The Powerful Message of the Hungarian People

Posted on April 14, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 14, 2026

If there is one person to  whom I turn for inspiration and truth when I write these articles, it’s historian Heather Cox Richardson, who writes extensively on Substack. I am one of millions of people who subscribe to her “Letters From an American” daily newsletter, which I find to be the most consistently valid voice trying to make sense of politics and foreign affairs.

Today, Ms. Richardson outdid herself, offering a perspective on the implications of the Hungarian people’s startling rejection of Prime Minister Viktor Orban after sixteen years in office. She notes that what we all witnessed on Sunday was a peaceful revolution staged by the people of Hungary who felt their democracy and their national heritage being ripped from them by a fascist-like political movement that wanted to replace “liberal democracy” with an autocracy based on a distorted view of Christian values.

That revolution had to overcome an election system that had been rigged as much as possible by Orban to assure that no opposition leader could ever wrest power from him. Had that proved to be true on Sunday, it would have been an adrenaline high for the Heritage Society and for Donald Trump and JD Vance who had ordained the Orban Hungarian rejection of democracy as the future model of American government.

Ms. Richardson made me realize how dramatic Orban’s defeat by former supporter Peter Magyar really was. Magyar told his people they had taken back their country and its democratic values. It’s a very big deal that the very thing the MAGA movement hung its collective hat on disappeared overnight. It’s an even bigger deal that the notion MAGA and the Heritage society have been spreading, that the Hungarian people were better off under Orban’s rule, and had rejected their previous values, was proved to be a lie when Hungarians when to the polls in record numbers to tell that to the world. If it’s breezy in your neighborhood today, you might be feeling the effect of a collective sigh of relief coming from all over Europe.

One of Richardson’s themes is that everything we see happening in the world  is part of repeating cycle. Whenever we think things couldn’t possibly get worse, that they have never been as bad as they are today, she reminds us that this has all happened before, in the 1850’s, 1890’s, and 1920’s, and that the current version of MAGA is an extremist outgrowth of what Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich began forty-five years ago. It’s almost too ironic that average Hungarians accomplished without firing a shot what Trump encouraged Iranians to do the day he started bombing them. MAGA got a serious lesson in the right way to achieve regime change.

Richardson made a pitch for Republicans to return to their traditional values of fiscal responsibility and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. She noted that Mitch McConnell, who spent decades building a right-wing corps of federal judges to support the growing Tea Party and MAGA movements, now seems to express contrition over having been instrumental in assisting in the overthrow of the Republican Party. Too little, too late, Mitch. Your legacy will always be helping to entrench the extremists who are trying to destroy the America we grew up in. You could have stood up for all the Republicans who simply quit under threat of a well-funded primary opponent, but that conflicted with your own designs on power.

As Richardson describes the growth of both Orban’s movement and MAGA, they both evolved out of small elite groups of people’s attempts to create oligarchies, espousing the notion that the wealthy are better suited to govern the rest of us and they should be unfettered in their power to change things. She relates that to the 1920’s, when wealthy individuals and corporations were out of control, not only in America, but throughout the industrial world. Their overreaches and excesses, much like Orban’s, led to the Great Depression, and possibly, World War 2.

Her masterstroke, today, was reprising the the words of Franklin Roosevelt in his 1932 campaign for president. Reading FDR’s promise of a “new deal for Americans” in the context of Hungary’s second revolution (they expelled the Soviets in 1958 only to be overwhelmed by military force) literally brought tears to my eyes. It’s clearly time for that kind of reset in American values. We’ve been wagged by the tail of MAGA for too long, and everything that’s happened so far in 2026 says Americans are poised to do exactly what Hungarians did last weekend.

That’s a very hopeful sign, although I don’t advocate any specific agenda. Flipping from MAGA to extreme progressivism or democratic socialism is not the antidote we need. That would just perpetuate the cycle, as MAGA goes underground preparing for their next attempted coup. America needs its leaders to remember the oaths they swore, and Americans need to replace their present leaders in both parties with people who care more about the future of all Americans than their own wealth and power.

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Trump’s War in Iran Will Never Achieve Its Primary Goals

Posted on April 13, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 13, 2026

When Donald Trump is in thrall of being Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military, his bombastic style consists in equal parts of lies, exaggerations, and delusional fantasies. What it never contains is an admission of any possibility of being wrong, any suggestion of contrition, and worst of all, any evidence of rational, competent planning.

The forty-day war has wasted the lives of thirteen American service members and more than 3,000 people in Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, most of whom were civilians. Trump’s war has not only not achieved its primary objectives, but if the Iranians accept JD Vance’s “best and final offer” they will be in a much stronger position than they were before Trump tore up the nuclear agreement the Obama administration and the EU negotiated. Most objective observers believe that that agreement was working, and Trump’s decision to end it was pure personal animus toward Obama.

Both Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu promised their populations that attacking Iran by air would end both its nuclear enrichment program and the tyrannical Iranian regime, and destroy Iran’s missiles and drones. Netanyahu had tried to sell this narrative to three previous American presidents, but George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, and Joe Biden all rejected it. Two center-left presidents and one who learned from experience that military incursions in the Middle East are like slogging through quicksand all understood that Netanyahu’s plan was a Hail Mary that had little or no chance of success. Yet, Trump fell for Netanyahu’s seductive appeal to his ego, because that’s what Trump lives for.

Netanyahu has been desperately trying to avoid a felony trial for corruption – in Israel, the PM does not have a get-out-of-jail-free card, compliments of its Supreme Court – and Trump has been dealing with the repercussions of his failed tariff and immigration policies and the specter of the Epstein Files. War against Iran suited both their personal agendas. To be fair to Netanyahu, his country has been at war for the entire seventy-eight years of its existence, surrounded by neighbors sworn to destroy it. From his point of view, even a Hail Mary was better than the status quo.

On the other hand, rational actors knew the attack on Iran would never succeed. Iran is not Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Grenada, or Panama, and the geography of the Persian Gulf gives Iran an advantage that cannot be overcome with air power. Eliminating Iran’s enriched uranium, which Netanyahu and Trump both claimed was their primary objective, was something Israeli and American military leaders knew from the start was not achievable with air strikes alone. Netanyahu knew it, too, but when Trump’s ego is in charge, rational thought takes a back seat.

How do we know the attack plan was doomed to fail? My own personal experience and that of many thousands of American military and civilians prove it. Iran isn’t the only country that buries it’s vital assets deep underground. I worked in one such facility during the Vietnam War, a fully functional military complex at Raven Rock Mountain, buried under eight-thousand feet of granite in Pennsylvania, It was built in the 1950s to provide a secure location from which the Joint Chiefs of Staff could retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Only a direct hit by a hydrogen bomb could affect it or similar facitilities like Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.

It’s an absolute certainty that both Netanyahu and Trump were aware that the same thing is true of the underground site at Istafan where the enriched uranium is kept. Unless they planned to use nuclear weapons, extracting the cannisters of uranium would require an extended ground war, neither of which were on Trump’s radar.

A poll by The Econmist last week asked responders who was winning the war. 2% said the U. S., 6% said Israel, 17% said Iran, and everyone else said None of the Above, and reputable polls in both Israel in the United States taken since Trump’s cease fire was declared found that nearly three quarters of Israelis and Americans consider the war a failure and believe Iran may now be a worse threat than before the bombing started.

The promises of regime change were equally disingenuous, and both Trump and Netanyahu understood that before the war started. Killing nearly a hundred of Iran’s top pollitical leaders did not “cut off the head of the snake.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and its religious autocracy number more than a million well-entrenched fanatical Shia Muslims who hate everything in the Judeo-Christian world and whose twisted version of Islam lists killing Jews, Americans, and Europeans as a pathway to Heaven.

We’ve been lied to. We have allowed our unstable, delusional president to drag us into a war from which there is no productive exit. Given the extremely negative response by both Americans and Israelis to the prospect of a full-scale war, and Iran’s ability and willingness to absorb destruction and use it to reinforce it’s people’s anger and hatred, it’s impossible to see this war as anything but an incompetent failure.

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Evolution or Opportunism – Who is the Real JD Vance?

Posted on April 11, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 11, 2026

Some leaders grow into their roles, maturing and broadening their perspective as they age. They start out espousing naive philosophies and opinions, but life experiences lead them in new directions. Probably the best example, during my lifetime, was Lyndon Johnson. As a young politician in Texas, and later, as a Congressman, he supported the New Deal and President Franklin Roosevelt, but he was also a southern Democrat who supported segregation and opposed civil rights legislation. As a Senator, he maintained his stance against integration while strongly supporting Texas’ oil and gas industry and was a bipartisan leader during the Eisenhower administration.

When Johnson succeeded John F. Kennedy as president, there was trepidation among Democrats that right-wing southerners would dominate the party and the White House. But Johnson instead became the steward of the Great Society movement that included passing the Civil Rights and Social Security Acts, including initiating both Medicaid and Medicare. After supporting the expansion of the Vietnam War, and condoning the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident that solidified popular support for the war, Johnson came to realize what a terrible error that was and dropped out of the 1968 presidential race. Lyndon Johnson proved that given the opportunity, hard core, ambitious politicians can evolve toward governing for all Americans and acknowledge when they’re wrong.

But Johnson was a rare bird. Far more common are politicians and influencers who are motivated by opportunism rather than ideology or principle. Notorious right-wing conservative Rush Limbaugh was one such, who had no ideology of his own until he seized on the rising trend of reactionary politics that was anti-everything liberal, including women’s rights, welfare, and equal opportunity, as a way to acquire influence and wealth.

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is credited with stacking district and appellate courts with right-wing judges and famously said at the beginning of Barrack Obama’s presidency, “My job as Senate Majority Leader is to assure that Obama fails.” In later years, McConnell told interviewers that his core principles had nothing to do with right-wing extremism, that he was motivated solely by finding a path to maximize his personal power. In his dotage, as he approached retirement and diminished capacity, he has expressed regret that his efforts resulted in helping Donald Trump rise to power.

Why are Johnson, Limbaugh, and McConnell relevant today? Because all the above raises similar questions about JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President who has taken over negotiations with Iran from the grossly unqualified Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. How Vance handles the tough, smart Iranians in Islamabad will make or break his ambition to succeed Donald Trump as the leader of the MAGA movement, and as president. Vance is someone whose major life decisions have been largely opportunistic.

He’s a really smart guy. You have to be to graduate from Yale Law School, notwithstanding that many of us wondered how George W. Bush managed the same accomplishment. What Vance has demonstrated more than anything else during his brief career, (he’s only 41,) is ambition, guts, and a keen ability to align himself with people like billionaire Peter Thiel who saw great potential in Vance and helped him win election to the Senate and the Vice Presidency. It’s been widely reported, and not denied by Vance, that he was not originally a supporter of Donald Trump or the Christian Nationalist movement Trump coopted from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

But Vance seems almost matchless in his ability to adapt to situations –  he can change his stripes as easily as donning a new tie to match Trump’s. In the current environment, in which it’s been leaked that Vance does not support the war in Iran, and Americans are realizing their error in giving Donald Trump what he believes is a mandate for an unfettered second term, I hear people debate one question every day. Would America be better off if Trump were removed from office and replaced by Vance? More often than not, people fear Vance, believing he’s more dangerous because he’s smarter than Trump and he generally behaves rationally even when he expresses radical views.

They fear MAGA in the hands of Vance would be worse than it is now, but I disagree. Movements like MAGA only succeed long-term with a hypnotic leader at the helm, someone with the charisma of a cobra, paired with extreme narcissism, greed, and sociopathy, in other words, Donald Trump. MAGA needs that to be viable post-Trump, but Vance does not check any of those boxes.

Vance is a mysterious black box. He is extremely talented at adapting to situations and seizing opportunities. He seems undaunted by criticism or opposition and gives every appearance of being the hardest worker in the administration. He is also very good a being loyal to whomever he needs to be to get ahead, but it’s impossible to know where he might come down on policy issues if given the power he obviously craves.

Vance has no credible experience with negotiations, but I suspect he will turn out to be talented in that regard. He’s good on his feet, always confident, and never at a loss for a response to tough questions. In his present role leading negotiations with Iran in the middle of a misguided war Trump is drowning in, he may display talents we didn’t know he had. The question is, if he finds himself succeeding in wresting concessions from tough Iranian negotiators, will he decide that it’s safe to stray from Trump’s insane daily-changing agenda. And if he does, which version of JD Vance will emerge?

I have no idea if Vance or anyone else can be successful in undoing the mess created by Trump. But I believe that negotiations in Pakistan will affect far more than the war. They could influence American politics for decades. Vance is only 41.

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Trump’s War in Iran Has Diminished America

Posted on April 9, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 9, 2026

The silliness over Donald Trump and Iran’s leaders both claiming victory in Trump’s thirty-eight day war masks a more troubling reality. For Iran, “victory” means that the regime still exists, and they still have the power and leverage to disrupt the entire world’s economy. Most important, the alleged trigger for the war, Iran’s nine-hundred pounds of enriched uranium, is still where it was.

Trump claims he proved that America has the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s like saying he proved the sun rises every morning. Everyone knows it does. So Trump got to play with his lethal toys, order around a bunch of generals, and dictate actions to the rest of the world – except, every foreign leader ignored him except the guy who dragged him into this war in the first place, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump’s fury at finding himself impotent to influence former allies and adversaries alike is evident in his increasingly bizarre behavior. While bragging about military successes, he fails to mention the blow American prestige has taken around the world. Because all that matters to Donald Trump is ego gratification, he thinks causing Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines to realize they can no longer count on us to defend them and the world order is a good thing.

The truth is, it’s a very bad thing. It disrupts the relative stability the world has seen, at least in terms of avoiding world wars, since 1945. Moreover, not only has Trump caused the entire world to view America as a declining world power, despite its military prowess, but even some of his allies are being hurt. If Hungary’s Viktor Orban loses Sunday’s election, many political experts believe it will be because of his close ties to Trump.

There’s an opinion piece in today’s New York Times by Steven Erlander that describes the current situation as America’s Suez moment, a reference to 1956 when France and Britain attacked Egypt to force the re-opening of the Suez Canal without coordinating with the United States. President Eisenhower ordered the attack stopped, and both Britain and France withdrew, acknowledging that they were no longer the world powers they once were. Erlander makes a convincing case that Trump’s war has left us in a similar position.

By withdrawing the United States from every initiative that represents a unified approach to a better future, Trump has by definition reduced our influence over world affairs. And watching how over 13,000 airstrikes failed to subdue Iran has simply confirmed what most rational world leaders already knew. Conventional military power alone does not make us a great power. When we lose our moral center and the world sees everything America has stood for being flushed down Trump’s gold commode, we are the losers.

The terrible situation we created in the Middle East is not our military’s fault. They performed brilliantly. But what good is tactical brilliance when they’re led by a madman? By telling both our Congress and all of our allies that we’re not interested in their opinions before starting a war that still might explode beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, unilaterally, he violated diplomatic protocol, our Constitution, and international law. Adding insult to injury, demanding that NATO join the fight after it became clear that Trump had badly underestimated Iran’s ability and willingness to absorb punishment and hold the world hostage, created rifts that will likely never heal.

When Trump launched air strikes on Iran, he said there were two objectives: preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon and enabling the people of Iran to overthrow the regime that he was confident he could bring down. Neither of those goals was achieved. Instead, Trump changed the objective every day, and his threats became more apocalyptic as his frustration at not being able to control the entire world increased. The allegedly huge compromise made by Iran to permit shipping to flow through the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a cessation of bombing wasn’t even an issue when Trump launched his war. Nor was the bombing by Iran of our Gulf state allies.

On balance, Trump showed the world two things. He is absolutely incompetent at strategic planning, and his vigilante-style war was far more about his ego than Iran’s enriched uranium. It’s likely that the two biggest winners of this war will be Russia and China. Russia is reaping a windfall of oil profits from the war, which, combined with our greatly reduced ability to support Ukraine has Vladimir Putin ecstatic. And China, Iran’s largest oil customer, came out of this being credited with convincing Iran to go along with the ceasefire. No doubt, Xi Jinping is licking his chops awaiting Trump’s visit.

Perhaps worst of all for our near-term future is the depletion of our munitions, especially laser-guided precision weapons. Our stockpiles have been recklessly degraded to the point where we have little left to continue the war if the cease-fire fails, counter aggression by Russia or deter China from overwhelming Taiwan. Considering Venezuela and Iran together, it’s clear from his own words that Trump’s dream was to control the world’s oil supply. He is proving again that greed and delusions of grandeur are not qualities we need in a president.

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What Has Trump’s War Against Iran Accomplished?

Posted on April 8, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 8, 2026

The world breathed a sigh of relief, but only minutes passed before the reality of the terms of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran were revealed for what they are. President Trump’s outrageous, inappropriate language threatening genocide and the destruction of an entire civilization was, after all, a bluff. But the fact that it so far has resulted in the appearance of further negotiations doesn’t change the reality that deliberate deception in diplomacy often leads to catastrophic outcomes. The consensus among world leaders is that Trump is reckless and dangerous. The trust and respect for the United States that existed before Trump took office is no more.  

With both the United States and Iran declaring victory and Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continuing to engage in hyperbole about the outcome, we’ll not soon see anything like transparency or truth from either. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains happily silent as his forces continue to destroy southern Lebanon while the world’s eyes are focused elsewhere. Not that Israel isn’t justified in attacking Hezbolah, but let’s not pretend the fighting is over.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summarized how the rest of Europe sees the cease fire: “The government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket. What is needed now: diplomacy, international law and PEACE.” If the lack of cheerleading and praise for Trump from every country we once viewed as allies seems dismaying or confusing, let’s look at why. As many observers have noted, Iran’s proposal, which Trump lauded as a sound basis for further negotiation, would leave Iran far stronger than it was before the war and America’s influence and ability to effect events in the Middle East far weaker.

Trump began this war demanding that Iran cease all work on enriching uranium and turn over its store of near weapon-grade uranium. He also demanded regime change and the end of Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism. The issue of the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t even mentioned, and insiders have suggested that Trump never took the possibility of Iran shutting down shipping in the Strait seriously. Nor did he heed warnings that Iran would attack the Gulf oil states as vigorously as it attacked Israel.

The Iranian proposal solved nothing except offering Trump an offramp he desperately needed to stop bombing or have to back off on his threats whether Iran complied or not. Trump’s “basis for further negotiations” is a proposal that supports Iran’s claims of victory. Iran demands acknowledgment of its right to continue refining weapon-grade uranium. It demands the removal of all U. S. military assets from the region, an end to all economic sanctions, and reparations to repair the damage done by American and Israeli bombing, while making no mention of suspending its support for terrorist organizations like Hezbolah, Hamas, and the Houthis. It also insists that the Strait remain under the control of the Iranian military who would have sole discretion over which ships were allowed to pass through, and being able to charge substantial tolls for passage.

This proposal would leave Iran in a stronger strategic and economic position than it was before the war, and it does nothing to relieve the distrust and anger that Trump has spread among allies in Europe, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. The leaders of our allies realize that as long as the United States is led by Trump, they cannot rely on us economically, militarily, or as the world’s leading promoter of democracy and human rights.

Trump ended that era, and depending on whether American voters end his power over Congress in November and replace him with a sane, morally centered president in 2028, those rifts may never heal. And then there is the economic cost of this war. In addition to raising energy costs, we depleted our supply of offensive weapons and the defensive munitions that protect us from incoming drones and missiles to the point that our ability to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine and China’s designs on Taiwan is severely limited. Trump wants Congress to give him $200 billion to replenish them at the expense of domestic programs millions of Americans depend on. Was salving Trump’s ego worth all that?

The better course of action, from the start, would have been convincing our allies and Congress that a joint action to force Iran to change was required. By letting Netanyahu play him into attacking Iran unilaterally, Trump supported the narrative that the world should be dominated by three great powers, Russia, China, and the United States, with everyone else secondary and dependent on them.

The European Union proved that open borders and the elimination of tariffs worked, bringing nations that fought two world wars together in peaceful if not always harmonious cooperation. The last century’s embracing of free trade and economic codependence as opposed to dominance by a few powerful nations has been temporarily sidelined by a worldwide movement toward authoritarianism. But if Trump is either neutralized or removed from office, and leaders like Viktor Orban of Hungary lose power, as Trump seems to fear he will, the world might get back on track for a prosperous, peaceful future.

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Does Anyone Actually Like Donald Trump?

Posted on April 5, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 5, 2026

In the transactional universe of Donald Trump, everything has a price, and every action generates a quid pro quo. Friendship, collegiality, and courtesy are simply bargaining chips, tools of manipulation, domination, and intimidation. All that matters in Trump’s world are blind loyalty, wealth, and power. Truth has no meaning except as a reference to lies and misrepresentations. It’s pure gangsterism. In that kind of universe it’s reasonable to ask, “Does anyone really like Donald Trump?”

Among two-thirds of our country there’s little chance of finding anyone who does, but what about his supporters? When I asked my extremely conservative cousin who supported Trump in all of his elections, and who devoted his entire life to military service and national security, he said “Trump’s just a blowhard, but we’re safer with him as president.” How many people have you heard say something comparable?

When I ask people in my purple community who voted for Trump what they think of him personally, the typical response is disgust over his behavior, dismay over his lack of moral center, and horror over his mobster-like persona. Without exception, my statistically invalid sample of interviewees dislike him, some intensely. Then why did they vote for him? The most common answer is that they have no faith in Democrats. I don’t either, and I hate the notion that “anything would be better,” but we can only choose from what is available. I’m utterly convinced that Trump will destroy this country if right-thinking Americans don’t find the means to stop him.

Years ago, I studied game theory, the science of intelligent decision making. We’re familiar with things like cost-benefit analyses and evaluating the odds of the success of different outcomes, but the most  important thing I learned from game theory is that all the analyses we use when we make decisions omit a critical element: how to assure avoiding catastrophic failure.

The solution is to first identify outcomes so awful, such as nuclear war, that they’re unacceptable under any circumstances. Any option that might result in such an outcome is nonnegotiably off the table before our search for the best option ever begins.

What if, given Trump’s history of questionable business dealings, bankruptcy filings, court defeats, and accusations of fraud leveled against him, the leaders of Atlantic City, NJ had thought that way before approving plans for Trump’s hotel/casino empire? They might have realized that the possibility of the total failure of Trump’s vision wouldn’t only hurt Trump, but devastate the city’s economy for decades. The lesson from game theory is that for such an outcome, even a tiny probability of occurrence is unacceptable, so we eliminate it before looking at anything else.

We can apply the same idea to most of Trump’s policies. Before passing the Big Beautiful Bill, many people asked if the near certainty that more than twenty million people would lose access to health care was a nonnegotiable outcome. Before turning ICE loose, unfettered to constitutional requirements like court orders and warrants, we might have asked if the death, injury, and general intimidation of innocent Americans that resulted from ICE’s tactics was a nonegotiable outcome.

We might have asked similar questions about Trump’s war against Iran, had we been given an opportunity to weigh in before the bombs starting falling, and by we, I mean every American including Congress who isn’t part of Trump’s inner circle. We might have asked if starting a major conflict with uncertain outcomes without the support of allies or the legitimacy of Congressional approval might yield an unacceptable outcome. We might have asked if the possibility that Iran could disrupt the entire world economy while enriching Russia’s war against Ukraine, the depletion of our stockpile of strategic and precision weaponry all over the world, or the horrific likelihood that the war might spiral out of control and become nuclear were acceptable risks.

Even people who, now that we’re inextricably committed to seeing the war through, recognizing that Trump’s notion that he can end it whenever he wants is pure fantasy, support continuing the fight until Iran’s threat to the world is eliminated, mostly regret the way the conflict was handled. They fear that even total victory over Iran will leave us in a far weaker position with respect to Russia and China. It didn’t have to be that way, except that for Trump, satisfying the desperate needs of his narcissistic disorder had as much to do with attacking Iran as any argument about Iran being a danger to the world.

A president who uses governing as therapy for his own mental illness and sociopathy is by definition an existential threat to us and the world. If Trump carries out his threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure over the objections of the rest of the world, he will draw the United States into a future that looks like a tea party compared to our forever war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vice President Vance and Trump’s Cabinet need to keep their powder dry just in case. I hope they remember where they put the 25th Amendment. It’s that serious.

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The First Rule of War

Posted on April 3, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 3, 2026

Donald Trump’s war with Iran and the events it triggers will plague us for years if not decades. ISIS kept us bogged down in the blood of Americans for twenty years, despite extensive planning and strategizing with a coalition of thirty-four willing nations that wanted to stabilize the Middle East. That would give any intelligent person pause before dropping bombs there. Anyone who expects that Trump can declare the war over, and expect Iran to thank him and promise to behave is delusional.

It’s important that we’re clear about this. There were two critical but distinct issues prior to this war. One was that Iran was a bad actor that no one was comfortable with, and that it seemed inevitable that we would have to confront it one day, especially if all of our allies’ Intelligence believed the threat of a nuclear weapon was imminent. Even our dysfunctional Congress could reach such a consensus, but that’s the easy part.

Modeling and war-gaming every possible strategy as our military did is only a starting point. Before we can employ what we learned, our experience tells us two other things must occur before we consider war. First, we have to ensure the integrity of our Intelligence. No one wants to engage in war based on misinformation, whether its simply in error or a deliberate, politically motivated lie, yet that’s exactly what the United States has done three times in the last sixty years, at enormous cost to all of us.

We apparently haven’t learned from the fictitious attack in the Gulf of Tonkin or the alleged weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein never had. We won’t know until people feel safe telling the truth, but many believe the nuclear threat Trump claimed was imminent wasn’t. Even with competent, responsible people like Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Dick Cheney making policy decisions, we were still drawn into wars that resulted in more than a quarter of a million Americans killed or injured over more than thirty years.

Compared to who Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Bush, and Nixon chose, Trump put Pete Hegseth in charge of military planning. His confirmation as Secretary of Defense first had to get past allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and excessive drinking, and we learned a lot about Hegseth when he became a cheerleader for changing the Department of Defense’s name to the Department of War. He’s no Dick Cheney.

I’ve never been to War College, but I imagine that the first principle they teach is never start a war you’re not willing or capable of finishing. But teaching our military leaders only works if they have the unbiased capacity to apply what they learned in the real world, and some arrogant bureaucrat doesn’t usurp their roles and undo it all. With Hegseth in charge of war policy, presiding over Joint Chiefs of Staff who are aware that if they disagree with Trump they’ll be fired, and by not permitting people with real expertise to comment freely, we’ve become involved in a war that violated the first principle. We opened a box we don’t know how to close with no clue what to do afterward.

This was the danger many Americans feared with a narcissistic sociopath as president. We’ve been sounding the alarm since Trump rode down the golden escalator, and now the wolf is at our door. A wolf cannot be tamed with offers food and loving care the way your yellow lab can, and Iran’s leaders cannot be trusted to behave like world leaders who care about peace and progress. If it were just Trump and his sycophants hung out to dry, there would be justice in their predicament. Watching these incompetent clowns crash and burn might be amusing if they weren’t capable of taking modern civilization down with them.

Vice President J.D. Vance was opposed to this war before he dutifully fell in line behind the administration. Now that they see Vance was right, I wonder how many Trump supporters understand that Trump is a terribly dangerous man capable of destroying everything, and realize our nation’s future may depend on removing the cancer he represents before it kills us. Don’t be surprised if we hear serious talk about the 25th Amendment as the midterm elections near or if the MAGA Republicans in the House who haven’t already thrown in the towel decide that a third impeachment is the charm to protect their seats.

Any discussion of removing Trump from office must include the Epstein files, and Trump can exert great influence over them when he replaces Pam Bondi as Attorney General. Trump knows what he’s guilty of, and he knows that when his Christian base realizes he was fully aware of the things his friend Jeffrey Epstein did and never reported them, they’ll abandon him, even if the hushed-up accusation that Trump sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old girl proves baseless. I wouldn’t want to be the new Attorney  General.

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Trump Finally Explains His War to Americans

Posted on April 2, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 2, 2026

Forty days after starting a war with Iran, Donald Trump finally got around to addressing the people who elected him on a platform that included no more endless wars, although the fallout from this one will be felt for years. Trump ordered our matchless military to attack Iran without consulting either Congress or our allies. Considering that the number of targets attacked, (obliterated according to Trump,) is approaching 15,000, this war was never going to be a quick foray like kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

This war is about Trump’s boundless ego and his belief that he understands war and diplomacy better than anyone else. Remember how many times he referred to his generals as stupid? Surrounded by yes-people and sycophants, his administration has run completely out of control because no one tells the truth to a president who punishes people who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear. Led by the nose by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who would ruthlessly destroy every Arab neighbor if he could, Trump allowed himself to be convinced that he really is the all-powerful dictator of policy for the western world.

The war with Iran is as much a result of Trump’s domestic reign of terror as anything else. Look at who is setting American policy goals: Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Scott Bessent, and J. D. Vance, all of whom march in lockstep with Donald Trump’s quest to create a Fascist oligarchy to replace our constitutional republic. Trump always imagined he was someone who could set the world on fire; now he’s doing it.

Reality check: we’re not safer than we were when Trump started this war, declaring that Iran was an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, a claim that has been debunked by both military and national security experts willing to speak out and risk their careers. Political analyst Van Jones said it perfectly after Trump’s speech, last night. He noted that Trump’s contradictory ramblings since the war began seemed to have focused on three objectives: getting rid of the regime that murdered thousands of its own people and is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, preventing Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon, and assuring free passage of international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

In addressing those concerns, Lindsey Graham called Trump’s speech a compellng explanation for the need for the war, and Ted Cruz said it made him feel safer. Mark Warner stated the obvious, that the speech had not provided evidence that Trump gave any thought to what happens after the bombing stops. Jones called last night’s speech a disaster. He said all Trump accomplished was replacing an old, murderous Ayatollah with a younger, worse one, and the revolutionary guard, which rules Iran with an iron fist is still in control. With respect to Trump’s claim that since we know where Iran’s refined uranium is buried, deep underground at Istafan, there’s no need to remove it because we can watch with spy satellites and hit them hard if they make a move to retrieve it, Jones said that is exactly what we were doing before the war. The war has left Iran’s stash of enriched uranium intact, which was what Trump claimed at the outset, was what convinced him to attack.

About opening the Strait of Hormuz, did Trump start this war ignorant of the near certainty that Iran would retaliate by attacking the small gulf states considered U. S. allies and threatening shipping in the Persian Gulf? Or was he fully aware of the threat, knowing that our European allies would suffer most from energy shortages, not to mention friendly countries like Japan and the Philippines who reported they will run out of oil in less than a month if the Strait isn’t reopened?

After putting Europe in that position, Trump tried to goad them into sending ships to reopen the Strait, and when they refused to get involved in his war, he abused all of our allies in worldwide media. Yesterday, he threatened to use Europe’s lack of support for a war about which they were never consulted as an excuse to quit NATO, the alliance that has kept the world safe for eighty years.

Trump cannot control when this war ends. He can only control when our military stops bombing Iran. But the fanatical Shia clerics who control Iran have long memories. The war will end only when they’ve exacted revenge at times and places of their choosing, and that does not address the always present risk of the war expanding into a nuclear conflict. Donald Trump has not made anyone safer by following Benjamin Netanyahu into battle without an exit plan. If he tries to extract himself from the mess he created, he will leave us with a legacy of terrorism and uncertainty that will never stop.

When you poke a beast like Iran in the eye, you’d better make sure it’s dead before you walk away, especially when all the friends you’ve alienated stop watching your back. This war has shown, as much as anything, that most world leaders detest Trump. They fear him, not as an adversary, but as a rabid animal running wild.

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Overgeneralization

Posted on March 22, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 22, 2026

Donald Trump’s greatest weakness and vulnerability may be the way he oversimplifies things. We all do it at times, but Trump seems to stop there. He doesn’t have the attention span to get into the weeds and details. The fact that he constantly contradicts himself makes it appear that either he never actually considers details until they come out of his mouth or he does it deliberately because he thinks it makes him unpredictable. Either way, in his desperation to look strong and maintain his power, there’s little or no substance behind his bluster, insults, and threats.

Trump loves to put on a big show. He urgently needs to project a greater-than-life image of himself. He never suggests reforms or moderate changes. Everything he does has to make a big splash to satisfy his ego, like knocking down the East Wing of the White House or shuttering Kennedy Center to avoid the embarrassment of people simply not buying tickets to protest Trump’s takeover.

Consider Project 2025, which history will view either as a bold attempt to completely remake America into a Fascist oligarchy or a classic case of far-right overreach that failed just as previous attempts have. Think big. Create a massive federal secret police force that follows its own rules and ignores the Constitution. Remove millions of alleged murderous and rapacious illegal immigrants from our nation. Pursue the most extreme possible gerrymandering to rig the midterm elections. Throw around America’s military might at the whims of a totally deranged narcissist. How’s all that working out, Donald?

Allowing an unfettered ICE to run wild creating havoc in America’s cities removed more than a half-million undocumented immigrants from our country in 2025. But at what cost? Aside from the injuries and deaths of innocent American citizens at ICE’s hands, the policy horrified most Americans and left Trump’s approval rating severely underwater.

His attempts to steal Congressional seats in red states while claiming similar actions by blue states were illegal collapsed in the courts, leaving the Democrats with what pollsters predict will be at least a two-seat gain in the House. Worse, for MAGA Republicans, their over-generalized analysis was based on the assumption that Trump would retain the support he received from Hispanic voters in 2024. Recent polling and special elections in Texas, for example, show that support badly eroded, with the likely outcome that Texas’ gerrymandering will have far less impact than Trump hoped.

Trump’s war of choice with Iran shows a similar lack of detailed planning with the likelihood of unpleasant outcomes increasing daily. Trump’s expectation that our military might would so intimidate Iran’s leaders that they would come crawling back to the negotiating table were nothing more than a fever dream. People who truly understood the issues in the Middle East knew the war would not go as Trump hoped. They understood that no matter how many (non-nuclear) bombs we dropped on Iran, it would retain the ability to throw the entire world economy into chaos, and the near-suicidal dedication of the Ayatollahs’ hatred for the west means there would be no surrender any time soon. Trump’s need to take full credit for everything combined with his compulsion to constantly surprise everyone alienated us even further from the alliances which have kept us safe since World War 2.

So here we are, seven months out from the midterm elections involved in a catastrophically costly military venture that is slowly spinning out of control and having exactly the reverse effect Trump expected it would on world opinion. Far from creating worldwide awe over American military power and sophistication, (the world was already aware of it,) the war has diminished us in the eyes of our allies while enriching Russia which was struggling to pay for its war in Ukraine.

In a desperate attempt to save his Congressional majority in November, Trump and his friends at the Heritage Society trotted out the Save America Act, which will require every voter to produce both a photo ID and proof of citizenship. That sounds almost reasonable until you drill down into the realities. In order to pass it, the Republicans will have to kill the filibuster, but John Thune and the other senior Republican Senators won’t do that. They understand that what goes around comes around, and even if they passed the bill and Trump signed it, it’s highly likely that the Supreme Court would find that it violates Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution.

But suppose MAGA somehow overcomes those obstacles and passes the Save America Act. Who will really benefit from it? Proof of citizenship requires either a birth certificate or passport. Do you have ready access to either? Do your friends and family members? And more to the point, are people in red states more likely to have either than people in blue states? Draw your own conclusions, but I’m convinced that this is another example of overgeneralizing without understanding the details. I hate the idea of the Save America Act – it’s nothing if not unAmerican – but if it passes, I’m confident it will hurt MAGA voters far more than Democrats.

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It’s Time to Take Our Country Back

Posted on March 16, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 16, 2026

I’m tempted to write that our president communicates as incoherently as my five-year-old grandson. But at dinner a few nights ago I spent an hour listening to him, and while I was dismayed by some of the things he said, I can’t complain about his coherence – unlike Donald Trump who sounds like he’s desperately treading water in a storm. Ever since it became clear that the White House’s planning for Trump’s war of choice against Iran was either nonexistent or incompetent, he seems unable to complete a sentence without contradicting himself and addressing every perceived injustice he’s experienced since he entered politics.

If you ever doubted that Trump lies instinctively whenever it suits him, the evidence is before you. If he contradicts himself every time he opens his mouth at least half of what he says has to be untrue. A more accurate way of putting it is that when Trump speaks, truth is irrelevant. The only thing motivating the things he says is another opportunity to salve his own ego or increase his wealth. It’s always a depressing thing to witness, but now it’s dangerous. Trump’s mouth poses an existential threat to all of us.

His antics, this week, demanding that other nations assist in escorting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, while simultaneously repeating that we have completely decimated Iran’s military and the war is over – oh wait, we still have three or four weeks of bombing ahead of us – result in the chaos we typically expect from him. But this is not a typical situation. Trump had a shiny new toy that no one else on Earth had, and he treats fighting a war like playing Call to Action. He made it worse by posting a picture of himself in his military school uniform with his “proud parents,” the same ones who sent him there to keep him from winding up in prison. Any similarity between our military personnel and Donald Trump exists only in Trump’s twisted mind.

The bombs in a video game aren’t real. Neither are the deaths and the destruction of the infrastructure that 90 million Iranians depend on for survival. In a video game, Trump can act out his need to control everything and everyone. In real life, it’s not that simple. Disparaging NATO for ten years and then characterizing their reluctance to be drawn into an ill-planned war that looks more and more, every day, like it will end in disaster as disloyalty goes way beyond Trump’s usual approach to trying to control things. This time, he has created a situation that grows more dangerous every day. This time, thousands of lives in countries all over the region, many of them civilians are being lost.

Our allies don’t want that blood on their hands, especially when it could be their own people bleeding from Iran’s retaliation to something they had nothing to do with. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made it clear, when he said Trump’s war is not NATO’s war. It could have been if Trump had consulted them before his buddy Netanyahu played him into joining Israel’s unlitateral war. Trump might also have retained a shred of credibility had he quietly obtained approval for his war from Congress. But Trump won’t do those things because he needs to be the only one in charge with everyone else bowing to him and kissing his ring.

Now, as most of us have predicted, Trump looks to most of the world like a pariah. He has spent ten years injudiciously lashing out at everyone who didn’t worship him. It’s only common sense that when you cozy up to your enemies while disparaging your friends, when you talk about other world leaders in the insulting terms he continually uses, when you call your allies stupid and incompetent and accuse them of ripping you off, they may not rush to your defense when you’re hoisted by your own petard. If the potential for disrupting the entire world’s economy weren’t so real, if the possibility of nuclear powers fighting over the spoils in Iran when we pull out after leaving it defenseless didn’t move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, we might treat this as business as usual.

But it’s not usual in any sense. Trump is simultaneously risking a regional or world war, attempting to muzzle the Congress and suppress the opposition’s voting rights, and trying to silence any media voice he considers disloyal. He can’t overtly defy the First Amendment, but he had a better idea. Get his billionaire friends to buy up all the media outlets and control what they tell the public. He’s already humbled CBS/Paramount, and while his friends the Ellisons promise they will not influence editorial content on CNN. I wouldn’t bet on that.

Check out a valid history of how Adolf Hitler destroyed the Weimar Republic in 1933. Donald Trump is attempting exactly the same thing in 2026 America. Trump is trying get unarmed Iranian citizens to revolt against a vicious Revolutionary Guard force that has already murdered tens of thousands of protestors. I would like to see millions of unarmed Americans stand up and assert that we won’t put up with this anymore.

We’d better start taking our country back now if we expect have one in ten years.

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