The Donald Trump guide to multi-national calamity

The last time an American president and his entourage of dissemblers face-planted into an international calamity, there was at least the courtesy of a meticulously produced pre-game show. George W. Bush, who was routinely blistered for his suspect intellect, but looks like a cross between Copernicus and Abraham Lincoln compared to the contemporary clown show, helped direct a months-long multi-front justification campaign in the ramp-up to the Iraq war that began 23 years ago this month.

Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sent before the United Nations with an elaborate prop arsenal of faulty intelligence, photos, charts, and power point presentations, all ostensibly proving that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Dick Cheney was busily lying about “yellow cake,” processed uranium turning up in Iraq from Niger, and Bush diligently animated himself like the college cheerleader he once was.

In an America that never seems to learn anything from international conflict, maybe because the very idea of diplomacy and its potentials and failures has long been considered the jurisdiction of dweebs and dorks, the next preventable disaster is always hurtling toward us at the speed of ignorance. So in the wee hours of Feb. 28, 2026, in the same building where party-goers the New York Times said paid $1 million per ticket to be power adjacent, Donald Trump announced that we were at war with Iran in a converted Situation Room at his golf club, Mar-a-Lago, aka the South Florida Home for the Criminally Insane/US Military War College.

Within 48 hours, a half dozen primary justifications had come out of the mouths of a half dozen senior administration officials, including a weapons grade schoolyard rant from Secretary of Testosterone Pete Hegseth that was peppered with the following terms: “Devastating,” “destroy,” “stupid rules of engagement,” “foolishness,” “savage” “death cult,” “unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” “hunt you down without apology,” and, “we will kill you.” These were the descriptors for Operation Epic Fury, a break from the administration’s habit of naming military campaigns like they were porn films, e.g. Operation Midnight Hammer, Operation Southern Spear.

Hegseth, to remind everyone, as the guy running an international military operation with profound geopolitical and global security implications, has credentials that are considered the gold standard in the Trump administration: He was a Fox News host. A weekend host, but still. His mission in Iran was so lethal and so precise it eliminated several of the people Trump had in mind to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom it also killed. As Trump explained to Jonathan Karl of ABC News, “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” So brilliant. Who’s in fourth place, Kid Rock?

The ongoing disaster: “We didn’t start this war,” Hegseth bleated. “But under President Trump, we are finishing it.” And that, of course, is 100% true except for the first part and the second part. You did start it, and you have no idea how or when it will be finished, but Trump said it could last four or five weeks before “we will easily prevail.” It will be easy as can be for Trump and his party guests. Six Americans died in the war’s first three days, but none were billionaires and none figure to be, even if, as in Iraq, 4,500 lives are eventually lost.

Trump said during a round of media calls that “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” meaning he’s not averse to deploying ground troops. That’s so long as they’re not his boots, because yips, no, bone spurs, hell yeah. “I learned years ago that when elites like Donald Trump bang the war drums and pound their chests in Washington, DC, and talk about sending troops into combat, he’s not talking about his kids,” said former Army Ranger and paratrooper Jason Crow (D-Colorado). “He’s not talking about all of his minions’ kids,” he continued. “He is talking about kids like me, people I grew up with in working-class areas, rural places around the country that have to pick up rifles, jump in the tanks or helicopters, and do the tough work. Well, America is over it.”

The justification the president seems to be gravitating to for the Iran war, the very kind of dubious adventure Trump has campaigned against for going on 15 years, is Iran’s nuclear capability, which most intelligence appears to indicate could not produce a nuclear missile that threatens the US for another 10 years. This would be the same nuclear capability Trump said last June he’d “completely and totally obliterated.” In any context, the president has a very hard time saying “completely” without adding “totally,” which would seem a simple annoying redundancy if not for its new clarity. Apparently he’d either complete destroyed Iran’s nuclear capability without totally destroying it, or the other way around.