"Swinging Wildly Toward Armageddon,
the Wrecking Ball Gets Wrecked"
by David Haggith
"It was not a good day for President Trump. He disgraced himself worse than he ever has by turning to NATO to beg for help with the war he started - Trump’s War. He humiliated himself by pursuing their aid after having already told them he doesn’t need them and having boasted to Iran he doesn’t need anyone.
To a country, all NATO members told the wildly swinging pendulum of a president, in various words, “You shook your finger at all of us all of last year, publicly ridiculing us over how useless we are in your opinion. You tried to take over some of our countries, even threatening the possible use of your military. You tore up old tariff deals that you had made and even boasted about during your first term and then slapped higher tariffs all over us, thereby damaging all of our economies. You changed the terms of your tariffs, and then did it all over again.
“Then you told us, when we didn’t immediately agree to your world-imperiling war with Iran right from the start, much less to helping out in it, that you didn’t need us anyway! AND NOW YOU’RE COMING TO US WITH YOUR HAND OUT FOR HELP??? Now you’re asking again for us to risk the lives of our sons and daughters to join you in a conflict we didn’t want and still don’t agree with, after having said you don't need our permission for this war because you can do anything you want??? Now you’re pushing for us to spend our own treasure from what is left of the economies you damaged to help out in your war????”
As could easily be imagined, Trump’s approach of provoke, punish, then pursue didn’t sell. One has to wonder in what world that approach would ever bring former friends to the rescue. What kind of derangement would make anyone think he could turn to people, even entire nations, he had treated with total disrespect (even though they might deserve it) and then expect them to step in and help him in a war of his own making?
Admittedly, while they used a good number of those words, they didn’t say all of them; but it is without a doubt the sweep of arguments that were banging around inside their splitting heads when Trump approached them actually demanding help, not even asking nicely. You can only slap other world leaders all over the place for so many months before they don’t really feel like your allies anymore; and, if they are smart enough to stay out of a Middle Eastern war in order to avoid escalating it into all-out World War III by throwing all their nations into the fighting mix, then you make yourself look like a completely unhinged, totally out-of-touch fool for turning to those you treated like enemies with your hand now out for help.
You make yourself look like you have no concept whatsoever of how other people think or how they feel about your constant barrage of hostile words and actions … toward them personally, toward their national sovereignty over their own borders and toward you raining down destruction upon their economies. They spent a whole year using up an inordinate amount of their time trying to negotiate through all the chaos you threw at them, only to find out, in the end, you never had the authority to do 9/10ths of what you did!
NATO is a defensive alliance (though it has not always been used that way). There is no provision in its charter that requires NATO members to support attacks made against other non-nations by a member nation when the nation being attacked did not attack the member nation! Worse still, Trump has even talked about attacking other NATO members! So, it is only a wonder that he did not get ripped to shreds even more than he did today. (You can read all about it in the many stories below.)
Russia, China and even a former fangirl turned on Trump: The “Peace President,” as he liked to define himself, is being taken down for all of his warring ways, but especially for the war he started with Iran. Besides the incredulous looks he got from all over Europe as he began disparaging European leaders for not helping him attack Iran, several Russian newspapers commented that his disgraced begging, after bragging that he didn’t need help from anyone, shows that, as one put it, “Iran has Trump by the throat.”
Russian Editor Steven Rosenberg translated the Kommersant article as: “He messed up, and destroyed everything around him, but he wants someone else to clear the rubble and create a new structure. This is, of course, all about him, Donald Trump. The US president pinned Iran to the wall and practically forced it, for its own survival, to block such a key global transport artery as the Strait of Hormuz.”
After doing what the paper calls a “strange political flipflop”, it now says that Trump demands that other countries such as the UK, Germany and China engage in solving in the problem in the form of an assault on Iran. “Such a formulation of the question is, of course, phenomenal cheek” … a “permanent political characteristic” of Trump.
The paper suggested that Trump had finally met his match in Iran, saying he had tried to “strangle” the authorities in Tehran but instead ended up “tightening the noose around his own neck” - and even around countries that had no involvement in the US attack on Iran.
The Russians also took great satisfaction in the fact that Trump’s War has significantly weakened his hand for helping Ukraine. Even the normally restrained Chinese mocked Trump relentlessly. Memes went viral all over the internet about Trump holding out his hand like a beggar to the very people whose purses he has been draining all year.
But the coup de grâce of rebukes came from a former beauty queen in Trump’s own USA pageant, who is now a conservative influencer and who was formerly an adoring supporter of Trump and proud member of MAGA. She disgraced him by saying that, because of him, “MAGA is deader than dead.” Carrie Prejean Boller, once a staunch Trump supporter and a beauty pageant queen, is criticizing the Trump administration for what she calls an abandonment of the campaign’s “America First” mentality. In an alarming statement, she disavowed the president from the conservative movement.
“I’ve been a loyal supporter of the president for almost 20 years,” she told broadcaster Piers Morgan. “This goes back to when I was 21 years old, and I was Miss California at the Miss USA pageant. And I’ve known him - I consider him a dear friend - and I will tell you right now, I do not recognize our president… “And MAGA, let me tell you right now, MAGA is dead. It is deader than dead. And Americans are furious,” Prejean Boller said. “We do not recognize President Donald J Trump anymore.”
The center no longer holds: Do you think the wannabe emperor, Trump the Great, might have gone just a little bat-excrement crazy? So crazy that his strongest and most adoring supporters say they no longer even recognize the man? As I said yesterday, don’t take it from me. Take it from them - from those closest to Trump: ‘We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] a** in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,’ a source close to the White House told Politico. ‘They decide how long we’re involved, and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.’
Some allies fear Trump risks being dragged into an open-ended conflict just as the midterm elections approach, with the escalating war threatening to drive up the cost of living for voters already furious about affordability. ‘The terms have changed,’ said a second person familiar with the military operation. ‘The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.’
The war has also caused a schism between top allies within Trump’s MAGA movement, including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as the President has argued for years against regime-change wars in the Middle East.
The center is no longer holding. The MAGA wall of power Trump erected around himself out of his supporters is falling apart because the center is falling apart. Trump is a man who has no center other than himself. Trump is falling apart. And when the center doesn’t hold, nothing built around it holds.
Trump is the center of his own universe; so, as he said again today, “I can do whatever I want.” He has the hubris of a demigod - someone who has come so thoroughly to believe and wrap himself in the fawning of everyone around him to where he now thinks of himself as a champion who no longer even needs those he wrapped around himself to build his wall of power. He no longer even attempts to be true them and all that he promised them. He has cast that all off as a distraction from his ambitions.
Yesterday, he started referring again to his next plans (because Iran is not enough) - his plans to take Cuba - to do, as he said, whatever he wants with it. There is never enough for the man with too much. President Donald Trump said he believes he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” and “could do anything” he wants with the Caribbean island nation… He talks like Cuba is his toy to do with as he pleases - again like a demigod - an incredible level of human pride.
So, away we go on another scatter-shot mission to take over another nation. Probably a war for next Sunday when Trump needs a distraction from his ongoing failure to bring the Iranian regime to its knees as he promised. He needs a quick victory, as he already claimed he had in Iran, to restore his image as the strongman - to show his supporters, who are rapidly falling away, that his imperial quest can succeed in order to galvanize their support and praise back around him. He needs a quick victory, and Cuba is starting to look like it.
Unfortunately for Trump, it is not likely to play out that way. As we have already seen with Iran, saw with Afghanistan and with Iraq and Syria, these things get messier than the Neocons and newly conned ever believe they will. It will only make him look all the more like the crazy man - stark raving crazy - as he tries to take on nation after nation to seize their land and is not even shy about stating their land or their oil is his aim.
Just this week, Trump said he’s going to seize for the US a strategic Iranian island named “Kharg” in the middle of the Strait of Hormuz because it is the hub of their oil shipping. It appears yesterday and today with his bombing and his moving of 5,000 marines, he has already begun the assault. Looking for land to grab from former European allies who have turned away from him. Looking to grab all of Canada. Seizing control of Venezuelan oil and maybe of its government (we shall see). For the man with too much, it is never enough.
Trump is a wrecking ball, swinging madly all over the planet, hitting any place that strikes his fancy. If he is, as his White House prophets have proclaimed, “God’s anointed” or “appointed,” then he must, as I’ve said, be God’s wrecking ball, intended to destroy the whole world because, so far, that seems to be what is happening. All nations are starting to turn away from the US and from Israel to leave the two to bring on Armageddon. I’m not predicting that is where all of this will go … but his Secretary of War is! I’m just stating an observation that it certainly appears hellbent in that direction. In the process, the president is cracking up and so is all the support around him.
While his departing supporters may be starting to see hints of the narcissism that was always obvious through the emerging cracks in his head, I now see something that goes even deeper. What we witnessed today was a president who is the sole center of his own universe, as is true of any narcissist, caving into his own megalomania. The star is collapsing into his own black hole, pulled in by the gravitas of his own thoughts about himself, and dragging all the light into the collapse."
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