President Trump: Please Don’t Nuke Iran
Last week, President Trump threatened Iran’s 93 million people with annihilation. This week, we’ve largely moved on, if only to keep up with the whipsawing events of the Iran War – now paused, or maybe not, hit refresh on Trump’s social media page to find out.
But I’m still stuck in last week. Maybe because I’m a glass half-empty kind of guy, I’m struggling to see how the US and Israel’s war on Iran ends without Trump’s threat of nuclear annihilation being realized.
I arrived at that horrifying conclusion by being unable to square the following circle: Donald J. Trump cares most in this world about appearing strong; indeed, he built his empire on this premise. But it’s not just a business strategy; Trump struggles to accept reality when it runs counter to this self-image. If that sounds far-fetched, ask him who won the 2020 election.
If he can’t accept losing to Joe Biden, a fellow white Christian, how can Trump admit battlefield defeat to darker-skinned Muslims he called “animals”? Yet Trump has indeed lost. “The single biggest mistake Trump, or any American president in my lifetime has made, was going to war with Iran in an effort to change its regime,” said Tucker Carlson, whose opposition to attacking Iran has upended his friendship with the president.
Unable to admit defeat, Trump is living in a twilight zone. Right now, any Tom, Dick or Bibi who presents Trump with an idea that keeps his victory fantasy alive even for a few more days, is liable to get the green light. When these “brilliant” ideas inevitably fail – Let’s blockade the Strait of Hormuz to unblock it! – Trump is left only more susceptible to the next charlatan who enters the Oval Office.
Meanwhile the real-world consequences mount in rising fuel prices at home and body counts abroad. The US and Israel have killed over 2,000 Iranians to date. And Israel has matched that number in Lebanon, where it is turning the southern part of that country into a Gaza-like moonscape. And all Trump can muster in response, even as Israel’s assault threatens a fragile ceasefire with Iran, is to ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “be sort of a little more low-key” with his war crimes.
Trump’s obeisance to Netanyahu stands in stark contrast to his unhinged threats against Iran. “Praise be to Allah,” Trump posted in a genocidal Easter Sunday message that demanded Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” Two days later, Trump followed up by writing, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Trump, of course, is the leader of the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in combat. Those nukes were dropped at the end of World War II, transforming the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into hellscapes.
Since then, the world has experienced some close calls, most famously during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. What I find notable about that pitched moment, compared to this one, is that even as leaders of the US and Soviet Union considered blowing up the world, they still aired differing viewpoints amongst themselves, before finding an off-ramp.
Today, it feels like the decision to plunge the world into nuclear war will be made by one man — who’s unstable, surrounded by sycophants, and desperate to change the channel from his disastrous war, not to mention his ties to the world’s most famous pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
And it feels like it’s only a matter of time before a nut job like Netanyahu or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth encourages Trump to make the bad headlines go away by dropping a nuke (or in Netanyahu’s case, just letting him do so).
Over on Fox News, Trump’s close ally Mark Levin has already made the case for nuking Iran. But Trump may not need much convincing; in his first term he reportedly asked what the point of having nukes was if not to use them.
Just how desperate this moment is can be seen in Pope Leo’s plea for Americans to contact their members of Congress.
“I would like to invite everyone to think in their hearts of so many innocent children, so many totally innocent elderly people who would also be victims of this escalation,” Leo told reporters at a papal retreat outside Rome last week. “I would like to invite everyone to pray, but also to seek ways to communicate. Perhaps with congressmen, with authorities, saying that we don’t want war, we want peace.”
I’d like to give the first US-born pope the last word, especially after Trump attacked him for being, among other things, “WEAK on Crime.” (Are popes supposed to be tough on crime?) But there’s one more point I need to raise, and it has to do with the Democrats.
Take my normally thoughtful congressman, Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He recently raised the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, suggesting Trump’s mental deficiencies render him unable to discharge his duties. A New York Times story on Monday, headlined “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate,” echoed Raskin’s concerns.
But the Times story noted that the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment is “moot,” since it requires the support of the cabinet, which remains in Trump’s enthrall. So while Raskin is correct about Trump’s fitness for office — after attacking Leo on Sunday night, Trump posted an image at around 3 AM portraying himself as Jesus — calling for the 25th amendment is unlikely to lead to Trump’s removal anytime soon. But doing so may irk our notoriously thin-skinned leader at the very moment his itchy finger is hovering over the nuclear button.
To be clear, Raskin is far from the only Democrat to poke the unstable bear. Senator Chuck Schumer — who last year taunted Trump for not being tough on Iran — called the president “an extremely sick person.” While Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next Speaker of the House, called Trump “unhinged,” and Representative Ted Lieu called him “batshit crazy,” the Times reported.
Senator Chris Murphy, meanwhile, initially claimed he was worried the Iran War might spin out of control. But the moment we stepped back from the brink and reached a ceasefire, Murphy attacked Trump for allowing Iran to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz, something it didn’t have before the war began. Such rhetoric only threatens to goad Trump back into war — a war that some Democrats quietly wanted, and certainly didn’t do much to prevent it, Drop Site News reported.
Over the coming days, our job – all of our job – is to find a way for cooler heads to prevail, and to avoid provoking an increasingly irrational Trump.
Almost no one wants to see Iran nuked. But there are a handful of lunatics who do, and they are wildly overrepresented in Trump’s inner circle.
Of course, Trump didn’t win the presidency twice by only listening to loonies. And he still cares about public opinion, at least somewhat, which makes him susceptible to public pressure, as we saw Monday. After portraying himself as Jesus, Trump deleted the post in the face of public backlash, including from the religious right.
A blasphemous post is one thing. Dropping a nuke is another. To ensure that doesn’t happen, we need to register our revulsion now, before it’s too late.
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