Trump Wants To Blow It Up

Iran, that is. This is not a good sign. He’s fascinated with videos of things blowing up in Iran. He is not paying attention to what he is told. He watches the videos on loop. What the hail is wrong with this picture? The ‘president’ of the United States wants to watch another nation explode? That shouldn’t be our way. We’re approaching dictator rule, here. He probably doesn’t give a damn about civilian casualties, either. Or war crimes, since he keeps saying we’re going to blow up infrastructure. We should worry. With respect to Raw Story:

National security experts were concerned that President Donald Trump has ignored important briefings and instead prefers to watch videos of explosions from the Iran war, according to an analyst on Thursday. Salon’s Chauncey DeVega described how Trump has started to treat the war — which has killed 13 American troops and nearly 1,500 Iranians — as entertainment.

In the past, presidents have sought information from daily security briefings. Trump, however, has not followed this method. “As the war progresses, Trump is reportedly being shown daily compilation videos of ‘stuff blowing up’ — two-minute highlight reels of death and destruction, curated to hold his attention due to his famously short attention span,” DeVega wrote.

Trump has never been a normal president. He uses it to grift. He uses it to hurt people. He uses the position to get what he wants, and the country doesn’t matter. He’s even scornful of MAGA, his dedicated base. Gas prices going up? We’ll be out in 2 weeks. Food prices going up? They’ll be going down soon. Job market dropping? We’re turning it around. And so on. He just doesn’t care. And he definitely doesn’t care how he’s screwing over the world with his and Dumb McNamara Petey Boy’s war.

This has impacted how he views the war and what comes next. “Trump’s reliance on the videos risks creating an echo chamber effect where he is not getting the best advice,” DeVega wrote. “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 planning and execution of the war, or its long-term strategic implications for American power and global stability.” NBC News reported that these montages have added to the president’s “increasing frustration” with how the media covers the war and skewed his views.

His views aren’t skewed, of course not. That’s why we went to war in the first place. He wanted to help out his friend Bibi. The *method* was wrong in that there was very little planning before they started, so a lot of things that *should* have been anticipated, well, weren’t. You know, like the Strait of Hormuz.

Steven Cash, the executive director of the nonprofit the Steady State, an organization of more than 360 former national security and diplomacy experts promoting American democracy, told DeVega that Americans expect the president to listen to a range of expert voices to guide military actions.

“This does not appear to be what is happening,” DeVega wrote. “Instead, the process has been reduced to a closed circle of advisers reinforcing Trump’s instincts while screens display short, dramatic clips of explosions and destruction. War, Cash observed, ‘is not a spectacle, and it is certainly not a form of entertainment. Treating it that way is both obscene and dangerous.'”

[Edit: add on: Cash said the repercussions have been clear. “The president has publicly suggested that basic strategic realities — such as the central importance of the Strait of Hormuz to the global economy — were somehow overlooked by ‘the experts,'” Cash said. “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 — or is willing to absorb — the information he needs.”]

Well said, sir! It’s a *war*, not a video game. And since he isn’t getting much, if any, other information, that’s the exhibition, the performance, that he’s seeing. He doesn’t see the actual people, the bombs, the ships, the fighting, the deaths. He just sees what the bombs do. And speaking of, I wonder how many more Tomahawks they’ve gone through by now. This is stunning. And we *still* can’t do anything to get him out or get out of the war. Damn.

See you soon!

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