Borrowing a line from comedian Steven Wright who said, “The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese,” we might classify President Donald Trump as the early bird in his June 2025 bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. However, as the first mouse, the president is caught in his own trap, as Benjamin Netanyahu sweeps in to claim his prize of deciding who gets credit for initiating the second incursion into Iran — in the planning stages since November. As John Stoehr of The Editorial Board states, our ally put Trump in a no-win situation toward launching an illegal war, though Trump could have condemned Netanyahu after the fact; but, apparently the appeal of being in a war had a greater influence on the commander of the world’s mightiest military. Allowing the foreign head of state to lead him around by the nose has resulted in a plethora reasons for entering into combat, and no matter how unconvincing those reasons put forth by him and his cabinet may be, it still draws attention — in the views of many — that Trump is probably not entirely in charge. It’s like Netanyahu told him, “I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.”

That viewpoint is problematic for many in Congress who declare that if Trump was not acting in our self-defense, then this is a war of choice which did not receive the consent of that governing body. Now, Trump will have to explain himself, risking his being held accountable for consumer prices, the rocky Wall Street situation, and chaos and destruction all around the Middle East as the war spreads. The best White House rationale for the war is that the US was forced to attack, because if Iran was forced to defend itself against a lone Israeli attack, they would also launch attacks on US facilities in the region. Trump asserted to CNN that in his opinion “Iran was going to attack first if the US didn’t.” If the MAGA crowd has faith in this lie, Trump will have affirmed his dominance. If he’s seen as Netanyahu’s puppet, this will be problematic far beyond the abstract debates in Congress over war powers. The problem the president has initiated for himself is not rooted in high-minded principles like freedom and national sovereignty, but in conspiracy theory and antisemitism — terms given the veneer of respectability by right-wing intellectuals and gullible reporters.

The largely ignored isolationist group, America First Committee, has an unshakeable belief in a global Jewish conspiracy against America, which was beneath the drive to release the Epstein files in the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump represented the God-sent hero to fulfill a prophecy to save America from a secret cabal of powerful Jews involved in sex-trafficking young girls to untouchable elites, with Jeffrey Epstein heading this syndicate. John Stoehr says, “Once reelected, Trump was supposed to bring them all to justice. When he didn’t, he triggered a crisis of faith that can be registered in polling that lumps him in with the rest of the ‘wealthy elites’ who act with impunity for the law — the so-called ‘Epstein class.'” However, these supporters can shift from anti-war to pro-war as smoothly as has the president; but not being rooted in high-minded principles — only Jew-hate — supporters are not going to warm up to the appearance of an American president seeming to take orders from the leader of a Jewish state. Instead, they might see Trump doing to believers in America First what he has done to supporters who demanded the release of the Epstein files. Thus, the president’s lie that he forced Netanyahu’s hand. Yet, this assertion of dominance is compounded by his heel-turn in the Epstein files case — the crisis of faith within MAGA leaves a growing suspicion that instead of destroying the global Jewish conspiracy against America, he has joined it.

The host of Anchor Watch on Lincoln Square, retired Navy commander Bobby Jones, offered his opinion on a week’s worth of warfare with Iran: “It’s important that people understand this is not going to be something that is a shot-term or easy operation to get out from under. If we’re not careful, it’s going to make Afghanistan and Iraq look like a church picnic.” To emphasize the lack of leadership, Jones says, “Depending on which one of the three — Trump, Hegseth, or Rubio — you’re talking to, you get a different justification for why these actions are taking place, which is a telltale sign that strategically, people are not aligned across the board.” Donald Trump’s claims of an imminent Iranian threat are so unbelievable that the Associated Press had given him personal ownership of the fiasco, reporting that Republicans in Congress stopped a war-powers vote last week concluding efforts to end ‘Donald Trump’s war against Iran.’ Pete Hegseth, obviously replaying one of his favorite video games, said, “This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

The Raw America blog reports that as President Trump was threatening Iran with annihilation on Truth Social, the “White House was quietly doing something that should alarm every mayor, police chief, and sheriff in America: blocking the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center from warning local law enforcement that his war has raised the terror threat on American soil.” The Daily Mail reported that the three agencies had prepared a five-page joint intelligence bulletin entitled ‘A Public Safety Awareness Report: Elevated Threat in the United States During US-Iran Conflict’ to send to state and local authorities. Detailed were elevated threats from Iranian government operatives, Iranian proxies, threats to Jewish and Israeli institutions, and the danger that radicalized individuals of varying ideologies might use as cover for their violence. Local law enforcement will never know how to respond because the bulletin never went out — Department of Homeland Security gave the White House a heads-up beforehand and Trump’s cronies put it on hold.

The White House didn’t deny killing the bulletin, with spokeswoman Abigail Jackson offering that the administration was “ensuring information being disseminated is accurate, up to date, and has been properly vetted.” A senior DHS official slammed the decision with, “They don’t want anything getting out that says what they’re doing in Iran is raising the threat level at home.” Such bulletins are meant to be politically untouched — neutral, fact-based, and issued without White House input. Such speculation was borne out in an Austin, Texas bar after Operation Epic Fury was launched, when a gun-toting supporter of the Iranian regime opened fire, killing three people and wounding fifteen before law enforcement dispatched him. Following the incident, FBI Director Kash Patel placed counterterrorism teams on high alert nationwide. As Raw America says, “The threat is real. The bulletin was real. And the White House sat on it.”

Hegseth’s accusations against the Islamic Republic that it is “hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions,” and Rubio’s statement that the country needed to be attacked now because “that entire regime is led by radical clerics who make decisions based on their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one,” stand in contrast to the executors of the war which phrase the conflict in apocalyptic terms of their own — that they are fulfilling the promises of their own holy books, and that their justice is in fact God’s. As Séamus Malekafzali, journalist and writer focusing on Middle East politics, writes in The Nation, “Both the US and Israel have long asserted the right to commit imperial violence with impunity, while expecting other countries to pay a high price if they do the same. Now that double standard is being applied to the idea of holy war itself. Theocracy, it would seem, is wrong only when some people do it. To play an old trope: ‘The apocalyptic prophecies are coming from inside the house.‘”

The Raw America site exposes the central horror of this moment: “Plainly, we are fighting a war under the direction of a man whose motivations nobody — not his allies, not his Cabinet, not the people who work for him every single day — can fully explain. Trump has made something of a brand out of this. He brags, openly, that nobody knows what he’s going to do because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. In a previous life, in a different kind of man, that might be strategic ambiguity. In Donald Trump, it is simply the truth.” As for the people around him, Marco Rubio wears the expression of a man who has realized the building is on fire. JD Vance has pivoted so many times he’s lost track of which direction he’s facing. And even Benjamin Netanyahu, after wanting American military action for decades, has the energy of a man attempting to cash a check before the bank changes its mind.

It comes down to one person who understands Trump most clearly — Jared Kushner — who is not in the government but is likely running foreign policy for his father-in-law. Jared collecting a $2B investment from a Saudi-backed fund after leaving office in Trump’s first tenure, earned Trump’s respect, despite not being a pART of the DEAL — or was he? The Donald’s reaction was  blissful unawareness in his expression of satisfaction: “Jared can really work the Arabs. They like Jews to handle the money.” For some — who question what Trump sees in this war — it has nothing to do with strategic interest, security, or regional stability, but something far simpler: what’s in it for him! The oil in Iran (which the Israelis are burning, to his horror), reconstruction money, and Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds looking for a post-war landscape to invest in. Perhaps Trump can’t explain why he’s taken us to war, but his son-in-law will figure out what it all means and how to profit from it.

As Steve Schmidt tells us in The Warning, “Only a fool would be surprised to discover that Jared Kushner is at the center of a growing scandal around highly sensitive national security matters — a torrent of corruption that follows in the footsteps of Kushner and Trump’s Middle East negotiator, Steve Witkoff.” Schmidt says it is stunning, with no words to adequately describe the depravity of the theft and their betrayal of the USA, as the full details of the sale of America’s most sensitive computer chips to the UAE become known. It is estimated that the Trump and Witkoff families pocketed $187 million and $31 million, respectively, in the sellout of American security, not in a corrupt business deal, but in an act of espionage. While The New York Times detailed Kushner’s $2 billion deal in April 2022, no one seemed to care, but Schmidt calls the corruption so gargantuan that it is beyond comprehension.

Trump has shattered every convention and tradition that requires dignity and integrity, while obliterating the law, duty, responsibility and obligation. Even the honor of being twice-elected to the presidency only bolstered his belief that his temporary power was a license to take, steal, smash, punish, destroy and avenge, with the current term experiencing his unleashing of cruel Gestapo-like secret police to terrorize the American people. Kushner has been an abhorrent contributor to American decline and division over the last eleven years, a sinister and corrupt figure who perfectly represents the fantastical levels of corruption that have engulfed Washington, DC in the Trump years. Schmidt describes Kushner as a soft-handed and fragile-boned child of privilege, whose only skill is the flattery of sociopathic egos. His family’s wealth obscured his mediocrity as he entered Harvard University, before diving into the “jungles of Manhattan” where he continued to prove that any child of an indulgent billionaire parent can make it anywhere…’New York, New York!‘

Kushner’s failed business decisions found him drifting into the Oval Office with Donald Trump, where they have done more damage to the US than any people since Secession, adding $6.7 trillion to the national debt, but parlaying $2.4 billion in personal income into their pockets. Anything and everything was for sale, with the American people being cut out of the equation, as the government was only for the Trump Crime Syndicate and the MAGA movement, with Kushner serving as an “informal advisor.” The ‘advisor’ was denied a security clearance, failing background investigations, as security officials deemed him untrustworthy and not to be trusted with classified information. Not a problem for father-in-law Don who then gave him the highest level security clearances, leading the classified-briefings-loving Jared to request them more often than any staff member as he began his flitting around the world as an architect of Middle East ‘peace.’ Both Jared and wife, Ivanka Trump, were “mediocrities who were unread, inexperienced, sheltered, arrogant beyond measure, and surprisingly simple fraudsters who didn’t know very much about anything except where to look for money,” says Schmidt.

Understood by most, that the US Congress is a thoroughly broken institution, though shining through is the January 6 Committee which showed what is possible when honorable men and women come together, putting America ahead of political parties and cults of personality. Schmidt says that in this vein, the Kushner payoff deserves scrutiny by Congress, counter intelligence officials, and the media until every detail comes out. Extremist movements are always corrupt and corrupt movements always become extremist movements — the NRA and CPAC being perfect examples of this circumstance. We should all care about knowing the details of what Jared Kushner did to get this money, as well as the reasoning behind Director of National Intelligence’s Tulsi Gabbard locking away in a safe a whistleblower’s report about Kushner.

President Trump has been insisting that he must be personally involved in the process of selecting a new leader in Iran, and that the Iranians are “wasting their time” in considering the 56-year old son of the late Ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the likely replacement. Trump said, “We want someone that will bring peace and harmony to Iran — Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. Potential future leaders keep dying — everyone who wants to be leader ends up dead.” There was some political dissension among leaders in Iran about the hereditary selection of the Ayatollah’s son, which resembled a clerical version of the rule of the shah who was toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but the leadership of the Assembly of Experts were in favor of this appointment for prosecution of the war. So, in the end Mojtaba was chosen to be in charge of Iran’s armed forces and any decision regarding pursuit of Tehran’s nuclear program. The successor has never held any governmental post, either elective or appointive, and he is said to be even more hard-line than his father, which will put him directly in the gunsights of the Israelis, but Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Lebanon’s Hezbollah both issued statements of support.

Trump’s pronouncement insisting on his involvement in choosing a successor was likely to complicate efforts to end the ongoing conflict, but now that Mojtaba has been selected, our president will view him as a “transitional figure” with a bullseye on his back, even as some Iranians are “chanting for his death.” The Trump administration may be willing to keep the Iranian regime in place if they accede to US demands involving the enrichment of uranium, ending their ballistic missile program, and an end to terrorist proxies around the world. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria termed Mojtaba’s appointment “a very bad sign for the war” in that Iran’s hardliners now have the upper hand, “showing that the Iranian regime is dug in.”

So we’ll just have to wait for a slithering Trump to provide us with an answer or justification for going to war, even as he demands “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” from the Iranians. Satirist Andy Borowitz offers his take on the new Iranian leader with this: “In a blistering takedown of Iran’s new Supreme Leader, on Sunday Eric Trump claimed that the late Ayatollah’s son was an incompetent idiot who only attained his position through nepotism. ‘The last thing the world needs is yet another total bonehead getting a leg up just because of who his dad is,’ Trump said. ‘If this dope’s last name was Henderson instead of Khamenei, he wouldn’t even be in the conversation.’ He added that giving someone control over massive sums of money just because he had a powerful father is ‘a recipe for disaster.’ ‘What kind of backward country showers someone with riches because of who his dad is?’ Trump asked. ‘All I can say is, congratulations, Iran: you just chose a member of the Lucky Sperm Club.'”