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GELFAND’S WORLD - There’s never a dull moment with this president, but gosh, I’d sure like that dull moment. The thing is, all that chaos goes beyond merely tiresome and moves us towards exhaustion. Whether it is exhaustion of the body or of the spirit I’ll leave to you to decide, but it’s there. Within just a few days, we’ve gone through the usual Epstein questions. There was a threat against NATO ally Spain by the president himself, and we are now looking at the question as to whether Iran is the new Viet Nam.
I’ve chosen a few of these highlights as taken from the DailyKos website, just to supply one little snapshot into this year of 2026.
In good news, Kristi Noem was fired, even though she epitomizes everything about Trump and his vengeful sadism. In bad news, the rest of the incompetent sadists in the Trump cabinet were not fired. But the Noem affair might be a clue that this Trump term is starting to follow the lines of the first term in at least one way. We can expect firings and replacements in the cabinet for the next several years because Trump is allergic to hiring the best and the brightest (or the honest, for that matter). His appointees ultimately do something embarrassing to him and get shown the door.
But there’s one big difference: Things are a lot worse this time around, even in the absence of an epidemic. It’s the economy and the fascism and the newly-found militarism.
Here is another way to put it: A lot of chickens are coming home to roost. Those roosting birds include the job creation rate (suddenly going negative), continuing inflation over the past several months, and a new and sudden oil shock that is reminiscent of the 1970s.
Let me share one moment I experienced recently. I was dealing with a guy who repairs cars – not one of those lofty academic types who like to quote John Maynard Keynes at you, but a guy who works with his hands for money. And he referred directly to “that fool Trump.” In conversation, it became clear that this same guy listens to conservative sources so he gets exposed to all those excuses that the right wing trots out for their failures, but he wasn’t buying it. He even voted for Trump at least once, but is now on the other side. It’s too bad that there were so many like-minded voters in 2024, but it is heartening that some of them are so obviously straying from the fold.
And it’s only a year and a month into the second term.
Allow me to mention a couple more items from the past week which illustrate the trend we are seeing. When Spain refused to become a part of the war against Iran, Trump promised to cut off all trade with them. This signifies one long-range Trump characteristic: He doesn’t seem to understand the idea that other countries have their own independence. It’s called sovereignty, and it cuts both ways. Consider another example, which is the sovereignty of Iran itself. Trump has insisted that he be involved in picking the successor to the leader that we had killed. And there was, of course, the interference with the governance of Venezuela.
The U.S. has interfered with foreign elections in the past, but Trump is being a lot more overt – to the point of military attack – in such actions. This approach to foreign affairs can be recognized as delusions of grandeur mixed in with a few other dangerous patterns of thought. What is recognizable this time around is Trump’s onset into dementia. It’s becoming more and more recognizable.
So now the big one, the concentrated essence of fear as expressed by an expert in the history of Naziism. Timothy Snyder points out that Trump is setting this country up for a terrorist attack. The aerial bombardment of Iran combined with the assassination of its leaders is an out-and-out provocation. It’s presumably only due to American military might and competent intelligence gathering that the White House and Mar a Lago haven’t yet been attacked. But any American city or defense plant or corporate establishment could be a target. We learned that lesson in the September 11 attacks.
Snyder has put the logic together and offers a warning. We could suffer some sort of terrorist attack and, whether it is large or small, the Trump administration will use it as an excuse to stifle civil liberties including the right to vote in the next election. You can read Snyder’s view here. The DailyKos website picked up on Snyder’s warning and offers its own concerns here.
I’d like to conclude this brief exploration with a couple of thoughts, a remembrance, and a song.
In spite of Donald Trump’s demand that he be allowed to choose the next leader of Iran (or close enough that it doesn’t make a difference) the Iranian religious insiders have gone along with their ruling structure and chosen their next leader. And he is none other than the son of the leader we had killed, the leader who has been described as a terrible awful person by people from every shade of politics and ideology on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Trump told Iran how to behave and they told him to stick it.
And while this was going on, the Iranians have threatened shipping that would otherwise bring us oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping has decreased essentially to zero and with that change, the price of oil has skyrocketed.
Unless the United States can break the blockade, oil prices will continue to rise, oil futures will rise even faster, and we will be reliving the oil crisis, price inflation, and economic recession we endured in the 1970s. Absent an armed invasion (aka “boots on the ground”) the Iranians can most likely defend their interests through oil diplomacy and we can’t do much about it.
In other words, absent a major escalation on the part of U.S. forces, the war is effectively lost. And it is hard to imagine what that escalation would have to be short of an armed invasion, control of the area along the gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and a lot of fighting.
Maybe not. Maybe aircraft can do the trick, but it seems less likely after the lessons of Viet Nam. And another thought: How dare he put young men back in a land war in Asia to die once again.
And with that thought, a remembrance of Country Joe and the Fish, and the loss of their leader as of this writing. From the 1960s and a place called Woodstock, here they are:
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
