KETCHUP, DEAD IN THE WATER, REPENTANCE

The illegal war against Iran is humming along with President Trump and Pete Hegseth continuing with their threats to destroy the country completely, though the president insists, “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” though Iran appears to be in control of the situation. International shipping is at a virtual standstill through the Strait of Hormuz, “the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing the global economy’s femoral artery,” in the words of Matt Ford in The New Republic. On-again-off-again cease fires, and passage through the strait, continue to plague any resolution, a result of the election of a loser to lead the world’s only superpower, says Ford — “loser” being the president’s favorite insult, followed closely by “failing” and “low IQ.” Ford sees that a loser is not someone who is left behind, nor someone who simply failed at something, since failure is a part of life and a possible step toward subsequent success.

His definition of a loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all, and believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled, always slighted by the world at large which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority. It’s curious that JD Vance wrote in ‘Hillbilly Elegy‘ that the message of the right-wingers is increasingly: “It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault,” his implication being “it’s your fault if you’re a loser.” The Vice President probably regrets inclusion of that sentiment in his book. Ford writes, “Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing — instead, they care about the perception of success and failure, a basis for Donald Trump’s insistence that he was the biggest and best in the New York real estate scene.” Trump is quoted as saying, “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” which might explain his tacky gold ornamentation in the White House. Also, when your blood type is ketchup…

Ford writes that “losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.” Trump describes himself as “highly intelligent” based on genetic grounds — his uncle was an MIT professor, therefore becoming a credential for his own cognitive ability. Fascism and loserdom go hand in hand because fascism is predicated on the notion that the fascist has been unjustly cheated and robbed, and that only force can lead to restoration and revitalization. Fascists idolize losers because no fascist society has ever flourished and because they see themselves reflected in other people’s failure. Hence, the praise lavished upon the likes of General Robert E. Lee, the loser of ‘The War of Northern Aggression.’

Ford concludes his piece with, “The goal of Trumpism, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherent’s lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter once told reporters, ‘He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.'”

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote on Substack: “President Trump has lost the war with Iran but is refusing to accept it.” Krugman says the president is “flat out unable” to deal with the fallout of the war, and is unable to accept that his intervention has failed — “it’s been clear for awhile that the United States has basically lost this war.” Goals to achieve regime change and take Iran’s uranium will not happen, with the regime being even more hardline. Iran is demonstrably strengthened with its ability to control the Hormuz Strait, and though temporarily permitting some access, Trump’s announced blockade hastened Iran’s decision to shut down all shipping, stating, “Control of the Strait of Hormuz has reverted to its previous state, and this strategic waterway is under strict management and control of the armed forces.” So, until Trump stops his meddling, allowing Iranian ships to navigate freely, the president is dead in the water.

American psychologist and psychotherapist, Dr. John Gartner, believes that Donald Trump is more like an animal at this point in his presidency, and will lash out at anything and everyone. As he told The Daily Beast, “A cornered, wounded animal is the most vicious and dangerous kind of animal there is, and that’s where he is right now.” Gartner worries that if the midterm elections bring about a complete turnover in both houses of Congress, Trump will still be a commander-in-chief who is getting off on the omnipotent destructiveness and power of blowing things up. Any thought Trump might have now is what he believes, even if it is completely false. Gartner says it’s a primitive type of thinking, where if you imagine it, it must be true — magical thinking! “Anything that occurs to him — any stray, crazy thought — is true,” warns Gartner. “His grandiosity is so extreme that not only does he want to be the Pope, and Jesus, and the president of Venezuela, and the Mullah of Iran — he wants to be all of these things at once. He wants the world to worship him, and he wants to erect massive monuments to praise himself.”

The now-infamous A.I.-generated image of Trump’s Truth Social post depicting himself as Jesus healing a patient, or raising someone from the dead, with an entourage of heavenly hosts and a plethora of American iconography, outraged religious and political leaders across the board. The president’s explanation that he saw himself as a Red Cross doctor healing the sick fell on deaf ears, so he was convinced to use his lighted celestial fingers for deleting the post. We can expect a surge in Halloween costumes this year of celebrants wearing white robes and carrying stethoscopes. Trump, of course, couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie, so he quickly followed up his chastisement with a Truth Social A.I. post depicting him being comforted by a Jesus-like figure.

Trump’s second A.I. post prompted a number of snarky comments on social media: “Wait a second. That’s not Jesus, that’s clearly a DOCTOR! Why does he look so forlorn? Is something wrong? Are the test results back? Is he breaking bad news to the president about his failing health? Is Trump trying to tell us something?“; and “Donald Trump is testing out a new portrayal of himself as the chosen one after deleting a post that sparked backlash for depicting himself as Jesus Christ.” As might be expected, Trump then posted, “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!! ” Right, warm fuzzies all around!

Since his return to the Oval Office, Trump has enacted changes that have encouraged a resurgence of religion within the federal bureaucracy, which some federal workers view as an alarming breakdown of the boundary between church and state which can be seen in the proselytizing emails, invitations to worship services, and religious undertones in high-profile policy pronouncements. Most government employees see their jobs as working on behalf of all Americans, but what they are observing is very explicitly Christian — in a very narrow representation of the faith, at that! Administration officials scoff at these charges on the pretext that such expressions are not new and shouldn’t be controversial. Last year, Trump established the White House Faith Office, headed by Televangelist Paula White-Cain, who has compared the president to Jesus, inviting a bit of mockery after she claimed that Trump, as a child, attended Saturday and Sunday school up to three times a week. “Church was a big part of his life,” she insists. Perhaps this is only a test of the emergency fascism system — do not adjust your conscience.

The Office of Personnel Management, in July of last year, released a memo permitting federal workers to “encourage” peers “to participate in religious expressions of faith, such as prayer,” and on Easter Sunday, Department of Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins sent an agency-wide email with the subject line “He has risen!” The email message described the life of Jesus as “the greatest story ever told, the foundations of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.” One department employee called the email “grotesque,” adding that such conduct would be unacceptable even for military chaplains; but, a department spokesperson felt that the secretary was within her rights to send such a message. A government employee says “people are uncomfortable,” with another saying “there’s a lot of carrying on” and while no one’s forcing you to pray, it’s happening in the middle of a government workplace — meaning that we, the taxpayers, are supporting the breakdown of the wall? It seems that Christo-fascism can be defined as a belief that being productive at work equals having the right to tell co-workers they are going to hell.

The Daily Dose of Democracy website reports on “Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth authorizing the deployment of weapons-grade cringe” last week at a Pentagon prayer service, as he quoted a Biblical-sounding verse that film buffs immediately recognized as the Samuel L. Jackson monologue from Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy ‘Pulp Fiction.’ The movie verse was delivered just before Jackson’s hitman character murders an unarmed man in cold blood, with Hegseth being too myopic to recognize that the speech is satirizing men who hide behind religion in order to justify unholy acts of violence — which is exactly what the Secretary himself is doing in Iran. “Nothing sums up the Trump regimes relationship with religion better than using fake Bible quotes to justify an illegal war of imperial aggression,” the writer charges. The verse is similar to Ezekiel 25:17 in the Old Testament, which uses only part of the scripture, the remainder being scripted by Tarantino. The comments section on DDoD prompted this post by Cy Clops: “And the Lord sayeth: ‘Spread out, numbskulls. Why I oughtta…’ Customized from The Book of Stooges: Nyuk 1, Nyuks 2 and 3.”

But wait! There’s more! Not satisfied with angering Christians all week, President Trump will be reading from the Bible as a publicity stunt in an effort to spread the lie that we live in a Christian Nation. MAGAs in the administration will be participating in a week-long Bible recitation as part of an initiative called ‘America Reads the Bible‘ at the Museum of the Bible to commemorate ‘250 Years of the Bible in America.’ As Hemant Mehta writes on The Friendly Atheist blog, Trump being fresh off posting the image of himself as Jesus while healing a Jeffrey Epstein-lookalike, and offending Pope Leo and Catholics world-wide, will be attempting to do damage control. To start, a recording of Trump reading a verse from the Old Testament — hopefully not Ezekiel 25:17 which should be given to Hegseth — to be released next week, to be followed by his reading of 2 Chronicles 7:14, a section about repentance. That’s sensible to Mehta, who says, “If the man lies during every speech and press conference, he might as well read a Bible verse he doesn’t believe in either. It’s not like they were going to ask him to read the Sermon on the Mount. Or anything from the Gospels.”

Mehta goes on to say that Trump was never going to be asked to follow the message of Jesus because he’s never been interested in that, so this is the next best thing for the right-wing Christians who have latched onto a man now being dubbed the Antichrist by many on the right. It’s good that they are recording it, which will be the only proof we ever get of Trump actually opening up The Book. In a more prudent world, those who cause as much harm in the world as that group would never be asked to hold a Bible, much less read from it, but conservatives have gone all in on hypocrisy. While no one is perfect, most of us put in a bit of effort, unlike Trump, who goes out of his way to be cruel and chaotic. That the people organizing the event won’t denounce his actions tells you a lot more about their values than a reading of the Bible that no one will ever listen to in full.

Mehta concludes that the event isn’t really about honoring the Bible, “It’s about projecting power over non-Christians. The fact that so many so many self-described Christian leaders are participating in the performance — when they would be appalled by a Democrat even citing one verse from the Qur’an in a speech — tells you everything you need to know about their intentions. If they cared about Christianity, they wouldn’t be reading a section of a book they’ve never bothered to read in full for an audience that’s never going to listen to them. They would talk from the heart about things like humility, repentance, compassion, and the vulnerable. But the same dishonest, cruel authoritarians who only care about Christianity to the extent that it keeps them in power don’t actually care about following any of the lessons from the faith. They don’t care if they have a leader shaped by the Bible; they just want one who knows how to use the Bible to control everyone else. That’s what Christian Nationalism is all about.”

The introduction of an exhilarated religious fervor by Trump and Hegseth into the Iran war is a gift to the mullahs of that country according to two former diplomats, who say that they are only going to make things worse. ‘Morning Joe‘ contributor Sam Stein approached former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan with his question, “When you frame war in matters of theology, when you have the president mocking Islam in his tweets or Truth Social posts, how does that play with the leadership of Iran? How will they view this war when you have the defense secretary talking like that?” Sullivan answered, “Well, it does two things. First, in a way, it plays into their hands because these guys are theocrats themselves. And so the idea of having a holy war against the Great Satan, the United States, and the Little Satan, Israel, is core to their identity and core to their argument, to their own people who they were just mowing down. ‘You’ve got to back us in this holy war.’ So it really plays on the turf of the Iranian mullahs and clerics.”

MS NOW host Joe Scarborough added, “The continued deification, to follow up on what Jake said, and having people coming in — scam preachers, phony preachers saying Donald Trump is Jesus Christ is grotesque…every single day. Jake’s exactly right — they are turning this into a crusade. They are literally playing right into Iran’s hands, right into the Revolutionary Guards’ hands.” Former president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haas replied, “Absolutely. And again, it works against the idea of compromise. For the Iranians this has become an existential conflict. For us, this is a limited conflict. It’s very hard to prevail in a limited conflict when you’re up against someone who basically feels if they lose, they’re gone.” As Lawrence Wright wrote in his novel, ‘The End of October,’ “Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil. When good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.”

Instead of shrinking from the idea that there is a religious aspect to the Iran “excursion,” US administration leaders are leaning into it, invoking God and promising fire and brimstone, once again, for Iran’s civil society if its leaders do not buckle to US demands. A reporter asked Trump if he thinks God supports the US in the war. “I do, because God is good, and God wants to see people taken care of,” Trump said, adding that neither he nor God “like what’s happening.” In Trump’s mind, he may think God is on his side, but international law is not if he carries out the threat to bomb bridges and power plants, which is a war crime by targeting a civilian population. Trump apologist and Representative Russell Fry of South Carolina explained to Fox Business why the GOP-controlled Congress refuses to do its job and rein in the Iran war. “Congress, right now, certainly has an obligation in some ways to assist in matters of international importance, but to micromanage the president with 535 CEOs of the country doesn’t make sense to me — doesn’t make sense to the American people.” What a low IQ, failing, loser of an answer, eh?!!

And this just in from satirist Andy Borowitz, dateline Tehran: “In a major setback for Donald J. Trump, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz will be closed the next two years for renovations. The Strait of Hormuz board also approved a plan to put Mojtaba Khamenei’s name on the renovated waterway. ‘The Khamenei Strait of Hormuz will be the biggest and most beautiful trade chokepoint EVER!,’ the ayatollah announced in a social media post. In the same post, he indicated that the renovated strait would have a ‘world-class tollbooth’ fitted with marble armrests ‘unlike anything ever done or seen before.‘”

Back in the news this week — the Epstein Report — as a result of a random press conference called by First Lady Melania Trump, a surprise for everyone including the president himself who claimed to know nothing about it. As Joanna Coles writes on Substack, “Melania Trump, last seen smiling alongside the Easter bunny, emerged briefly on Thursday from her gilded witness protection program to issue a statement about Jeffrey Epstein. Why now? Her documentary ‘Melania,’ a long and frictionless Instagram exercise in image laundering, offered the perfect, hermetically sealed environment to address any lingering questions about proximity, rumor, or denial. A captive audience, a sympathetic frame, and not a whisper of Epstein. One might think the omission was the point.”

Melania’s White House statement denying ties to Jeffrey Epstein and knowledge of his crimes, and calling for a congressional hearing for survivors allowing them to testify before lawmakers and have their stories entered into the congressional record, comes at a time when President Trump and his administration had finally succeeded in moving beyond the controversy with the Iran “excursion” dominating headlines. While lawmakers had complained at the limited release last month of files by the Justice Department, the agency said more time was needed for review to ensure no sensitive information about victims was released. The First Lady didn’t waste any of her time defending her husband, and the White House was blindsided with her admitting that she had partied with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in New York in 1998. Journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X, “I am not sure why Melania Trump decided to make a statement about Jeffrey Epstein seemingly out of nowhere today, but if the idea was to put the ongoing coverup in the rearview mirror it will backfire spectacularly.”

She denied being a victim of Epstein, to which research paralegal and progressive commentator, RJ Riley, posted on X: “Again, no one asked you if you were Epstein’s victim. That’s a deflection. The actual question is why you and your husband were, at MINIMUM, embedded in the same elite party circuit as a known predator for years, praised him publicly, and only distanced himself after Epstein became radioactive. That’s not chance. So no, a self-written book isn’t evidence, it’s clean up.” Paul Kavanagh, a columnist at the Scottish publication, The National, posted on Bluesky: “Melania Trump is talking about Epstein in order to distract from the Iran war her husband started in order to distract from Epstein.” David Rothkopf on The Daily Beast speculates that Donald Trump has apparently decided that being heavily linked to a notorious sex trafficker, while bad enough to make him want to start a war to distract from it, is not as bad as being seen as a genocidal maniac, behaving like Hitler.

Rothkopf goes on to say that suggesting the president’s wife never had a relationship with Maxwell, seems a stretch, since the internet is flooded with images of the First Lady looking very cozy with Epstein and Maxwell, which raises the questions about her intervention — why? And why now? Is there a pending legal matter in which she is involved? It seems that she would be unable to commandeer the White House stage without approval of and support of the president’s staff, and why would they condone it? Especially in light of Pam Bondi’s firing, she being unable to make the story go away. As delicious as the possibility of Melania’s going rogue may seem, Rothkopf says that is very unlikely since it took place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; and he leaves us with the choices of believing the president decided to place Epstein center-stage, or that he was blindsided by his wife because he is the old guy who is no more aware of, or in control of, what goes on in the White House than he is of anything else at the moment.

Jimmy Kimmel, on his show, says that Melania might have highlighted the Epstein scandal out of sheer resentment towards her husband, saying, “He spent the past six weeks trying to bomb this Epstein story out of the headlines. Two days after the ceasefire, she puts it right back on top. She must really hate him. I don’t know how else to explain it. For whatever reason, she didn’t ask. She didn’t give a heads up. She just went right out in front of the cameras and fired away.” To Melania’s demand that lies and rumors about her “cease today,” he ponders if ‘tomorrow’ would be okay, since he needs to catch up on what her concerns are. Melania declared that she is not Epstein’s victim, but Kimmel insisted she meant, “I am my husband’s victim,” and theorizing that the 5+ minute speech was the same one Donald gave to her after the Stormy Daniels brouhaha erupted. Political scientist, Professor Kristoffer Ealy, wrote on Lincon Square, “She spoke for five minutes, reading from a prepared statement, plugged her book, told Congress what investigations to conduct, and walked away without taking a single question. A press conference where you don’t take questions isn’t a press conference — that’s a hostage video with better lighting.”

Ealy goes on: “I want to be very clear about something before we go any further. I do not believe this woman. I have not believed this woman for a long time. And it is not because of anything Jeffrey Epstein-related. It is because I have been watching Melania Trump operate for the better part of fifteen years, and what I have observed is a person who lies the way most people breathe — reflexively, efficiently, and without apparent discomfort. The difference between Melania Trump lying and Melania Trump telling the truth is not something you merely hear. It is something you feel. It settles in the room like humidity. And what settled into the White House Grand Foyer on April 9, 2026 was very, very familiar. The media will spend the next several days debating whether her denial was credible. I am not interested in that debate. I am interested in the record. Because the record is long, it is documented, and it has more receipts than a Whole Foods on a Saturday afternoon.”

On The Hartmann Report, Thom Hartmann asks “when will the other Melania shoe drop?” He says the great mystery this week, is why Melania Trump would go on TV from the White House and pull a ‘Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon’ for no apparent reason. “That didn’t work out well for Nixon, and it’s unlikely her demands will do anything other than fuel more speculation and a faster circulation of her nudie pictures and photos of her and Jeffrey Epstein. Speculations about what provoked her, run from a woman close to threatening to ‘expose’ her ‘pedophile’ husband, to the possibility of a new book release claiming Melania and Epstein were once involved, to weird theories that Trump asked her to do it to distract from the Iran debacle,” writes Hartmann. “Something very, very weird is going on with this couple (if you could call two people who live and sleep separately a couple). But then, if you were married to Trump, wouldn’t you be a bit on edge, too?”

As expected, NBC’s Saturday Night Live’s cold opening ripped into the Melania speech, with two regulars portraying the First Couple in a phone conversation. Melania has called her husband to warn him about her bombshell press conference, saying, “I decided I should do a big random speech completely out of nowhere and say, ‘I am not Epstein’s victim.’ Is that good?” The president replies, “Darling, I gotta admit that sounds a little insane. Who are you…me? Melania, I’d really love to talk to you more, but I have a meeting with, uh, Ronald Reagan.”

Oliver Willis, on Daily Kos, provides some details on Melania Trump’s standing in this country, with polling showing the First Lady is netting some of the lowest approval ratings in US history. Despite the White House-backed documentary, ‘Melania,’ which attempted to promote her image around the world, a CNN poll last month showed her favorability rating standing at a -12, a drop from the +3 she had upon her return to the White House in January 2025. This contrasts with second-term First Ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush who had a +42 rating, while Nancy Reagan netted a +50; and even Hillary Clinton, who suffered slings and arrows for most of her public life, garnered a +25. CNN data analyst, Harry Enten, notes, “Melania Trump is breaking records in the way that you don’t want to break records — historically awful. The American people don’t really care for her.”

The ‘Melania‘ documentary, costing billionaire Jeff Bezos $75 million, has a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and is regarded as “shallow, sycophantic and absent a single unguarded moment, a near-two-hour infomercial disguised as a documentary,’ says reviewer Peter Travers. The First Lady’s recent activities might explain her poor standing, starting with her walking with a robot at the White House, touting use of A.I. in education. “This is exactly what Big Tech wants to create: a sense of a society being led by and taught by robots, displacing all of who we are, starting with education,” says AFT President Randi Weingarten. Melania’s recent chairing of a United Nations session on ‘children in conflict’ was frowned upon, in particular for her husband’s Iran war bombing of a school in which 168 children lost their lives. The administration has been blamed for traumatizing children in its anti-immigrant activities and the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. Oliver Willis writes that Melania’s poor ratings only echo the low ratings she held upon exiting the White House in January 2021, and that historically, unpopular presidents have been unable to rely on public support for first ladies, even while dealing with political headwinds of their own. Donald Trump has had no such luck — his wife is disliked just as much as he is.

With less than 20% of Americans identifying as MAGA Republicans, they continue to support nearly every decision President Donald Trump makes, yet his “contempt” for his most loyal supporters “is getting worse,” argues writer Amanda Marcotte on Substack. “To Trump and his top brass, like JD Vance, feeling like they owe anything to anybody, especially the red-hat yokels who got them into office, is insulting,” she writes. “Their resentment at their own voters for actually expecting results is getting worse, and that’s starting to be reflected in policy choices.” Trump’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the nation’s airports to supposedly alleviate staffing shortages sparked by the partial government shutdown also impacts MAGA voters — after all, Trump voters fly, too!

Marcotte says that more revealing, and aggravating, was Trump’s response to questions about rising gas prices, which should have been a predictable outcome once war against Iran was initiated. “Trump and even the Vice President can’t help but sneer with annoyance each time they are asked to care about skyrocketing prices at the pump,” says Marcotte. “Trump even tried to spin that as a good thing, claiming that ‘we make a lot of money’ when gas prices go up. Of course, that ‘we’ does not include approximately 99% of Americans, so he’s basically just telling the rest of us we don’t matter. Including his own voters.” Marcotte’s conclusion? “I think Trump and the rest of the White House really do hate Americans. They view the majority who don’t support the MAGA agenda as bratty liberals who need to be squashed into silence. But they also hold most Trump voters in contempt, seeing them as easily duped morons — which is hard to argue with, honestly!”

SFGate columnist, Drew Magary, launched a diatribe against Trump and his war last week, following the TACO president’s chickening-out on destroying the Iranian nation. He congratulates the Iranians for calling Trump’s bluff, and is thankful that we are all still here, though it got a bit dicey. A two-week ceasefire was agreed upon, although things have been iffy, and with JD Vance’s 21-hour negotiations with Iran falling through — provoked by the White House — everything is drifting back to square one. Magary says Trump believed Israeli PM Netanyahu’s pitch that a war would be a cakewalk, even after “human footstool” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the plan “b.s.” Every war at its core is a self-inflicted wound, Trump’s wound so wide that the Artemis crew could see it from the dark side of the moon — a decisive loss for the US, with Magary hoping it portends many electoral losses for the orchestrators.

Hawkish politicians who kept the Iranian bogeyman alive for half a century were waiting for a useful idiot to occupy the Oval Office to make the war happen — enter Donald Trump — the best and last chance to make war a reality. Netanyahu convinced Trump that Iran would fold in short order, and that he could seize the Strait of Hormuz, with Iranians greeting the US as liberators — shades of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld! Didn’t happen! Mojtaba Khamenei took control of everything, gas prices soared, global markets went haywire, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps began to charge nations to use the strait, which was free until Trump went off the deep end. Easter Sunday saw Trump screaming curses, throwing a hissy fit, throwing insulting names, and threatening to destroy the entire civilization — no matter that the US was getting low on munitions! Then Russia and China backed Iran, knowing a winner when they see one, as Iran dared Trump to blink. He did so, Iran winning the PR campaign, withTrump complaining the Strait of Hormuz is closed, yet is somehow open. Go figure.

Initially, the administration said Iran could keep its nuclear weapons program, as Trump tried to fish the Obama agreement out of the toilet, but that was transitioned in JD Vance’s negotiations, so expect the sound of flushing once again. As part of the ceasefire agreement, Iran might have received punitive damages from the US for bombing destruction, and with Trump’s negotiating acumen, Iran probably could have gotten Alaska thrown in had they wanted it. Magary accuses Trump of starting this “excursion” for no reason at all, quickly found himself in over his head, then tried to skulk away from it, while the country is stuck with skyrocketing gas bills and a nosediving stock market. Magary says he is outraged and mortified, and is sick to death of living in a country with a ruling party stupid enough to think this war was a good idea, especially when every war in his lifetime has been an unmitigated failure. “I’m sick of the fact that threats of a nuclear holocaust are now routine because our president is a terrorist who has a bowl of oatmeal for a brain. I’m sick of our military professionals having to take orders from politicians who have no idea what they’re doing. And I’m sick of the United States being run by a bunch of absolute losers. Trump lost this war. I hope that, one day soon, he loses everything else,” concludes Magary.

The last word belongs to satirist Andy Borowitz, datelined Tehran: “In its first act of goodwill since the declaration of a ceasefire, on Wednesday Iran permitted a container ship loaded with copies of the Epstein files to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. ‘In recent weeks, the closure of the Strait has cut off the world’s supply of Epstein files,’ and Iranian government statement read. ‘Now, those files will flow freely to the four corners of the globe.’ Although Iran is charging vessels millions for safe passage through the Strait, ‘We are sending the Epstein files through free of charge,’ the statement indicated. The Iranians said they had taken Donald J. Trump’s threat to destroy their civilization ‘very seriously,’ noting, ‘We see what he’s already done to American civilization.‘”