The irrational strongman we’ve been warned about is here
In the run up to the Iraq War, President George W. Bush characterized Saddam Hussein as a “madman” who would lash out indiscriminately at the US, Israel, and other nations if not stopped.
Negotiations were impossible, Bush argued, because Hussein was driven by uncontainable animus and bloodlust.
“His word is no good,” Bush concluded, “and he’s a brute.”
Over the years the United States government and various analysts have labeled a range of designated enemies — Iraq, North Korea, Iran — as not just evil, but irrational, unpredictable, and therefore beyond the reach of diplomacy. As with Bush and Hussein, these characterizations often were as much excuse and rationalization for violence as analysis.
But we have at last found a global villain who matches the bugbear — an ill-informed violent despot who seems to enjoy carnage for its own sake, and who has the power and the will to project terror and violence anywhere on earth for any reason or for none.
That global villain is, of course, President Donald Trump.
Trump’s attacks on Iran this weekend — joined by Israel — are terrifying not just because they resulted in the deaths of numerous civilians, not just because he is flirting with a massive regional conflict, and not even because his war of aggression is flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional.
They are terrifying because they seem untethered alike from policy goals and logic. Trump offered a range of half-hearted explanations for his rush to war, but the conflicting excuses only underlined the obvious truth — he attacked Iran because he felt like it.
Nuclear weapons? Regime change? Who knows.
Many commenters have pointed out that Trump has done little to nothing to explain the case for war to the American people or to Congress. Even Republican leaders admitted they had no idea what Trump was doing or why.
“I’m learning like you are as the news unfolds exactly what’s happening,” Sen. John Cornyn stammered on Saturday.
Many statements from Democratic senators and representatives have highlighted Trump’s failure to provide a rationale for his actions and details of his plan.
“The administration has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a (much too mild) statement.
In his statement, Schumer mentions America’s longstanding concerns about the possibility that Iran might develop a nuclear weapon. These nuclear fears are about as close as Trump has come to an actual reason for the strikes — but that explanation makes no sense.
In June 2025, after he had (also illegally) bombed Iran for the first time, Trump claimed he had “obliterated” the nation’s nuclear weapon’s program. In his State of the Union address last week he claimed Iran wants “to start [the program] all over again,” but there’s no evidence they have even tried to enrich uranium.
Similarly, Trump claimed Iran was developing ballistic missiles that could reach the US, but US intelligence agencies believe it is at best years away from developing such technology.
Trump has toyed with justifying the bombing as a humanitarian measure to free Iran’s people from its dictatorial regime. At the end of January, he demanded Iran “stop killing protestors.” After the latest strikes he told the Iranian people to “seize control of your destiny” and “take over your government.” This rhetoric is in line with Trump’s decision to target Iran’s head of state; Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the bombing.
But it’s hard to take the vague gestures at uplifting sentiment very seriously. In the first place, the US has made little effort to plan for a democratic Iran. In fact, as the New York Times notes, Trump has spent his second term gutting Voice of America and other resources which reached out to people there.
More, we all know that Trump himself is shredding the Constitution, repressing protest, and literally murdering people in the street at home. A president who ignores democratic processes to launch a lawless war of aggression is not a credible messenger for democracy and freedom. Does anyone really think Trump cares about the well-being of the Iranian people he just bombed?
You’d think two incoherent half-assed justifications for an illegal war would be enough. But late at night after the bombs were launched, Trump tried out a third. At four in the morning on Saturday, he declared on his own Truth Social site that “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.” As evidence, he included a link to a far right news article.
Trump knows Iran does not have nuclear capability. He does not care about the fate of the Iranian people. But we know he has been brooding for six years about his loss in the 2020 election, which he has claimed ever since (with no evidence) that he won. This is something we know Trump actually cares about.
Did the US start an illegal war of aggression because Trump believes his own election conspiracy theories and wants revenge on Iran for its fictional aid to Joe Biden? It sounds ludicrous and horrifying. But it’s as plausible an explanation as any.
Aberration is not aberration
Trump’s inability to explain why he started a war is a core aspect of the war’s illegality under international law.
Israel claimed the strikes were “preventive” as a vague effort to suggest they were justified as self-defense. But even if preventive wars were legal (they are not), Trump barely even pretended to make the case that Iran was an imminent threat to the US. He bombed Iran because he could and because he wanted to — the very definition of a war of choice.
Trump’s Iran policy is, unfortunately, perfectly consistent with the rest of his incoherent and bloodthirsty approach to the world. Bombing Iran for their fictional interference in the 2020 election is of a piece with his desire to annex Greenland because it looks big in the Mercator Projection and with his attack on Venezuela because sending the military in provides him with the rush of a television show. It would almost be funny, except for the part where the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world keeps using it to murder people around the globe as he giggles and mutters over and over, “That’ll show Joe Biden!”
With first Iraq and now Iran, the US justified illegal invasions by arguing that nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational, violent, and cruel regime was an insupportable danger. These arguments were wrong because Iran and Iraq were not as irrational as portrayed, because they did not have nuclear weapons, and because they did not have any way to deliver those fictional weapons over any distance.
With those caveats, though, the logic was correct. If nuclear weapons were to get into the hands of an unrestrained, bloodthirsty, and irrational actor, it would be a nightmare scenario.
And that is the scenario we are living in right now. Trump has the power to destroy the world, and he is showing, over and over, that he enjoys illegally dropping bombs and spreading chaos at random, just because.
The fantasy monster that president after president has conjured up is real, and he is squatting orangely over his phone in the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago.
Yesterday it was Venezuela, today it’s Iran, tomorrow it could be anywhere. Or, god help us, everywhere.
