The Missile That May Bring Down a Presidency

Yesterday, the President of the United States told the world that Iran fired American Tomahawk missiles at a girls’ school.

Sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Other times it feels like I’m a background character with no dialogue in a bizarre cold-open SNL skit. Except this time, I actually have something to say about how the present one may have just torpedoed his own presidency, and how his sickening sycophants helped him do it.

Imagine telling a room full of reporters, and by extension the entire country, that a foreign adversary fired not one but TWO of your own highly-guarded Tomahawk missiles at an Iranian girls’ school.

And yet, that is exactly what our “president” incredulously did today.

We all know what a presidency is supposed to look like. They are grand, official, often consequential. Serious and sometimes boring. Full of statecraft and legislation, proclamations and poll numbers.

Occasionally, they veer into terrifying drama, when the consequences of action or inaction could lead to war… or worse.

Presidencies can be wildly different. Democrat or Republican. Black or White. Man or… well, we’re still apparently a ways off from THAT one. Damn you, America.

But what they all tend to have in common is deliberation.

The biggest decisions are supposed to be weighed carefully. Advisors gather. Consequences are examined. Alternatives are debated.

No impulsive decisions made in anger or ignorance.

The office demands seriousness.

What we have in the Oval Office now is the exact opposite.

A complete clown show.

A presidency lurching from week to week with a new scandal or crisis, each one seemingly engineered to distract from the previous one.

Great leaders assemble teams of experts to eliminate blind spots and fill gaps in knowledge, ensuring that the president has the full benefit of experience and perspective at his fingertips.

But this jackass, trump?

He has assembled the WORST cabinet in modern American history.

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What should be a council of seasoned advisors often looks more like a junk drawer.

Where one would expect gravitas, experience, and steady leadership, there is instead a swirling collection of clapping seals, each one trying to outdo the next with grotesque displays of loyalty rather than offering sober guidance.

trump doesn’t want advice.

He wants fealty.

He wants bowing and scraping, the more humiliating the better.

There is an empty crater where trump’s self-esteem should be, and no amount of unearned praise or stolen Peace Prizes will ever fill it.

Thus far, at the time I’m writing this, an ill-advised and illegal war against Iran has been raging without the approval of Congress, without any clear strategic objective, and without anything resembling an exit strategy.

Now, I’m not a foreign policy expert.

But I probably know as much as that bobble-headed buffoon trump.

I know that the United States has had an adversarial relationship with Iran for decades, ever since 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in the late 1970s.

I know that Iranian leaders have chanted “death to America” ever since.

I know that Iran has long pursued nuclear capability.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning that Iran is “weeks away” from a nuclear weapon for roughly forty years now.

Iran has also claimed to be developing nuclear energy, the stated justification for its uranium enrichment activities.

And I know that President Obama negotiated the JCPOA nuclear agreement, which placed strict international monitoring on Iran’s nuclear program to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons.

I also know that trump’s irrational hatred of Barack Hussein Obama compelled him to rip up that agreement and replace it with absolutely nothing.

Nothing but bombast.

Nothing but bluster.

And thus far, bombast and bluster remain the primary weapons with which he is prosecuting this war.

A war that began so suddenly that Americans inside Iran reportedly received little or no warning to evacuate.

The press briefings surrounding this conflict often resemble an Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First?” routine.

Officials contradict one another.

Nobody seems quite sure who said what… or who authorized what.

Pete Hegseth, the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” is a hilariously hollow caricature of chest-thumping male bravado whose apparent mission is to reassure the public that the Pentagon suffers from no shortage of testosterone.

But cartoonishly loud machismo does not inspire confidence.

It inspires concern.

Pentagon officials and staff have reportedly described Hegseth’s leadership environment as “chaotic” and “paranoid.”

And that should terrify anyone paying attention.