The U.S. president has lost the war he started with Iran — or at the very least he has no chance of winning it — but accepting defeat and repairing the damage of the error is simply beyond his reach.
President Donald Trump at a Turning Point USA event at Dream City Church in Phoenix in April. (White House/Daniel Torok)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
You have to hand it to Sara Jacobs, the California Democrat and the youngest member of the Golden State’s House delegation.
She has an O.K.–plus voting record — at least by Capitol Hill standards — as a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, but this is not why you have to hand it to Sara Jacobs.
You have to hand it to Sara Jacobs because she has just forced the question of Donald Trump’s lapsing sanity into an open debate in the U.S. Congress.
Jacobs accomplished this during the very heated grilling of Pete Hegseth during his testimony in Armed Services hearings on Wednesday.
The defense secretary was a belligerently incoherent mess, but we already knew he was a hopeless Dummkopf, and his appearance on the Hill — his first since the U.S.–Israeli attacks on Iran began Feb. 28 — is merely par for his course.
Jacobs stole the show with her opening question when her time came. Here is a video of her five minutes with the microphone, and here is the query that may find some small place in the annals of the Trump II regime when they are written:
“Mr. Secretary, you are with the president a lot, and it pains me even to have to ask this about our president, but my constituents’ lives are at stake: Do you believe the president is mentally stable enough to be the commander-in-chief?”
Sara Jacobs, you go girl.
I asked Secretary Hegseth a straightforward, yes or no question today: Is Donald Trump mentally stable enough to be Commander in Chief?
He didn’t say yes. And that speaks volumes. pic.twitter.com/ncWhEBAX9r
— Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (@RepSaraJacobs) April 29, 2026
The Trumpster’s mental instability — indeed, his relationship with reality — is much remarked upon these days.
Threatening to destroy one of humanity’s oldest civilizations, blowing his cool so badly his adjutants recently locked him out of the Situation Room so they could coherently discuss… the situation; “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” and so on: It reaches the point where there is a better-than-even chance America’s rotund leader will not make it to the end of his term.
I see little chance of it, honestly.
And Sara Jacobs just pushed open the door, slightly ajar at this early moment, to 25th Amendment proceedings. O.K., she’s a Democrat in a GOP–controlled House, but there are now Republicans sporting beads of sweat over Trump’s failing sanity, and, in any case, they may not have a House majority come the midterm elections.
And here’s the thing. Donald J. Trump — setting aside clinical symptoms unrelated to the global calamity he has set in motion — has very good reasons, two of them, to lose his mind.
One has to do with American ideology and the other with Israel. It is important to know this because whoever succeeds Trump will be similarly taxed to stay compos mentis.
Trump is trapped. And whoever follows him will be trapped, too.
The Imperium’s Sunset Phase
Hegseth before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. (C-Span)
It is not a good time, to put this point differently, to be president of these United States.
This was bound to be the case, I should add, once the imperium entered its sunset phase — which began, as I have argued severally in this space, on Sept. 11, 2001. And as many have remarked, if the Iran crisis forces one truth on Americans above all others, it is that the sun is going down even more swiftly than anyone could have anticipated.
Of the two reasons the Trumpster is discernibly slipping his grip, the first has to do with America’s exceptionalist ideology. America cannot lose in its confrontation with Iran for the simple reason America cannot lose anything. Defeats, reversals, failures — history altogether — are what befall other nations, never the United States.
This imperative, a function of a collective neurosis now four centuries old, cancels all possibility of a leader or leaders setting a wise, imaginative, even modestly courageous new course into the 21st century. Join me in counting this the essential tragedy of our fading republic.
Think of it. Fifty-one years after the rise of Saigon (as I insist we consider it), the United States has yet officially to acknowledge it lost the Vietnam war to the Vietnamese people. Officially, Washington still nurses the “peace with honor” delusion.
This is what I mean by Trump’s trap. He has lost the war he started with Iran — or at the very least he has no chance of winning it — but accepting defeat and repairing the damage of the error is simply beyond his reach. It is irrational, an ideological blocage, but the “American experiment” (curious phrase) has never been a rational proposition.
At the moment, DJT must listen to various military options to continue the Iran campaign, one more cockeyed than the next, while squirming in desperation to get out of it.
So does he descend into fabrications, fantasies and, let’s just say it, other symptoms of clinical psychosis — taking Hegseth and the rest of his cabinet with him as he watches the war he cannot win — but cannot lose — disrupt the global economy to the point that it drifts toward a depression which could match or exceed 1929.
Conversations & Questions
The New York Times building. (Ermell, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
I have to note some interesting conversations bearing on the trap wherein Trump finds himself.
“The United States can accept some degree of geopolitical embarrassment as the price of ending our war with Iran, without that embarrassment being an era-defining debacle or inflection point.” This is Ross Douthat, the thinking man’s conservative, making his case for a rational way forward in an April 21 column in The New York Times.
A couple of questions arise. Ross, do you honestly think the Trump regime can accept the humiliation and loss of credibility attaching to any retreat from the Iran debacle? I don’t.
It would be a fine thing for America to accept that it has embarrassed itself before the world — a big step toward becoming “a normal nation” — but history is persuasive on this point. There is also America’s “civil religion” to think about. It remains far too strong to permit of any such acceptance.
Second question, in two parts. Were the United States wise and brave enough to accept some “geopolitical embarrassment,” how could it be other than “era-defining?”
And what under the sun is wrong with defining an era in this way? If America and the rest of the world need one thing more than any other, it is a humbler, post-hubristic, post-hegemonic American republic.
I need to hear why Ross Douthat proposes the embarrassment but wants the present “era” to remain intact.
Ben Rhodes is a curious figure. He served in the Obama administration as a consent-manufacturing propagandist but seemed aware his work was as insidious as it gets even as he got it done. Rhodes now writes opinion at the Times and has recently published an interesting piece on Graham Platner after traveling through Maine with the Down East oysterman running for a Senate seat as a left Democrat.
This is an important piece. (And I accept Rhodes’s apology for his errant past). His conversations with Platner, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, ranged widely as they drove along in Platner’s pickup truck, but Rhodes, at heart a foreign policy man, is interested primarily in Platner’s “radical honesty” as to the imperium’s incessant violence in the post–Sept. 11 years and mainstream Democrats’ abject refusal to stand against it.
On the past 25 years of the Pentagon’s invasions and interventions:
“The core of his message [Platner’s] is an unflinching disgust for the forever war we have waged since 9/11. ‘Nobody is going to be able to convince me that what I did in Iraq and Afghanistan did anything for the people of Sullivan, Maine,’ he told me, punctuating his point with an obscenity. ‘I don’t want other young Americans to go through what I’ve been through. And I don’t want to send other young Americans to inflict the horror that I had to inflict on people.’”
On the Democrats’ limp-wristed objections as Iran joins the list of forever wars while they vote consistently for bloated defense budgets and implicitly reaffirm the late-phase imperium’s reigning ideology:
“All this undercuts Democrats’ ability to credibly argue for a fundamental shift in the nation’s priorities. … The absurdity of these priorities makes Washington feel distant and obtuse, an imperial capital cloistered from its subjects with National Guard troops patrolling the city.
‘Here in the real world, most people get it,’ Mr. Platner says of his campaign events. ‘Do you think this country should spend more on schools and hospitals and less on bombs? A lot of people are like, yeah, that’s pretty obvious.’”
On the current impasse in Washington:
“’If the Democratic Party is to flourish in the future,’ Mr. Platner told me, ‘it needs to be an antiwar party.’ As talks to end the latest disastrous war focus on reopening a narrow strait of water that was open before the war began, this seems like an obvious conclusion. And yet many Democratic politicians would most likely be wary of embracing it.”
In effect, Rhodes via Platner makes the case for a fundamental renovation of American foreign policy — a turn toward 21st century realities, chief among these the end of U.S. preeminence and the arrival of a multipolar order. Platner’s voice is to be altogether welcomed for this.
Is such a turn possible — and possible via the Democratic Party, as both Rhodes and Platner implicitly propose? This is our question.
And I simply don’t see it. The trap that springs on Donald Trump as we speak will spring again and again until the trap itself is destroyed.
Despite a 40-point lead, Maine Senate candidate @grahamformaine says he hasn’t heard from DNC leadership. #theweeklyshow #jonstewart #politics pic.twitter.com/VzZPAVbmMc
— The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (@weeklyshowpod) April 29, 2026
After Gov. Janet Mills’ withdrawal from the primary race, Platner, now the Democratic Party presumptive nominee, is looking ahead to the general election.
Drop Site News, in an excellent piece published April 28, reports that billionaire donors — all of them from out of state — are spending multiple millions of dollars via a super PAC in support of Susan Collins, the doddering Republican incumbent Platner is at the moment projected to unseat.
This is how the trap often springs.
Zionist Billionaire Influence
During their apparently extended road trip neither Rhodes nor Platner seems to have mentioned the Israel lobbies and the political power exerted by wealthy American Zionists. They should have.
Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), Paul Singer (Elliott Management), Alex Karp (Palantir): These are the billionaires now spending big to destroy Platner’s bid for a seat in the Senate. They are militant Zionists to a one.
A new true thing: It no longer makes any sense to discuss American politics without reference to the pernicious influence of Zionists over policy and the political process policy is supposed to reflect. New and true, in any case, since the Israelis’ post–Oct. 7 terror has brought “the Jewish state” in for near-universal condemnation.
There is no saying how Graham Platner will fare against the Zionist donors now ganging up against him. But it is perfectly plain that the trap Israel and its many American allies set for Donald Trump is the second reason he seems to be losing his mind at an accelerated pace since Bibi Netanyahu railroaded him into the war against the Islamic Republic.
Ross Douthat, in the aforementioned Times opinion piece, makes this observation in his second paragraph:
“A different question, though, is whether this war will be remembered as an inflection point for Israel in its relationship with the United States.”
Douthat, while professing mild reservations about the Israelis’ various terror campaigns, does not think the Iran mess will go down at all in this way. He does not, in any case want to see any such “inflection point” in the U.S.–Israel relationship.
It is dreadful to think Ross Douthat will get his way on this point, but the Trumpster’s predicament suggests he will.
The Israelis face DJT with the worst possible choice so long as he remains within the reigning orthodoxy, as certainly he will: He can either turn against the Israelis and risk the damage, almost certainly fatal, the Zionists will wreak on his regime (and him personally, given what is almost certainly in the Epstein files), or he can continue to oblige these vicious people as they keep the war going — wars at this point — and the global economy descends into havoc.
I have long wondered — in my mind, not in print — whether the truth of any given age is radical. It certainly is so in ours. The only way out for whomever leads our crumbling republic is a radical, “era-defining” admission of defeat in the Iran war and a radical, “era-defining” rejection of the Zionist regime.
These would be excellent prospects ware either even remotely possible. The sun would shine at the end of both these roads. But America no longer avails of excellent prospects. The sun must first set on the imperium if it is ever to rise again.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
So Trump is losing this war or will lose it – like Ukraine which lost the war 2 or more years ago as many said as well as ‘Russia has won’.
Has that happened?
Paul, you write that “I accept Rhodes’s apology for his errant past.”
I wonder how the victims and survivors of Obama’s (for that is who Rhodes protracted himself before) feel about the entire Obama ‘team,’ and how willing they are to forgive the president who advocated ‘hope’ and ‘change’ while escalating the wars initiated by his predecessor?
‘Team’ – a horrible metaphor at the best of times – that is probably appropriate; for how many US administrations treat the lives of others (US citizens & nonUS people) as a sport.
Back in the day when Jimmy Carter talked about the malaise afflicting the US, it felt to me like people were re-examining their understanding of what this country stands for after the disastrous genocidal war on Southest Asia. That was a healthy response to what we had been through.
Along came Reagan with his classic alcoholic family upbringing of denial of the family’s illness. We were still “The Shining City on the Hill” compared to the evil “enemies” of democracy. The invitation to party and make gobs of money any way that you can proved too irresistible to a majority of the voters. They fell into the trap with wild abandon. If we had only resisted that invitation and continued to examine our ethics and morals as a country, we might not be in this near impossible situation now.
Still waiting for the real grownups to enter the scene and boot these pretenders and charlatans out of power for good.
I sure appreciate your comment Lois Gagnon. You know the difference in outcomes between reckoning with one’s shadow (personal, collective) and its denial, classically modeled by Reagan’s (alcoholic) be cheery persona. The result of the latter is exquisitely manifested in the blowhard character of our leader in office and those surrounding him all of whom mirror his essential rootlessness (cluelessness?).
Remember, the genocidal zionists wanted the war with Iran for decades. Even Nixon was tired of them telling him what to do! This is the zionists war and the US, beholden to AIPAC, Street and their ilk will get the US to do its bidding again.
If we’re being honest, Hegseth’s reply to the Trump mental stability question was perfectly legit in the partisan corrupt world of DC politics. Who would deny the fact that the dems ignored Biden’s severe mental decline? Sarah Jacob’s is a partisan hack, and she would not have the Armed Services or Foreign Affairs positions she holds without her allegiance to the very zionists Mr. Lawrence so astutely mentions. Hegseth is a younger version of Trump, in your face, evil to the core, and wrapped in biblical falsehood.
My heart goes out to journalists and others whose job necessitates they listen to the belligerent braying of idiots like Pete Hegseth or any of the other hostile, incompetent buffoons who pass for leadership in the U.S. these days. I personally cannot tolerate their self-righteous gibberish for more than 30 seconds max.
Compared to the brilliant strategists, scholars — even heart surgeons, poets — and diplomats handling the most consequential responsibilities in civilized countries across the global majority, U.S., EU — and Canadian, despite the widely lauded because he is totally misunderstood debt peddler and militarist known as Prime Minister “Values” Goldman Sachs — the U.S.-led Western hegemon is a toxic, genocidal joke.
hxxps://radiobill.ca/Content/BlocPoliticsDisguisedAsMultilateralism.html
tRump has surrounded himself with sycophants.
They all do it. They love having their egos stroked.
Is he unhinged?
Tis a prerequisite for the job.
In her closing words, Sara Jacobs’ cutting suggestion that Hegseth be replaced – straight to his face – was good timing and delivery. A powerful punch line – right to the jaw. He had no chance.
Even if Platner becomes the next senator from Maine, it is likely that he will be neutered by the Democratic leadership in that chamber. Chuck Schumer is a troglodyte who works tirelessly to keep the Democratic Party in the corporatist, pro-Israel center. Most of the Democratic caucus is just fine with that, as they are happy to accept money from corporations and corporate PACs as well as from Israel loyalists. Money in politics is the single biggest problem facing what’s left of our democracy. .
American exceptionalism is not just an R conceit. Notice “the U.S.has yet to acknowledge it lost the Vietnam war.” David Halberstam had it right in his book /The Best and the Brightest/ on that war and the imperiousness of its designers, the Ivy D elite. The same who later dumped the New Deal, abandoned the majority working class, and became, like the Rs, neolib and neocon. The difference is they’re articulate, smooth, and mesh well with their Euro equivalents. A Harvard grad friend told me from day one they’re taught they’re the best and everyone wants to be them. So Ds and Rs have in common the Ivy certainty of their own superiority. Hegseth has a Princeton BA and a Harvard MPP.
Why would the D elite listen to us lessers whom Yale grad HRC characterized as “a basket of deplorables” simply because they’re losing elections? Just explain it away as “stupid” voters. Remain comfortable with an econopathic system producing 40 years of suffering in places like the Rust Belt and its deaths of despair. Places once solidly D voting. Continue those forever wars to enforce economic empire. Then when challenged in primaries by some nobody who dares to tell the truth, engage in character assassination and pull in big $$$ from Ivy grad (or equivalent) Zionists.
The planet is being turned into a baked, smoldering ruin by the arrogant few certain it’s their plaything. Who believe they will buy their way out of any future problems as they’ve done for centuries.
Why should the USA not be subject to life’s essential dynamic? That is the birth life-death-birth …cycle? Those super materialists (billionaires) probably are incapable of recognizing this except in the most superficial way because of their likely God complex. Imagine the ego inflation of the three billionaires cited in this piece. To be utterly convinced they control the world – individually or together. Consider the condition of the people of the world’s survival instinct to allow one or three human beings power over their particular and or collective death and life? In this context it is interesting to compare two countries with two different economic systems USA/Israel and China. Controlling for difference in population size, which has improved the material lot of their citizens the most in the shortest time?
Oh, Mr. Lawrence, if only you could advise the president. You could let him know that the rock and the hard place aren’t the only options. There is also the truth. However, the truth entails consequences and there is one consequence you did not mention–assassination. The Israelis have proven to be a vicious people. Perhaps the attempts were just reminders. Is there anyone brave enough to fall on their sword to save humanity?
My grandmother’s name was Sarah (with an “H”) Jacobs. This young woman makes me proud. Very well prepared and steadfast against “Mr. Secretary’s” bombast. He is clearly close to the same level of mental disability as the trumpster. Patrick lays out the issues clearly: our own ideology and its bondage to the Zionists. I don’t see a way out either.
“The Israelis face DJT with the worst possible choice so long as he remains within the reigning orthodoxy, as certainly he will: He can either turn against the Israelis and risk the damage, almost certainly fatal, the Zionists will wreak on his regime (and him personally, given what is almost certainly in the Epstein files),”
IMHO, the problem is not existing or not existing files or videos, because deploying them is a double-edge sword, Israel will not look good revealing such a collection. After all, as Israel sinks deeper in Messianic inhuman ideology, Exodus, Conquest, divine command of exterminating Amalek etc, its image is deteriorating already. The problem is how deeply the command to support Israel spread among both parties and billionaire class (not just Jews, unfortunately). It is not easy to overcome the collective mentality.
I watched a glimpse of an interview with Wendy Sherman, perhaps as well meaning liberal as one can find in government elite, instrumental in formulating and concluding JCPOA. “It is essential that Israel remains our ally. But [atrocities that we should not tolerate etc]”. Why essential? This is the axiom that pushed Biden Administration at a disastrous course, not ENTIRELY composed of committed Zionists like Blinken.
“Israel will not look good revealing such a collection.” Anonymous leak that Israel would deny even if everyone knows who leaked it. Lots of people want the unredacted files and videos to be released. It would be a service.
The true goal of the Iran war is to cut oil exports to China. The USA is a net fossil fuel exporter so a rise in oil prices on will hurt the USA less than it will China. That’s why the USA is causing a depression. The USA is a net food exporter which is why the USA causing a global famine. The deaths will weaken other nations.
Funny that everyone in the media thinks we lost the war.
The war’s objectives were to help Israel and weaken China/ India. Are you and I the only people seeing that the US is blockading China and India’s oil?
I’m actually impressed that the Trump administration isn’t bragging that they’ve won, because they’ve accomplished their objectives perfectly and skillfully. How else could the USA have a military blockade of Hormuz in plain sight and have no objection from China.
I’m surprised China/ India don’t see this as an act of war against them; we must be that intimidating.
It is a shame that we elected a man with mental and emotional problems. But it is even more shameful that supposedly sane officials will not remove him from office when he is obviously harming our country.
It’s undeniable that “we elected a man with mental and emotional problems,” but really, what choice did we have? Our “system” guaranteed that the only permitted alternatives were either Biden or Harris, and the latter made clear that there was no “daylight” between her and Biden. IOW, both unapologetically represented a policy of total US support for Israel’s ongoing genocide.
So American “democracy” served up a choice between electing a pro-genocide candidate, or electing Trump — who was not only pro-genocide, but also had a long list of well-known personality & character disorders. You could argue that Harris was perhaps marginally “less evil,” but that still wasn’t much of a choice.
Does Lawrence actually get what this con artist extraordinaire and his ilk’s intentions are?
It has not a thing to do with the betterment of the overall population, more to do with fleecing it of its riches and resources while lining his and their pockets.
That he has come this far unimpeded is the fact that he has never been held to account by the very system he now heads.
Freedom of opinion!
The best solution is the END of the USA!
Break it up into several, less criminal, less dangerous, beter governed, more democratic smaller nations
Isn’t this precisely what the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France, with Russian approval (the Imperial Powers of the time), to divide the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories into spheres of influence during World War I succeeded in bringing about in the Levant and Southwestern Peninsula for the purpose of regaining control over the entire Middle East, specifically targeting Ottoman lands, following that war?
Isn’t this precisely what the hegemon of the day and its lackey are attempting to reestablish with the war against Iran, in order to once again have unilateral control over all the natural resources of the area, and beyond for the European elites of all denominations?
Re Trumps’s sanity, I recently saw an article header (that I didn’t pursue) titled “Trump declares victory – hopes Iranians will die laughing.”
That pretty much defines anything Jesus-wearing-a-toupee says nowadays.
Mr Hegseth looks dapper in the photo. If only his professional performance matched his ability to dress neatly!
(Although… is he a professional? If so, a professional what?)