The Madness Of King Trump: War Games, War Crimes And A Wrecking Ball Presidency – OpEd

Dysfunction, decadence, depravity and a death cult: that, in a nutshell, sums up the mindset now at the heart of the Trump administration.

History shows that when political movements glorify violence, celebrate cruelty, and frame conflict in apocalyptic moral terms, they often drift toward what scholars describe as a “death cult”—a worldview in which destruction becomes proof of righteousness and human life becomes expendable in pursuit of ideological victory.

Troubling reports have surfaced that apocalyptic Christian rhetoric is being used to justify the Trump administration’s attacks on Iran as part of an “end-times” struggle between good and evil. “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” one commander told his combat unit.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation—which is comprised primarily of Christians—has received more than 200 calls and more than 100 complaints that military commanders have characterized Trump’s attacks on Iran as a religious war.

Once war is framed as a holy mission, cruelty quickly becomes a virtue.

Measured against that standard, what we are witnessing now should alarm anyone who values human life or constitutional government.

With each new release from the Epstein files, another allegation of depravity surfaces involving Donald Trump.

Every day, the Trump administration doubles down on cruelty, inhumanity, and a wrecking-ball approach to governing.

Every moment Congress allows this madness and corruption to continue, more innocent people die—and the American dream of a nation built on liberty, justice and opportunity dies a little more.

That taxpayers are being forced to fund this evil masquerading as governance only deepens the outrage. In the first two days of the U.S. war with Iran alone, the Pentagon reportedly used roughly $5.6 billion worth of munitions—spent in service of a war Congress never authorized.

Congress has failed in its duty to act as a guardrail against executive excess and overreach. Its inaction is not merely partisan—it is a betrayal of “we the people.”

The Supreme Court has deferred, deflected and delayed in holding the president accountable to the rule of law, which reveals exactly where their allegiance lies—and it is not with the Constitution.

Meanwhile, large segments of the evangelical community remain silent about the mortal and venial sins being perpetrated in their name by leaders who show little interest in what the Judeo-Christian tradition actually requires of its followers.

That silence speaks volumes. And while religious leaders look the other way, the consequences are playing out on the battlefield.

Now we have war crimes to add to the list of moral failings by the people supposedly in charge.

Leading news outlets, including the New York Times, report that it is likely the U.S. military was not only responsible for the Tomahawk missile that killed a school of over 165 Iranian girls, but may have carried out a double tap strike— a tactic widely condemned as a war crime under international humanitarian law—to target any parents and officials attempting to rescue survivors.

Pete Hegseth, the self-dubbed Secretary of War, has publicly boasted about directing a U.S. submarine attack on an Iranian naval vessel in international waters—an action critics argue could constitute a violation of international law.

When asked about the possibility that the number of casualties will mount from this reckless, heedless, mindless war, the official response from Trump and Hegseth has been largely a dismissive shrug that fails to recognize the magnitude of loss when even a single human life is lost.

The founders warned that moral corruption at the highest levels of government would eventually destroy the republic.

When John Adams declared that “Avarice, Ambition and Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” he was not advocating for a theocracy, but for a government grounded in moral restraint.

Two centuries later, the warning reads less like history and more like prophecy.

And yet here we are.

We should be better than this.

If ever there were a time to draw a line in the sand, it is now.

We are long past the point of partisan nitpicking over which politician’s positions are marginally better than another’s.

This is no longer a debate about Democrats vs. Republicans, Christians vs. non-Christians, or citizens vs. immigrants. It is about the extent to which the U.S. government has been overtaken by a cabal of immoral, amoral, and indecent degenerates who use religion as a front for their abuses of power.

These are not serious people.

They are power-hungry demagogues who have been playing reckless and costly war games with people’s lives, livelihoods, and freedoms for far too long.

The Constitution anticipated exactly this kind of danger.

Under the Constitution, the power to declare war belongs to Congress—not the president.

Yet once again, Congress has surrendered that authority, allowing a single individual to plunge the nation into conflict without debate, authorization, or accountability.

Without presenting any credible case of an imminent threat requiring offensive war maneuvers by the military without congressional authorization—first in Iran to destroy their supposed nuclear labs, then against shipping vessels in the Caribbean, then in Venezuela to kidnap the nation’s president, and now again in Iran—Trump is attempting to normalize brutality, aggression and thuggery as the defining characteristics of American leadership.

In the process, he risks staining the reputation of the American military itself.

The rhetoric and imagery being pushed by the Trump administration is in-your-face, unapologetically glorifying war, death and destruction.

In one Truth Social post, Trump warned that “Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them” if Iran does anything to stop the flow of oil within the Strait of Hormuz.

In one Facebook post, captioned “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” the so-called Department of War depicts a missile with the words “No mercy” superimposed over it. This from the same Secretary of War who has tattooed a cross on his body, invited his own pastor to preach at the Pentagon, and repeatedly speaks of his Christian faith in one breath while bragging that “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.” Hegseth might need to be reminded of Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

This rhetoric is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate attempt to normalize brutality as a virtue. The language being embraced by Trump officials—especially Hegseth—takes open pride in violence.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down, as it should be,” Hegseth bragged about the U.S. military’s attacks on Iran, which have reportedly resulted in more than 1,000 civilian deaths so far, including hundreds of children.

The U.S. and Israel have also been accused of deliberately targeting civilian sites such as schools, a hospital, and historic landmarks.

There is a reason Trump wants blanket immunity for himself and his top officials from the International Criminal Court, the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal.

The reason is simple: he knows the policies he is pursuing could be prosecuted as war crimes.

In other words, the administration is demanding immunity for actions it knows could be judged illegal.

That hypocrisy reveals more of the same double standard we have come to expect from Trump and his administration: he wants to be able to break the laws—repeatedly—but he believes he should get a free pass for doing so.

This culture of impunity does more than excuse lawlessness— it reshapes the language of war itself, normalizing brutality and erasing the humanity of the enemy.

As Casey Ryan Kelly, a communication scholar who has studied political rhetoric, explains, Hegseth routinely employs “what is known as ‘kill talk,’ a verbal strategy, typically directed at new military recruits, that denies the enemy’s humanity and disguises the terrible costs of violence.”

The kill talk has been accompanied by a social media presence straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and the video game Call of Duty, in which images of battle, war and destruction are glorified and presented as noble.

Juan Cole predicted this a decade ago:

“I have long wondered why no one in Hollywood has remade Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 ‘Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’… From the paranoid military officer Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper … to the ex-Nazi evil genius (Peter Sellers) who can barely constrain himself from repeated Hitler salutes to the exuberant cowboy fighter pilot Major T. J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), who rides a nuke down on the old Soviet Union, the film is an archive of the craziest Cold War excesses. Now it turns out that Donald Trump is remaking Dr. Strangelove in real life.”

In other words, what once passed for political satire has become our political reality.

Nearly every accusation made by Donald Trump and his cohorts against political opponents is proving, with time, to have been projection of the greatest magnitude to deflect from his even greater transgressions.

He accused Hilary Clinton of national security violations for using a private email server for official government business. Yet investigations have shown that members of Trump’s own administration repeatedly mishandled classified materials, used unsecured communications platforms, and ignored long-standing national security protocols.

He accused political opponents of being linked to Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Trump himself appears repeatedly in Epstein-related records, and the allegations leveled against him—of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl and forcing her to perform sexual acts—make a mockery of every religious leader who continues to hold him up as a political savior.

Trump mocked Joe Biden as too old and mentally incapacitated to govern. Yet Trump himself now appears increasingly absent from public view, reportedly falling asleep during meetings and struggling to deliver coherent remarks without a teleprompter.

He accused Obama of being so weak he would start a war with Iran just to stay in office. Instead, Trump has launched a war so reckless and unauthorized that every official who approved it should face investigation for war crimes.

It must be said: Donald Trump is no longer fit for office.

Reports, including by those who once supported him, indicate increasing concerns that he may no longer be running the show. Instead, critics point to White House aide Stephen Miller as the acting shadow president.

Whether the problem is cognitive decline, moral corruption, or simply a president more interested in personal power and wealth than constitutional duty, the result is the same: a government untethered from competence, restraint and accountability.

Donald Trump is not making America great again. He is not making America (or Iran) safe again. He is not making America healthy again. And he is certainly not making America wealthy again.

So where does that leave us?

Republicans in Congress have refused to restrain Trump’s unlawful war powers.

That failure is not merely political cowardice—it is a constitutional betrayal.

A president who wages unauthorized wars, glorifies civilian casualties, and openly flirts with war crimes cannot remain in office.

As James Madison warned, the accumulation of power in a single set of hands “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The founders understood that republics do not collapse overnight—they collapse when those sworn to defend the Constitution refuse to act.

The remedy is the same one the founders provided for moments like this: impeachment.

Impeach them all—from the president on down.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, every official who has betrayed the Constitution and the American people must be held accountable, regardless of party.