Let’s Say You Wanted a New 9-11

“Bibi made us do it. Watch out for the squirters. Have you seen the drapes?“

Mar 03, 2026

On the third day of America’s war on Iran, facing almost no political support, even from his own party, Donald Trump’s White House slapped together a Medal of Honor Ceremony to try to do some damage control. The public relations goal was clearly to try to “recapture the magic” of the State of the Union where Trump’s strategy seemed to be to give away stuff to half the room like Oprah rather than attempt any policy: “Look under your chairs everyone! You get a medal! And you get a medal!“

Monday morning, after a prayer by the Chaplain, Trump said this to a room of wounded warriors:

“Thank you, everybody. We have a lot of great service members here with us too and this beautiful building, and it’s beautiful. We’re adding onto the building a little bit. We’re improving the building. See that nice drape? …
I picked those drapes in my first term. I always like gold. But I think we can save a lot of money. I just saved -- I just saved curtains.
… And when you hear all that hammering out there, you know why the first lady is not thrilled, exactly? … To me, that’s a beautiful sound. She doesn’t like it. …It’ll be under budget ahead of schedule. It’ll be 400 million or less. Most people say 400 million or more. No, it’ll be less. But when I hear that sound, that beautiful sound behind me, it means money. So I like it.”

Trump’s demented soliloquy about his ballroom, at a cost of “less than $400 million,” came a few hours after Kuwait shot down three F-15 fighter jets in a friendly fire incident. The accident thankfully resulted in no injuries, but cost over $100 million per jet—essentially the full price of Trump’s gilded building.

One of the people in the room listening to Trump, instead of doing whatever a “War Secretary” is supposed to do during an actual war, was Pete Hegseth—who gave a briefing earlier in the morning with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan “Raisin’” Caine. Hegseth was asked what the objectives of the war are—and what the circumstances of the three American deaths up to that point were:

“Radical Islamists can’t have a nuclear bomb that they wield against the world. He gave them every single opportunity. Then we precisely took it away. And even then, after that, they didn’t have that. They didn’t come to the table with a willingness to give it away. So ultimately, those nuclear ambitions, which never ceased, are something that had to be addressed as well. So that’s a discrete sense of what’s being addressed to you and sure that they can’t use that conventional umbrella to continue a pursuit of nuclear ambitions.
And then, as it pertains to the U.S. casualties, that particular incident was, you know, you have air defenses and the lot’s coming in, and you hit most of it. And we absolutely do. We have incredible air defenders. Every once in a while, you might have one unfortunately we call it a squirter that makes its way through.”

Imagine tuning in to hear that your loved one was killed in action by a “squirter” because the government is scared of a nuclear program they claim to have already destroyed. This is what happens when you a put an incompetent, unintelligent psychopath in charge of the most lethal kinetic force in human history. He can’t even lie about it very well.

A bit later in the day, the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio agreed with Pete Hegseth that “radical clerics” with “apocalyptic theology” are the reason for the attack on Iran—without a hint of irony concerning Hegseth’s own christofascist End Times eschatology. However, Rubio also blamed the attack on the threat that Israel was going to strike Iran, which would have created blowback against the U.S.—a claim repeated by bloodless cult member Mike Johnson.

By all accounts, this attack was a long time in the planning, and pushed through by two countries with a long, strange hold over Trump—and the Republican Party writ large: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

It was just 25 years ago that Saudi Arabia paid hijackers to slam commercial jets into American buildings. But now they just have to pay Jared Kushner a few billion dollars and Trump commits national suicide instead.

Monday night, Iran set the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh on fire with Shahed drones, while Netanyahu went on Fox to praise Trump’s ability to be “persuaded.”

On the domestic front, rather than rush to bolster our counterintelligence capabilities in advance of the Iran attack, which he surely knew about ahead of time, FBI Director Kash Patel instead fired people on the team that investigates Iranian threats in America.

At the same time, Mike Flynn is already trying to figure out how to use the war to steal the midterms by abusing “emergency powers” based on “foreign election interference.”

[Full disclosure: Both Mike Flynn and Kash Patel are suing me. We are truly living in a simulation.]

If you were trying to script a maximal threat to American national security, you would be hard pressed to find a more precarious scenario than this one. We’ve deliberately opened ourselves up to mass retaliation, not just in the Middle East, but in America.

Trump has now normalized the decapitation strike as a tool of American foreign policy. It is hard to imagine this behavior not coming back to haunt his own regime. The United States is now seen by many foreign countries, appropriately, as an imperialist, fascist threat—and its leader as an unhinged lunatic surrounded by a clown car of cult members.

We are watching the forming of a new Axis of Evil—U.S., Russia, Saudi, Israel, Qatar, UAE, to start—which represents just a slight variation on the extremist ideology that brought down the Towers a quarter century ago. It’s just now the terrorists are on both sides. And We The People are stuck in the middle.

“States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”
—George W. Bush, State of the Union, 2002

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