Well, I guess it’s reassuring to learn that gasoline prices have nothing to do with Trump’s war. And that we’re winning against Iran. In fact it’s won! Better than anybody could ever have imagined!!! Although we’ll be there another few weeks... And maybe we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age… And he needs another $200 billion… And let’s activate the draft (except for Barron, who has congenital bone-spurs.…)
One day, we’ll look back on last Wednesday’s speech as the moment it became impossible to ignore. Not just the policy or the war, but the man and his growing mental and emotional disabilities.
Because what’s now vividly clear — and increasingly dangerous — is that Donald Trump isn’t just prosecuting a war against a major, wealthy, modern, 2,500-year-old Middle Eastern empire that is politically and militarily aligned with Russia and China: he’s doing it while he’s visibly unraveling.
Go back just a few weeks.
On February 28th, as the first strikes loomed, Trump told Axios he could “go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.” He was calling for total conquest or a quick hit in the same sentence, the same breath.
By March 1st, he’d shifted. The war had “always been a four-week process… it’ll take four weeks — or less,” he said, according to the Washington Post. That same day, it became “four to five weeks.”
On March 2nd, he claimed we were already “ahead of schedule,” still referencing that timeline. But on social media, tracked by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, he added something else entirely: wars, he said, could be fought “forever.”
Really? Forever. Four weeks. Two days. I guess we’re just supposed to pick one?
By March 7th, he was calling the war “a short excursion” (the proper word is “incursion”) while also saying it would continue “for a little while.” On his Nazi-infested, failing social media site he bragged that “we’ve already won.”
On March 9th, he said the war was “pretty well complete.” In an interview summarized by TIME, he insisted there was “nothing left in a military sense,” even as the fighting continued, and he predicted it would end “very soon.”
Two days later, March 11th, he declared, “We’ve won… in the first hour, it was over.” Then, on March 13th, it would last “as long as it’s necessary” — but also “not long.” By March 17th, he was rewriting history, claiming it had been “essentially largely over in two or three days.” And yet by March 31st, he was telling Reuters it would take “two weeks, maybe three” more.
And now he’s using genuinely obscene and entirely un-American language like “bomb them back to the Stone Age” that seems to invoke nuclear war.
This isn’t strategy, spin, or political 3-D chess: something is deeply wrong with this man, and American troops and Iranian schoolchildren are dying because of it. And it’s not just Trump’s critics or “liberals” noticing his rapidly increasing mental deterioration.
Laura Ingraham — hardly a member of the resistance, but a longtime Trump ally and one of the most reliable voices in the billionaire Murdoch media ecosystem — raised the question of Trump’s ability to “understand the complexity of this” out loud on her show.
“Was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?” she asked. “And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this, how complex it could actually get?”
Meanwhile, major conservative figures like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and other online and podcast-based influencers who once embraced Trump are starting to peel away, disturbed by the chaos and the drift toward a wider war that never would have happened if we’d had a rational president in control of his faculties and willing to listen to the experts around him.
None of this surprises longtime Trump watchers like his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, who wrote about his “decompensating” mental state:
“This isn’t a joke; this isn’t one more thing we can sweep under the rug. This issue, which is infinitely more important and serious than the... emails, needs to be on the front page of every newspaper…”
Trump is running the United States the same way he ran his businesses, but worse. Impulsively, recklessly, and with a long, well-documented history of failure. This is a man, after all, who bankrupted casinos; businesses so structurally profitable that, in normal hands, they’re almost impossible to kill. A man whose corporate history is littered with collapsed ventures, unpaid contractors, lawsuits, and burned partners.
Back then, it was just his own inherited wealth that he was destroying. Now he’s ruining America’s economy, our international standing, and has set up a military disaster in the most volatile region of the world. All while it appears he’s melting down.
Nuclear-armed powers are watching and American troops’ lives — and potentially millions of others — are now on the line. Trump’s lifelong pathological lying, his sociopathic disregard for anybody but himself, and his impulsivity are now all colliding with literally life-and-death stakes that make wrecking an airline, a steak business, or a casino seem insignificant.
First of all, he appears increasingly drunk on power, both in person and online. The bizarre, overblown language of his social media posts — “we’ve already won,” “militarily WON,” his declarations clearly detached from observable reality — increasingly read like something from a spoiled, over-emotional, always-got-his-way adolescent. Tearing down the East Wing. Running multiple grifts. Attacking foreign countries. Picking unnecessary fights with allies. Hanging Putin’s picture in the White House.
Second, unlike his first term, this time Trump’s surrounded himself entirely with toadies who are absolutely terrified to tell him no or even gently contradict him. The guardrails to impulsive or destructive behavior, the professionals and experts who surrounded him nine years ago and restrained him, however imperfectly, are long gone, and what’s left is an horror-movie-funhouse echo chamber of groveling flattery and silent, breath-holding fear. His cabinet meetings are downright shocking. He’s forcing Marco Rubio to wear shoes that don’t even fit.
And third — the part nobody in the GOP or the billionaire-owned rightwing media wants to say out loud — is the reality that he’s pushing 80, and it’s showing.
The contradictions are sharper, his claims more disconnected from reality, and his rhetorical tics like “more powerful than anybody ever imagined” feel like they’re coming from somebody who’s genuinely disoriented. His public comments and posts are becoming more erratic, more grandiose, and more uncoupled from the real events that the rest of us can easily see. It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except nobody near him has yet been willing to point out his nakedness.
This isn’t a partisan critique: I’m just observing a pattern that others have noticed as well. And it’s accelerating at a uniquely dangerous moment in world history.
James Madison warned us that war is “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” War, he noted, concentrates political power, erodes accountability, and creates the possibility that a president can essentially turn himself into a dictator.
So, that’s where we are now: a war launched and incoherently narrated by a man whose own words seem to randomly fall all over themselves. Who’s visibly losing it in real time.
A commander-in-chief who treats our troops like they’re objects, toy soldiers with tin tanks and planes, rather than human people with families and hopes for the future.
A government that’s drifting toward disaster, with congressional Republicans and his cabinet members too terrified to even squeak out the tiniest objection or concern.
This has gone way beyond politics; we’re now talking national — and, perhaps, planetary — survival. It’s way bigger than one sick old man who slathers his face in orange makeup and compulsively plasters everything around him with gold paint.
Republicans in Congress and the cabinet must decide whether their loyalty is to an aging, mentally ill, demonstrably incompetent man or to the nation and world he’s put at risk.
Because the cost of continued inaction here isn’t some abstraction; it’s already being paid in American blood and treasure, and could easily lead to an escalation that no one can deal with if it really starts to spin out of control. The echoes of World War I are too loud to ignore any longer.
There are two immediate constitutional remedies: Impeachment and removal from office, or the 25th Amendment.
If even a handful of Trump’s cabinet members can summon the courage to deal with the reality that we all saw last Wednesday, they could force him into retirement. Alternatively, if enough Republicans in Congress choose country over career, they could impeach him and thus end this crisis before it spirals further.
But the clock is ticking, the prime ministers of Great Britain and Australia are already warning their people, and strongman autocrats like Putin, MBS, and Netanyahu are rubbing their hands gleefully as America crashes and burns.
If we’re serious about avoiding a wider war — or worse, a global one — we may not have the luxury of waiting for November’s election; we need to push a few brave Republicans (if we can find them) to join all the Democrats and take action now.
Because last night’s speech not only failed to tell us where this war is going but starkly shoved in all our faces the reality of how far gone the man leading it already is.
Call your Republican representative and/or Senators at 202-224-3121.
The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.