’s capabilities, he added, are “evaporating.”

Trump, with his usual inconsistency, has called for Iranians to rise up against the ruthless theocracy—last week, he demanded its “unconditional surrender”—but also said that he’s prepared to deal with a new religious leader. Since 2017, millions of Iranians have participated in protests; tens of thousands have been killed. For now, though, an uprising seems unlikely. Iranians will first need to pick up the political and physical pieces of their lives, and although public fury at the government has not diminished, foreign military intervention has ignited a sense of millennia-old nationalism. The prospect of many members of the Iranian security forces—there are more than a million, counting reservists—joining a popular rebellion seems improbable, too.

The Iran war rattled the international order, troubled as it already was. After two disastrous U.S. wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an ominous sense of how messy and costly and deadly this one will  get, however confident Trump sounds. 

Iran is larger, in size and in population, than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It is arguably the most important geostrategic country in the three regions it borders—the Arab world; the formerly Soviet “stans” of Central Asia; and Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan, in South Asia. It has vast oil and gas reserves, along with the largest military in the Middle East, and it has had powerful sway in parts of the Muslim world, particularly among Shiites.

Trump said that the biggest surprise to him is the scope of Tehran’s response. Iran was clearly prepared, especially after the Twelve-Day War, last June, when Donald Trump ordered B-2 stealth warplanes to drop bunker-busting bombs on nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. This time, it countered with missile and drone strikes on seven oil-rich neighbors allied with the United States, from Iraq to Saudi Arabia and Oman. It targeted international airports, hotels, businesses, ports, and energy facilities. Despite American defensive superiority, Iran hit the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh; the consulate in Dubai; the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, at Al Udeid, in Qatar; and the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, which coördinates U.S. naval operations across the Middle East. Netanyahu said that he has been dreaming for forty years about overthrowing the theocracy, but Iranian missiles penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. Air sirens repeatedly alerted the residents of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to seek shelter. Dozens of buildings, including a military airbase, were hit. Hezbollah, Iran’s longtime partner, opened a second front with Israel from Lebanon.

In fact, the scale of Iran’s retaliation has led U.S. allies, who had balked at joining a U.S.-led offensive, to reluctantly agree to play a role. France, Germany, and Britain pledged to “take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region,” with Britain deploying warplanes in Qatar. Greece, following a drone strike on Cyprus, sent four fighter jets to the island. Italy promised defense systems to Gulf nations. By the end of the first week of war, seventeen countries were involved. After cutting direct military aid to Ukraine last year, Washington even reached out to Kyiv for its expertise in countering Iranian drones, which Russia uses to attack it.

Beyond the physical damage, Epic Fury has spooked the global economy. Stocks plunged, and the price of oil spiked by fifteen per cent, as Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes. Saudi Arabia temporarily shut its Ras Tanura oil refinery, one of the world’s largest, after a drone strike. Qatar suspended the production and export of liquefied natural gas.

Iran, then, still has some leverage. Hadi Semati, a former professor of political science at the University of Tehran, who is now in Washington, said, “If Iran comes out of this crisis alive, it has essentially won, albeit with degraded military capability.” And the theocracy may survive. Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution, cautioned, “We’re going to be left with some kind of bloodied, battered rump version of the Islamic Republic, led by officials who are now even more determined to try to cling to power, and who are going to be more confident of the fact that they’re able to stay, because they have withstood this terrible crisis.”

Last week, as Iran’s Assembly of Experts met to elect a new Supreme Leader, Trump insisted that he should have the right of approval. He told Axios, “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.” He rejected Khamenei’s hawkish son Mojtaba as “unacceptable.” (Trump, Maloney said, “seems to think that this is an episode of ‘The Apprentice.’ ”) But the Assembly may select a revolutionary hard-liner to signal continuity. 

Meanwhile, Iran’s ninety-two million people are trapped between a bloody war and the bloody regime. ♦

#HasIranSurrenderedYet ❓

Published in the print edition of the March 16, 2026, issue, with the headline “War-Torn.”

Making Israel less safe again- an echo opinion

This is the road to a form of apartheid.

Trump and "Bibi"- creating uncertainty where there had been stability

This echo opinion is critical of how Donald Trump has deliberately played into the Evangelical playbook, just because he could. In so doing, Trump has created an incendiary situation in an politically combustible area of the world where people need calm leadership, rather than political posturing based on extremist religious ideologies.

Trudy Rubin writes an opinion published in the Madison Wisconsin State Journal newspaper. She is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Donald Trump wanted to give Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu a boost in hotly contested Israeli elections, set for April 9.

So, Donald Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy, by tweet of course: He posted that the United States should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a rocky plateau that Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 Arab–Israeli war.

This was a purely political gesture to solve a problem that didn’t exist. There was no pressure on Israel from any quarter to return the Golan to Syria, a country wrecked by civil war and penetrated by Iran. Nor will U.S. recognition of Jerusalem’s 1981 annexation of the Golan make Israel any safer.

On the contrary, Trump’s political boon for Bibi will prompt unnecessary new threats to the Jewish state.

To understand why, a little background is helpful. Driving along the western edge of the Golan Heights one can look directly down on towns and villages of northern Israel, practically into the windows of some residential homes. Syrian artillery regularly shelled Israel from the heights between 1948 and 1967.

Since 1974, U.N. observers have patrolled an armistice line on the heights between Israel and Syria. In 1999-2000, Israel offered to return most of the Golan. But peace talks foundered because Syria wanted every inch back.

On my most recent trip to the Golan, 15 months ago, it was apparent why Israel could never return the entire territory in the foreseeable future. Driving along the Israeli side of the armistice line, one could see smoke rising in the distance. The same Iranian-backed militias that helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad essentially win the civil war were trying to seize turf along the Syrian side of the armistice line. Pro-Iranian Hezbollah fighters were joining that fight, arriving in Syria from Lebanon, just to the north of the Golan. Syrian civilians were crossing daily into Israel for medical treatment.

Yet -- let me emphasize again -- there was no pressure on Israel to return the Golan, not from Syria, not from Arab states, not from the international community. Indeed, life on the Israeli side of the Golan was, and still is, relatively prosperous and peaceful. Israeli troops, and Israeli planes had the area under control.

At least 20,000 Israelis have moved to the Golan, many in prosperous agricultural settlements, featuring apple orchards and high end wineries. The bulk of the Syrian population on the Golan are Druze, a small religious sect that was able to reconnect with many of their brethren who live in northern Israel. With heavy investment, the Druze capital Majdal Shams was booming with restaurants and cafes, and young women shop in western-style dress.

I was told by then Majdal Shams mayor Dolan Abu Saleh that, since the Syrian civil war, Druze had change their attitude toward Assad, perceiving him as a puppet of Iran and Russia. 

They were not eager, he said, to return to Syrian control and Russian hegemony -- or to a simmering civil war.

But very few were willing to take Israeli citizenship (as Saleh had done), because of the negative impact that would have for their Druze relatives on the Syrian side of the border.

So to summarize: before Trump’s tweet on the Golan, the internal situation in that region was stable. Assad had no chance to get the heights back, nor were Sunni Arab states raising the issue. Moreover, Russia, in understandings worked out with Israel, had pressed Iran to keep its proxies far back from the armistice line. The Russians, who control much of Syrian air space, were also letting Israel bomb many Iranian military targets in Syria.

All good for Israel.

U.S. recognition of Israel’s annexation of Golan would upset this positive scenario on several fronts.

First, by formally recognizing Israeli annexation, Trump would raise the issue of Israeli violations of international law. 

Most of the world protested Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a part of Ukraine, so how to avoid chastising Israel for annexing land that is a sovereign part of Syria. Nobody was raising the issue before Trump’s tweet, but now Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia may see an opening (or feel the need) to challenge Israel.

The Syrian Druze on the Golan, caught in between, may be forced to protest.

All for no practical Israeli gains.

Equally adverse, a U.S. nod to Israel’s annexation of the Golan has already emboldened Israeli right wing parties that want Jerusalem to formally annex much or all of the West Bank. Knesset (parliament) speaker Yuli Edelstein told a huge crowd in Tel Aviv last week that U.S. shift on Golan was a first step toward U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty there.

Down this annexation path lies a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem in which Israel winds up ruling permanently over a majority of disenfranchised Arabs. 

Forget about any Trump-led peace “deal of the century.” 

This is the road to a form of apartheid.

Trump’s tweet indicates this would cause him no heartburn. His only goal is to help reelect his scandal-plagued counterpart in Israel. Or perhaps to please his evangelical supporters.

Evangelicals and the Second Coming of Jesus

For reasons known unto themselves and ignited by their interpretation of Biblical prophesy, Evangelicals are obsessed with the Second Coming of Jesus.  

Evangelicals believe the Second Coming of Jesus should come sooner rather than later and are prepared to risk world order to force their false prophesy on the world. They support Donald Trump's decree to make Jerusalem the capital of Israel, without any inside information, and absent a Biblical reference to the Rapture they claim will occur with the return of Jesus. They are ignoring international opposition to this unwarranted action and foreign experts' advice to the contrary.

Evangelicals weirdly believe that all of humanity must endure the final judgment of God, so that only the righteous will see the Kingdom of Heaven. Moreover, they want to expedite this occurrence based on a prophesy about the final judgment, when, in fact, they have no inside information about when, why or how the end of the world's doomsday scenario will happen.

Nevertheless, in Evangelicals' twisted prophesies, they are supporting the decision made by Donald Trump to name Jerusalem the capital of Israel, in spite of the turmoil this action is causing in the Middle East, where all surrounding nations claim a heritage in the world's Holiest City. Jerusalem is the city where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus Christ to death by crucifixion and, therefore, the city is apparently the focus of the Second Coming. Jews don't share ownership in the New Testament history of the city, but they value Jerusalem because it is the place where their heritage is rooted, going back in time to King David.

Let's be honest. Evangelicals do not care whether or not Benjamin Netanyahu wants Jerusalem to be the capital city of Israel, instead of Tel Aviv.  Instead, they want to expedite the wrong minded Armageddon prophecies, so that the "Rapture" can take them to heaven and leave the rest of us to burn in hell. And that's the truth.  Meanwhile, there is no Biblical reference to this invented "Rapture" mythology. In fact, it's made up prophesy.

Evangelicals even include the Jews in their doomsday prophesy of hell and damnation, unless they happen to convert to Christianity, which is never going to happen. It's as rare for a person of Jewish heritage to become a baptized Christian as it is for a Muslim to convert to Judaism.

Therefore, when Donald Trump signed his dangerous decree about declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, he accepted the weird thinking of a very small group of religious zealots against the advice of those who opposed this action- including all Middle East nations and the Palestinians.  

Donald Trump scribbled his illegible signature on the unpopular Jerusalem announcement, that (by the way) looks like an EKG reading of a patient in cardiac arrest (it's true!). He might as well be putting the Middle East into cardiac arrest, as a result, 

Evangelicals believe in the prophesy of Armageddon: 

The prophesied location of a gathering of armies for a battle during the end times, variously interpreted as either a literal or a symbolic location. The term is also used in a generic sense to refer to any end of the world scenario.

The big problems with this mystical belief are two fold:

1.  In the Gospel of Matthew, the fact is "only the father knows" when the end of times will happen. "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
2.  Biblical made up prophesies, like "the Rapture" are obviously not intelligent precedents upon which to create foreign policy. 

In my opinion as a Roman Catholic woman, with no understanding of prophesies or experience in foreign policy, the Evangelicals' end of times scenario will harm millions of innocent people and, moreover, there will be no Second Coming of Jesus to show for it. 

So, that's my prophesy. Evangelicals are wrong. (I have a right to prophesy, just like they do.)

Moreover, Donald Trump now owns the end of times as we know it, as his legacy.