Behind Trump's war fever lies profound weakness

[marmar]

Behind Trump’s war fever lies profound weakness
US wages fast-escalating war, with no clear motivation and no realistic plan. It isn’t fooling anyone

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published March 8, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) “America is winning,” announced Pete Hegseth during a remarkably ugly Pentagon press conference this past week, in the latest and perhaps greatest example of the second Trump administration outdoing Mike Judge’s legendary 2006 farce “Idiocracy.” Admittedly, there’s plenty of competition for that prize: The White House has also released a series of grotesque propaganda videos in recent days, apparently constructed by AI and incorporating images of U.S. strikes on Iran with unlicensed clips from action movies, popular TV series and video games. (Ben Stiller has requested that footage from his 2008 satire “Tropic Thunder” be deleted, something of a Hollywood in-joke given that film’s troubled history.)

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Unfortunately, there’s a real war happening to real people, including more than 150 children who were apparently killed when a U.S. missile struck a girls’ school in southern Iran on Feb. 28. So let’s get back to Hegseth, a classic example of the MAGA-sphere inability to perceive other people as real or other perspectives as potentially legitimate. He somehow managed not to start pumping iron or drop to the stage for push-ups during his press appearance rather han using words, those known tools of the woke mind virus and trans agenda. It might also have been a tell for the “secretary of war” — now in charge of a war that isn’t a war — to loudly insist that the greatest military power in the history of the world is “winning” against an adversary with one-fourth its population, severely damaged military and civilian infrastructure, and an economy crippled by sanctions, mismanagement and environmental crisis. Who was he trying to convince?

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But we don’t need to know exactly what will happen in this war to conclude that it was a bad idea, based on bad premises, that will lead to more bad things. As for the pundits and think-tankers and accused thought-leaders who once seduced themselves into supporting George W. Bush’s post-9/11 wars and are now repeating the exercise, like traumatized mice returning to the spot in the maze where the cheese used to be, what is there to say? The intellectual class has never been immune to the pathological American conviction that history is bunk.

There’s a painful well of comedy to be mined, as observed above, in the Trump administration’s ‘roid-ragey, AI-slop-infused war propaganda. In this case, the war itself is propaganda, a desperate effort to shift the narrative away from the Epstein files, the massively unpopular ICE crackdown and the stagnating economy, among other symptoms of the regime’s political implosion. None of this is entirely new: Since at least the Vietnam era, America’s attempts to project strength on the global stage have often looked like embarrassing weakness. But the shameless bigotry, delusion and narcissism of the MAGA regime acts as a force multiplier, revealing and accelerating the declining empire’s worst tendencies. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/08/behind-trumps-war-fever-lies-profound-weakness/