Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann
Donald Trump may be about to escalate to an apocalyptic war to stay out of prison, and Benjamin Netanyahu may help him for the same reason.
As Alexander Willis wrote this morning for Raw Story:
“Panic spread late Sunday as a prominent conservative figure with deep ties to the Donald Trump administration warned that the president is just days away from deciding whether to use nuclear weapons in his deeply unpopular war against Iran.”
Three weeks ago I speculated here about Trump’s willingness to provoke a 9/11-style attack against America from Iran after he publicly speculated about letting them “take out” LA and San Diego.
So far, Iran hasn’t taken the bait, so now the question is whether Trump’s about to do something (to prevent victorious Democrats from being seated in Congress in January) that’s so dramatic that the Iranians will feel they have no option but to respond against America in an overwhelming way.
Keep in mind what this man has done before. Senator Tommy Tuberville called him on the afternoon of the 6th to tell Trump that the Secret Service had just pulled Vice President Mike Pence off the Senate floor. Trump was watching the mob on TV and decided to amp up the pressure on Pence—or get him out of the way—by tweeting at 2:24 pm that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
There was a gallows on the lawn outside and the crowd was chanting for his vice president’s hanging. Two witnesses told the January 6 Committee that Mark Meadows walked out of that dining room and told colleagues Trump had, as Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney described for Politico, “expressed support for hanging his vice president.”
In response, Pence’s own security detail began making goodbye calls to their families, fully expecting to die at the mob’s hands (as five police officers did). Trump did and said nothing to reassure them; he’s already proven to us and the world that he’ll do anything to hold onto power.
And the stakes for him now are wildly higher than they were then.
“You got to win the midterms,” he told House Republicans in January. “They’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”
And while the media doesn’t like to discuss it, Trump knows that the consequence of impeachment is much worse for him today than it was back then; if he’s impeached now, there’s a good chance he’ll end up in prison in a way that President Vance can’t stop with a pardon or clemency.
He’s been convicted of 34 felonies—imprisonable offenses—by a jury in New York state, which is beyond the reach of a federal pardon, and he hasn’t yet been sentenced because the process froze when he was elected president.
Not only that, there’s also the Epstein files, the crypto deals, the pardons sold, and the family’s foreign money—all things that weren’t on the table when he appears to have encouraged the murder of the Vice President of the United States.
The stakes are way higher now than they were then: in his mind, losing Congress and getting removed from office could be—like it was for his good friends Bolsonaro and Duterte, who are now both in prison—the end of his own personal freedom and the loss of his family’s wealth.
Add to that the things he’s done in the past few weeks that suggest he’s up to something extraordinarily dangerous.
On October 15th, CNN reported that Trump has ordered the Pentagon to develop new strike packages against Iran that include the possible use of the GBU-43/B, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (MOAB, sometimes called the Mother Of All Bombs), the largest conventional weapon in the American arsenal.
Trump confirmed it the next night on Newsmax, saying he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons because “we don’t have to”; the MOAB will hit with the power of a tactical nuclear weapon. As one military expert noted, “its massive blast will destroy everything above ground within a 1km (0.6-mile) radius.”
Most interesting, the MOAB can’t take out the infamous Pickaxe Mountain complex because it’s too far underground. But bomb designed for an in-air-explosion could cause a smaller version of Hiroshima-like destruction if used against an Iranian city or military complex.
A Yale analyst told Forbes he could see no militarily justifiable use for it in Iran, only “sheer psychological effect and dramatic show of power.”
We’ve heard that phrase before, although there are few Americans still alive who remember it from the time; you’ll find it in our history books, though. It ended World War II.
In May 1945, President Truman’s Target Committee chose Hiroshima for the nuclear bomb because, they recorded in their minutes, psychological factors were “of great importance,” and that the first use should be “sufficiently spectacular” for the weapon’s importance to be recognized worldwide.
It worked, in large part because Japan had already been defeated. That’s very much not the case today with Iran, but nobody has ever accused Trump, Vance, or Hegseth of being students of history.
This past weekend, Iran’s leader Mojtaba Khamenei met with his three top commanders and ordered them to answer any renewed American or Israeli attack “without geographical limitations,” and to update Iran’s “target bank” so that every American asset—presumably including US cities—is “within the reach” of his forces. His commanders reported a severalfold increase in weapons production.
Khamenei is also a follower of the militant, apocalyptic end-times school of Mahdism that his father deliberately cultivated inside the Revolutionary Guard; like some Christian and Jewish end-timers, they think bringing about an Armageddon-style war will bring back to Earth their long-departed religious leader.
A guy who welcomes catastrophe isn’t somebody you should be trying to provoke with the MOAB; the essence of deterrence requires the other side to fear, not welcome, annihilation.
And Trump and his toadies in the Pentagon have to know that. Which is probably why at his Nebraska rally he mused that Iran might “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego and called it “a small price.”
Meanwhile, spreading like wildfire around the internet is the news that the Pentagon is developing a requirement that every major base in the continental United States be able to run for 90 days without civilian power, water, fuel or communications.
Ninety days takes us well past the January 3rd seating of the new Congress.
Then there’s the firing last Wednesday of Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, the director of the Joint Staff’s J5, the office that writes the war plans for the chairman and the president. The official excuse is that he failed a polygraph, but the Washington Post reports the case has stunned his colleagues, some of whom question the story Hegseth’s team is telling.
Any attack like this on Iran would have had to run through General Sylvia, who’d have veto power over such a crazy scheme. Because his predecessor was similarly removed by “Pretty Pete” Hegseth last year, there’s nobody in that position now and nobody to quickly move into it.
Let’s also not forget that this entire mess with Iran started with Benjamin Netanyahu, who just came through an election that saw neither him (53 seats) nor his opponent, Gadi Eisenkot (48 seats), gain the 61 votes needed in the Knesset to govern. He’s already claiming that the opposition “stole” the election, something rightwing wannabe dictators love to claim.
Al-Monitor’s sources are even blunter, saying Netanyahu could attack Iran after the vote here in America to force his rivals to form a wartime unity government with him. The Financial Times reported it’s “not an unreasonable scenario” that the Trump/Netanyahu war against Iran resumes after both countries’ elections. And Axios reported that Trump and Netanyahu had already discussed exactly such an operation by phone last month.
The danger here—beyond triggering WWIII—is that an attack by Iran could provide Trump with the pretext he wants to justify putting more troops in American cities, seizing ballots, claiming Democrats are “treasonous” (he’s already said this, repeatedly) and thus can’t be seated, and throwing the nation into chaos.
Raw Story documented last week that his followers are already calling for this exact scenario, with one host saying that if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act he should “unleash” the armed supporters he pardoned and tried to give a billion dollars to.
It could also justify his signing the 17-page draft executive order his allies have been circulating, which sources say he has reviewed, declaring a foreign-election-interference emergency like the one he previewed in his national speech on July 16th.
And it could discourage a sitting Congress—assuming we get that far—from impeaching a wartime president leading the country through recovery from a massive 9/11 style attack by Iran. It certainly worked that way for Netanyahu as a result of the October 7th attack by Hamas, and both Trump and Netanyahu know it.
So what those of us who haven’t yet voted do today and tomorrow matters more than it has at any time in our lifetimes. Get to the polls, and bring as many friends who are registered voters as you can.
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.
