Trump’s military excursion, into an abyss
The evident fact is that the president is nuts.
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Observers have spent two weeks trying to discern the “aims” of Trump’s war on Iran, and therefore what might constitute a victory or defeat. His every bizarre utterance about his war “plans” — including wildly conflicting declarations that Iran has surrendered and the war must be expanded to defeat the regime — immediately move markets.
The evident fact, though, is that Trump is completely nuts, and that he’s “governing” the country — and has now taken the US to war — based on his impulses alone, without even the pretense of a strategy or goal.
It’s almost as if Trump felt that, as a would-be dictator, he had to have his own nihilistic war, just like his idol Vlad Putin. But Trump’s “excursion” against Iran is nothing like Putin’s years long “special military operation” against Ukraine — it’s actually more stupid.
Putin’s goals have never been hidden or uncertain — he wants to erase the nation of Ukraine and reincorporate its territory into his neo-Russian Empire. Trump, by contrast — and characteristically — is utterly unable to articulate why he started the largest war the United States has embarked on since the years following 9/11, let alone explain what “victory” might look like.
This is hardly unusual. In fact, it’s the sine qua non of late Trumpism, in which the Strongman of Mar-a-Lago “rules” the country based on pure impulse, rather than even the most misguided of strategy.
“Governance” by impulse
It’s a frightening reality of the Trump regime that, as Trump has descended into utter incoherence and is now nothing more than an assortment of adolescent (and frequently violent) urges, the US government has been remade into a tool for the immediate satisfaction of his wants and desires no matter how absurd or nihilistic they may be.
We’ve seen this dynamic of chaos descend upon various components of our government and society over the past 14 months.
By way of example:
First, under the “leadership” of stooge Pam Bondi, the United States Department of Justice has been transformed from a law enforcement agency into a mechanism for carrying out whatever vendetta happens to be at the front of Trump’s raging mind at a given moment.
Bondi and other stooges, like “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, understand they can hope to retain their positions only if, and for so long as, they pursue every baseless charge Trump demands a given moment, whether that be against a former FBI director, a Fed governor, or a voting machine company.
The result is a DOJ that has descended into utter dysfunction in nearly every respect, has lost its mission critical asset of credibility before the courts, and survives largely as a means for Trump to express his ire.
Second, the Department of Homeland Security’s “mass deportation” scheme — and the huge and growing internal militia created to effectuate it — rapidly became a more dramatic venue for Trump to give effect to his disordered and sadistic impulses.
Trump has long expressed a visceral desire to foment violence between city residents and police. His deep attraction to such chaos and destruction was perhaps best expressed in a May 2020 tweet — posted in the midst of the unrest in Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s slow strangulation — that declared “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” (It was properly flagged for glorifying violence.)
It was therefore unsurprising that the Trump regime plucked Greg Bovino from obscurity to become the ad hoc commandant of the newly created internal DHS militia, given that the CPB official — who favored Nazi-redolent attire and haircuts — perfectly embodied Trump’s deep and abiding hatred of immigrants and the cities they live in.
Trump’s long-burning desire to turn urban America into a theater of war culminated in the months-long assault launched, likely not coincidentally, on Minnesota’s Twin Cities by thousands of masked militia members. The occupation culminated in the cold-blooded murders and other assaults the nation witnessed on video.
It is a mistake to view the wars Trump declared on LA County, Chicago, and the Twin Cities to be the result of a considered strategy. They are far more accurately explained — like the tariffs that wildly fluctuate with Trump’s moods — as a product of a disordered mind that relishes violence and take pleasure in suffering, and has assumed near total control over the levers of our government.
Trump’s full scale invasion of the Twin Cities abated, and then only partially, because of the heavy political cost Republicans began to pay for Americans’ increasing anger over the gratuitous violence and brutality, which transformed Republicans’ strongest issue (immigration) into a source of weakness. Now Republican leaders are urging their congressional candidates to avoid even speaking about Trump’s mass deportation scheme on the campaign trail.
One can only imagine the anger Trump must feel after being forced by political circumstance to limit the scope of his war an America, if only for the moment. It was inevitable he’d would find another outlet for his chaotic impulses.
From isolationist to warmonger in a year
Trump has long billed himself as a bulwark against “foreign wars.” And during the first 12 months of his second term, he claimed to be such a successful “peacemaker” that he was being cheated out of a Nobel Prize.
But it was never astute for Trump’s followers to take him at his isolationist word.
After all, Trump enthusiastically renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” He then assembled a military birthday parade for himself, complete with M1 tanks, that — while it fizzled in the rain — was designed to resemble those held in Red Square.
Furthermore, Trump, the purported war opponent, bombed Iran for the first of what turned out to be multiple times in June 2025. He began a campaign of secret, and likely illegal, boat bombings in two oceans three months later.
Then came Trump’s January 2026 incursion into Venezuela, after which he left the leadership of the corrupt Maduro regime with a stranglehold on power in return for a slice of the country’s wealth.
After that brief “excursion,” Trump apparently became convinced that violence against other countries could provide him with greater immediate and visceral satisfaction than his failed war-making on US cities, with no voters in foreign nations to complain. From that point forward, his attack on Iran became both inevitable and predictably half-baked.
Trump had a longstanding beef with Iran’s klepto-clerical regime. But his ire had nothing to do with the well being of the Iranian people, who have lived under repression far longer than the population of Venezuela. It also had nothing to do with concern about the regime’s ongoing threat to the region.
Ultimately, Trump doesn’t like being defied by those he considered lessors, and the fact the Iranian regime not only survived but brutally entrenched itself following purportedly “obliterating” US and Israeli strikes plainly stuck in his craw. So he ordered the US into a massive war — with potentially catastrophic consequences — without any strategy or cogently defined aims.
It is that simple, a reality as flabbergasting as it is terrifying.
As impulsively as Trump took America into war, it is quite possible that faced with politically punishing increasing oil prices and disappointing battlefield results, he will just as impulsively declare the “mission accomplished,” assert Iran has surrendered in spirit if not in deed, and end his “excursion” as quickly as it began.
If so, he will leave Iran with a new leader closely tied to the regime’s most extremist fringe and bent on revenge through terrorist proxies, the Gulf region profoundly destabilized, and the US military having expended many of its hardest to replace weapons stocks at a time of global uncertainty — all because The Donald felt a war itch.
Flitting from from one excursion into chaos to another
There’s no reason to expect that Trump’s Iranian debacle-in-the-making will prevent him from lighting yet another match of chaos or conflict, just as he moved almost immediately from failed war-making in Minneapolis to an attack on Tehran. Experience teaches that Trump bristling from a failure makes him more, not less, likely to do something equally stupid, and to do so soon.
The next scheme could well be another military excursion closer to home, in Cuba. Marco Rubio openly pines to take down the regime of the Caribbean’s largest island —once again without any clear plan, and despite a record of failed US intervention there. And Trump and his lackeys have strongly signaled they are on board.
So why the heck not?
Equally, if not more ominously, lurks the possibility that Trump’s impulses might lead him to embark on another assault upon the homeland. Once again, there are hints.
As soon as the Iran “excursion” began turning sour, Trump’s pronouncements started ever more frequently turning away from Iran, and toward his abiding preoccupation with changing vote in procedures in ways calculated to suppress Democratic votes in advance of the rapidly approaching midterms.
Despite Trump’s urging, it is now all but certain he will not succeed in bullying Senate Republicans into nuking the filibuster in order to pass an extreme vote suppression bill titled the “SAVE America Act.”
In the absence of realizing that particularly unhinged piece of legislation, Trump is likely to focus on his threats to unilaterally “nationalize” or “take over” elections now run by the states, likely in violation of law and the Constitution.
Like so many of Trump’s pronouncements, the implications of his ominous “takeover” threats are unclear — almost certainly to him, as to us. But we have hints. An election conspiracist Trump installed at DOJ recently obtained a warrant for a raid on Atlanta’s 2020 voting records. (Trump received a report from the scene of the raid from, curiously, Tulsi Gabbard.) The records of a Maricopa County, Arizona, 2020 election audit were also recently taken by the FBI. Meanwhile, Trumper election conspiracists have spent years boring themselves into various state and local electoral systems and regulatory bodies.
While we don’t know where this is going, we do know Trump has no compunction about using extreme measures, including violence, to obtain the electoral outcomes he prefers. His electoral war could well be upon us sooner rather than later, and Trump already has a militia in place to fight it.
Predicting where Trump’s impulsive desire to manufacture disorder next takes the nation (and world) may be fool’s errand. But the increasing scope and pace of his ever-revving chaos engine makes it all but certain that more danger is ahead — and soon.
That’s it for today
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Powerful. Devastatingly powerful. And you hit it on the nose. I'm glad you used the word "sadistic." In August, 2016, I watched the Republican debates. I was astonished by the pleasure Trump took in humiliating his opponents. I am a retired psychiatrist, and recognized his behavior for what it was: sadism. From that day till now, I have never used his name. (I did here, which is one of my very few exceptions.) My name for him is, and always will be, "the orange sadist." I've added a middle name recently: "the orange pedophilic sadist." Could we have a worse creature in charge of our nation?
Great choice for that top photo. trump howling at the world.