Trump faces a ‘personal Vietnam’ in Iran | Sidney Blumenthal

Donald Trump is lost in his fog of war. He compounds confusion with improvised fabrications as his naive expectation of a lightning victory has been sunk in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, he felt certain, would easily follow the “perfect scenario” of Venezuela, accede to naming a leader who would instantly do his bidding, and there would be no disruption of the oil markets – “a strong game plan”, stated Karoline Leavitt, his White House press secretary, who defends each of his changeable excuses with equal ferocity.

There may be few if any facts underlying the delusions upon which Trump constructs his vapid explanations and evanescent strategies. The belief that coherent sense can be made out of Trump’s shuffling words is a weakness of the rational mind that refuses to accept the impulses of the inveterate demagogue for what they are. Searching for reason in the jungle of Trump’s tales may compel hopelessly sensible people to superimpose logic where there is none in order to satisfy the need for some semblance of soundness.

Trump’s erratic efforts to reframe his rationale further expose his incompetence and unintelligibility, utterly predictable but now lethal on a global scale. His stream of sputtering remarks has, however, clearly established the ground that should be explored by congressional inquiries into the war’s origins, planning and conduct.

Trump is also at war with the English language. His war is not a war, he insists, but a “short-term excursion”, a semantic dodge to skirt congressional and international accountability. Then, when asked whether it’s an excursion or a war, he replied: “Well, it’s both. It’s an excursion that will keep us out of a war.” His rhetorical legerdemain is the equivalent of René Magritte’s painting of a pipe with the caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” – “This is not a pipe.” The title Magritte gave to his painting was The Treachery of Images. Orwell or Magritte? Propaganda or surrealism?

Trump has declared he will force “regime change” or negotiate with some unnamed personage in the regime who happens to have been recently killed. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said. Trump demands “unconditional surrender” or he declares the war “very complete” after an hour-long conversation with Vladimir Putin, after Putin pledged “unwavering support” to the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khomeini, the 56-year-old son of the assassinated 86-year-old supreme leader, about whose ascension Trump said he was “not happy” and called him a “lightweight”.

On 3 March, Trump refuted the reason secretary of state Marco Rubio gave for why Trump launched the war. Rubio explained that the US expected Israel would stage a preemptive attack and that Iran would attack “American forces”. According to Rubio’s logic, which might have some truth: “There absolutely was an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us.” If true, though, it was Israel that triggered the “imminent threat” and Bibi Netanyahu who manipulated Trump into war. Rubio appears like a contestant in “The Apprentice Goes To War,” in his guessing game in quest of an answer.

But Trump dismissed Rubio’s account: “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he said. Trump claimed that he was the one who triggered the sequence of the “imminent threat”. But the Pentagon briefed congressional staffers that there was no intelligence at all about an “imminent threat”.

Then, Trump tweeted that he had been rushed to judgment. “Based on what Steve [Witkoff] and Jared [Kushner] and Pete [Hegseth] and others were telling me, Marco is so involved, I thought they were going to attack us.” Here Trump seemed to be supporting an element of Rubio’s account, which he had previously brushed aside. “The Apprentice Goes To War” moves on to the championship round.

The “excursion” is ending “very soon”, according to Trump, or as defense secretary Pete Hegseth said, “only just the beginning” or “both”, according to Trump when questioned at a press conference on 9 March. “I have a plan for everything,” Trump boasted to the New York Post earlier that day in response to surging oil prices. “You’ll be very happy.” But he fought the gas pump and the gas pump is winning. Grappling to explain his ultimate war aim, Trump said on 9 March to House Republicans: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” One of the most unpopular presidents of the century is attempting to restore his popularity with an unpopular war. Winning is the object constantly receding over the horizon that cannot be seen through the black clouds of acid rain over Tehran.

The Trump White House is the first in history to define a war’s purpose as achieving the ecstatic sensation of playing a simulated war video game. Trump’s little shop of horrors, his communications department, has produced a mash-up of clips from action movies, cartoons, football games and images of real bombings of Iran mixed with false images from the Halo video game. These official presidential videos represent the distilled essence of Maga incel culture. The only woman depicted is Lois Lane, silently gazing up at Superman. With a little AI tweak, the communications department geniuses could put Lois in an apron carrying a tuna fish casserole.

Trump escaped from serving in the Vietnam war by claiming he had bone spurs. Avoiding getting a sexually transmitted disease, he told Howard Stern on his radio show, “is my personal Vietnam”. He described women as “landmines”. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” He told Stern: “You know, if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam – it’s called the dating game ... Dating is like being in Vietnam.”

The survivor of “the dating game” is clueless that there is now no “light at the end of the tunnel”, a phrase Gen William Westmoreland, the US commander in Vietnam, conceived to express his optimism about the war in 1967. In Trump’s Iran war, he faces a real “personal Vietnam”. His “credibility gap”, which bedeviled president Lyndon Johnson, is a chasm. He is stuck in a quagmire. His goals are elusive. His bombing does not force a surrender. The adversary has proved resilient. He has alienated our allies. He is creating a humanitarian disaster. He is generating economic insolvency. He has no exit strategy. Good morning, Vietnam.

After the Senate voted down a War Powers Resolution mainly along party lines on 4 March, a group of Senate Democrats declared their intention to hold up Senate business on the floor until Hegseth, Rubio and others testify on the war before the armed services and foreign relations committees. If the Republican controlled Senate leadership were to agree, the hearings would create a public forum for raising crucial questions. If the Democrats were to gain control of the House or Senate, they could run a continuing series of hearings.

Those potential hearings would resemble the first hearings on the Vietnam war. In February 1966, senator J William Fulbright, who had been an ally of president Lyndon Johnson, broke with him over Vietnam. As chair of the foreign relations committee, he had supported the Tonkin Bay Resolution in 1964 authorizing US military action without having a formal declaration of war, but became disillusioned as the conflict escalated into a full-scale war.

The Fulbright hearings exposed the “credibility gap” between the administration’s demands for more troops and the facts about past claims that had been made in favor of escalation. Within four weeks, Johnson’s approval rating for his handling of the war plummeted from 63% to 49%. An enraged president ordered FBI director J Edgar Hoover to investigate Fulbright as “either a communist agent or a dupe of the communists”.

Fulbright elaborated his critique in a book entitled The Arrogance of Power, which he defined as “the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission”.

He did not believe that “greatness” was proven by demonstrations of belligerence. “I do not think that America’s greatness is questioned in the world, and I certainly do not think that strident behavior is the best way for a nation to prove its greatness. Indeed, in nations as in individuals bellicosity is a mark of weakness and self-doubt rather than of strength and self-assurance.”

But Fulbright went unheeded on the Vietnam war. It would destroy Johnson’s presidency and ruin the presidential hopes of Hubert Humphrey. Fulbright had a premonition of the coming of Richard Nixon, cautioning that “without prospect of victory or negotiated peace … hopes will give rise to fears, and tolerance and freedom of discussion will give way to a false and strident patriotism.” Fulbright had in mind “the McCarthy hysteria” and the dangers of its recrudescence in a curdled war.

Nixon campaigned in 1968 to end the Vietnam War, suggesting a secret plan, “Peace With Honor”, but his agents subverted Johnson’s peace negotiations in order to tilt the election. Nixon dramatically extended the war with the heaviest bombing since the second world war not only of Vietnam but also of Cambodia and Laos.

He called antiwar protesters “bums” and invoked a patriotic “silent majority”. When the Washington Post and New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, he attempted to suppress them. In response, he created a clandestine group called “the Plumbers”, ostensibly to plug leaks, but who were arrested breaking in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Nixon’s paranoia ran as a continuous thread from Vietnam to Watergate, from the war to domestic politics.

On 11 March, Trump traveled to Kentucky to stage his packaged rally with YMCA blaring and bused-in supporters to whip up enthusiasm for his war and a Maga primary challenger to representative Thomas Massie, who is a principal proponent of opening the Epstein files. On the war, Trump declared victory. “You know, you never want to say too early you won. We won. The first hour, it was over.” We are now apparently in the part of war that is an excursion to the aftermath, or both.

Then, Trump swiveled to attack Massie. “He is disloyal to the Republican party. He’s disloyal to the people of Kentucky. And most importantly – he is disloyal to the United States of America.” Disloyalty to Trump, according to Trump, is treason to the country. Trump did not specify whether Massie is a traitor because of his dissent on the war or the Epstein files, or both.

• Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist