ArcaMax

PARIS — When President Donald Trump vowed to neutralize the warmongering neocon establishment in Washington, hardly anyone imagined his master plan would involve hugging it so tightly that he couldn’t tell where it ended and he began — and then politically self-immolating like he was chasing 72 virgins.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” the President told a White House Easter brunch.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Apparently, Trump’s long-promised “Golden Age” features Tomahawks, not toddlers.

His tune sure has changed fast. “The Trump administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again)… The press is lying again,” the White House said in March 2025.

Trump’s chief diplomat, Marco Rubio, even recently evoked the state of Iranians’ social safety net as the latest justification for bombing them, citing the Iranian government’s use of whatever wealth hasn’t been embargoed for years under U.S. sanctions “not to build roads and bridges, not to build health care systems or universities, not to build a better, more prosperous country. They’ve used the wealth of that country to sponsor terrorism, build rockets, build drones, build missiles, build sea mines.”

But the U.S.-Israeli tag team hasn’t had too much difficulty locating Iranian universities, schools and health care facilities to bomb — reportedly including Tehran’s French-linked Pasteur Institute for biomedical research.

Good thing Tehran happened to have a few weapons lying around. Otherwise, Trump might already have installed Rubio as Ayatollah — or at least as the interim administrator of whatever fragments remained of Iran’s social and medical services. The rationale of bombing Iran for better public health is about as persuasive as Trump’s rhetorical pivot from “liberating” Iranians to bombing them “back to the stone ages.”

Another day, another rationale for sustaining a spectacle that has long since ceased pretending to be strategic in any even remotely imaginable sense.

Iran has shot down American warplanes over its skies, successfully targeted U.S. warships in its waters and nearly 400 American troops (and counting) are reportedly killed or injured according to the Pentagon itself, all while Trump now asks Congress to keep the party going with an eye-watering $1.5 trillion in defense spending. Something’s got to give. And that something, predictably, is domestic programs, with the New York Times reporting the proposed tradeoff as “$73 billion in cuts spread across … federal health, housing, and education.”

All because Trump can’t seem to locate a face-saving off-ramp from this disaster that isn’t also a Slip ’n Slide straight into a brick wall.

Iran has already won — not yet on the battlefield where it’s been punching way above its weight, but in the arguably more consequential arena of perception. Trump’s insistence on bullying European allies into sending their troops to Iran — effectively inviting them to become targets under the pretext of forcing open the Strait of Hormuz and repairing his damage done to the global oil market — has found no takers. Even after Trump tried to sweeten the pitch by musing publicly that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife, age 72, punches him in the face, and by launching into impersonations of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer refusing to send his “two, old broken-down aircraft carriers.” Macron called Trump’s remarks “neither elegant nor up to standard.”

Trump thinks it’s open mic night or some kind of reality TV show, but all these guys see are the bombs and missiles flying around as European gas stations run dry.

Having closed the Strait of Hormuz amid the U.S.-Israeli attacks, Iran now seems to be back-channeling directly with European countries. A French tanker was recently the first from a major Western European company to be let through the strait in a month, according to the BBC.

It’s not hard to see how this unfolds. Every other nation edges toward unilateral deals with Iran, normalizing diplomacy and trade. Everyone, that is, except the U.S. and Israel, whose economies risk becoming collateral damage of their own policies — a self-imposed embargo to the detriment of the American and Israel people, masquerading as moral clarity but obscuring shady special interests. Iran, meanwhile, continues to demonstrate the adaptability of a country that has survived decades of isolation, while the Western world shows signs of fraying after mere days of the same sort of discomfort.

The entire world has been given a real-time demonstration of how Iran calibrates its responses, complicating its caricature as an existential menace.

A whole generation, particularly younger observers raised on the kind of contradiction-detection fostered through social media interaction, is now asking why the West is at war with these people in the first place. Propaganda coming out of Iran — including those surreal, hilarious LEGO-style animated videos mocking Team Trump and framing the conflict as a struggle against an Israeli-led neocon globalist system — resonates because it aligns with observable reality.

Trump vowed to take down the globalist system, all right. But he probably didn’t imagine doing it by climbing inside of it himself and hammering in the final nail.