“Let me say, we’ve won,” he told a rally in Kentucky on 11 March. “I think we’ve won,” he said on the White House south lawn on 20 March. “We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” he said in the Oval Office on 24 March. “We are winning so big,” he promised a fundraising dinner on 25 March.
Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so. While the US president insists that his military campaign in the Middle East is a historic success, the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy.
The war is turning into the ultimate test of an operating principle that has guided Trump for decades: construct a narrative, declare it to be true and relentlessly force the world to submit to it. It has proved effective in Manhattan boardrooms, on reality television and even at the heart of power in Washington.
But in Iran, Trump’s unique brand of “truthful hyperbole” has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into a brick wall.
“This is war and you can’t just will a win into existence in war,” said Tara Setmayer, cofounder of the Seneca Project, a women-led political action committee. “The American people are not on board with what’s going on because he cannot articulate an argument for why we’re there or what victory actually looks like.”
What happens when an unstoppable idiot collides with an immovable reality?
Trump invented Schrödinger’s War: it is at the same time conclusively won, and he needs $200 billion to continue. The Iranians have no military capabilities left, but at the same time they have to open the Strait of Hormuz. And for all of you bitching about the gas prices: just buy fewer pencils, that will do the trick.
Something Something …
Enemy is both strong and weak …
Something…
I thought i heard something similar, just can’t place it.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
I can’t believe it. He was right, in this age of post meaning, where words have none, I really am tired of ‘winning’. All this ‘winning’ we’ve been doing over the last year has been fucking exhausting.
(Note, in this case ‘winning’ really means the shit slop of evil, failure, and pain being inflicted on minorities, the rest of the world, children, really anyone except billionaires)
Turns out it’s all a misunderstanding. When people ask about the war, he’s not saying “we have won”, but instead “we have one”. Of course
