It is generally believed that American voters elected Donald Trump president at least in part due to their embracing his lies that he was a peacemaker who would not involve the United States in the pointless wars that have proliferated since 9/11. Trump’s predecessor the hapless Genocide Joe Biden had entangled the US deep in a conflict involving nuclear armed Russia and had also armed, funded and politically protected war criminal Israel in its openly declared objective to eliminate the Palestinians. Neither conflict could be justified based on actual American interests. So Trump looked like a better bet than a witless giggler like Kamala Harris, though voters would have benefited from looking at the Trump record during his first term in office where he was little more than Israel’s mouthpiece after being heavily bribed during his campaign by Nevada casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Trump and his ambassador in Israel David Friedman endorsed the oppression of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza and also illegally approved moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Trump also allowed Israel to annex part of the Syrian Golan Heights and ordered the assassination of Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and regarded as a major enemy by Israel, killing the man when he was in Baghdad Iraq for peace talks. Trump, like his successor Joe Biden, never said “no” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Be that as it may, the past five months have demonstrated that searching for an honest man (or woman) in Washington would require Diogenes and his lamp, with little hope of coming up with someone who was not alternately a bad joke, an incompetent, or a screaming psychopath. The last several weeks illustrate just how bad things are, though the real fear must be that they can actually get worse if Trump joins Israel when it ignores the current ceasefire and attacks Iran once again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump will no doubt have to construct a new big lie to explain their belligerency as it is now clear that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
Even given the horrors being perpetrated by the United States as a bosom buddy ally of Israel, one is nevertheless particularly taken by the malapropisms and the verbal slurs and even threats of physical abuse increasingly being hurled about by the buffoon who pretends to be the president of the United States. Trump, pretending to negotiate with Iran, also saw fit to threaten to “eliminate” the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if Iran did not submit to unconditional surrender. He claimed to know the “secret location” where Ali Khamenei was hiding but “won’t kill him for now.” Trump also called out Representative Thomas Massie, one of the most principled men in Congress, on social media, calling him a “LOSER” after Massie posted a social media post criticizing the president for unconstitutionally bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday night without a declaration of war. Worse still, Trump also engaged in screaming fits focused on two women journalists who questioned his claim that he had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, demanding that CNN’s White House correspondent “Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out like a dog.”
Over the past few years Trump’s disdain for dogs has often been on display and he has likened a long list of perceived enemies to dogs — including former FBI director James B. Comey, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, and even his own Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As an animal lover, I found Trump’s expression particularly disgusting and I wondered where the sense of dignity and decency was in a man holding the highest office who would use such a phrase. Or of the brain connected to mouth that would use such an expression in the first place, particularly as the ladies were referring to a leaked report by government analysts. The report suggested that the enriched uranium and centrifuges had been removed from the Iranian sites days before Trump had sent his B-2 bombers to attack them in support of Israel’s own attack on Iran several days before. The damage to the sites was considered to be limited. Interestingly, the Defense Department’s own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysts were among those who were skeptical of Trump’s claims about the Iranian program. To put it succinctly, Trump may have spent billions of dollars successfully bombing empty tunnels and he been since taking pains to pretend otherwise.
Trump has also shifted his tirades over the Iran attack to what he prefers to label his critics’ disdain for the US military, which carried the bombing out under his orders. President Trump and other White House officials are now suggesting that questioning the decision and efficacy of bombing Iran shows a “lack of patriotism” and is something that “disparages American troops.” These claims remind one of the disastrous Iraq War in 2003 when skeptics were simply marginalized by George W Bush as anti-American or as “traitors” by asserting that they didn’t support the troops.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed the Iran operation’s success in a press conference and fielded questions from the press, while President Trump, who was himself a draft dodger during the Vietnam war, shared his opinion on social media where he posted how “Secretary of Defense (War!) Pete Hegseth, together with Military Representatives, will be holding a Major News Conference tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. EST at The Pentagon, in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots. After 36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory, they landed, they knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!”
Hegseth repeated the message from his boss in the White House to the media, explaining how “What’s really happening is you’re undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots and incredible F-35 pilots and incredible refuelers and incredible air defenders who accomplished their mission, set back a nuclear program in ways that other presidents would have dreamed. How about we celebrate that? How about we talk about how special America is, that we — only we have these capabilities? I think it’s too much to ask, unfortunately, for the fake news.”
And then there was the usual lie encrusted follow-through that inevitably is produced whenever a leading politician screws up. In a long post on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night, President Trump demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial in Israel come to an end. Netanyahu and his wife have been on the receiving end of three charges of bribery, theft, and breach of trust. Trump, who only last month was reputedly not speaking to Netanyahu and as recently as last Tuesday criticized his government as well as Iran by saying “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
But Trump has perhaps inevitably changed his tune under pressure from the Israel Lobby and Congress and is now defending his war criminal buddy while also praising himself, writing how:
I was shocked to hear that the State of Israel, which has just had one of its Greatest Moments in History, and is strongly led by Bibi Netanyahu, is continuing its ridiculous Witch Hunt against their Great War Time Prime Minister! Bibi and I just went through HELL together, fighting a very tough and brilliant longtime enemy of Israel, Iran, and Bibi could not have been better, sharper, or stronger in his LOVE for the incredible Holy Land. Anybody else would have suffered losses, embarrassment, and chaos! Bibi Netanyahu was a WARRIOR, like perhaps no other Warrior in the History of Israel, and the result was something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the World, and it was going to happen, SOON! We were fighting, literally, for the Survival of Israel, and there is nobody in Israel’s History that fought harder or more competently than Bibi Netanyahu. Despite all of this, I just learned that Bibi has been summoned to Court on Monday for the continuation of this long running politically motivated case…
And so it goes, so much lying and dissimulation that one has to wonder what surprises will be on the table next week. The fog of war may have lifted for now and the phony ceasefire between Israel and Iran has paused the immediate bloodshed, but don’t be fooled. The respite is to allow an exhausted Israel to rearm with US provided weapons so the neoconservatives and the Israel Firsters aren’t done. The war drums are still beating, and Trump’s America First movement is starting to fracture under the strain, with a growing divide inside MAGA over America’s pointless wars for Israel. One group wants to stay out of foreign conflicts while the other is ready to back Israel completely, no matter the cost. Trump is either consciously or inadvertently playing his usual role of spewing contradictions and sowing confusion and instability every time he speaks or acts. Israel cannot retreat, it can only continue on its path of blood and slaughter, and Iran will not surrender. This might create in the near and long run the potential for a major false flag operation by Israel to draw the US in and trigger a full-blown war against Iran.
Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.
