Vibe War I: “The President Had a Feeling”
The psychological backdrop of the Iran war is the worst case scenario.
According to Donald Trump and the White House Press Secretary, the United States Armed Forces launched a massive military assault on Iran, decapitating the leadership, because Trump “had a feeling, based on facts” that Iran was going to strike America first. This is just the latest story about the reason for the strike, but in many ways it’s the closest to the truth.
The psychological backdrop here is the worst case scenario.
Trump is rapidly declining due to dementia and he is a malignant narcissist in existential collapse over Epstein. He has reached the stage in the process where destruction of the world is better than suffering further ego-injury—and crucially he has lost the physical machinery to use his frontal lobe to regulate his emotional decisions.
Our collective ignorance about his pathologies—in large part due to smears on professionals like Bandy Lee who warned us about this a decade ago—has left us psychologically unarmed and perpetually unprepared for his behavior.
Wednesday, in his one appearance, Trump was apathetic, mumbling, slurring, and totally disinhibited. He has every symptom of either Alzheimer’s or, more likely, frontotemporal dementia. The decline is real. The trajectory is in one inevitable, accelerating direction.
“I have to go back and look at the war” is exactly how he thinks of it. For him, war has always been something to look at. War is just another TV show where the poors entertain the elites. Captain Bone Spurs learned that sixty years ago.
Psychologically, Trump went to war because it gave him an escape from the prison of his own shame—because he is now in control. Even if his arson burns down the whole world, at least he will be the one to have done it.
The situation has reached a critical point because it is increasingly hard for Trump to back out, both mentally and logistically. The entire region is aflame. He can’t undo what he’s done.
Without intervention, Trump will do to Tehran what Netanyahu did to Gaza, not because of a nuclear program, but because Trump needs a grandiose gesture to restore his grandiose self-image. TACO is not an option for him here.
The tipping point has been tipped.
But Iran is not Venezuela. It will not go quietly, or peacefully. While it has been led by an odious, theocratic, terrorist regime for 47 years, we are talking about Persia—which has been there for five millennia. It will not turn into a puppet state to Donald Trump, no matter how many bombs they drop.
Trump has no real idea what he has done, or who he’s dealing with. And neither does anyone around him. All they know is they have to win, even though they can’t define what that actually means. Stephen Miller made the entire argument for the conflict when he said:
“What you’re seeing right now, Sean, is a military under President Trump’s leadership that’s not fighting politically correct… because we had a woke Pentagon. Because we had a military who, at the very highest levels, not the war fighters, was forced to fight a less than full fight.”
The war has no objective but war. It was chosen to prove that Trump is in control—and to advance two supremacist agendas: white supremacy and Christian supremacy.
At the “Department of War” Thursday morning, Miller referred to the people they are killing in Iran as “savages that torture and rape and murder” who deserve no human rights. This is definitionally racist, dehumanizing propaganda designed to justify mass death against an outgroup:
“And the human rights that we are going to protect are not of the savages that torture and rape and murder. The human rights that we are going to protect are of the peaceable citizens who have an absolute human right to live in physical safety and security every day of their lives. And in that mission, I promise you, we will be your closest partner.”
In reality, Trump’s psychological need to display dominance in the face of losing control has already claimed the lives of six American service members, killed more than 160 girls at a school, and turned Tehran into an “apocalypse.”
As first reported by Jonathan Larsen, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) catalogued hundreds of complaints from soldiers who had taken their cues directly from Christian extremist Pete Hegseth, and inserted apocalyptic End Times theology into the mission. For example:
“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
This is becoming endemic in the military—a deliberate attempt at reengineering a professional American defense force into a racist instrument of holy war, unconcerned with the niceties of international law or “stupid rules of engagement.”
It is the Crusades meets Dr. Strangelove.
The common theme here is that it’s all based on feelings, on vibes. But in this perverse shell of a government, feelings are all that matter.
It’s going to take something way outside the box to escape a historic calamity here. Trump is already covering up the murder of hundreds of kids—and his regime is demanding that the press stop covering the death of American soldiers so much.
In the meantime, we now have boots on the ground in Ecuador, and Cuba may be next as Trump strangles it with a blockade in preparation for potential invasion.
I’m trying to find a silver lining or something to hang hope on, but I just don’t see how we get out of this without a global conflict, or an intervention from some unknown pocket of courage in the Republican Party.
Trump is a bad man, surrounded by bad people, determined to do bad things.
I wish I had better news.
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A government led by a demented sociopath,being advised by a cabinet full of the most unqualified, inexperienced, and morally bankrupt narcissists he could find, fully supported by an entire party of the most sycophantic and corrupt cowards our country could possibly elect. Whatever more could possibly go wrong?
Great essay. We are all so sad. What evil, incomplete excuses of human beings these people are. What they have stolen from us has me angry for the rest of my life. I have the heart of a rebel now.