We Are Headed For A Catastrophe In Iran
This war is ill-conceived, poorly planned, and being run by two sociopaths, one of whom is the President of the United States.
Asked by a reporter why the U.S. didn’t tell Japan or other allies about its decision to strike Iran before it did so, the president said: “We went in very hard and we didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? OK, why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
“You believe in surprise, I think, much more than us,” Trump added, referencing the 1941 attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii that precipitated the United States’ entry into World War II.
Trump makes Pearl Harbor joke during meeting with Japanese prime minister
—NBC News, March 19, 2026
That comment was indicative of the lack of control that our president displays these days (more on this later), but it’s the next part that is far worse.
“This is a very volatile world, and the military equipment, the power of some of this weaponry is unthinkable. You don’t even want to know about it. Oh, you could end this thing in two seconds if you wanted to,” Trump added.
In case you aren’t paying attention, that’s the President of the United States openly threatening to drop a nuke on Iran.
Trump also joked about the war with Iran last week, telling NBC News in a phone interview that the U.S. military had “totally demolished” most of Kharg Island in earlier strikes, but “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”
Kharg Island is a strategic island off the coast of Iran that houses some of the nation’s oil infrastructure.
This is textbook sociopathy. “We may hit it a few more times just for fun.” What person in their right mind talks like this?
Sadly, frighteningly, the President of the United States does.
Donald Trump’s mental and physiological unraveling has been on full display for the bulk of his second term. From telling a female reporter “Quiet piggy! Quiet!” when he was asked a question he did not like on Air Force One, to wandering off randomly at events where he’s supposed to stay next to another foreign leader, or falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Trump has behaved more like an octogenarian in assisted care than a president. He is an octogenarian, to be sure, who won in part because his predecessor of near age, Joseph R. Biden Jr., experienced similar moments and refused to acknowledge them. Trump played off that in a carefully stage-managed campaign that limited his events until Biden dropped out, and then-Vice President Kamala Harris ran a frantic campaign to try and prevent Trump’s seeming victory.
It was late in that campaign where the cracks appeared in Trump’s facade—such as the time he stopped his town hall to play DJ for over a half hour, requesting various songs be played and seemingly forgetting there was an audience waiting to interact with him. There was also the odd incident with a Trump garbage truck supposed to be a metaphor about him taking out the Biden trash—except his spray tan was applied in hideous fashion and he seemed to forget how to open the truck door.
It happened so late in the campaign that it did not impact him. Had there been more time, perhaps it could’ve been exploited, but it seemed like minds were made up by mid-October, when Harris had blown multiple chances to get on the right side of history over the Gaza genocide that her boss, President Biden, had too willingly provided the munitions for. It did not seem to matter what happened at that point, and it showed when fifteen million Biden 2020 voters stayed home. Trump won in a walk. Democracy has been in a tailspin since.
Earlier this week, there was another incident that was extremely telling about the decline of Donald Trump’s emotional control. During an event discussing the (completely unnecessary) two-year shutdown and renovation of the Kennedy Center for the Arts, a story came up regarding a GOP congressman who was in ill health, and, well, watch for yourself.
It has been obvious for nearly two decades that Donald Trump is a sociopath. Per the Cleveland Clinic, a premier medical institution:
Sociopathic tendencies, associated with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), involve a persistent pattern of disregarding others’ rights, lack of empathy, and impulsivity. Key behaviors [of sociopaths] include superficial charm, deceitfulness, manipulation, and a lack of remorse. They often display volatile emotions, irresponsibility, and failure to learn from negative consequences.
I think it is self-evident how Donald Trump embodies every single one of these characteristics. What concerns me most of all in this moment is the impulsivity and lack of remorse he has shown about his extremely stupid war with Iran, a war launched because Senator Lindsey Graham and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goaded him into it. They stroked his ego, they pushed the right buttons, especially the narcissism, and away we went—no preparation, no thought as to the consequences, and no plan. The special ops job to snatch Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, just after New Year’s Day gave Trump and his overconfident, underqualified “Secretary of War” Drunky McRapist Pete Hegseth far too much faith in their ability to dominate militarily.
Now we’re running into a problem, though. What happens when inescapable consequences run headlong into the sociopath’s sphere? They often display volatile emotions and failure to learn from negative consequences. Donald Trump has made an entire career off of being able to escape negative consequences. Using bankruptcy to avoid paying his debts, using media to manipulate the facts, using his power to shut down investigations, and then using the cult of personality he’s built around himself to keep cowardly congressional representatives from using their power to remove him.
None of that can effectively counter the following consequences of his actions.
Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-third of the world’s fertilizer supply and one-quarter of its fuel supplies traverse. While America was initially insulated during the first week of the war, the closure of the Strait has changed that dynamic. The price of a gallon of gasoline here in Michigan, for example, has gone up a whopping $1.40 from three weeks ago—a 52% increase. The planting season is beginning in the Northern Hemisphere, and farmers across the nation will be hit with a second consecutive shockwave. A year ago was when the immigration crackdown began, and as migrant workers make up the vast majority of farmworkers, the direct effect of that crackdown is that fresh vegetables cost Americans 48% more now than they did when Donald Trump took office. Now the fertilizers that they depend upon to start crop growth are going to cost far more, with one of two likely results: either farm collapses will begin anew as they did in the 1980s, or the farms will manage to absorb that blow, but either result will further drive up the cost of grains and vegetables across the country and the world.
As bad as that is for us, the effects on Asia are even greater—90% of its oil and gas supplies come through the Strait. The rather rapid knock-on effects have been, for example, that 40% of gas stations in Laos are closed, completely out of fuel. While a few China-linked tankers have gotten through in the past ten days, the fact is that this represents a substantial harm to the continent. Why does this matter? Why, indeed, does this matter to us?
The United States economy is driven by debt. We are over-leveraged and have been for years, because the political will to change that is subverted by the Epstein class of bankers and billionaires, who have personally profited greatly from this state of affairs. That debt is financed through the sale of Treasury bonds, commonly known as “T-bills,” of which three-quarters of a trillion dollars is held by China. The overall amount of debt is at $39 trillion—a completely unsustainable number. Our interest payments alone are now $1 trillion/year, which was the entire national budget forty years ago. The American war machine at the Pentagon hoovers up that money each year by itself. Donald Trump promised, when he first became president in 2017, that he would eliminate our debt. It has doubled since then, much of it tied to his relentless slashing of taxes on billionaires and corporations, further necessitating increased borrowing when consequences like COVID-19 came calling.
China has long held the ability to cause a massive collapse in the value of the dollar as a currency if they sell off their T-bills. This current situation provides them an opening to do it, because we have, by choice, weakened ourselves and our military by depleting our weaponry in a completely pointless war. Adding to that, we are directly harming the Chinese economy with the oil shortage we’ve caused, and they may decide that we need to be knocked on our heels and choose to attack us, or Taiwan, or Japan. They could spur Kim Jong Un into invading South Korea, since Iran demonstrated the weakness of the THAAD missile defense system by destroying the one in the Persian Gulf with $20,000 drones. In short, this war could rapidly escalate to a world war.
We do not have the capacity to fight a world war. We are an empire at its limits, our friends deserting us due to insult after insult hurled by the sociopath-in-chief (who demands help with Iran while denigrating them!), and our ability to replenish our weapons diminished by the consequences of the war. The only thing we have that could prevent such a thing is our nuclear weapons…except that the impulsive, consequences-averse sociopath, as pointed out at the top, is implying he might use them if conventional arms cannot back the Iranians down.
We should never have started this war, we can’t even express why we’re doing it in a consistent fashion (reasoning seems to change hourly or daily), and instead of sober counsel, the president hears from: a former National Guard officer and known alcoholic; a closeted queer senator overcompensating by demanding war everywhere; a career politician who has never held another job but elected office; a general that was promoted over hundreds of more experienced and senior generals to the top spot as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman; and the prime minister of Israel, who has wanted war with Iran as long as Hegseth has been alive.
The remainder, such as DNI Tulsi Gabbard (who campaigned for President in 2020 on an antiwar platform), Vice-President JD Vance (who has told every reporter in earshot for a month that he was against this war) and several other sundry advisers, were shunted aside. Not that Gabbard and Vance are great people, because they are rank opportunists with no moral compass, but it’s telling that Trump chose to launch this war from Mar-A-Lago, without Gabbard or Vance present. It’s telling that he continues to sideline them on public comment of this war, which caused Gabbard to twist herself into a pretzel to avoid criticizing Trump during her required congressional testimony this week.
That means that Donald Trump, a textbook definition of a sociopath, whose personality led hundreds of psychiatrists to publicly break the old “Goldwater Rule” about not publicly diagnosing a patient they had not met a decade ago, is faced with enormous consequences that he cannot escape. His advisers that he’ll listen to won’t present contrarian or cautionary advice. His disdain for the rights of other people, his lack of empathy, and his incessant need to always win are a toxic combination, and I do not say this lightly, but I believe the evidence leads to a dark place. When confronted in the next couple of weeks with the overwhelming evidence that conventional arms cannot end the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, I believe Donald Trump will decide to use nuclear weapons on the coastal cities of Iran where the blockades will be run from, or even on Tehran or Qom, the centers of government power. He doesn’t care about what happens to those people, he only cares about himself and his determination that he not lose, and because he believes he is America, that is the only logical endpoint of this trajectory.
We are rapidly running out of time to prevent that sort of apocalyptic disaster. Congress absolutely must impeach and remove him with alacrity, for the sake of this nation and the world at large. He will destroy it to save himself if he is not stopped.