If you’re tracking the urgent news about Trump and Iran, my sincere advice is you ignore every word that falls from his mouth or pops from his paws on social media.

The sociopathic liar has morphed into a bone-spurs warlord, and the last thing you want is to swallow his predictable sludge. I inadvertently saw one particular phrase – something about how the U.S. bombings were a “tremendous success” – and I couldn’t help but remember the fraud ballyhooed similar garbage about Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump University, and Trump Shuttle.

Why did this self-proclaimed champion of world peace (“When I’m back in the White House, we will expel the warmongers”) suddenly turn on a dime and saddle up for Bombs Away? I’ve been writing political analysis since the early 1990s and I can state with full confidence that answering that question is a cinch. The answers are intertwined:

He needed to compensate for his ill-attended military toy parade.

He needed to compensate for his early exit from the G7 Summit, where members ignored him or treated him with the disdain he deserves.

He needed something new because he was losing multiple news cycles.

He needed a piece of the action because the Israeli strikes looked good on Fox News.

He needed to indulge his neediness because he has the biorhythms of a baby and Bibi is his binky.

Trump thinks playing warlord will make him look strong, and if dire fallout down the road triggers mass antiwar protests at home, suppressing that dissent might make him look even stronger. Foreign policy specialist Robert Kagan reminds us that civil liberties often suffer during times of strife: “Think of how Trump can use a state of war to strengthen his dictatorial control at home…Imagine what he will do when the United States is actually at war with a real country, one that many Americans fear. Will he tolerate dissent in wartime?”

77 million people freely gave life-and-death power to an empty suit who’s so incompetent, he could bankrupt a lemonade stand. I especially pity the millions of suckers who bought his worthless campaign pledge to “measure our success” by “the wars we never get into.” Hasn’t it long been obvious that virtually everything he says or vows has the intrinsic value of toilet-bound Kleenex? Hasn’t it long been obvious that this guy is so far over his head that he’d drown in a kiddy pool?

Oh well, duh people have spoken. It’s too late to stop him now. And it doesn’t matter a whit that public support for bombing Iran is anemic – only 35 percent in one national survey; only 38 percent in another – because all Trump cares about is his MAGA base. No worries there. As recently as a week ago, they loved his vow to end “forever wars,” but now that he has dropped state-of-the-art bang-bang, most mindless MAGAts have pulled a 180 to cheerlead for war – which is a helluva lot easier than thinking for oneself. To quote your average sheep, “Bahhhhh.”

Naturally, it took a grand total of one day for the warlord’s lies to be blown sky high. On social media he decreed “the sites we hit in Iran were totally destroyed and everyone knows it,” but apparently the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency didn’t get his memo because leakers have already told the press the bombing was a fiasco, that the Iranians’ highly enriched uranium wasn’t hit at all, that the targeted sites were not destroyed, and that the whole Iranian nuclear program was set back, at most, by only a few months.

The best we can hope for is Trump will convince himself he “won” something, and therefore no further military moves are needed.

Peggy Noonan, the veteran Republican commentator, suggested the other day in The Wall Street Journal that if “Tehran limps back and in time develops nuclear weapons, (Trump) will suffer with some of his base.” Um, nope. His sheep will continue to bleat no matter what. Indeed, if Iran finds a way to lash out – by killing American soldiers in their region, or staging terrorist attacks here in our homeland – rest assured that the MAGAts will find a way to believe that it’s Joe Biden’s fault.

The Greek tragedian Aeschylus reputedly said “the first casualty, when war comes, is truth.” But we don’t need a war to know that, with respect to the capacity for critical thinking, roughly half the American populace has already been bombed senseless.

–

Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]