Trump’s ALL-CAPS War

We used to say that U.S. politics stopped at the border. Then again, we used to tell ourselves all kinds of childlike, adorable stuff. Today, to the dismay of children everywhere, the border is simply the limit of imagination.

Donald Trump started a war against Iran. Or didn’t. Maybe Israel did, and he helped, or Israel struck without warning and made him look weak and out of control, so he claimed he helped. He issued ultimatums to Iran, which they ignored, and then he bombed Iran, and it worked and they had a nuclear weapons program, or it worked and they didn’t, or it didn’t work at all and can’t because we lack follow-through. Oh well! Trump then announced a ceasefire that he brokered, which probably didn’t exist, and which he probably didn’t broker if it did, but which Israel and Iran probably never committed to, and either way they didn’t obey.

Aside from the prospect of mass death, it’s a little funny to watch what happens when someone used to underlings rearranging reality to resemble his fantasies runs headlong into those who won’t play along. What a difference noncompliance makes! It kills the sense of the possible, like a concert audience sitting on its hands or an improv troupe made of people who were taught to say, “No, but …” Here on Planet Imagination, rotating along the N.Y.-D.C. Acela Axis, Iran and Israel’s mulish adherence to their own sovereignty seems like the hobgoblin of little minds. They’re making the president look like a joke he didn’t tell. Clearly, they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

Here at home, we know a little imagination can make anything true. Trump doesn’t have the power to impound funds apportioned by Congress, shutter executive departments, send the armed forces after the political opposition, kidnap and traffic people legally in the country, extort companies via the Federal Communications Commission, punish law firms for working against him, or screw around with the sliders on tariff rates like he’s trying to mix a Mr. Bungle album. And yet, if you can imagine he already has those powers, or that he would be really upset not to have them, he does. If even that fails, when all seems desperately illegal, the Supreme Court can find a way to imagine that it isn’t.

Which seems sort of backward, when you think about it. The president’s powers and potency should be a more plausible fantasy overseas, where everyone’s too far away to reach for and peer behind the curtain. At home, up close, where the reality of a Time Before Trump still holds a tenacious purchase on habits of mind, everything should appear more illusory. All our groceries stores are here, for one thing, and all the prices Trump was going to lower on Day 1 linger on. Despite the Hispanosocialist takeover of California, last weekend anyone in L.A. could walk outside the four blocks of protests and the thousand protestors and see that for the remaining 497.3 square miles and 12,236,000 residents, it was a great day to go to the farmers’ market.

Like every crime Trump commits, the road to Tehran is paved with precedent. Those arguing simultaneously for bombing and regime change in Iran have been wrong about the power of the former to accomplish the latter since it was first argued in WWII. Essentially everyone wrong about the invasion of Iraq is back to apply the same motivations and motivated reasoning to Iran, and the only thing keeping their pitch from being literally identical is a single stubborn letter in each nation’s name. Some daydreams truly are forever.

But memory lasts a long time, and apart from the fact that he’s a demented old dullard with dog food for brains, you’d think Trump would bother to consult his own and remember all that time he spent in 2015 and 2016 pretending that he’d opposed the Iraq war from the get-go. Instead, like the rest of his executive function, his memory seems poisoned every bit as much by jealousy and entertainment.

Trump has spent the last 40 years watching presidents press the war button and receive plaudits. People clapped for a chickenshit operation like Grenada, and they clapped for George H.W. Bush deposing Manuel Noriega despite the whole thing feeling like one mob leader whacking a co-conspirator. Bill Clinton was applauded for sending cruise missiles to Sudan in the middle of his penis being put on trial by a suite of adulterers, and in case Trump couldn’t piece together that machine, “Wag the Dog” provided him with the only kind of text he can read. The mechanism works; it always works.

It’s clear too that at some point, he thought he could split the difference — press the war button but avoid the war itself, flirt with resembling the start of a deeply unpopular and seemingly endless war, but bail out within the week. He seems not to have realized that starting-haha-jk-not-starting an unpopular war is as sensible and persuasive to the average person as admitting that you’re going every day to a restaurant everyone hates but not ordering anything. That you went there at all overrides whatever technical distinction you wanted to make once you’re inside and drowns out whatever objections you had about the menu.

A brief effort to hide the ball about who ordered what first and when provided just enough pause for Trump to move into his reflexive jealous emulation, attempting both to create and end an American conflict in a span of a few days and fast-track himself to world-historic peacemaker. If that dope Obama could get a Nobel Prize while waging war in two locations, then surely he could manage this. If only Benjamin Netanyahu and Ali Khamenei were members of the Republican Party and dependent on him for their futures, maybe things would be different.

There is a kind of mercy to Trump’s being this much of a dumbass. The Bush II case for Iraq was rolled out over months, letting opinion makers stew in doubt about having doubts and accommodate themselves to both-sidesing the unproven and the incredible. Trump tried to condense the sales pitch, the conflict and the peace to a 72-hour period and made each step look like childish make-believe in the process. Even if the mechanisms are fundamentally nearly identical, nobody whose job is selling you brain damage while wearing a think-tank lanyard wants to risk sounding like producers foisting an instantly charmless theme week on a reality show. If this was Sweeps Week, we’d know for sure what Trump’s motivation was, but our striking Iran doesn’t even have the gravitas of successfully goosing TV ratings. As it is, this was barely a step above trying to drive the ayatollahs out of power by running “Operation Casa O’War” and dropping only the most elite sluts from “Love Island” on Tehran.

What we learned is that Trump can break anything. For generations, presidents of both parties have known that they can escape scrutiny and accountability by hucking a few bombs toward a part of the map labeled “Problem” and be accorded the presumption that it — whatever and wherever it was — worked. Apart from the fortunes and innocent people wasted, it was a perfect system.

Trump bombed like a comic during a disastrous first volley of crowd work. The No. 1 lesson of trying to own a room is never do anything to prove that you can’t, and he did it in an all-caps frenzy over multiple days. Trump’s own theory of himself cannot survive contact with the enemy, which he has designated as almost anything outside our borders. There is no one on the other side of them who owes him the assumption of authority or the kindness of playing along. Imagine, then, the power awaiting anyone at home who also stops pretending.