Trump Only Wants to Go to War for the Ego Boost

Being the sole occupant of his idiomatic, dark, personal universe, the president conforms his actions to its idiomatic, dark, personal laws and according to its idiomatic, dark, personal logic. Given that he has managed to make too much of the government conform to his actions, and too many of us to conform to that logic, it should come as no surprise that he is talking openly about taking the country down the entirely unnecessary and perilous course of joining Israel’s attack on Iran. From The New York Times:

Trump said Iran wants to negotiate, but he reiterated his view that it should have done so earlier. “Why didn’t you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction?” he said. “Why didn’t you negotiate? I said to the people, ‘Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine. You would have had a country.’” In fact, Iran had been in negotiations with the United States, but had not bowed to White House demands. In response to a question about whether it was now too late to negotiate, Trump said: “Nothing’s too late.”

It had been a terrible week for him. His martial festival in Washington had been an enervating catastrophe, a historic festival of pure failure while hundreds of thousands of Americans protested joyfully against him. Then, he had embarrassed himself and the nation by stalking out of the G7 summit, ostensibly to monitor the situation in the Middle East. It had not begun well for him, anyway. He enlivened a press availability with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney by launching into what appeared to be a section of his stump speech. From Fox News:

The last question Trump responded to focused on a social media post of his in which he called for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to expand efforts to detain and deport illegal immigrants in America’s largest cities, such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. “Biden allowed 21 million people to come into our country,” Trump said. “The vast numbers of those people and murderers, killers, people from gangs, people from jails, they emptied their jails out into the U.S. Most of those people are in the cities, all blue cities, all Democrat-run cities, and they think they’re going to use them to vote. It’s not going to happen.”

Carney bailed him out but not before one final Trumpian flourish in which the president explained that the real problem began in 2014, when Russia was expelled from the summit due to its forced annexation of Crimea. Oh, and also because he had not been president for the past eleven years.

Trump had reminded reporters that the G7 summit used to be the G8 until Obama and Trudeau pushed out Russia. Russia’s membership was suspended following the 2014 annexation of Crimea. “That was a mistake because I think you wouldn’t have a war right now if you had Russia, and you wouldn't have a war right now if Trump were president four years ago,” Trump told reporters. “But it didn’t work out that way. It was a mistake in that you spend so much time talking about Russia. He’s no longer at the table, so it makes life more complicated,” Trump said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “But you wouldn’t have had the war.”

Naturally, with all of that, he had to rebuild himself as the He Alone Can Fix It world-historical leader who exists in his head. He has done so by throwing out all sorts of threats and admonitions that neither Iran nor Israel need to pay any mind. For example, I don't think the people in Tehran needed his encouragement to leave the city. Relentless air strikes are motivating enough.

So far, thank God, that’s as far as his war-maddened ego has been willing to go. Committing American forces to Israel’s offensive has consequences that he is incapable of comprehending, and his State and Defense Departments are both such chewy clusters of fck that there’s nobody left even to try to explain them to him.

And, holy tap-dancing Jesus, is this ever a terrible idea. By all means, let’s get back in bed with the Pahlavi clan because that worked out so well the last time.