As soon as Operation Epic Fury began to move dials in Wall Street in the wrong direction, and the prospect of international inflation, stagnation, energy market mega-turbulence registered with the idiot king Donald J Trump, who is the shame of the US and Americans, the brakes were slammed on.

The war that Pete Hegseth, self-styled US Secretary for War, championed was dialled down from a projected length of four to six weeks to an operation that could end in days. Trump’s curious refusal to rule out US boots on the ground vanished in a flurry of negative market and economic signals.

The very first day of Epic Fury, the all-powerful US military fired a barrage of super-sophisticated Tomahawk missiles at Minab in southeastern Iran, one of which hit a primary school, killing a reported 160 girls and staff. Video footage of the American atrocity was proudly uploaded to international media.

Then Trump became aware of the child carnage, and promptly did what he always does in any such difficulty: he lied. He immediately claimed that the Iranians had butchered those children in an accidental misfiring of their own ordnance.

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That was a classic move by the US president. Always accuse your opponent of your own wrongdoing. Always adopt offence rather than defence. Never disappoint or confuse your wilder political Maga followers.

[ If Putin was wrong to invade Ukraine, Trump is wrong to invade Iran ]

And the cherry on top was sending Melania Trump – star of the silver screen – to chair a meeting of the United Nations (UN) Security Council at a session on protecting children. Slaughtering 160 girls is, of course, insignificant collateral damage when compared with the deaths of 20,000 to 30,000 children in the related US-Israeli war crimes in Gaza – and the physical and mental maiming of tens of thousands more.

Not a word of apology or regret for children’s slaughter. But instant deep concern about entirely predictable stock market reaction to the early outcomes of Epic Fury.

Is Epic Fury (also known in Israel as Lion’s Roar) going to bring an end to the Islamic Republic? How can it do so?

You set about wrecking the infrastructure of an odious, despotic and cruel Shi-ite theocratic state with a population of more than 90 million people. You slaughter children. You demand to decide their future leadership.

You lie to dissidents that you will come to their aid if they take to the streets and confront the armed security forces of their state. And you let them die unaided in their thousands.

You dare not risk lives of any US soldiers by placing them on Iranian soil. Boots on the ground are reserved for US cities. That is the current greatness of American military power.

You yo-yo between asserting and denying that your purpose is regime change. You claim that you want to destroy their nuclear infrastructure – the same infrastructure that you falsely claimed to have obliterated by bombing a few months ago. Even that lie was doubted by your own experts until you cowed them into silence.

Where does this all end? Is it an “epic” story or a short one? When does the “fury” expire – when energy prices and international interest rates stabilise? Where are the puppets you would like to run Iran? Where is China to source its oil? Russia?

How does this play in Peoria? A faltering US economy bodes ill for the November midterm congressional elections. Where now is the tariff-fuelled US economic “golden age” promised last spring?

Of course, there remain political off-ramps. First up is Trump’s demand that the Republicans in Congress give him the power to suppress voting in November – with obstacles in the form of severe voter identification measures and restrictions on postal voting coupled with long polling-day queues in Democrat precincts.

Trump is asking for electoral powers and threatening to veto all congressional legislation until he is given them. One member of Congress is reportedly tabling a Bill to enable a constitutional change to allow a third Trump presidential term. Gerrymandering of congressional voting districts is rife. January 6th, 2021, was just a foretaste of what can be attempted and what may yet happen.

The saddest thing is destruction of truth and democracy in Trump’s plutocracy. It is awful to have to hope for economic downturn and the pain of poverty to bring home to Americans the shameful horror of whom they last elected.

I agree with Fintan O’Toole when he wrote in these pages that Trump is suffering from madness rather than classical mental illness. His psychological derangements, if I may use that term in preference to mental illness, could perhaps be described as psychopathy or sociopathy, coupled with extreme narcissism.

The old trilogy – “mad, bad and dangerous” – is perfect to describe him. I warned and wrote as much in early 2016, well before Trump was elected. The tragedy is that he was re-elected to supreme office by citizens of what was once the world’s leading democracy.

November is now the only, tenuous hope for American redemption.

© The Irish Times