The Dangerous Incoherence of Trump’s War With Iran
“Epic Fury” suits an administration devoted to cheap shots that “own the libs,” livestreams of Cabinet members awkwardly attempting pull-ups, AI videos of our obese president, and sunset piloting fighter jets or posing with glistening muscles and ripped abs. “Epic” once meant vast, glorious; it was Lawrence of Arabia Or The ten commandments. Now it’s just another dirty talk, the kind of thing that spit from the mouth of Elon Musk while he boasts about his fascistic, child pornography-generating AI chatbot.
Yet this operation is, I suppose, epic: the largest air attack since the start of the Iraq War. He is also furious, although that fury itself raises a question that the administration has not been able to answer because it cannot be provided: Why are we going to war in Iran?
One possible explanation is simply that the president and his cabinet are simply in the grip of burgeoning fury and rage, as are many of their supporters, and are desperate to find outlets to be released. They expressed their violent impulses in Venezuela, in Minneapolis, and within the federal government itself, all of which were decimated as part of the administration’s broader pursuit of destruction. Trump and his supporters are obsessed with power and strength and are desperate to show that they and the country they ostensibly lead are powerful and strong and that no one – not their political opponents or critics, nor the “international community,” to the extent that it exists, nor Congress or the Constitution – can do anything to stop them.
