“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Donald Trump wrote in a post on his own social media platform, Truth Social. “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? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
The night ended with both the United States and Iran agreeing to a two-week ceasefire. The two nations issued conflicting reports of the terms to which they agreed—and America’s ally in the fight, Israel, celebrated the occasion by shelling Lebanon.
That prompted Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz once more, choking off much of the world’s oil supply again and setting the U.S. and Iran to making increasingly belligerent demands of each other.
In other words … just another day in the funhouse-mirror reality that is the world in which Donald Trump is president of the United States.
It’s impossible to know why this president acts the way he does.
There are those who say it’s because he’s spectacularly dumb and ill-informed about anything other than his own exceedingly narrow self-interest. It is evident that he knows little about Iran and the Middle East.
For example, it seems not to have occurred to him that his threat to annihilate an entire culture alienated the very people he claimed to have most wanted to help when he launched this foolish war—the long-suffering people of Iran.
Many, maybe even most, of the Iranian people don’t support that nation’s regime, but they don’t want to see their families, friends and neighbors wiped out just so Trump can make a point. By threatening the Iranian nation with annihilation, the U.S. president prompted Iran’s rulers and its people to link arms in opposition to a common foe.
Smooth move, Mr. President.
There also are people who claim he suffers from dementia or some other form of diminished capacity. It’s a charge that enrages the president and his supporters but shouldn’t—given how quick they were to hurl similar accusations at former President Joe Biden, whose conduct was nowhere near as erratic and often irrational as Trump’s has been in his second term.
Then there are those who say Trump acts this way just because he’s mean. They argue that, for this president, the cruelty of threatening not men, but women and children and old people, with death after decades of suffering, isn’t a side effect but the point of the exercise.
Whatever the reason or reasons might be for this president’s aberrant, abhorrent behavior might be, the costs attached to it are now clear.
Some of them are tangible and hit close to home.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun—one of Trump’s loudest and most fervent Republican enablers—just announced that the state would temporarily suspend the tax on gasoline.
Braun and other Trump apologists presented this move as a life buoy for Hoosiers drowning in rising commuting and transportation costs because of this president’s ill-advised and poorly planned war.
The truth, as is always the case, is more complicated.
Suspending the gas tax will deprive the state of revenue. Given that Indiana’s budget already is stressed and the Trump camp followers in the state legislature and the governor’s office have relieved the stress by cutting services to the most vulnerable Hoosiers, Indiana citizens likely will find this life buoy weighted with lead.
Team Trump doesn’t rob Peter to pay Paul.
They rob Peter so they don’t have to tax their friends.
But that’s not the biggest cost to this craziness.
Not long ago, the United States prided itself on being a beacon of liberty—and having other nations see us as freedom’s great defender.
But in this, the 250th anniversary of our independence, it’s impossible even for us to believe that’s still true.
When we start wars and threaten to slaughter entire populations if the nation we attacked doesn’t give us oil, it’s clear we’re no longer what Thomas Jefferson called “an empire of liberty.”
Worse, we’re not even trying to be.
