Trump's Wild War Game

If you want to understand where we are at this moment in Trump’s second administration, all you have to do is look at that picture of Marco Rubio wearing a pair of oversized Florsheim shoes. This footwear, the WSJ revealed, is Trump’s go-to gift for members of his inner circle, to whom he wishes to show approbation. He determines the shoe size by rough instinct and, 24 hours later, a pair of $145 leather oxfords, the proud badge of political servility, arrives.

Size matters: Secretary of State Marco Rubio wearing his too big Florsheims.

We are in Uganda’s Idi Amin territory now. I dream of the cabinet meeting when Trump is finally pelted with Florsheims, like that glorious moment in 2008 when the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference with Iraqi puppet PM al-Maliki in Baghdad. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, dog!” shouted Muntadhar, before he was wrestled to the ground and thrown into jail. (“I don’t know what his beef is,” commented Bush, who lacked imagination at the best of times.)

The unsettling thing is, we are all wearing Florsheims now. Not because we lack raucous expressions of dissent at the manner in which America lurched into a war of choice with Iran, but because we all keep pretending there is a functioning alternative reality in which norms, policy, think tanks, and geopolitical game plans still play their traditional roles. Pundits speak sonorously about “regime modification” (shorthand for a next-gen, turban-charged Islamic republic) and the “extension of presidential power,” as if this were the long-ago world of institutional gravitas and coequal branches of government, instead of an inescapable escape room, in which we are trapped with a berserk brontosaurus peddling vehement ignorance.

(credit: The White House via X Account/Handout)

We nod away as former military brass with their flat procedural voices outline the latest wheeze from the White House about special ops forces extracting canisters of enriched uranium from the rubble of Iran’s nuclear facilities without getting blown up. The sudden notion of resurgent Kurds has already come and gone from the news cycle. Trump, who hasn’t even flown commercial since circa 1988, is contemptuous of mariners and shipping companies who are hesitant to set sail on the perilous Strait of Hormuz, now seething with mines and drones. “These ships should go through…and show some guts. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Trump bloviated to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade on the phone, not long before three international cargo ships were hit by fiery Iranian projectiles. The truth is Trump’s Iran high is already wearing off. He all but yawned to reporters on Monday, “We want a system that can lead to many years of peace, and if we can’t have that, we might as well get it over with right now.” On to Cuba.

Jus’ the Facts

Didn’t MAGA vote for Trump to end foreign “forever” wars? Yes, but Iran has been marketed to them as a series of hot-shit video game explosions. Still, no one likes this war. Just as no one likes the excesses of ICE. And no one likes the price of coffee and beef. But it’s only MS NOW hosts who think Trump is in a panic about his underwater polling. The Dems are betting that MAGA will soon demand a reckoning for his broken promises, but all the evidence is that Trump doesn’t care. “MAGA loves everything I do,” he told House Republicans at a retreat this week at his Doral golf resort. “MAGA is me.” It’s lonely being king. Trump is now more insulated than his L’état, c’est moi predecessor, Louis XIV. When social media feeds provide your very own bespoke bullshit, it’s almost impossible to be educated by the truth. Thank God for the rigor of NYT and other journalists who combed through surveillance videos of the girls’ school bombing in southern Iran. After Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who looks more like a mendacious milkmaid every day, insisted that it was “propaganda” that the U.S. may be responsible, these digital sloggers revealed the gutting evidence.

Straight shooter: Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine

Meanwhile, America’s deluded hope that someone in the White House has an explicable plan is a form of national self-soothing. My own personal teething ring is General Dan “stay-in-my-own-lane” Caine’s regular briefings. There was an unexpectedly lyrical moment in Tuesday’s update when the Joint Chiefs’ chair departed from his dry military-speak to conjure up the reality of this war in the person of young, yellow-shirted sailors on the flight decks of aircraft carriers in the Gulf region. Beside him, the pumped-up War Sec didn’t realize Caine’s words were a subtle demolition of Hegseth’s manufactured machismo and the dangerous chimera of a push-button war.

“Just for a minute, imagine you’re standing on that aircraft carrier flight deck,” said Caine. “There’s 30 knots of wind in your face. The deck is slippery, covered in grease. It’s noisy. There are propellers spinning. There’s jet blast everywhere. The helicopters are running. Your head is on a swivel and you’re trying to direct a multi-million dollar fighter into a one-foot square box so that those naval aviators can be shot off into the black of night to go do America’s work.”

America’s work. Remember that?