OOn Sunday morning (5 April), America awoke to an Easter message from their president, which he had posted on his Truth Social: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” Beyond representing yet another almost dreamlike instance of this man’s mental disorder, the outburst signified the place the Iran War holds in Trump’s floundering mind. It barely registers. He went into Iran, and now he is impatient to get out. The truth is that the horrifying catastrophe he is creating is not fundamentally about Iran, any more than Venezuela, or Cuba, or Greenland, or Panama – remember Panama? – or Nigeria hold any real strategic significance for America. In Trump’s eyes, the war with Iran, and war in general, is one battle in Trump’s war with America. Or rather his war to cling to power in America, and thus to rule the world from his American perch.
One of the cardinal traits of a sociopath is to hide the fact that they are a sociopath. Imagine Iago telling Othello that he could drop dead of jealousy for all Iago cared. But Trump is so much a sociopath that he cannot even pretend, sociopathically, not to be one. In his brief remarks to America last Wednesday evening (1 April), his first national address about the war that he began over a month ago, he expressed not a fraction of feeling for Americans worried, frightened, economically pressed as a result of the war. He offered no temporal framework or strategic condition for ending it. Instead he vowed to “bring them back to the Stone Ages”. It made no sense in any context, except in the most hidden, personal terms.
As Americans gazed into their screens in wonder – and perhaps envy – at Artemis II, the American spaceship headed toward the moon, Trump’s flunky, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, quietly fired the Army’s top-ranking general. That he did so in the middle of a war was alarming enough. But the fact that barely any high-ranking military staff now remain who were not appointed by Hegseth is an emergency. Almost immediately after the news about the general’s firing, the Trump administration announced that it was proposing a $1.5 trillion budget for the military, a 40 per cent increase from this year and the largest apportionment of money to the military in the country’s history. It includes a 5 to 7 per cent pay raise for military personnel – how much more the newly elevated military brass will make is unknown. Perhaps Elon Musk will cut their checks himself.
At a time when Americans worry about the basic cost of living, Trump’s indifference to rising prices, combined with his indifference to the apprehensions of Americans at a time of war, could mean that he is placing all his bets on undermining the elections in November should they not go his way. The blur of war, in the Middle East, Latin America, or somewhere else, will provide cover for the undermining of democratic institutions; the money lavished on the military, and the military’s increasing primacy and centrality – its stunningly successful overseas operations occupying the national limelight – might well guarantee the Pentagon’s compliance in the fall.
Trump’s abrupt firing of his fawning attorney general, Pam Bondi, should be seen in this light. People are blaming her downfall on her “mis-steps” with the Epstein files – she made contradictory announcements about their fate – and her inability to use the justice system to imprison Trump’s enemies. Perhaps. But the Epstein files have not touched Trump, only a smattering of liberal elites, and Bondi’s persecution of his enemies has in fact been a wild success: the entire liberal establishment has been, for the most part, paralysed. More likely, Trump delivered his boot to Bondi because of her recent appearance before the House Judiciary Committee in February. She astounded Americans with her insults to sitting congressmen, calling Jamie Raskin, congressman from Maryland, a “washed-up loser lawyer” and Thomas Massie, from Kentucky, a “failed politician”. With her desecration of their own place of power and privilege, she astounded Republicans too.
Never mind the contrived theatrics of it, and the fact that, as it later emerged, Bondi was reading her insults off flash cards. Like Kristi Noem, the former head of Homeland Security, who was fired by Trump partly for out megalomaniac-ing him by dressing up for the cameras as an armed Ice agent one day, and a cowboy patrolling the Mexican border the next, Bondi did not have the correct appearance for the upheaval Trump has planned for the fall. In November, Trump will need Cabinet officials who act barbarically without appearing barbaric. His instincts here, as debased as they may be, are correct. The replacement of the Gestapo-styled Gregory Bovino as Border Control commander with the avuncular White House Border “czar” Tom Homans was greeted by even the liberal media with relief. The former mixed marital arts fighter and US senator Markwayne Mullin’s stepping in for Noem elicited mere sneers rather than the cries of outrage that followed his predecessor. Trump is adjusting his cast for his biggest performance of all; he likes to do his research, to borrow a phrase, in the form of spectacle. Goodbye Joan Crawford. Hello Clint Eastwood. He is preparing the arena for his showdown with democracy. “War is peace” – you can genuinely imagine that is now Trump’s a strategy for holding on to power. War unifies, stills, frightens, awes, confuses, justifies, worries, thrills. As the American media rightly celebrated the rescue of the airman whose fighter jet had been shot down over Iran – thus helplessly legitimating, in some subtle, unavoidable way, American power in a war they despise – the world continues to search in vain for a way to end a war that has no cause, no rationale, no apparent condition for continuing or concluding. That is because the origin of the war is buried like uranium deep inside the decomposing brain of Donald Trump, for whom Iran is just another word for the chaos that he is desperately hoping will keep him king.
[Further reading: I am ashamed to be an American]
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