Springtime for Donald!
With summer finally here, it's time to look back on our President's gayly murderous romp through the world.
He has to be the best at everything.
Two things can be entirely mutually exclusive — he still wants to be best at both of them
He’s long wanted to be the best of the best at nuclear disarmament. More than 30 years ago, when he was just a casino and hotel guy, he was angling, with touching absurdity, to be put in charge of all international nuclear disarmament talks. (His actual negotiating plan: Arrive late, walk up to the biggest Russian on the other side of the table, stick a finger in his chest and say, “Fuck you!”)
But even as one of part of the President’s mind savors the thought of rescuing all of humanity by getting rid of all the nuclear bombs — he’s simultaneously irate that past presidents had more nuclear bombs. Where did all the bombs go? He has repeatedly, sourly demanded his aides explain this. Once, during his first term, he interrupted a presentation about the history of arms control to complain about a graph that illustrated its successes. The graph showed a huge decline in the U.S. nuclear arsenal from a peak of 32,000 bombs in 1969 to a few thousand or so in Trump’s day. He pointed to the peak in 1969 and asked why he didn’t have that many?
Likewise, he seems genuinely sincere when he expresses concern about the human suffering of war. He often decries the completely avoidable deaths of people far from our shores, including young men in foreign militaries. When he does this, he becomes a better person than most of our politicians. One part of his mind thus does seem to want to be “the best at peace” — to bring peace, so much peace, and to win Nobel Prizes for peace, and to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore to honor his peacey-ness.
But another part of his mind, of course, wants to be “the best at war.” It’s unclear if these two parts of the President’s brain actually communicate. Regardless, at some point he’ll abruptly tell us the presidents before him were weak and dumb and pathetic, right before he then does exactly what they had always done: Backs yet another wildly expensive, poorly conceived and horrifically murderous bombing campaign that flirts, always, with spinning out of control.
Pounding Sand
In Yemen, for example, one of the world’s poorest countries, Trump this spring orchestrated a massive bombing campaign. He killed 224 civilians in just eight weeks — a death toll nearly as bloody as the entire 23 prior years of off-again, on-again American bombing of this sad patch of Arabian desert.
Why are we forever bombing Yemen? There have been so many different reasons offered over the years.
In the Barack Obama era, bombings of Yemen were about “fighting terrorism.”
“[Obama’s] first strike was a catastrophe,” recalls The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “[U.S.] commanders thought they were targeting al Qaeda but instead hit a tribe with cluster munitions, killing 55 people. Twenty-one were children — 10 of them under five. Twelve were women, five of them pregnant.”
Such surgical precision! This occurred right after Obama had been awarded his Nobel Peace Prize. By insurgent math, killing 33 innocents created 330 angry new recruits for al-Qaeda. (Maybe more, if pregnant victims count twice in the insurgent math equation.) It’s no wonder the wars are forever.
Obama also infamously became the first U.S. president to order the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, who was then abroad in Yemen. There was no court ruling. Just a presidential kill order. That the killing was carried out by an unmanned drone just added to the dystopian creepiness. So did the fact that a second CIA drone strike two week’s later killed the man’s 16-year-old American son.
George W. Bush had pioneered the modern practice of the White House sending drones to kill foreigners. But Obama had been elected to stop that. He was the self-proclaimed anti-war, “Hope and Change,” “Yes We Can!” candidate; the man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
Yet instead of ending the madness, Obama normalized it. He was not only the first to assert the power of a king with his order to kill a U.S. citizen; he increased the size of the drone killing program by 10-fold. Obama rained death down from the skies onto Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and of course Yemen. Even Obama himself was surprised. Discussing his death-by-drones legacy, he famously told his aides, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
But if Obama was good at something, Trump was damn well going to be better at it. And after this crazy spring, Trump has indeed killed far more Yemeni civilians than any other U.S. president. He’s winning again!
From March to May, the Trump team spent far more than $1 billion raining Tomahawk cruise missiles, StormBreaker glide bombs and other death tech down on the lands of the so-called Houthis. Why? These days, the explanation is different: Now we were doing it because the Houthis, mostly in charge of Yemen and outraged over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, had been shooting missiles at Israel and especially Israeli ships, as well as at U.S. ships. (The Houthis were also allied with — gasp! — Iran.)
We could have disassociated ourselves from the Gaza genocide, and the Houthis would have left our ships alone. We could also have stopped providing weapons, money and international political protection for the Gaza genocide, and maybe even tried to be true friends of Israel by helping them stop that genocide themselves; it will be a stain on Israel’s reputation forever more.
Instead, we dropped more than 2,000 various bombs onto more than 1,000 Yemeni targets. We blew apart a major port, killing 84 civilians and injuring 150 more, and intentionally spilling enormous amounts of oil into the Red Sea. (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called it a war crime.) The Houthis fought back. They destroyed seven of our $30 million-a-pop MQ-9 Reaper drones. They fired a missile at one of our aircraft carriers and missed, but the carrier had to turn so abruptly that one of our F/A-18 fighter jets ($60 million a pop) fell overboard and sank.
And then abruptly, Trump declared victory, and moved on.
No one cared. No one noticed that we had committed atrocities and spent at least a billion dollars — a billion dollars! — killing dozens of poor or working class civilians halfway around the world, solely because we proudly refused to disassociate ourselves from an even greater crime, the ethnic cleansing and killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Instead, what our media did seize upon was a bizarre footnote: For reasons unclear, a well-connected D.C. journalist ended up CC’d and lurking silently on a Signal text message thread where top Trump officials discussed the Yemeni operations in real time.
Those text messages showed our leaders couldn’t even explain to each other why we ought to bomb Yemen! Here was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s text to a skeptical vice president and others laying out the justification:
“I think messaging [about why we’re bombing Yemen] is going to be tough no matter what — nobody knows who the Houthis are — which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded. … This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.”
But “the message” the media focused on instead was Defense Secretary Hegseth’s failure of operational security. Yes, this was the outrage among journalists: Someone had let a journalist into the war room!
‘A Friendly Plane Wave’ to Iran
When it was suggested he also bomb Iran, how could a man like Trump ever have not used the best bomb, the biggest bomb, the Big Beautiful Bunker Buster?
Washington’s warmongering neoconservatives, nipping at Trump’s heels like a pack of Welsh Corgis, steered him like a stumbling cow towards the slaughterhouse. They only had to yap one thing at him, over and over: No other president has ever dropped the Bunker Buster!
Maybe that was because, to channel Vice President JD Vance, “back then, we had dumb presidents.” Apparently only Trump knows how to negotiate peace deals by using his Massive Ordinance Penetrators.
I just attacked your country in an act of war with the biggest non-nuclear bombs known to man — 14 of them, 30,000 pounds each, $500 million, is this a great country or what? — so now it’s time for peace! Or maybe more war! Or unconditional surrender! One of those things! Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has been shrilly warning that Iran was “about to go nuclear” since literally 1992. He once infamously trotted out a childish bomb cartoon before the United Nations, drew a red line on it with a marker, and claimed Iran was this close to having a nuclear bomb. This was in 2013!
After more than 20 years of such warnings, it became an overnight Internet meme.
After decades of such shrill warnings, what finally mandated a full-scale attack on Iran? Well, for one thing, these days, Netanyahu is in real legal and political trouble. He was indicted in 2019 on fraud and bribery charges and if convicted could face up to 10 years in jail. He and his wife Sara are accused of seeking and accepting more than $200,000 worth of jewelry, pink champagne, fancy cigars and other gifts in exchange for political favors; and he is also accused of providing regulatory favors worth around $500 million to a major telecoms company in return for favorable news coverage.
Many Israelis have also been furious at him over the massive security failure on his watch of October 7, 2023, and some even over his implicating their nation in the shameful ethnic cleansing under way in Gaza and the West Bank.
What better way to change multiple uncomfortable subjects than to start another war? And so, Israel surprise-attacked Iran on June 13. The Israeli missiles killed 935 people, including 38 children and 132 women. The initial wave of attacks killed many leading Iranian scientists and top military officials, often while they were at home with their families.
Imagine if, say, Russia, out-of-the-blue, used drones and planes for targeted bombings of London — and then proudly bragged of how they’d murdered twenty or thirty top British scientists and military officers in their homes with their families. Yet somehow, Israel can do what has never been acceptable for any other nation.
Soon the Iranians were retaliating. Their counterattack killed only 1/30th as many civilians, but among them was a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor and a 7-year-old Ukrainian cancer patient:
Into this maelstrom leapt President Trump. After eight days of Israel and Iran trading blows, suddenly the United States was off the sidelines and also bombing Iran.
One looked at the President’s social media feed in those days with a feeling akin to awe: He actually seemed to believe he was controlling events, like some sort of intergalactic stage director — only instead of whispering cues to theater actors, he was using ALL CAPS POSTS on social media to SHOUT AT ENTIRE OTHER NATIONS that they should “do this”, or “stop that”, AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
It’s always beautiful, and he never gets any credit. But he would like to circle back now and talk about a Peace Prize please, for stopping the war he just started. He also demanded that Israel “LET BIBI GO,” and stop his prosecution “over NOTHING”, a “POLITICAL WITCH HUNT.” And incredibly, the war did stop, and Netanyahu’s court case hearings this week did get canceled. One is suddenly uncertain; did the President actually make all of that happen by “Truthing” on TruthSocial?
A friendly “Plane Wave”! Really!
I am amazed that no one has asked the president about this friendly plane wave. Was Trump reporting something that he felt he and the Israelis had agreed upon — that Israeli planes, instead of bombing, would give a little wing wave to say goodbye? Or did Trump feel that he had just given a direct order to the Israeli Air Force, by social media post?
The Fuhrer is causing a furor
For sheer wild weirdness, the spring of 2025 thus rivals “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden”, the silly fictional play central to the plot of the Mel Brooks movie “The Producers.” It was a musical celebration of the Nazis, complete with tap dancing gals in brown shirts, short shorts and red swastika arm bands, goose-stepping stormtroopers, and a very swish Hitler crooning, “Heil myself / Heil to me!”
Arguably the world was not improved by the appearance of “Springtime for Hitler,” but of course it was all a con: It was supposed to offend, so that it would fail at the box office and let its producers quietly defraud their many investors. Instead, it came across as ingenious satire, succeeded wildly, and the horrified producers got caught and ended up in prison.
“Springtime for Donald” is the mirror image. It’s life imitating art. It ought to be horrifying and offensive; instead, it’s portrayed in the media as normal, sober presidential stuff. “Well, of course we’ve got to bomb Yemen, and support Israel, and bomb Iran, and support Ukraine, because of the terrorists, and the Russians, and nuclear weapons, and the Chinese, and radical Islam — right?” The only difference is that, unlike in art, in real life there’s no happy ending. The Producers are succeeding easily at their long con, and absconding with all of the public’s money. And the show’s tour never seems to end.
Next time: Part II.
reading your articles feels like someone is eloquently organizing all my thoughts and views into the most reasonable package…I send these to those who I’ve ranted to just so they can hear what I was actually trying to say. Thank you!
This is the best thing you've written (of the articles I've read so far)