<\/p>\n
Donald Trump<\/a>\u2018s <\/span>war of choice against Iran<\/span><\/a> is spiraling. For five decades, experts have warned that military conflict with the country would <\/span>destabilize the Middle East<\/span><\/a> and fracture the global order. Trump knew this, and yet he <\/span>proceeded anyway<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Previous American presidents have treated their role as commander-in-chief with great respect bordering on dread. Abraham Lincoln\u2019s depression deepened during the Civil War, and the <\/span>physical toll the conflict took on him<\/span><\/a> can be seen in a <\/span>series of famous daguerreotypes<\/span><\/a> by Alexander Gardner, Matthew Brady and others. During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson appeared to age in real-time as he and his military advisers sent tens of thousands of American soldiers to their deaths.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n How is Donald Trump behaving compared to Lincoln and Johnson? He is reportedly <\/span>bored by the war<\/span><\/a>, which has <\/span>killed 13 U.S. service members and nearly 1,500 Iranian civilians<\/span><\/a>. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, up to 3.2 million Iranians have <\/span>been displaced<\/span><\/a>. As the war progresses, Trump is reportedly being shown daily <\/span>compilation videos of \u201cstuff blowing up\u201d<\/span><\/a> \u2014 two-minute highlight reels of death and destruction, curated to hold his attention due to his famously short attention span.<\/span><\/p>\n Trump\u2019s reliance on the videos risks creating an echo chamber effect where he is not getting the best advice\u2026 According to NBC News, the reels have also contributed to his \u201cincreasing frustration\u201d with how the war is being covered by the media.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Trump\u2019s <\/span>reliance on the videos<\/span><\/a> risks creating an echo chamber effect where he is <\/span>not getting the best advice<\/span><\/a>. Pushing back against the reports, the administration claims the president receives advice throughout the day from senior military leadership, the intelligence community, diplomats and foreign leaders. He also watches the news. But this does not appear to be reflected in the <\/span>planning and execution of the war<\/span><\/a>, or its <\/span>long-term strategic implications<\/span><\/a> for American power and global stability. According to NBC News, the reels have also contributed to Trump\u2019s \u201cincreasing frustration\u201d with how the war is being covered by the media: \u201cTrump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration <\/span>can\u2019t better influence the public narrative<\/span><\/a>, asking aides why the news media doesn\u2019t emphasize what he\u2019s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n On Wednesday night, the president attempted to take control of that narrative by giving a primetime address on the war. While casting the administration\u2019s objectives as \u201cnearing completion,\u201d Trump promised that Iran would be hit \u201cextremely hard\u201d over the next two to three weeks. Instead of a draw-down, he telegraphed that escalation was a possibility, promising to hit key energy targets, including the country\u2019s electricity-generating plants, if the regime didn\u2019t agree to a deal, and vowing that the U.S. would blow Iran \u201cback to the Stone Ages [sic] where they belong.\u201d<\/p>\n Bombastic phrases like this and others scattered throughout the speech are of a piece with the destruction on display in the president\u2019s highlight clips, and they would not be out of place in violent video games like those in the Mortal Kombat series.<\/p>\n Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State, a nonprofit organization of more than 360 former senior national security and diplomacy officials that promotes American democracy and the rule of law, told me that Americans expect the president to be \u201clistening carefully to a range of expert voices\u201d across the government during military operations to help \u201cguide the nation\u2019s defense.\u201d This does not appear to be what is happening. Instead, the process has been reduced to a closed circle of advisers reinforcing Trump\u2019s instincts while screens display short, dramatic clips of explosions and destruction. War, Cash observed, \u201cis not a spectacle, and it is certainly not a form of entertainment. Treating it that way is both obscene and dangerous.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The consequences are already visible, he said. \u201cThe president has publicly suggested that basic strategic realities \u2014 such as the central importance of the Strait of Hormuz<\/a> to the global economy \u2014 were somehow overlooked by \u2018the experts.\u2019 That is simply not true. These are among the most well-established facts in international security. When a president appears unaware of such fundamentals, it raises serious concerns about whether he is receiving \u2014 or is willing to absorb \u2014 the information he needs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The president\u2019s daily brief is designed to prevent exactly this failure. This practice, he said, isn\u2019t \u201cmeant to flatter or entertain\u201d but to provide objective intelligence and information that often includes \u201cuncomfortable or inconvenient truths.\u201d While presidents have used and engaged with the daily brief differently, its objective is consistent, he explained: \u201cto ensure the commander-in-chief understands the world as it is, not as he might wish it to be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s why Cash and other experts are so alarmed at recent reports about Trump\u2019s video montages. \u201cThis is not a video game,\u201d Cash warned. \u201cThe consequences are real.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>, Standing Room Only,<\/em> written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Trump\u2019s two-minute briefings point to more than an underlying lack of intellectual engagement and sophistication. Former members of his inner circle have <\/span>described<\/span><\/a> needing to find <\/span>creative ways to hold his focus<\/span><\/a> as he famously <\/span>does not read<\/span><\/a> and is said to defer to the last in the room \u2014 behavior that reflects Trump\u2019s mind, personality and understanding of power and leadership.<\/span><\/p>\n As a function of his authoritarian personality, Trump has repeatedly shown he is deeply attracted to violence. With the war against Iran, he is acting like a warlord in demanding that Iran <\/span>give him all their oil<\/span><\/a>, or the country\u2019s citizens will suffer greatly, and an absolute monarch who is literally <\/span>demanding tribute<\/span><\/a>, and he is bragging about receiving \u201csecret gifts\u201d due to Iran\u2019s leaders supposedly being terrified of his power. The daily highlight video of destruction encourages these pathological power fantasies.<\/span><\/p>\n At his core, Trump is an authoritarian and a personalist ruler; the state, society and culture must become extensions of his own mind, will and emotional needs. Reality must conform to him.<\/span><\/p>\n But David Altheide, a leading scholar on the media, sees something more systematic at work involving the Big Lie, gaslighting, manipulating the American people and what he describes as \u201cgonzo politics.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Trump, Altheide said, \u201cwants people to believe what he sees in two-minute video reels of \u2018things blowing up\u2019 are the whole of reality itself.\u201d This is gonzo governance, a logic that \u201cdelegitimizes social institutions by promoting the politics of fear and violating conventional standards of reason and objectivity.\u201d When paired with gaslighting, \u201cthe result is a powerful and destabilizing political dynamic\u201d in which \u201cpolitical disagreements can [no longer] be adjudicated \u2014 and wars ended \u2014 through shared facts.\u201d Gonzo governance, Altheide noted, \u201caccelerates events, dramatizes policy, and centers personality over process, precedent, and tradition,\u201d mobilizing supporters and disorienting critics. \u201cThe cost, however, is a critical loss of trust that is difficult to restore.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n There are no universal truths or facts in this ecosystem, only constant stimulus, endless content, a lack of narrative coherence and a surreal version of reality filtered through nihilism, in which nothing is quite real and therefore nothing quite matters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The two-minute videos of airstrikes in Iran \u2014 along with the White House and Pentagon\u2019s <\/span>propaganda videos<\/span><\/a> that splice together scenes from Hollywood action movies, videogames and actual combat \u2014 reflect the media logic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There are no universal truths or facts in this ecosystem, only constant stimulus, endless content, a lack of narrative coherence and a surreal version of reality filtered through nihilism, in which nothing is quite real and therefore nothing quite matters.<\/span><\/p>\n Trump is a product of this culture, if not its distillation. He is now more of a character and a symbol than a real person. A warlord, an absolute monarch and a Mafia don all rolled into one. And as a former reality television star, the president thinks about governance the way <\/span>a producer thinks about television<\/span><\/a>: the audience must never be bored, the drama must never stop, the spectacle must always escalate.<\/span><\/p>\n Under Trump, social theorist Henry Giroux said, \u201cleadership [has] collapse[d] into spectatorship\u201d and \u201cdecision-making is shaped less by deliberation than by affect, impulse and the visceral thrill of destruction.\u201d This is deliberate, he said, arguing that fascism \u201cdoes not rely on force alone; it works through images, rhythms and effects that teach people how to feel before they are able to think.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The two-minute war videos are not an aberration \u2014 they are a mirror. Trump is us.<\/span><\/p>\n The implications of this, Giroux warned, extend well beyond any single presidency. A society trained to consume violence as entertainment \u201closes its capacity for judgment, memory, and resistance.\u201d In such a culture, \u201cwar does not simply destroy lives abroad; it erodes the ethical and political foundations of democracy at home, producing subjects who are more attuned to the pleasures of domination than to the demands of justice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Too many Americans are distracted, impulsive, attracted to violence, anti-intellectual and <\/span>hostile to expertise<\/span><\/a>. They are married to screens, to self-curated realities and spectacle.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A serious people would not have elevated Trump to the White House \u2014 twice. A healthy society, with functioning elites and institutions, would have restrained him and the MAGA<\/a> project long before now.<\/span><\/p>\n Trump may enjoy his bloody two-minute highlight reels. But the damage to human lives, to the Middle East, to the world, to America\u2019s credibility and power, will last much longer. Does he care? Beyond his own self-interest, I doubt it.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThings blowing up\u201d will continue to be fun for Trump until he gets bored and wants to destroy something else. This is not a side effect of his politics; the destruction is the point. And everyone else is collateral damage.<\/span><\/p>\n