Reality TV star bombs Iran

We could really use some honest headlines right now.

Do you remember where you were during the Sept. 11 attacks? I was in the emergency room with a sprained ankle in my first semester of college. I hobbled out on crutches to find the campus completely deserted and had to ask a stranger what happened. My roommate’s mom worked in the Pentagon, which had been hit by one of the planes, so she had already hauled ass to Northern Virginia by the time I got back to our room. (Her mom was fine.)

Everything got really stupid and nationalistic for a couple years after that, which was my whole college experience. We renamed French fries “freedom fries.” The Disney Channel started selling patriotism to kids. George W. Bush humiliated us regularly with his one brain cell and inability to form sentences. A man in France spit on me while I was studying abroad there during a stilted conversation I was apparently having with him about Bush (I genuinely thought he was talking about the band). And the vast majority of our elected politicians from both parties supported the Iraq war based on lies we were all fed about “weapons of mass destruction.”

Most people realize now how colossally stupid the Iraq war was, and the few politicians who had the clarity to oppose it off the bat have watched their careers rise as a result. Barack Obama rode his early, outspoken opposition to the war all the way to the White House. So it’s pretty surreal now, in 2025, to be watching our unhinged and wildly ignorant reality TV star president—who won re-election, in part, by promising to be a “peacemaker” and “stop all wars” in the Middle East—randomly start bombing Iran based on no new intelligence at all about nuclear weapons proliferation. Just vibes, a blind devotion to Israel, and the general sense that bombing Iran might improve Trump’s tanking poll numbers. And maybe the hope of declaring martial law to broaden his own dictatorial power.

It was Trump, ironically, who pulled us out of the Iran deal that Obama negotiated in the first place, simply because he likes to undo anything that Democrats did. But he has repeatedly bragged that various conflicts going on around the globe would not be happening at all if he were president, because he is the ultimate dealmaker. Only he can secure world peace! It was Kamala Harris who threatened to draft our young men into endless foreign wars! Much like Hillary Clinton before her was the hawk to Donald’s dove! And now here we are, slashing Medicaid and food stamps and cancer research grants and foreign aid and suicide hotlines for LGBTQ youth that we supposedly can’t afford, with a budget that looks like this:

And last night, we bombed Iran’s alleged “nuclear facilities” to “defend Israel,” though it was Israel who attacked Iran first. In fact, Iran hasn’t attacked any other country unprovoked in nearly 300 years, while Israel has attacked five countries in just the past year while also committing genocide. It seems that Netanyahu has finally duped Trump into joining his Iran war—which he’s tried and failed to goad previous American presidents into doing—in order to remain in power indefinitely. And it’s simply insane that the host of The Apprentice is in a position to make a decision like that on behalf of so many millions of people, risking so many innocent lives and upending the global order. Only 16% of Americans support this.

If you need any further proof that this administration has absolutely no idea how to justify what it did last night, take a look at the line that J.D. Vance fed us on Sunday shows this morning:

We’re all doing the best we can to stay emotionally afloat these days, and I’ll admit that I had a dark chuckle last week when it was reported that Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, the Defense Secretary and Director of Intelligence respectively, were not even being invited to meetings about Iran. I really enjoy it when Hegseth, in particular, is being left out of things. But I thought when Trump said a couple days ago he would make a decision “within two weeks” about bombing Iran that he was kicking the can down the road indefinitely. I didn’t think he would attack the country on a whim over the weekend without even consulting his own intelligence agency. The abject idiocy and recklessness on display right now at all levels of this administration is making George W. Bush look like a fucking genius, or at least a B student.

Trump gave a 10 p.m. press conference last night in which he gave a shout-out to God, despite not believing in God, that would have been rejected in the Veep writers’ room as being too ridiculous.

I am so sad and embarrassed for this country right now. We simply want health care. We want student loans forgiven. We want cancer and Alzheimers research back. We want peace and diplomacy. We want disaster relief. And we want an opposition party that shows signs of life when a spray-tanned clown threatens to kill us all.

Democrats, I’m gonna need to see those articles of impeachment—even if you don’t have the votes right now—before I launch myself into the sun.