What we see now from Trump and the White House is not so much government as a bizarre mess of lies, baseless assertions and toddler-like outbursts.
Yesterday, the bizarrely energised secretary of war Pete Hegseth addressed a room of journalists, one of whom brought up the fact that six American service personnel had been killed in an Iranian drone strike.
In response, Hegseth said this: “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen it’s front page news.
“I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.”
It is hard to overstate the cynicism, the immaturity and the callousness of those remarks.
But it also shows that the inner circle responsible for starting and overseeing this war are completely out of touch with US public opinion. Polls show that an overwhelming majority – almost 60% – of the American public do not like Trump’s war in Iran. Hegseth seemed to have no sense of this unpopularity, and he made no attempt to explain or justify the war. The central message of his astoundingly weird performance seemed to be that the American public should just suck it up.
And then came something even more unsettling and bizarre. Several hours after Hegseth’s deranged press conference, the official White House Twitter feed put out a video, titled: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”.
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Over a rousing techno soundtrack, the video is a montage of movie clips from Braveheart, Top Gun, Transformers and others, inter-cut with what appears to be genuine footage of US strikes on Iranian targets, all of it marked “declassified”. The film ends with a robotic voice predicting “flawless victory”, over an image of a darkened White House.
It is ludicrous, bizarre and horrifying. It is not a message of government. It is a message of entertainment: this war is not a real war, it says.
Not the kind of war where real people really die. Instead, it’s more like the kind of war that you see in the movies, of flashy equipment, huge explosions and where the good guys – ie the Americans – always win.
It is, in other words, a piece of propaganda – but one made by idiots, to sell an idiotic war, in the hope that people will happily fall for the idiocy.
What Hegseth’s startling performance and this gruesome video both ignore, but cannot conceal, is that there is no explanation for the Iran war. There is no logic, no strategy, no clever-clever game of four-dimensional chess being played. Nothing.
There is simply a large white neo-classical building in Washington DC flanked by a demolished ballroom, filled with people who do not know what they are doing, and led by a man who appears to have gone to war because he likes smashing things up – just as he smashed up that ballroom.
No amount of shouting at the press or idiotic Twitter video montages can obscure that fact.
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