On Iran: Follow the Money—Into Trump’s Pocket
And Jared Kushner's pockets, too.
We’re in the middle of a major war on the orders and under the direction of someone whose goals, motivations, and point of view nobody can discern.
Trump may or may not be flying blind, but certainly the world is.
All of the many textbook reasons for war—historical, military, political, economic, defensive or aggressive—are less than relevant because he has only limited awareness of them. What any world leader, ally, enemy, diplomatic expert, pundit, or political pro thinks about war is absent—because it’s Trump. Sometimes he even seems to have an amount of self-awareness about this strange vacuum, proudly proclaiming that nobody knows what he’s going to do because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, which gives him quite an advantage over everybody else. Beware the crazy man.
This goes, of course, to an even broader breakdown in all the assumptions about leadership and the world order: the most consequential person in the world is, for all practical purposes, a dummy. He neither operates within accepted rules nor with any understanding that he might be breaking those rules, because he’s unfamiliar with them, doesn’t have the language to even address them, and, most of all, truly, just doesn’t give a shit about them.
