No real estate crook should complete a project on time, let alone ahead of schedule, but Donald Trump wrapped up the Iran war years shy of the average American loss. Technically, after threatening a genocide, he secured merely a two-week ceasefire before we’d have to resume the war we already won. Also, the ceasefire is over, and the Strait of Hormuz is a parking lot again.
No loss should be orphaned or left to single parenting at Trump’s hands. Luckily, he has company. Historian AJP Taylor once wrote that America’s role on the road to the Second World War was like Sherlock Holmes’ curious incident of the dog in the nighttime: It did nothing. We hurtled toward a Trump-imposed 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline for nuclear war or massive conventional war crimes, and we have three contenders — the media, the Democrats and Trump himself — for the biggest dog of the Iran war . The less said about the media the better. Listening to Trump live illustrates the hideous dishonesty of his portrayal at almost every level of print and TV media. Failure of responsibility in the days leading up to each Trump crisis is not excused by sniping behind-the-scenes stories in their aftermath. The media knew Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States; if it had, Trump would have put the dope on the table. They knew the war was a bad idea and that, thanks to Trump, it’s OK to say so, because he’s currently running an updated version of wars he’s been ridiculing since 2015. They knew he had no practical objectives , because he said so every day. They know how the global economy works and shop there too. They know what a genocidal threat looks like. And apparently that’s pretty much not anything — not even just this particular Tuesday, but a Tuesday.
Any journalistic organ that considers itself a member of the reality-based community should have responded to Trump’s vow to commit Nuremberg-inducing atrocity with a clear demand for removal. The fact that he isn’t subject to regular calls to be at the very least convicted and imprisoned for the rest of his natural life is the one aspect of Beltway consciousness nearly as insane as he is. The media knew Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. The Democrats The most moderate party response on Tuesday needed to be that Donald Trump is a dope, and we’re putting prison on the table. It wasn’t. Chuck Schumer’s letter wasn’t even particularly sternly worded. Representatives left scheduled posts up, sounding like characters in a disaster movie complaining about a parking ticket seconds before a meteor atomizes their car. And while some Democrats dipped their toes (again) in the impeachment and 25th Amendment pond, removal and punishment must be a relentless chorus until it arrives on the table of permissible thoughts for the media to have — and until enough voters move toward it and trigger the remainder of the party’s urge to lead from behind. The opening bid is still justice . Congressional vacation didn’t help, but nobody expected the party to shoot the moon. If Democrats couldn’t march to the well of the Senate, tell C-SPAN to flip the switch and start talking, they could have gathered in the halls, the lobby or on the Capitol steps. If not those, they could have taken a fucking walk . If not in D.C., then at a military base or a post office or a public park — anything to suggest that the occasion merited an urgency greater than making eyebrow-steepled concern-face at an iPhone.
Whatever their motivations, the party’s poll-driven strategy of leading people where they already are forecloses opportunity by forgetting that parties shape opinion. People want to be led, and nobody has time to add “Chuck Schumer’s” as a third job in this economy. Sometimes they only want to be led after the fact, taking credit for things they resisted, like a dad boasting about getting his family to the amusement park and omitting mention of getting lost and throwing a tantrum when his wife bought a map.
And then there’s the president, who bought time to end a war, looked past an ally who won’t let him, and did nothing. Trump’s theory of war, diplomacy and expectations management is basically wearing Schwarzenegger’s head disguise in “Total Recall” that keeps repeating “two weeks.” Israel gave him less than 20 hours to enjoy ending his eighth war and post about how SEAL Team Six should bring him Malala Yousafzai’s “very unfair” Nobel Peace Prize. It was a beautiful deal. Domestic prices were going to go up and stay there; America’s soft power and munition stores would be dangerously depleted; our allies would remain alienated; the petrodollar may sunset; and freedom of the seas might dissolve so we can pay a $2 million toll on a waterway that was free just weeks and tens of billions of everyday dollars ago. But then Israel blew it up! Both the deal, and a horrifying amount of Lebanon, a country globally recognized as “not Iran.” By dawn in Washington, Israel had rained 100 airstrikes on what it claimed were “Hezbollah targets,” an excuse that carries less water than the Gaza treatment plant after years of watching Israel and the U.S. level Hamas hospitals, abduct terrorist Columbia students and level tactical girls schools. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz faster than JD Vance could lie about how the fax machine ate the page about the Lebanon ceasefire.
There’s a glumly satisfying irony to seeing a profoundly evil and corrupt American leader running from accountability by perverting justice and killing people abroad declare, “I didn’t lose,” then have his exit thwarted by a profoundly evil and corrupt Israeli leader running from accountability by perverting justice and killing people abroad. There is a little more irony in knowing that two moral perverts who just want to be famous and racist and do crimes are both trapped within a cluster of their respective coalitions’ version of psychotic klansmen tying rope and hooting on a jug. Donald Trump doesn’t have a person he wouldn’t betray. Those people have no interest in ending the war, because that makes ethnic cleansing harder. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no interest himself, because the existential imperatives of prosecuting a war are the only things obstructing the domestic criminal justice imperatives of prosecuting Benjamin Netanyahu. Both will happily take everything between the border and the Litani River — for security reasons — as long as Trump gets his cut and every goon who spent Barack Obama’s terms screaming “Munich!” learns to swallow his tongue.
“But Israel … ” used to be a handy thought-terminating cliché, but Netanyahu has spent decades now spending down the hasbara war chest like Donald Trump running a casino. Israel is now underwater with a majority of Americans . Watching a captive people being bombed and starved for a few years on the TV and finding out you’re underwriting it will do that. And while many people in the Biden administration deserve a lifetime of shame for that too, it’s just not a great time to be leading an American fascist movement.
Fortunately, Donald Trump doesn’t have a person he wouldn’t betray, and the things that can keep him in power after the end of this term are things that Netanyahu can’t help him with. The media won’t hang him, and the Democrats would apologize for thinking to ask, so he’ll just have to go back to basics and scum his way out. First of all, we won’t have to pay Iran directly at the strait, and he has nothing but contempt for other people’s money. Secondly, nobody doubts that Trump is an Islamophobe. He has murdered so many Muslim people, loves himself for doing it and expects you to love him too. He loves Israel — no president has loved it more than he has — and he’s loving them like never before. He moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. His son-in-law is Jewish! He’s even conducting a fascist war on American education to defeat antisemitism.
Israel can threaten to conduct more war, but a statesmanlike moment waits to provide the Nixonian escape hatch. Trump alone can fix it. If he’d thought about it for any of the 19 hours or so of maybe-peace, Don would have seen the answer written all through his past: Only Trump could stop sending the checks.
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