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 and maga Republicans must face the truth. Donald Trump has a list of impeachable offenses Senator Susan Collins alert!

Trump will be impeached in 2027.  Philadelphia Inquirer opinion, by columnist Will Bunch.

(BTW, where is Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins❓)

War❗ Good God, y’all. Since my music brain stopped growing around age 11, Edwin Starr’s “War,” a No. 1 hit from the fall of 1970, always gets stuck in my head every time the United States starts dropping bombs on yet another foreign land, and the tune usually stays there for a long time. 

Meanwhile, there’s not much new to say about Donald Trump’s folly in the Persian Gulf. The bombs keep coming down. Gas prices keep going up. And what is it good for❓ Absolutely nothing.

A political bombshell fell over the weekend. You just didn’t hear it, thanks to all the real bombshells that fell across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran slogged into its third week.

It had to do with one of the 1,700 pardons or commutations that Donald Trump has issued since he returned to office 14 months ago — including just about everyone involved in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 but also a rogue’s gallery of ex-GOP officials, crypto scammers, and politically connected folks making massive donations.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But, Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

The Times reported that Schwartz hired a conservative lawyer and friend of Donald Trump Jr. named Josh Nass as a “pardon broker,” an increasingly lucrative business under Trump Sr.’s lax interpretation of his clemency responsibilities. Records show that Schwartz paid Nass 💲100,000, but — according to the Times account — the lawyer apparently believed he was owed a lot more.

According to a federal indictment, Nass hired a Russian-speaking convicted felon to collect another 💲500,000 from his client, telling his alleged goon to “do anything and everything” to get the money. Prosecutors in Brooklyn have now charged Nass with extortion in the matter.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ 

We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

There’s a lot more like this, but you get the point.

Trump’s dodgy pardon practices, with millions of dollars changing greasy palms, deserve a major, Watergate-style investigation. That’s not going to happen — not in 2026, anyway. One Brooklyn blip doesn’t change the reality that Trump’s Justice Department and its lapdog attorney general, Pam Bondi, mainly only do white-collar probes of Trump’s perceived enemies. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress would rather wield their subpoena powers against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s looking more and more likely that a big part of this equation is going to change in January. Nothing is a lock in American politics — sorry, Polymarket bettors — but Democrats have a healthy lead in the polls ahead of this fall’s midterm election, have flipped seat after seat since 2024, and are posting big early turnout numbers.

With Trump’s popularity falling with every uptick of the gas pump, November is looking now like a wave election for Democrats who only need a couple more seat flips to regain the House majority. The party’s new committee chairs will find themselves with power to investigate whatever suspected misdeeds of MAGA World they want to, And — as we saw twice during Trump’s first term — it only takes a simple majority vote to impeach a president.

As Trump himself is well aware. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” POTUS 47 told House Republicans at a gathering in January, Well, there actually are reasons.

It’s kind of the opposite of what happened in 2023 when the GOP retook the House with a burning zeal to impeach Joe Biden but didn’t really have anything to charge him with. With Trump, it’s more than a matter of, where does one start? For example:

• The pardon mess, as described above. Trump’s outrageous abuse of his clemency pen has proved America’s founders made a big mistake in granting such absolute power to just one man. Congressional hearings can and should spur pardon reform, but could also expose evidence that could be used in a Trump impeachment case.

• Cryptogate. Presidents used to put their assets in a blind trust, as Jimmy Carter famously did with his peanut farm. Trump, on the other hand, keeps doing deals and has seen his net worth roughly triple to more than $6 billion in just the first year of his second term. There are many tentacles to what I called Cryptogate with this handy guide I published last spring. Trump’s pump-and-dump meme coin launched on inauguration weekend seems a high crime unto itself.

• War crimes. The war in Iran is illegal,❗. The president did not seek congressional approval to start dropping bombs up and down the Persian Gulf as required by both the U.S. Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act. It’s also an illegal, aggressive war under international law. Ditto his regime-change assault on Venezuela, which killed more than 100 people. Ditto his regime’s unending lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which have no legal basis. Congress can reassert its authority by impeaching Trump.

• Abuse of power in the justice system. The flip side of Trump’s pardons has been the unprecedented attempt to use the Justice Department to go after the president’s perceived enemies, from former FBI chief James Comey to Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. These investigations, directly urged on by Trump in Truth Social posts, have repeatedly failed to pass muster with judges or grand juries, but that doesn’t erase the stain of such clearly wrongful prosecutions.

This list doesn’t even cover some of the more morally repugnant aspects of the Trump regime, such as the brutal and too often deadly mass deportation program and the push to build inhumane warehouse detention centers. Nor does it anticipate future surprises, like the Ukraine phone calls that sparked Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019.

It also doesn’t include the political calculation facing House Democrats. Baring a dramatic change in the zeitgeist, there still won’t be the 67 Senate votes needed to remove Trump from office — a likely replay of his first two impeachments. 

Some will argue that impeachment would be a distraction or even a time waster, preventing Congress from tackling meat-and-potatoes legislation.

That’s not the point. Arguably the biggest task facing the 120th Congress will be simply proving that the United States is still governed by the rule of law. Nothing is more central to that than reestablishing that high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution have consequences — including the stain of impeachment.

Most importantly, impeachment hearings are the vehicle to air Trump’s wrongdoing before the American people — much as it was during his first term. 

A national denunciation of a president’s abuse of power — even if it doesn’t end Trump’s presidency — is the first step toward making sure it never happens again. 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans abandoned their message about "affordabability"- guess it had too many letters difficult to spell

 Echo opinion published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore: Trump Waging War on His Own Affordability* Strategy #SIASD

(This opinion essays seems prophetic, in my opinion, creates the sense of a looming world wide depression.  #ImpeachTrumpNow❗ #SenatorSusanCollins)

Donald Trump’s “war of choice” against Iran is a big departure from his administration’s alleged determination to focus on improving the domestic economy and addressing concerns about affordability before crucial midterm elections this November. 

But, aside from the Donald Trump's spectacular failure to stay on message, there is a more specific problem with the sudden lurch into a regional war in the Middle East. 

To the extent Trump had an actual affordability agenda (other than calling concerns about living costs “a hoax”), a central pillar was keeping energy prices low by demolishing any obstacles to maximum exploitation of fossil-fuel resources. Aside from the beneficial effect this might have on prices for other goods and services influenced by energy costs, the “drill baby drill” mentality was designed to reduce gasoline pump prices, one of the most visible inflation indicators from the perspective of regular folks.

Suddenly, the United States has produced an energy-price crisis for itself and for the whole world, Reuters reports:

Traffic through the Strait ​of Hormuz was closed for a fourth day after Iran attacked five ships, choking off a key artery accounting for about 20% of global oil and LNG supply. …

The conflict risks triggering a renewed spike in inflation that could choke off economic recovery in Europe and Asia if the war is prolonged in a region that accounts for just under a third of global ​oil production and almost a fifth of natural gas.

Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, on Tuesday said it may be forced to cut production by more than three million barrels per day ​in a few days if oil tankers cannot move freely to loading points, according to two Iraqi oil officials.

While other countries face the most dire immediate economic consequences from a war that Trump is now projecting to last a month or more (“whatever it takes,” to be precise), it’s about to affect Americans too:

American motorists will pay more at the pump amid spiking oil prices due to the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran, with experts predicting gasoline prices could rise sharply this week.

The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, a type of oil primarily produced in the U.S., jumped 6.2% on Monday to $71.19 per barrel, according to data from FactSet. Brent crude, the international benchmark, surged nearly 9% to $79.31 per barrel on Monday, its highest point in more than a year.

Gas prices in the U.S. will move higher, according to GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan, who predicted that some gas stations could be charging as much as 30 cents more per gallon. 

And the indirect effects could be even more severe, as Canadian energy expert Rory Johnston told our own Benjamin Hart:

I think if this lasts a couple more days, we’ll see it reflected at the gas pump in terms of overall gas prices. 

Diesel will be even more acutely affected. I think the big impact will be on freight and shipping rates, and that’s going to hit consumers more on the price of produce, the price of random consumer goods. That’s the type of stuff that diesel will complicate more. So I think you will see an impact at the price of the pumps, but the biggest impact won’t be as visible to consumers immediately. It will take a while to work through the supply chain.

As part of their furious spin about a war that’s already unpopular outside Trump’s Republican base, administration gabbers are arguing that Trump’s expansion of fossil-fuel production is giving him the strategic flexibility to wreck global oil markets without catastrophic consequences, notes the New York Times:

The Trump administration said that it has more leeway to act aggressively in the Middle East because the world is flush with oil and gas, thanks in part to record U.S. production, and has less to fear than it once did from energy price shocks.

The ongoing war in Iran could put that theory to the test.🤥

While it may be comforting to Americans to be told they won’t be paying as much for this war as they might have had Trump not impatiently brushed aside environmental fears about fossil fuels, it doesn’t explain the decision to subordinate economic policy to another Donald Trump (bone spurs❗🦴❗)military adventure. 

Yes, MAGA true believers are buying Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear-weapon and missile programs posed an immediate threat to the United States, but other Americans are not persuaded at the moment. So, Donald Trump's reckless decision thrusting in this radical direction sure looks like a conscious choice to subordinate the daily concerns of our American people to a globalist agenda and an alliance with Israel that already troubles a majority of Americans.

Shortly before the 2024, presidential election, I was filling up my car with gas in California, and someone had placed on the pump a little decal of Trump pointing at the per-gallon prices and saying, Biden did this! If pump prices continue to go up in 2026, it will be even easier to show that Trump did this❗ And the price will be paid not just by consumers, but by Republican candidates whose affordability arguments have been blown up by the explosions in Iran.

*Affordability is defined as the state of being cheap enough for people to be able to buy. 

Emoluments Clause is pseudonym for Grand Grift: Donald Trump violates the Constitution on a daily basis

The Sky-High Corruption of Donald Trump

Echo report published in The Nation by Chris Lehmann.

The Democrats missed their first chance to spotlight Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They shouldn’t miss their second.

Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019, lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of the most fraught regions for U.S. national security in the world [could] curry favor with the President by purchasing real estate from one of his companies.”

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Trump-branded real-estate conflicts in the Middle East still abound, of course—most notoriously via Trump’s son-in-law and erstwhile Middle East envoy Jared Kushner’s billion-dollar dealings with the Saudis. Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. 

In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.” Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

Republican grand grift and Donald Trump's violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.”

This outburst showcases every element of the Trumpian defense of corruption, starting with the mind-bending assertion that insulating the presidency from foreign financial influence is somehow a “Crooked” political maneuver, as opposed to a central plank of constitutional governance. There’s also the ludicrous notion that the Qatari emolument is a savvy piece of deal-making, and not a quid-pro-quo arrangement to benefit the donor. The tell here is Trump’s adverbial stipulation that the deal is temporary; if it were such a self-evident boon to the country, shouldn’t it be permanent? 

In reality, of course, ownership of the airborne decadent palace will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of his term—the deal employs the federal government as a dummy corporation that’s hosting a pass-through arrangement to land the aircraft safely in Trump’s gilded empire of grand grift❗

The Qatari payoff also defies Trump’s bogus image as the heroic savior of American industry, as he’s gone out of his way to engineer a disastrous global trade war in order to preside over a “golden age” in US manufacturing. The American aerospace giant Boeing has an existing $5 billion contract to replace both Air Force One jets—a project that’s now five years behind its delivery date with reported company losses of more than $2.5 billion. 

$400 million 💲Donald Trump's BribeJet

Part of that overrun is due to the technical challenges of outfitting a plane with the basic security and communications safeguards required in a presidential aircraft—indeed, the economies Trump boasts he’s achieving in the Qatari “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE” will soon evaporate when the government will have to essentially disassemble and rebuild the craft to ensure that it operates free of foreign surveillance.

Beyond that, though, Boeing has become a purveyor of hazardous and performance-challenged aircraft thanks to a regime of financialized corporate governance that scorns basic engineering protocols and safeguards. 

In other words, Trump is scurrying to a foreign monarchy to meet his air travel demands because the American contractor originally charged with producing a pair of Air Force Ones has failed to meet its obligations under a Trumpian model of commerce that privileges stock buybacks over performance fundamentals. 

Small wonder, then, that Trump’s own tirade trails off into a phoned-in show of rancor: “Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”

But, alas, Trump isn’t wrong to call out Democratic fecklessness. During Trump’s first term, Democratic congressional leaders failed to bring emoluments charges in their impeachment actions against the president. That’s why national security advisers were reduced to weighing in on a civil suit against Trump for his many emoluments violations, which ranged from trademark deals with China for the Trump Organization to the proposed use of his Doral golf compound for a G-7 meeting to his doubling of the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee to $200,000 shortly after his election. 

And the civil suit eventually ran aground once it reached the US Supreme Court, which predictably declared the issue moot after Trump completed his first term. (Indeed, the Trump-stacked right-wing court is itself a plain instance of executive branch corruption run amok, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)

The timorousness of Democratic leaders in the face of such blatant abuse of power failed to exploit a political opportunity. 

At the time, Trump was using the Oval Office to benefit himself on a scale unseen in the annals of presidential corruption—and exposing his fraudulent business practices would upend the chief basis of his demagogic appeal as a master dealmaker. 

Instead, Democrats first homed in on the effort to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a military aid package and then sought to impeach Trump for fomenting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Both of those shameful criminal episodes were founded in Trump’s bedrock conviction that he’s an unparalleled gamer of the governing racket, and the effort to police them in Congress would have been greatly advanced by emoluments charges undercutting Trump’s phony standing as a maestro of the deal.

The same core dynamic holds true today—there’s nothing stopping Democrats from stressing the ways in which Trump’s corruption is integral to how he rules and to his transformation of the federal government into a transactional mob syndicate enforced by goons such as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel. 

Indeed, the impeachment resolution introduced last month by Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar includes an article on “bribery and corruption” that cites the Emoluments Clause. A Democratic Party serious about combating MAGA authoritarianism and graft could start by reversing its policy of treating Thanedar like a fringe pariah.

Instead, Congress’s functional silence on emoluments has further enabled the posture of MAGA impunity in Trump’s second term, which has, among other things, transformed January 6 into a model of right-wing governance. Congress’s dilatory treatment of Trumpian corruption is also why, for all Trump’s whining over the Qatar deal, Democratic responses somehow manage to be worse. “Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on X. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with legroom.” No, Chuck—nothing says “failing to do your job” like thinking you can combat executive-branch influence-peddling with some staffer’s pathetic idea of a social media zinger.

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

Persecuted Christians in Iraq - Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act

Columbia Magazine, an article written by Supreme Knight Anderson, published by The Knights of Columbus:

Our Lady of Help of Persecuted Christians

Aiding Persecuted Christians:

In my opinion, the information in this article should somehow reach the main stream media rather than buried in religious magazines and on Christian websites!  

"....the road ahead for our Christian brothers and sisters is long and dangerous.  But, the Knights of Columbus will be there with prayers and support.  In fact, the Knights will work to ensure that Christianity has a future in the lands where it first flourished." - Supreme Knight Anderson

So, too, the Knights of Columbus will continue the efforts to save fellow Christians in the Middle East.

Here as well, this is not only a matter of charity. It is also a matter of unity---and it is a matter of justice.

In May, the British Government released a terrifying repot.  It concluded that persecution of Christians around the world is at "near genocide levels".

We see that clearly in the Middle East, where Christianity is now on the verge of annihilation.  Simply look at Iraq. Over the past 15 years, the Christian population there has plummeted from one and a half million to about 120,000.

When I met with Pope Francis earlier this year about this crisis, he told me that "the Middle East without Christians is not the Middle Eat," and he strongly encouraged us to continue our work.

I recently traveled to Iraq, where I saw firsthand the difficulties facing Christians there- and the difference the Knights of Columbus is making. 

Persecuted Christians in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and around the world need our continued aid and support. Therefore, we can show our solidarity by praying for our persecuted brothers and sisters.

The Knights of Columbus bring us the icon of Our Lady Help of Persecuted Christians as part of their Marian Prayer Program. Through the image, they intend to raise awareness of the plight of Christians persecuted for their faith. Moreover, the icon inspires us to stand in prayerful solidarity with them.

Since 2014, we have committed more than $25 million to help persecuted Christians and others targeted for genocide in the Middle East.  We provide food, housing, education and medical care for tens of thousands of displaced people.  I heard time and again on my trip to Iraq: "Without the Knights of Columbus, our Christian community would not have survived."  

Late last year, the Knights also played a pivotal role in the unanimous passage of the Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act. That bill will provide humanitarian relief for victims of genocide in Iraq and Syria.  

Last fall, the Knights also entered into a historic Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S. Agency for International Development in a new public/private partnership to establish a greater level of support for the Christian communities in Iraq.

And, the Knights joined in an address with the State Department's Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom.

The Ministerial brought together government representatives from more than 100 nations and private sector leaders from around the world to advance religious liberty.  And, the Knights leadership in this area is widely recognized and respected.

The combination of our financial support and policy advocacy is providing relief to Iraq's Christians.  In fact, the Knights of Columbus helped the town of Karamles to rebuild after the liberation from ISIS.  Moreover, the Knights provided some $2 million, and ans one of the town's priests said, "Ninety-seven percent of the restoration of homes and church buildings came from the Knights of Columbus."

Last year, the Knights requested the delegates at the convention to appropriate $1 million to finish the McGivney House, a 140-unit apartment building for Chaldean and Syrian Christian families.  The response was tremendous.  In fact, the amount raised exceeded the goal and McGivney House is open.

What the Islamic State did was evil when, five years ago, it captured the Christian towns of Qaraqosh and Karamles.  But, it was not the last word.  Fortunately, the Knights of Columbus has helped to rebuild Karamles and they are helping to rebuild the cathedral in Qaraqosh.  Another $1 million is committed to support Syriac Christian refugees and rebuild the Syriac Cathedral in Qaraqosh, Iraq.  These refugee efforts have been organized by the Syriac Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan, who is there on the fifth anniversary of the assault by ISIS.  Christians are deeply grateful for his courageous witness as he is a brother Knight and shepherd of his people.  The Knights of Columbus is proud to support Syriac Patriarch Ignatius Joseph II Younan.

Despite all the Knights of Columbus has done, Iraq's Christians sill suffer.  Now, the knights are launching a new project known as "Adopt-a-Parish."  This initiative allows councils to directly support the parishes spread across Iraq.  It requires a two-year commitment on the council's part.  Council's are called on to adopt an Iraqi parish in need.

Our fellow Christians throughout the world also need prayers.  This year, the Knights will continue the Marian Prayer Program with the icon of Our Lady of Help of Persecuted Christians.  Every Council is encouraged to bring a prayer program to their parish.

Frankly, the road ahead for our Christian brothers and sisters is long and dangerous.  But, the Knights of Columbus will be there with prayers and support.  In fact, the Knights will work to ensure that Christianity has a future in the lands where it first flourished."

A new rat- America has been down this maze before: Trump's war path

Again? Raise your hand if you smell a rat.

Does that rat smell a lot like the argument used to go after Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction we later confirmed did not really exist?

We saw and heard high-level government officials do their best to convince the American public the threat was real, imminent, and we needed to strike hard and fast.

The weighted rhetoric was force-fed through media outlets, and counterarguments were greatly muted.

The invasion of Iraq took place, and American troops and treasure were locked in a prolonged conflict based on an embellished lie.

The new rat is being paraded as an effort to justify a new military action against Iran.

We see grainy images of a small boat and several individuals floating next to a giant oil tanker. The action is being labeled as a military strike against shipping in the region.

It appears to be a weak attempt by someone who wants to draw America into another expensive war and keep us entangled in the Middle East.

If the attacks on tankers were truly an act of war, those tankers would be resting on the bottom of the ocean. There are special interests at play here.

America has been led down this path before, and the results do not work in our favor. War should only be a response to an undeniable threat, and it must also include a well-defined end game.

Soldiers will die for political reasons - again.

Bob Warterfield, Tulsa