Trump’s TV-Warped Brain Is Putting the World in Danger
Policy
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March 26, 2026
The president is experiencing the war in Iran almost entirely through misleading video clips – and that’s very bad news for all of us.
Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House, Thursday March 26, 2026.
(Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Everything about America’s reckless and baseless attack on Iran flies in the face of objective reality, from the failure of the round-robin competition within the Trump White House to identify a coherent casus belli, to President Donald Trump’s fabricated anecdote about a conveniently anonymous former president’s stated desire for war, to his invention of nonexistent ceasefire negotiations to retreat from the next escalation of war crimes by the conflict he was about to start.
Our president is, of course, an inexhaustible source of this kind of self-generated delusion, dating back to the days when he posed as his own public relations agent to manipulate the New York tabloids’ coverage of his struggling real estate empire. But exploiting Trump’s flawed understanding of reality for the towering Moloch of America’s war machine represents an unprecedented new level of imperial nihilism — and the main driving force behind it is the same thing that turned this inert Caligulan stooge into our commander-in-chief in the first place: television.
Amid the senseless and growing carnage of the Iran war, NBC News’ reporting on how Trump’s daily briefings on the conflict consist not of substantive information but of small video montages came across as a deflating afterthought. Nor is it shocking to learn that these video clips appear to be nothing more than glorified cheerleading exercises, documenting the scale of destruction wrought by the American air war while conspicuously omitting the deflating news of Iranian counterattacks and diplomatic resistance to the chaotic succession of jury-rigged American “walkouts.” One administration official called the daily collection of clips a nonstop loop of footage devoted to “blowing stuff up.” Condensing the new daily summary of carnage from above into a tight two-minute compass recalls the “two-minute hatreds” immortalized in George Orwell’s novel. 1984– only where these rancorous hallucinations of the news were designed for mass consumption, these videos are curated for the delectation of the Maximum Leader.
This poses a very difficult problem in relation to what cultural studies scholars called “audience reception theory” – the notion that media consumers are not passive automatons but active interpreters imbuing texts with new layers of meaning. In Trump’s case, the receptive field is largely a closed loop, so much so that the president would be upset and disoriented by actual information about the conflict that contradicts the hot bath of bombing montages that begins his day. White House sources told NBC that
the videos…fuel Trump’s growing frustration with media coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in daily videos only to privately question why his administration can’t better influence public discourse, asking aides why the news media isn’t emphasizing what he sees, one of the current and current U.S. officials said. [a] said a former US official.
In a truly frightening episode, Trump was reportedly disconcerted by reports of a successful Iranian strike on five Air Force planes as they were refueling at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia; his daily video montage contained nothing about the attack. Yet even as Trump “reacted angrily behind the scenes” to this gap in his spoon-fed narrative of the war’s progress, he nevertheless continued to stick to his election-tested message, accusing the press of allegedly fabricating information he doesn’t like; “Publicly, he posted on Truth Social calling coverage of the strike misleading and accusing the media of wanting the United States to ‘lose the war,'” NBC reports.
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In other words, even when confronted with evidence that his personal war briefings are truncated agitprop, Trump’s solution is not to change his briefings but to change the reporting — to the point of backing FCC Commissioner Brandan Carr’s threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of networks that don’t produce news that meets the White House’s chauvinistic standards. In this strongman version of audience reception theory, Trump, as the world’s most powerful viewer, should naturally dictate content and coverage priorities for the entire media sphere.
There are, of course, countless problems arising from this information model as agitprop for a single audience. To begin with, it is vital for any commander in chief to confront and absorb bad news regarding military conflict, since under the deranged and unconstitutional conditions of the imperial presidency, the occupant of the White House is endowed with maximum war power. If he continues to operate in a blissful information bubble, assuring him that all is well and that his military prowess is unprecedented, conflicts quickly turn into quagmires, and quagmires turn into world-historical imperial follies. This is the long-forgotten reason why the modern conservative movement’s ideological attack on the media grew out of the grievances of the Nixon White House as it presided over successive disastrous interventions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; this administration, too, demanded a newly prostrate and docile media to encourage its blind imperial madness.
On a deeper level, however, Trump’s Baudrillardian experience of war on television arguably does something worse than transform him into a cathode-haunted Caesar figure; it prevents the deadliest perpetrator of mass violence on the planet from understanding the effects of his actions. We saw this syndrome in real time during Trump’s deeply disturbing press conference after the United States illegally kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Trump, who at times seemed on the verge of falling asleep, presented yet another jury-rigged justification for the violent violation of another country’s sovereignty, citing the nationalization of its oil industry in the 1970s as proof that “they stole our oil. We can’t let them get away with that” — even though the oil in question was never really ours, and despite the U.S. oil industry’s repeated insistence that it would rather not have anything having to do with capital-intensive modernization efforts. Venezuela’s decaying oil infrastructure. Trump followed up by threatening to take military control of Cuba and Mexico — at which point Iran was off the administration’s kaleidoscopic axis of evil, since Trump was no doubt still savoring the sweet taste of his bombing of the Islamic Republic last summer. For no intelligible reason, he mocked the National Guard siege in Washington DC and ICE’s reign of terror in Los Angeles; These anarchic exercises of federal force were obviously part of the president’s war-hungry lizard brain. It was like watching Chauncy Gardner, the TV-addicted idiot president of Be theretransforms into Coriolanus before our eyes.
This is obviously how Trump experienced it too. In an interview with Fox and friends Before the press conference, he enthused about his own audience’s reception of the Venezuela raid: “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show.” »
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding popularity couldn’t have been clearer: rampant corruption and billions of dollars’ worth of personal enrichment during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided solely by his own abandoned sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Today, an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire across the region and Europe. A new “forever war” – with an ever-increasing likelihood of US troops on the ground – could very well be upon us.
As we have seen time and time again, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory justifications for attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are threatened by non-citizens registered to vote. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is the only one that can uncover the lies that threaten our republic – and civilians around the world – and shine a light on the truth.
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