Neutron Flashbang: Trump’s Iran Flameout
Donald Trump has always been a kind of freelance neutron bomb.
If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider it!
A neutron bomb or enhanced radiation weapon (ERW) is a type of thermonuclear device designed to pump as much deadly neutron radiation over the target zone as possible, while doing minimal physical damage to structures, vehicles and infrastructure. This kind of weapon was in the U.S. arsenal through the 1980s and provided a kind of lightning rod for the non-proliferation movement.
For most of humanity, it is as evil a device as has ever been conceived, deliberately prioritizing property over life.
However, for a necrophile—using Erich Fromm’s definition of a person obsessed with replacing living things with machines—a neutron bomb is the perfect device. It eliminates the messy organic problem and leaves the valuable, durable parts: Why waste all those perfectly good buildings in a war?
Freelance Neutron Bomb
Donald Trump has always been a kind of freelance neutron bomb, a walking radiation plume who plants himself over a target and spews out poison until he gets rid of the residents—in order to sell off the remaining parts. He has done this in real estate for six decades, along with a long string of well-known misadventures when he tried to move into markets he didn’t understand like commercial airlines, groceries, and school.
Part of the way Trump has always gotten away with his behavior is that in his best years, he possessed the ability to control his deepest impulses in public while offering the kind of “charm” that many psychopaths like him possess.
There are two main types of empathy:
Affective empathy, where you place yourself in someone’s position emotionally and actually feel something for them.
Cognitive empathy, where you do a mental simulation of how someone would feel, so you can use the information for your own purposes.
People like Trump have no affective empathy—they don’t feel anything but rage. Their emotions were cut off, whether through genetics, an abusive childhood, or a combination of both. But functional psychopaths collect enough data about how others operate emotionally to be able to predict how people might feel given certain input. This ability is key to manipulating people, which is the psychopath’s favorite sport—and often their occupation.
However, Trump is no longer able use this learned skill at all.
Failure to Achieve Criticality
In years past, Trump was able to simulate caring about people through mimicry and mental calculation—but now all he has left is his id. This is the nature of disinhibition in dementia patients. His frontal lobes are shut down, so he has no way to assess the impact of his actions on others, even by pretending—and even if he really wants to.
Below is an example of how bad his condition has gotten. Saturday morning at the inaugural meeting of the newly created “Shield of the Americas”—another extra-legal grift like the “Board of Peace”—in front of a dozen or so Latin American leaders at his Florida golf course, Trump uncorked a bizarre racist rant about how he won’t be “learning your damn language”—and bitterly complained at length about interpreters.
I included the transcript because reading it is even more eye-watering than watching it. There is no rational thought remaining in the president’s head. It’s just his unfiltered lizard brain performing for maximum narcissistic supply in the moment.
In short, he can’t even fake it anymore. And that matters—or it will have to, eventually.
Bills to Pay
If it were just Trump freelancing as a neutron bomb, that would be catastrophic enough in a president—but Trump would have never gotten where he is on his own. He has debts. People have kompromat on him. And now he has oversold his portfolio.
Trump has at least four major constituencies that he is obliged to satisfy in some form, simultaneously:
Foreign nation-states and dictators
Russia and Israel most significantly, but also Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Argentina, El Salvador, etc.
Putin and Netanyahu have massively outsized psychological influence over Trump—and their goals are not always compatible
American oligarchs
PayPal Mafia, oil & gas industry
His personal wealth—including his family
Bribes, pardons, crypto, insider trading
His base—and his party
Politics is a distant last in his calculus at the moment but it still fuels his narcissism and gives him ways to express his rage
This would be a lot of stress on a healthy man, an impossible juggling match of wildly varying demands and risk/reward calculations about who to prioritize—and who to ignore. But in a degenerating near-octogenarian beset by pathological terror, it’s easy to see why he’s so dysfunctional.
This kind of behavior has a term: narcissistic rage. Speaking Friday night at an event about college sports scheduled during a war, Fox propagandist Steve Doocy, usually a Trump favorite, asked him what should be a softball question about Russia supplying targeting information to Iran to use against American troops.
DOOCY: It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran target and attack Americans now.
TRUMP That’s an easy problem compared to what we’re doing here. Can I be honest? It’s just -- I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time. We’re talking about something else.
Trump says Putin providing Iran with deadly intelligence is an “easy problem” to solve compared to figuring out which college players should be eligible to be paid. How dare a reporter ask about such a trivial matter as war at such an important meeting?
Putin vs. Lindsey Graham
Trump’s sensitivity is not about the danger being posed to American soldiers; it’s about the conflict between prioritizing two of his allies—Putin and Bibi Netanyahu.
As reported by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Trump zealot Senator Lindsey Graham has been taking frequent trips to Israel to meet with Israel intelligence and “coached” Netanyahu on how to “lobby the president for action” in Iran.
In other words, Lindsey Graham admitted to a newspaper to being an asset of Mossad who helped convince Trump to commit the United States to a war of choice costing hundreds of lives and at least $2 billion per day.
I’m old enough to remember when this sort of thing was frowned upon—or called words like espionage. Regardless, it shows the core dynamic: a competition for who is able to most successfully capture Donald Trump’s very limited attention.
Three-layer Video Game
The White House is an unserious place doing very serious things. This is one of a series of posts from the official X account over the last several days that show different groups of Iranians being killed by American weapons—interspersed with footage from violent video games like Grand Theft Auto.
This shows the techno-fascist project in one post, representing three kinds of warfare developed by the PayPal Mafia:
Kinetic warfare—profit from death and violence through Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX
Memetic warfare—use the internet and its culture to create shareable content to dehumanize and desensitize at scale through social media
Mimetic warfare—weaponize the human tendency to imitate
Peter Thiel and his cohorts have been building this machine for many years. Now the parts have been crudely lashed together and unleashed by Donald Trump in a last ditch effort to seize total power.
Neutron Flashbang
The essential plan of the necrophilic broligarchs and dictators behind Trump has always been to use him for what he does best: to be a neutron bomb.
Trump’s job is get rid of the people problem, so billionaires and their companies can swoop in with technological “solutions.” They want to repeat the genocide in Gaza, not just in Iran, but in America as well. That’s what mass deportations, forcing people off insurance, and taking away vaccines is all about. They are preparing the ground.
However, despite all their careful planning, Trump’s deteriorating condition has made him less of a bomb and more of a neutron flashbang. We are living through a confusing but temporary onslaught of deafening sound and blinding light. But in the end, the bomb will no longer ignite.
If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider it! I never hide important information behind a paywall, so I rely on my readers for support. Thank you for reading and sharing!
If you’d like to help me with expenses, here is my DonorBox. 💙
Here are a few benefits to upgrading:
Live Zoom call each Sunday
Ability to comment and access all content
Wonderful, supportive community
Helping independent journalism fill in the gaps for our failing media
If you’d like to help with my legal fees: DefendSpeechNow.org.
My podcast is @radicalizedpod & YouTube — Livestream is Fridays at 3PM PT.
Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
Threads: jimstewartson
In the US, they have been trying to scale structural eugenics for decades. They have succeeded at a blistering pace in Trump's second term but they've been building this machine for a very long time. It's why homelessness, alcoholism and drug abuse proliferate in the 'world's richest country.' Hitler got his playbook directly from the US' fine example of the wholesale slaughter and subjugation of indigenous and black peoples. The US was always at the forefront of the eugenics movement.
Love the poster, 'money back if not satisfied, just return in 2 days'- classic.
Trumps id is showing, but I think trump is maga's id personified.