Trump vows to commit war crimes as Iran War spirals out of his control

Donald Trump spent the weekend in hiding, a pattern that has become common on the first few days of each recent month. And, as usual, when he reappeared in public he sported an obvious IV bruise on one hand and looked and sounded like crap.

So it seems obvious at this point that the man is receiving aggressive medical interventions for something, with most guesses at something focusing on the two IV-infused Alzheimer's drugs Lecanemab and Donanemab. But our press is declining to tell us, and indeed continues to be entirely uninterested in the mystery. It's a bit curious, given the Shark Week-styled frenzy whenever the last president did something that hinted of Being Old, but at this point the American press' willingness to paper over even the worst of Trump's bizarre and oft-criminal antics is well established. They have decided that the idiot sociopath must have some secret genius to him, even if they have to invent it.

Because if he is not a secret genius whose every word-burp means eleventy different things all much more sane and clever than the thing he actually said, well then that makes the American people, and American elites, and them look like terrible and stupid people themselves. And we can't have that.

I'll again assert my own belief here that Trump is decaying, both mentally and physically, much faster than anyone is willing to admit and that it's only a matter of time before not even his little seditionist pony clubbers can convincingly cover it up. But he's also landed himself in a world-shaking megacrisis of his own stupid making—his Iran not-a-war—and for the first time in a long, long while it is a crisis that he cannot solve in his usual way: Declaring a false victory, then running like hell.

Narcissists and dementia sufferers are both prone to fits of fury when they find themselves in positions where their own internal fictions are running too sharp-edged against reality. Decompensation takes the form of heightened irrationality, angry denials, and ketchup-throwing fits.

And that's where Dear Idiot Leader is at, now. He's unraveling before our eyes. He's becoming more disgusting, and even less inhibited, and even more violence-obsessed, and it would be very nice if anyone around him or in the so-called business of journalism started caring about that before we all die in nuclear fire.

Those were among the more provocative of Trump's weekend posts, while he was out of the public eye, and it is not often that a sitting president announces that "Hell will reign," or issue a diplomatic statement demanding his enemy "Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards," or pipe up with a "Praise be to Allah" right after saying so, and this is because most sitting presidents are not enraged decompensating dementia-addled narcissists whose brains have devolved back to toddler status.

Right now Trump is obviously enraged to the point of madness, as he faces the consequences of his actions and realizes that there's no way back out of it that doesn't mark him as an eternal failure.

To the point of madness, I say:

Donald Trump, a Christian, opted to skip Easter service and instead went on a bizarre tour of Washington, D.C.

The 79-year-old president spent Easter Sunday taking a “ceremoniously slow” presidential motorcade tour around Memorial Circle—close to the Arlington Memorial Bridge, where he hopes to build an arch honoring himself, according to pool reports.

During his travels, he also stopped at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.

Ditching public appearances to instead get driven slowly around town, moping and looking for new buildings to put his name on is one of those too-weird-to-hide mindbreaks that I expect we'll see more often in the coming weeks—again, presuming we aren't all dead before then.

When he again appeared in public, he was still Being Not Normal. He spent Monday's White House Easter Egg Roll clutching a picture of that same envisioned triumphal arch.

This is what rich people do when they realize they're dying and there's nothing they can do about it. The man appears obsessed with leaving a permanent mark on everything he can, but still by using other people's money whenever possible, and whether the mark being made is good or bad makes no difference.

Maybe you'll remember him by his enormous tacky-as-hell gilded monuments to himself. Maybe you'll remember him for his war crimes. Doesn't matter, so long as his name is bigger than anyone else's when the new history books are written.

The reason I'm emphasizing Trump's visibly fragile mental state is because history teaches us that these things matter. Go through the a list of history's worst blunders and you'll see that far too many of them were predicated not on somebody's grand tactical vision, but on the bizarre personality flaws of whoever happened to be in charge at the time. You might think that a military campaign was launched when Emperor So-And-So noticed a subtle flaw in the border defenses of Such-And-Such, but just as often the true history is "a bird pooped on the western shoulder of the emperor's father's marble monument rather than the eastern shoulder, which the emperor believed to be a sign and/or portent, after which 50,000 people died."

For several weeks now we have been watching for signals of how Trump would make everything worse, once he realized that his war of contrivance had turned into a garrote strangling nearly every economy on the planet.

Would he launch a ground war to "Open the Fuckin' Strait"? Would he tuck his tail between his swollen legs and waddle off, leaving the world economy to collapse unless a majority of nations made new bargains with Iran to keep it from happening? Trump has the nearly paranormal ability to do the worst possible thing in every situation; knowing it in our guts, we've all just been waiting to see the form his newest destruction would take.

He appears to have settled on an answer, for now: War crimes. Having failed to eliminate Iran's nuclear stockpiles, its missile and drone capabilities, and its ability to choke off world energy supplies in retaliation for Trump's strikes, Trump is loudly announcing he intends to instead focus on destroying civilian infrastructure as means to send its population to "Hell."

Unless everyone does what he wants, by the deadline he imposes.

But it needs to be emphasized: This is an extreme act of cowardice, on Trump's part. If the sociopath follows through on his promised war crime—and it is unambiguously a war crime, because Trump is explicitly asserting that the strikes are intended to cause civilian, not military, havoc—then it will be another case of Trump chickening out.

Over the weekend, there has been a massive new airlift from U.S. bases into the Middle East, a strong hint that a major escalation is underway. Militarily, Pete Hegseth is laying the groundwork for doing any one of multiple extremely stupid and risky things.

• A ground operation to recover or fully destroy Iran's stockpile of enriched nuclear material, an insanely risky mission that would see at least hundreds of U.S. special forces pinned to one or several fixed positions inside Iran for the span of several weeks—easy target practice for Iranian missiles and drones.

• An amphibious assault to "occupy" Iran's major oil export terminal, Kharg Island: See above. While the occupation of Kharg would do little to "open the strait," it would apply economic pressure to Iran by cutting off oil exports that, at least for now, are still flowing. But it would do so by creating, again, a shooting gallery in which Iran could target U.S. troops from the closest possible range—causing casualties that Iranian strategists believe the American people could not stomach.

• An amphibious assault to occupy the entire Iranian coastline in an attempt to "open the strait." Sure to be a bloodbath, because see above (again).

• A full invasion of the entire nation of Iran. Numerous hawks have been pushing for this, because they are bloodthirsty monsters who are well past draft age and have never seen a war they didn't like.

You will note that all of the options being floated for opening the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise clawing some pretended-at victory out of Trump and Hegseth's failure have several things in common. They will put U.S. troops directly in harm's way; they will almost assuredly result in at least hundreds of U.S. casualties even in the better-case scenarios; they're not terribly likely to work.

Faced with the certain knowledge that he has to either escalate the war or admit defeat, Trump is now inventing a new third option: What if the United States instead engages in a campaign of civilian-targeting war crimes until Iranian leaders become too sad to continue, or until starving, dehydrated, and diseased Iranian civilians something something a new pro-American government.

That's what Trump and Hegseth are openly claiming to be their new war strategy. Having failed at every objective and fearful that escalating with U.S. ground troops would result in massive political blowback here at home, the pair are falling back on one of the United States' most cherished modern strategic fuck-ups: An air campaign directed at regime change.

Which, infamously, does not work. Has never worked. Will never work. You cannot bomb a place into democracy; this is something that no doubt every Hegseth-fired military leader was keenly aware of but which U.S. politicians have not been able to learn at any point in the era of manned flight. It is the Stupidest Possible Military Strategy, which would appear to be the sole reason that the day-drinking Department of "War" influencer and his idiot boss have seized on it.

Trump may yet back out; the phrase war crime has been bandied about on his television set enough for it to possibly sink into his brain, and while he's given up on getting a Nobel Peace Prize he has to be at least a little uncomfortable with the notion that he might not ever again be able to leave the country, post-presidency, for fear of international arrest.

It's not likely that this promise of a campaign of war crimes starting on Tuesday (Wednesday, in Iran) is meant as a cover for some other military operation, however. I think we all understand that Trump's ability to not boast about military secrets is near nil, at this point.

So the most likely scenario is that Trump will commit his new murders, and Republican lawmakers will let him because they are, to a person, crooks who would rather see America's superpower status collapse into rubble rather than challenge the Oaf in Chief.

The plan, such as it is, is to cause a great many people inside Iran to lose power, water, and food, initiating a Gaza-like famine. That is what the goals of Trump's war have devolved into, in the hopes that a sufficient level of civilian deaths will magically make everything work out again.

It won't, of course. It still won't work to "open the fuckin' strait," and that will leave the gutless and dementia-addled Trump back where he began but with even more of the world recoiling in revulsion at what this new America stands for. And the economy will still collapse, here and elsewhere, while the world's stupidest antichrist stares at a crumpled picture of his would-be triumphal arch and dreams up new crimes to commit.