What Else Is New?
Here is a breaking news headline from CBS News: “Trump agrees to two-week ceasefire with Iran, delaying large-scale attack.”
And from the accompanying story:
President Trump said Tuesday he has agreed to a “double sided CEASEFIRE” with Iran, less than two hours before his deadline for Iran to either cut a deal with the U.S. or face massive strikes on its power plants.
“I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
He said the ceasefire, which he agreed to at Pakistan’s request, was “subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.”
Well, what a shock! A coward pretends to be brave by threatening to destroy everything, and then backs away when “Pakistan” (clever code word for “Putin”) asks on Iran’s behalf (i.e., demands on Russia’s behalf) for more time to reach a peace deal (aka to end the thoroughly worthless, purposeless, economically devastating, and geopolitically dangerous war of whim against a country that posed no real threat to the United States whatsoever, before he ends up in an actual confrontation with his personal idol and hero). Of course, before getting to this brilliant deal to back out of the quagmire he himself created, Trump took every opportunity to crush whatever was left of his country’s credibility and moral stature on the world stage, by delivering expletive-filled anti-civilizational rants against one of humanity’s oldest nations.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I summed up Trump’s negotiating psychology a few days ago.
Trump as president has exhibited two basic modes of operation. The first: Create a looming disaster through megalomaniacal incompetence; then abandon his own mess just in time to avert final collapse, while taking credit for saving everyone from the crisis that would never have been on the horizon in the first place had he not caused it. The second: Create a looming disaster through megalomaniacal incompetence; then abandon his own mess too late to avert final collapse, while seeking to lay the blame for the whole problem on people who had little or nothing to do with the mess he created and would never have made the same catastrophic decisions he made, but who are now on the hook to clean up after him in order to save themselves, because Trump lacks both the intelligence and the basic human decency to help those people recover the losses that he himself precipitated.
Meanwhile, as Trump throws the United States of America into the dumpster once and for all, his vice president, J. D. Vance, is reminding everyone why. Vance, like Marco Rubio before him, has visited Hungary for the sole purpose of standing next to Vladimir Putin’s mole within the European Union, Viktor Orbán, and declaring yet again the Trump administration’s strong and unequivocal support for Orbán’s authoritarian, pro-Putin rule. Vance also took the opportunity to accuse Ukraine of attempting to tamper with the Hungarian election — just as, he claims, Ukraine also tampered with the American election, because “this is just what they do.” He thereby openly condemns Zelensky’s government as corrupt and duplicitous for daring to speak out against politicians who support the Russian war of annihilation against their country, even while he is openly supporting Europe’s puppet-spokesman for the dictator who is carrying out war crimes against Ukraine on a daily basis the likes of which Donald Trump only wishes he had the chutzpah to carry out against anyone. That is, Vance levels this accusation of foreign election interference against the Ukrainian government, typically, as he himself stands on a Hungarian podium, speaking on President Trump’s behalf, brazenly and officially in the process of interfering in the Hungarian election.
The United States of America, so recently the modern world’s last hope for the survival of practical freedom on this Earth, transformed into a two-bit thug nation led by authoritarian oligarchs and madmen functioning on principles of power borrowed from Hollywood mafia movies. The American government officially, openly, undeniably in the pocket of a Russian, KGB-trained dictator with a quarter century of brutality and bloodlust on his resume. The institutions, and the national dreams, built by Washington, Jefferson, and Madison reduced to an entire government of profiteering toadies and kowtowers quivering in fear over the hysterical vacillations of an emotional infant who absolutely refuses to accept the reality of a world in which anyone disagrees with, or disapproves of, him.
But none of that is the worst of it. The worst of it is that there are still tens of millions of people in that rotted-out and vandalized country — and, I believe, tens of millions more around the world — who continue to believe in Trump and his administration, even to regard them as saviors. Trump alone in his bedroom, or in a madhouse, raving against a universe unwilling to bend to his fantasies, would be no more than a sad story of one man’s amoral and emotionally unstable spiritual decay. That there are so many previously normal and nominally rational human beings prepared to go to their deaths as parties to and defenders of this sub-rational monster’s megalomania, greed, and emotional solipsism, is the worst of it, and arguably one of the worst worsts, if you will, in the long, sorry history of fallen empires.
Progressive nihilism reaps what it sows, inevitably.
