Let’s stop pretending these military strikes against Iran, which were launched without the consent of Congress as required by the Constitution, and in flagrant violation of international law, are about national security for either the United States or Israel, or have anything to do with strategic diplomacy. No one paying attention is that gullible. Regardless of whether or not Iran was on the verge of a nuclear weapon (which Netanyahu has been saying, literally, for 30 years), and irrespective of the Iranian regime’s hardline sponsorship of terror, Trump’s entry into the war has only one strategy, and that’s distraction.

 

This out-of-the-blue military adventure from a self-proclaimed “peace president,” angling embarrassingly for a Nobel Peace Prize, reeks of desperation. Maybe in Trump’s addled mind, dropping a few bombs buys him some leverage with Tehran. But that’s giving him too much credit for strategic thinking. This isn’t three-dimensional chess, as his obsequious sycophants would have you believe. It isn’t even chess. It’s a toddler flipping the board when he’s losing.

 

The more obvious explanation is distraction from a cascade of humiliating failures that even his most creative spin doctors can’t salvage, let alone the lying sleazebag Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, who should really leave it alone. His much-vaunted tariff strategy with China has accomplished precisely jack shit beyond rattling global markets and earning diplomatic eyerolls from Beijing to Bunbury.

 

Immigration – the cornerstone of his political identity – has crashed headfirst into the Constitution, where the judiciary is creaming him, even among judges he appointed. His immigration “crackdown” carried out by the puppy-killing, filler-lipped, collagen-poisoned Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, and renegade ICE agents out of uniform, in masks and unmarked cars, like petrified Ku Klux Klanners, is turning Americans against him quicker than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth encountering an unattended whiskey on the rocks. His abuse of the National Guard in California is not winning him any new supporters but instead costing him more with each passing day.

 

His idiotically titled “big, beautiful bill” is hemorrhaging support in the Senate, dying a slow, public death. And being propped up by little Secretary of State Marco Rubio and even littler Speaker Mike Johnson isn’t doing much to enhance his image on the macho front.

And let’s not forget his embarrassing micro-dick pissing contest with Elon Musk. The world’s two most fragile male egos locked in a social media platform bitch fight better suited for Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise than the global stage. For all his self-congratulatory peacock strutting, he’s failed to broker any meaningful progress in Gaza or Ukraine. The man who claimed he alone could fix everything, negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine on his first day in office, can’t seem to fix, negotiate, or broker anything at all.

 

The weekend before the strikes delivered a particularly brutal blow to his paper-thin ego. While millions of Americans marched in the “No Kings” protests in a massive rejection of his authoritarian cosplay, Trump and his cabinet sat grimly watching his sad, sparsely attended, creaky imitation of a birthday “military parade” that had all the gravitas of a middle school stage production in Bumfuck, Alabama.

 

So when you’re losing on every possible front and faced with plummeting approval ratings and a stack of court defeats, what else do you do but start a war, of course? Nothing distracts from domestic incompetence and personal impotence like some manufactured carnage abroad. Those “emergency powers” he’s been itching to invoke at the behest of his personal Goebbels-like gnome, Stephen Miller, suddenly seem within reach when missiles are flying and the entire world is outraged.

 

Trump doesn’t want diplomacy or peace, not for America and certainly not for Israel. He wants a rerun of history’s darkest chapters with himself cast as the God-delivered strongman savior and the Constitution reduced to a convenient prop, if not used as toilet paper. He urgently needs us afraid, divided, and distracted while he consolidates power.

 

This isn’t foreign policy either. Unless you call bridge-burning on a global scale, foreign policy. It’s panic dressed up in military regalia. And once again, enabled, promoted, and amplified by the toxic Murdoch media empire. It’s pyrotechnics designed to make us forget his failures and fear our neighbors rather than the erosion of our institutions and desecration of our civil liberties.

 

The missiles may be aimed at Iran, but the real target is us—our attention, our fear, our historical jingoistic willingness to rally around a leader in times of crisis, no matter how manufactured, immoral, or short-sighted. Don’t fall for it. Keep your eyes on what matters: the systematic dismantling of democratic norms, the weaponization of government against perceived political enemies, and the blatant, unadulterated corruption that permeates every level of this administration.

 

That’s what this is about.