I know many of you are probably annoyed that I've been writing exclusively on the Iran War of late, but I'm obsessed over the incoherence of this seemingly-intentional torching of America's international leadership position so I'll ask you to bear with me a while longer. In exchange, you will be treated to the sight of me going slowly but irrevocably insane. Perhaps you will find it funny! Or, perhaps, we will simply all go a little bit insane together, and if that's the worst international outcome here then we'll count ourselves blessed for it.
I've run out of ways to say "this is insanity." In the broader American discourse, however, there is little talk of it. And the markets care not one damn; every trader is so focused on their efforts to wring another penny out of someone else that nobody can be bothered to look up. And this is all very, very weird, to the point where I half imagine it to be the final sign of a complete national collapse.
On Friday, Donald Trump hallucinated an elaborate supposed peace deal with Iran. No such deal existed; he made it up, either because he is a compulsive liar or because he regularly detaches from our reality to go off sniffing feet in somebody else's.
The sitting president was, as I said, elaborate in the details. He claimed that "IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN," "Iran, with the help of the U.S.A., has removed, or is removing, all sea mines!" and "Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!" He announced that the U.S. will "get" all of Iran's nuclear materials. And he announced that Israel is now "PROHIBITED" from bombing Lebanon.
It was an unforeseen and total American victoryâand it was entirely made up. No American officials came out to vouch for the deal. Iran came out quickly to say that they had no idea what agreement the buffoon was talking about while emphasizing that the strait was indeed "open"âbut only in the same sense it previously was: Shippers willing to cut a deal with Iran for safe passage were still welcome to apply.
Despite the conspicuous silence from the rest of Trump's administration and conflicting statements from Iran, Trump's announcement was enough to spur notes of cautious optimism from maritime insurers. And, more importantly still, it convinced a number of ships stranded in the Persian Gulf to attempt the Hormuz crossing.
The result was immediate chaos. An Iranian gunboat fired on an Indian-flagged tanker attempting to make the crossing, forcing it to turn around. Another ship was hit by an unknown projectile. The rest of the fleet hastily turned back. The Iranian government announced that they would close the strait completely if the American blockade of Iranian ports remained in place; it remained in place, and the next day a U.S. guided missile destroyer fired on and seized an Iranian-flagged ship in the Gulf of Oman.
Within 48 hours of Trump's announcement of a U.S.-Iranian peace deal that had supposedly opened the strait, placed the U.S. in charge of Iranian "nuclear dust," launched a joint mine-clearing effort and barred Israel from further attacks in Lebanon, Trump was back to promising to "knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!"
Trump's previous announcements remain unexplained. There's been no details on how Trump came to believeâor, at least, why he announcedâan alleged already-completed deal with Iran that nobody else knew of or could confirm. There's only been silence.
From the administration, from the media outlets supposedly reporting on the war: Nothing. It apparently never happened, or if it did it is nothing that the American public needs to worry their heads about. This is just something that happens, now: A sitting American president announces a completely fake peace deal, the markets get a nice little Friday boost, and after it becomes clear the whole thing was imaginary our government and press are to never speak of it again.
There is something wrong here. And not just a little wrong, either; this is failed state and/or decaying dictatorship nonsense, and it's oozing out of our national floorboards even as the White House press prepares for their annual self-feting gala and the Dear Leader figure at the head of it wanders off again to plan his new ballroom and tacky-as-sin monumental arch.
There are two explanations for Trump announcing, in a manic series of social media posts, a new peace deal that never actually existed. The unspoken first interpretation is that the man is a compulsive liar who is now inventing entire new fictional treaties in order to goose the markets for a few hours.
This is bad, of course. A president glibly lying about reality itself so as to maintain better control of the populace and/or economy and/or press is, definitionally, propaganda. If we are in a propaganda state so entrenched that we are not even allowed to know whether we are at war, on any given weekend, then democracy has collapsed, the press has colluded, and both have rendered themselves illegitimate.
It's not a matter of the man being an irredeemable liar. The President being an irredeemable liar is a completely different and world-shakingly consequential thing. It is not something that even the most well-coiffed anchors and "reporters" ought to be treating as a new normal.
The second and more charitable explanation for Trump's imaginary peace deal is that the man was, quite literally, hallucinating. It is, given what we already know of the man, not only plausible but likely.
Trump has shown numerous symptoms of dementia in the last year. His sleep patterns are erratic; he has difficulty remembering some words, and boasts when he remembers others, like "groceries," as if they are special treasures that others around him might not know of. His awareness of his surroundings has deteriorated; see how often he calls out a name, then appears surprised when the person he's calling to is just behind him, standing in front of the same cameras. How often he has to be reminded of why he is in the room, during signings or other mundane appearances. He was confused by a picture portraying him as Jesus, iconography that few Christians, no matter how superficial their alleged faith, would be confused by.
His social inhibitions, never strong to begin with, are now near-nil. He is even quicker to rage, even more erratic in his attentions and announcements, and he continually appears in public with prominent but entirely unexplained IV bruises on his hands on a schedule that matches up with the treatment plans for several new dementia treatments.
Most to the point, there are a great many of us in America who have cared for dementia sufferers in our own lives. We know the drill. Trump waking up in the morning believing an event just happened even though it provably did not is so familiar, to us, as to be maddening. Dementia patients often seem to dream events that, on waking, they are certain are real. For Trump to be presented with the outlines of the latest negotiations and, after an erratic night's sleep, waking up with a very elaborate theory of how new imaginary negotiations concluded in his favorâthat's a familiar pattern. That's something a great many of us have seen, over and over and over again.
The part that is going to drive me out of what little mind I have left, however, is that once again we find ourselves with a Trumpian pronouncement that is either ludicrously dishonest or is an outright hallucination dredged up from inside his head, and the entire collected elite establishments of this nation are utterly unconcerned about that happening.
It's not questioned. It's not probed by panels of experts, or panels of partisans, or made the subject of an in-depth investigation into What The Great F--k this man might be going on about.
In this case, though, Trump's invented announcement came very close to costing lives. Ships moved based on his say-so, and were fired on when they did. The Strait of Hormuz is now closed to all traffic, both Iranian and notâa significant escalation spurred by Trump's declaration. It is damn lucky for all involved that nobody was killed, as the fleet moved towards the straight on his false claims and were turned back.
But here we are on the following Monday, and it is as if Trump's hallucinated deal was never announced. There is no press curiosity on how Trump came to believe a fictitious peace agreement was now in hand. There is no apparent concern, either among journalists or in the droolingly fickle world markets, that the sitting U.S. president's fraudulent announcement might have been purely to manipulate them.
Do you see, then, why I think I may be well on my way to losing my mind over this?
In the history books, "and then ____ sent a fleet of merchant ships into hostile waters, possibly because of a dream he had" would be one of the anecdotes chosen to illustrate the incompetence of a mad king. A Dear Leader figure constantly announcing completely invented false realities, only to have national elites clap their flippers together like trained seals and gush over Dear Leader's new version of events, would be the story recounted to show the depravity of a leader and the collapse of its bourgeois. More so if the leader thought themselves either divine or akin to the divine; double so again if the leader's decisions could be shown, at all points during their reign, to be nation-screwing errors with immediate economic, diplomatic, and military implications that proved difficult or impossible to recover from.
But no. No, a sitting national leader inventing fictitious peace agreements, announcing them to the world, having the whole thing prove delusional within 12 hours and having the situation go from bad to worse within 24âthat it's a chain of events that our collected journalists of Washington have any interest in untangling, because it either means the leader's lies have now risen to lies about war and peace or it means the man is literally delusional but nonetheless remains in control of both military operations and a nuclear arsenal.
Nobody gives a shit that Dear Leader deluded himself into a fake peace announcement, huh. Not Congress; not journalists; not the op-ed keepers of our national discourse. Nobody's concerned that even Trump's own top aides sewed their mouths shut and hid in their closets, rather than explain the situation.
At this point this does not even count as incompetence, on the part of the national media. This is collusion. The continued refusal to probe, even at the most superficial level, the reasons why The President is piping up with irrational and often hallucinatory pronouncements on a daily basis is a choice.
And now we're in a war because of it. And the war is, today, on the verge of getting much, much worse as he threatens war crimes in another attempt to extricate himself from his hallucinatory theory that he could murder most of a nation's top leadership and their families and wander off again without consequence. And the last ships to have made it out of the Persian Gulf before the war are now docking at their destinations, emptying their cargoes, and no matter what price the oil markets settle on, 20% of the entire world's supply ain't coming.
And nobody cares.
Yes, I do think I may be going a wee little bit brain-bent. I don't think it's entirely my fault. I'm willing to put my own insanity up against that of, say, Jake Tapper's, if we're going to have a sane-off, and I still think I might come out ahead.
But there is no chance, none at all, that I will be able to acclimate myself to a nation in which a Dear Leader blowhard figure has outright hallucinations about what is happening, and acts on them, and has his big-shoed acolytes clap for him, and has the nation's press meekly not giving a shit as they prepare for their annual ballâno, I don't think there is anything our elites can pipe up with that would convince me that this is how things are supposed to work.
Comments
We want Uncharted Blue to be a welcoming and progressive space.
Before commenting, make sure you've read our Community Guidelines.