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.

Abraham Lincoln time traveler- Message to Donald Trump

Their view: What would Lincoln think of Donald Trump?- 

Opinion in the Wilkes Barre, PA Times Leader news.

Sidney Blumenthal commentary:

Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum Address was delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838, titled "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions". 

Donald Trump has a sketchy relationship with Abraham Lincoln. “Great president,” Trump said. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right?” Trump also conjectured that “had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” though Jackson had died many years before.

But what would the 16th president have thought of the 45th? 

Beyond pure speculation, we can find clues in Lincoln’s first formal speech, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” in which he criticized attacks on the free press and warned against a future demagogue who would threaten the fragile American experiment.

On Jan. 27, 1838, mounting the podium before the Springfield Lyceum for Young Men in Illinois, the 29-year-old Lincoln, a member of the Illinois Legislature, described the “mob-ocratic spirit.”

Lincoln began by decrying a spate of recent crimes that reduced the rule of law to “the caprice of a mob,” including the lynching of a black prisoner in St. Louis. “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation.” He also condemned the “bands of hundreds and thousands” who “throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors” — which everyone in the audience would have recognized as a reference to the Lovejoy case.

On Nov. 6, 1837, in Alton, Ill., Elijah P. Lovejoy, an antislavery editor, was murdered by a group of men who stormed his warehouse to destroy his printing press. 

Lovejoy had been driven out of St. Louis for publishing antislavery articles. Moving his base of operations across the Mississippi River, he soon joined in calling for the formation of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society. Lovejoy’s assassination made him the first martyr of the abolitionist movement. His killers were acquitted in a trial that reached its verdict eight days before Lincoln delivered his speech.

The overwhelming view in Illinois was that Lovejoy deserved his fate. Promoting antislavery opinion was deeply unpopular. In Washington, lawmakers upheld a gag rule that barred the presentation of antislavery petitions to Congress. Former President John Quincy Adams, now serving in the House of Representatives, stubbornly led the resistance. But Northern legislature after legislature passed resolutions in solidarity with Southern states to affirm the gag rule. On March 3, 1837, Lincoln and only one other member of the Illinois House signed a dissenting statement declaring “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.”

Lovejoy, according to Lincoln, did not bring about his own death. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he was wholly innocent, the victim of “the vicious.” Those who “shoot editors” were not simply breaking the law, but also assailing the basic right of free speech — the very foundation of American government. The attack on Lovejoy, whether one agreed with his opinions or not, was an attempt “to subvert our national freedom.”

Then Lincoln pointed to an even greater menace than rampaging mobs, “a probable case, highly dangerous.” He warned against the emergence of a man driven to power by a fierce desire for “celebrity and fame” who “thirsts and burns for distinction.” 

This demagogue “scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious,” and believing that “nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”

There is a contemporary figure who resembles that fame-hungry demagogue, one who tears down institutions and incites the mob-ocratic spirit, subverting the right to free expression and, with it, our national freedom. These Lincolnian terms describe our reality-TV-star-turned-president, who called the “FAKE NEWS media” the “enemy of the American people,” and tweeted an altered video that showed him body-slamming a man with the CNN logo in place of his head.

But Trump would no more understand Lincoln’s forewarning than he will accept responsibility for his incitement. 

Trump’s sense of history is as limited as his self-control.

If we can deduce how Lincoln would perceive Trump, we can also surmise how he would advise Americans to handle him. This is what he said about the possible rise of an American demagogue: “And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”

Sidney Blumenthal is the author of “Wrestling With His Angel, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume II, 1849-1856.” “A Self-Made Man, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume I, 1809-1849,” describes Lincoln’s Lyceum Address. 

Blumenthal wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.

MaineWriter- Abraham Lincoln's 1838 was prophetic, as though he time traveled to the 21st century.