“America is winning,” announced Pete Hegseth during a remarkably ugly Pentagon press conference this past week, in the latest and perhaps greatest example of the second Trump administration outdoing Mike Judge’s legendary 2006 farce “Idiocracy.” Admittedly, there’s plenty of competition for that prize: The White House has also released a series of grotesque propaganda videos in recent days, apparently constructed by AI and incorporating images of U.S. strikes on Iran with unlicensed clips from action movies, popular TV series and video games. (Ben Stiller has requested that footage from his 2008 satire “Tropic Thunder” be deleted, something of a Hollywood in-joke given that film’s troubled history.)
Determined not to be left behind in the contest for maximal self-ownership, Donald Trump was up early on Saturday morning to issue, even by his standards, an incoherent stream-of-unconsciousness Truth Social post. It came complete with classic Trump moves: upside-down run-on sentences, the leaders of unidentified nations (no doubt holding back tears) saying “Thank you President Trump” and a self-canceling proclamation that Iran had “surrendered to its Middle East neighbors” and was now “THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,” but was also, somehow, unlikely to surrender or collapse “for many decades” into the future. I’m not much good at the poker table, but I believe that’s called a tell.
Life is too short to spend much of it troubled by the unbelievable stupidity of the people supposedly in charge of this country. We give each other these lectures, right? Stay hydrated, touch grass, see your friends, tell the people you love that you love them. Still though: How did we get here?
Unfortunately, there’s a real war happening to real people, including more than 150 children who were apparently killed when a U.S. missile struck a girls’ school in southern Iran on Feb. 28. So let’s get back to Hegseth, a classic example of the MAGA-sphere inability to perceive other people as real or other perspectives as potentially legitimate. He somehow managed not to start pumping iron or drop to the stage for push-ups during his press appearance rather han using words, those known tools of the woke mind virus and trans agenda. It might also have been a tell for the “secretary of war” — now in charge of a war that isn’t a war — to loudly insist that the greatest military power in the history of the world is “winning” against an adversary with one-fourth its population, severely damaged military and civilian infrastructure, and an economy crippled by sanctions, mismanagement and environmental crisis. Who was he trying to convince?
If Pete Hegseth were capable of self-awareness, we might suggest that he was striking macho-man poses on the deck of a sinking ship in an effort to convince himself that his personal brand, along with the rest of the MAGA enterprise, wasn’t headed straight for the historical dumpster.
First and foremost, of course, there’s the only audience that matters: Hegseth’s boss at the top of the worm-eaten executive branch, the guy whose skin appears to literally be rotting off his frame and who claims not to have “the yips” about using ground troops in a war of indefinite duration that was launched on invented premises with constantly shifting objectives.
Another Hegseth target was surely the mainstream media, which has been purged from the Pentagon and has been so badly burned by this administration’s relentless lies that it’s now disconcertingly reluctant to cheerlead for a war the public doesn’t want. (We can of course exempt Bari Weiss and CBS News, still boldly chasing the pseudo-centrist, pro-MAGA “vibe shift” that expired six months ago.) And let’s not forget the spineless but increasingly restless Republicans in the House and Senate, who can see the mounting daily cost of Trump’s Iran war — which by now could easily have funded the Obamacare subsidies they voted down — and who already fear an electoral Waterloo in November.
If Hegseth were actually capable of self-awareness, we might suggest that he was striking macho-man poses on the deck of a sinking ship in an effort to convince himself that his personal brand, along with the rest of the MAGA enterprise, wasn’t headed straight for the historical dumpster. Let’s put it this way: This recycled Fox News frat boy, whose bottomless stupidity and moral emptiness make the now-cashiered Kristi Noem seem like a nuanced thinker, seems to be experiencing doubts he cannot quite suppress. If that’s how it’s going, then “America” isn’t winning anything, regardless of what does or doesn’t happen in Tehran.
It would be foolish to make confident predictions about what will happen in this war, except to say that nearly all potential outcomes are likely to create much bigger problems down the road. I make no claims to military expertise, but here’s my sophisticated meta-analysis of what actual military experts say: Nobody knows anything. There’s a cautious consensus that U.S. and Israeli forces are now playing beat-the-clock against a possible missile gap: They hope to destroy Iran’s extensive arsenal of ballistic missiles before the U.S., Israel and the Gulf states start to run out of expensive Interceptor missiles and other air-defense tech, which may or may not be in short supply.
You can find experts who argue that the semi-decapitated Iranian regime is close to collapse and searching for an exit strategy right next to experts who argue that Trump and his advisers have blundered into a Heffalump trap lovingly constructed from their own arrogance and moral blindness — with a lot of help from Benjamin Netanyahu — and will soon need to make excuses for another U.S. humiliation on the global stage. Many Salon readers, and many Americans in general (if we go by opinion polls), are likely to find the latter scenario disturbingly plausible.
But we don’t need to know exactly what will happen in this war to conclude that it was a bad idea, based on bad premises, that will lead to more bad things. As for the pundits and think-tankers and accused thought-leaders who once seduced themselves into supporting George W. Bush’s post-9/11 wars and are now repeating the exercise, like traumatized mice returning to the spot in the maze where the cheese used to be, what is there to say? The intellectual class has never been immune to the pathological American conviction that history is bunk.
There’s a painful well of comedy to be mined, as observed above, in the Trump administration’s ‘roid-ragey, AI-slop-infused war propaganda. In this case, the war itself is propaganda, a desperate effort to shift the narrative away from the Epstein files, the massively unpopular ICE crackdown and the stagnating economy, among other symptoms of the regime’s political implosion. None of this is entirely new: Since at least the Vietnam era, America’s attempts to project strength on the global stage have often looked like embarrassing weakness. But the shameless bigotry, delusion and narcissism of the MAGA regime acts as a force multiplier, revealing and accelerating the declining empire’s worst tendencies.
None of this is entirely new: Since the Vietnam era, America’s attempts to project strength on the global stage have often looked like embarrassing weakness. But the MAGA regime acts as a force multiplier, revealing and accelerating the declining empire’s worst tendencies.
If military experts are perplexed about how things are going in the Middle East, foreign-policy experts are not. A survey of 949 international relations scholars conducted by researchers at William & Mary and the University of Georgia found that nearly 87 percent opposed the U.S. decision to attack Iran, while 81 percent believed the attacks would “probably” or “definitely” make the U.S. less secure. Financial markets have declined sharply since the war began while crude oil prices have spiked, from less than $70 a barrel to more than $90. More to the point for Donald Trump, gasoline prices in the U.S. are now higher than they were before the 2024 election, which might give him the “yips” in a way that the deaths of human beings never will.
American war-planners, it would seem, never considered the possibility that Iran would respond with “a massive and escalating bombardment” of its Gulf neighbors, which George Washington University scholar Marc Lynch describes as a clear and coordinated strategy meant to inflict “global economic pain to build pressure for a cease-fire.” Autocratic leaders of the prosperous Gulf states, Lynch writes, viewed Trump as a friend but now feel a “sense of betrayal” that he launched a war alongside Israel without consulting them, threatening their perceived “immunity from regional politics” and leaving them open to “catastrophic fallout” no matter how the war ends. Those sultans and emirs and sheikhs are learning “that the United States cannot be relied upon to protect them,” a historical lesson that counts double when you’re dealing with Donald Trump, who has no actual friends and no loyalty to anyone.
Trying to look manly and tough when your entire regime, from the top on down, consists of shifty characters with a wide range of obvious personality disorders might seem like a categorical error. But it’s a core principle of MAGA ideology, which teaches believers that there is no truth and that any level of cowardly and shameless behavior in service to the leader is a show of strength.
There’s no point in trying to catalog all the excuses Trump’s minions have offered about why they started this war and what its goals are. Plan A was threadbare, and they never had a Plan B. His followers don’t care, and the rest of us are inured to the endless lies. On Friday, Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” landing the phrase on the front of the New York Times. Shortly afterward, Karoline Leavitt explained that away as a metaphor: Maybe the Iranians would somewhat surrender, sort of unconditionally, without knowing they were doing that. These pathological losers are making America look like a failed state before the whole world, which might be funny if it weren’t terrifying.
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from Andrew O’Hehir
