Trump Is in His Own Universe—but He’s Still Wrecking Ours

Earlier this week, a panicked would-be Führer Trump, looking for an exit ramp to a war he should never have started, threatened to blow up Iran’s oil wells, water desalination plants, and power generation infrastructure unless the Iranians ceded immediately to American demands.

The United States, Trump announced on social media, would wrap up its “lovely stay” in the region with an orgy of violence that, experts noted, would surely constitute a serious war crime. His fetid words, so dismissive of the lives lost and the broader pain caused by saturation bombing, are worth quoting in full. “We will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

In his live address to the nation on Wednesday, Trump repeatedly tried to convince the American public that a war which the Iranians show no sign of having lost—and which, by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, is crippling the global economy and risks diluting Americans’ purchasing power through years of high inflation—has actually already been won, and won in a nature unprecedented in human history. “We are unstoppable as a military force,” Trump crowed. The rest of the world “can’t believe the brilliance of the United States military.”

If by that, Trump—who had spent his morning scowling at the Supreme Court justices as they heard arguments in the case that the MAGA leader hoped will end birthright citizenship—meant that every European ally has said “thanks but no, thanks” to participating in what is clearly an illegal war, or to granting US bombers flight rights over their territories, then he’s right. (Not even Viktor Orbán, the embattled far-right Hungarian prime minister whom Trump and his minions have lavished praise on in recent weeks in an effort to help him win an upcoming election, has expressed support for this insane war.) But if Trump meant that they were dancing with joy at the display of American pyrotechnics, then, um, no.

This was authoritarian delusion, fueled by the misleading reports given to Trump of the war’s progress by the sycophants surrounding him, taken to a whole new level. Think of Bruno Ganz, in Downfall, the powerful movie about Hitler’s final days in the bunker. It was delusional, in the same way that this week’s patently unconstitutional executive order mandating states to curb mail-in voting, implement strict voter-ID laws, and pass lists of qualified citizen-voters to the feds and also to the US Postal Service was delusional. It was the same sort of narcissistic claptrap that has led Trump to go on a spree to convince cultural centers, government institutions, and legislatures to place his name and his physical image on a growing array of monuments, federal buildings, coinage, parks passes, military ships, and—the latest outrage—the Palm Beach international airport, now renamed the President Donald J. Trump airport.

For much of his rambling, incoherent address to the nation, Trump just seemed an utterly exhausted, befuddled old man. His strongman boasts rang hollow; his attempts to describe the nature of the Iranian threat sounded like they had been written by an out-of-sorts, frumpy ChatGPT. His braying about the well-being of the American economy came off as beyond tone-deaf. And his energy level was that of Eeyore after he had sat on a thistle.

But when Trump started talking about what the US military would do to Iran if it didn’t immediately cave to his demands, he came fiercely alive. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age where they belong,” he threatened, his itch for slaughter suddenly scratched. There was almost a twinkle in his dead fish eyes. The United States would, he promised, destroy every power plant, quite possibly simultaneously, and if he so chose, “could hit” the oil wells also, thus destroying whatever is left of the Iranian economy after five weeks of nonstop bombardment.

At times, it seemed that Trump was competing with his Israeli wingmen in bloodcurdling, war criminal bombast. Israel has, this week, embarked on an explicit campaign of ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon that will displace many hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims from their homes. And, as if that isn’t a big enough moral stench, this week, too, Israel’s parliament passed a law essentially creating a selective death penalty, with death by hanging reserved for Palestinians in the West Bank who are convicted in a military court of deadly efforts to destroy the state of Israel. Trump’s speech, larded with an authoritarian’s contempt for human life and dignity, seemed to say, “I’ll see your war crimes and I’ll raise them twofold.”

Of course, in doing so, Trump spooked the markets that he has been so desperate to calm. In the minutes after he opened his mouth, Dow Futures plummeted by nearly 400 points, and the price of oil soared. Give the man a second opportunity to address the nation, and it’s entirely possible he could throw the whole world into a Great Depression.

Not that that matters a whole heap to Trump’s cohort, an increasing number of whom seem to have been playing the markets by using their insider knowledge of upcoming political and military decisions to turn a tidy profit. The most recent allegation: that “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s stockbroker apparently bet big on defense industry investments in the days leading up to the opening of hostilities against Iran.

I wonder how these gangsters, so void of the sense of public good, will try to rake in the cash should Trump follow through on his threat this week to pull the US out of the “paper tiger” NATO and leave eastern Europe to Putin’s tender mercies. Maybe they’ll just sit back and watch as one country after another falls to the conflagrations accompanying the end of the Pax Americana, simply sending instructions to their brokers every so often to buy more hot stock in the latest military-company sensation.