Alan Zendell, April 21, 2026

It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Even most of Trump’s base had to realize his war against Iran would be a train wreck. I imagine most of his supporters must feel like parents of a teenage drug addict. They love their kid, but he’s erratic and unstable, and he exhibits behaviors that suggest serious mental health problems.

The parents know that if they don’t execute some kind of intervention things will only get worse until they’re faced with a disaster, but it’s their kid. Tough love is really hard. Friends and relatives start to call, worried. Before long it’s a cacophony. Everyone except the parents knows what has to be done, but no one’s willing to pull the trigger. If they’re lucky, some third party might intervene, a teacher, a counselor, a close friend. If not they’re likely to wind up with a kid who is either dead or in jail.

I think that metaphorically sums up the position we, as American voters find ourselves in. Almost half of us voted for Trump, even knowing what he was. We’d even been forewarned by Project 2025 which was a roadmap for voiding the Constitution and replacing our republic with a white male dominated Christian Nationalist autocracy, in other words, a twenty-first century fascist state.

We also knew that his promises of no more wars were just hot air. The appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense clearly signaled that our narcissistic president’s need to dominate everyone and everything, especially our military would show up in ugly ways. Hegseth has the personality of a mafia enforcer. I can only guess how frustrating and humiliating it must be for people like Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Daniel Caine, a highly regarded leader who must fall on his sword every day. It reminds me of Anthony Fauci standing off camera cringing while Trump was telling people to drink bleach.

There’s no sugar coating this. It began with a combination of Trump’s massive ego, his inability to focus on complex details – even his daily White House briefing seems beyond his childlike attention span – and his basic ignorance of how both the government and the military work. Add his delusions of grandeur to the mix, and we have a president and Commander-in-Chief of the military who treats our sophisticated weaponry and munitions like his own personal video game. It wouldn’t surprise me if ordering generals around and dropping bombs on people he despises is a source of extreme sexual arousal for Trump. Actually, nothing he did would surprise me.

Ignoring his generals and professional diplomats, but mostly out of hatred for Barack Obama, Trump tore up the nuclear deal that the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had been complying with. That deal would have ensured that Iran couldn’t produce a nuclear weapon for twenty-five years. Tearing it up put Israel significantly at risk, as Iran immediately began enriching uranium, which it had not been doing since signing the deal with Obama.

I’m not a fan of Benjamin Netanyahu, but I understand why he believed an unfettered Iran was an existential threat. Iran had been threatening to destroy Israel for decades. It wasn’t unreasonable for Netanyahu to believe that destroying Iran’s enriched uranium was a non-negotiable necessity. Except, much like the way Bush 43’s administration falsified or exaggerated the threat of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” as a justification for the Iraq-Afghanistan war, Netanyahu did the same thing with intelligence about Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, knowing he could play on Trump’s vulnerability.

Trump was warned about all the ways the war could go wrong, but his fantasy that he was really in control of the world succumbed to his ignorant belief that six weeks of bombing would cause Iran to come crawling to him. All of our allies knew that was wrong. Most Americans knew it was wrong, including Republicans who had served for decades on foreign relations and military oversight committees. But with Trump, Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio all yessing each other, Trump began a war with no contingency plans or exit strategy. The current situation was extremely predictable.

Now, Trump has infuriated much of his base, he has thrown a wrench into our economy and the world’s causing damage that might take a decade to repair. No one takes his threats of more bombing seriously, because it’s clear to the entire world, excluding Trump’s incompetent inner circle, that he has backed himself into a political cul-de-sac. He knows his base will join the opposition if he expands the war and if the prices he promised to lower don’t come down after he caused them to spike.

Trump hoisted himself on his own narcissistic ego, and his media supporters are abandoning him and watching him swing in the breeze. If the troubled teenager had come to such a pass, I would have sympathy for him. But Trump is an eighty-year-old man who has been hurting people all his life, and now he has undermined Americans’ confidence in their government. I have absolutely no sympathy for Trump’s self-imposed distress. He deserves all the pain and humiliation he’s likely to receive.

I hope for the sake of the United States and the world that our Vice President, Cabinet and Congress realize that every day Trump remains in office places everyone and everything in jeopardy.