President Trump: Please Don’t Nuke Iran

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Last week, President Trump threatened Iran’s 93 million people with annihilation. This week, we’ve largely moved on, if only to keep up with the whipsawing events of the Iran War – now paused, or maybe not, hit refresh on Trump’s social media page to find out.

But I’m still stuck in last week. Maybe because I’m a glass half-empty kind of guy, I’m struggling to see how the US and Israel’s war on Iran ends without Trump’s threat of nuclear annihilation being realized.

I arrived at that horrifying conclusion by being unable to square the following circle: Donald J. Trump cares most in this world about appearing strong; indeed, he built his empire on this premise. But it’s not just a business strategy; Trump struggles to accept reality when it runs counter to this self-image. If that sounds far-fetched, ask him who won the 2020 election.

If he can’t accept losing to Joe Biden, a fellow white Christian, how can Trump admit battlefield defeat to darker-skinned Muslims he called “animals”? Yet Trump has indeed lost. “The single biggest mistake Trump, or any American president in my lifetime has made, was going to war with Iran in an effort to change its regime,” said Tucker Carlson, whose opposition to attacking Iran has upended his friendship with the president.

Unable to admit defeat, Trump is living in a twilight zone. Right now, any Tom, Dick or Bibi who presents Trump with an idea that keeps his victory fantasy alive even for a few more days, is liable to get the green light. When these “brilliant” ideas inevitably fail – Let’s blockade the Strait of Hormuz to unblock it! – Trump is left only more susceptible to the next charlatan who enters the Oval Office.

Meanwhile the real-world consequences mount in rising fuel prices at home and body counts abroad. The US and Israel have killed over 2,000 Iranians to date. And Israel has matched that number in Lebanon, where it is turning the........

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