ArcaMax

PARIS — Do you have a pro-Trump friend or family member who’s gung-ho about him bombing Iran? Polls suggest that you might.

If so, that person likely feels that this is some kind of football match and that Trump is the star quarterback who deserves fan loyalty at all costs — even if he keeps throwing the ball to the other team. Here’s how to gently guide them back to reality.

Start by explaining that one can either be in favor of Trump’s previously declared anti-establishment and anti-neocon values or, alternatively, can support the overwhelmingly neocon values that he’s now demonstrating. It’s impossible to coherently be both of these things. Unless loyalty to a political figure now outweighs loyalty to the principles that first made him appealing — like a fan who keeps buying the jersey even after the team relocates.

But there are now two Donald Trumps: the candidate who warned against foreign entanglements, and the leader now flailing around inside of one of his own making.

“We should have never been in Iraq ... George Bush made a mistake,” Trump said prior to ever being elected.

He also went on repeatedly about how expensive the mistake was, and how going to war over a lie about Iraq being some kind of threat to the U.S. homeland ended up wasting Americans cash and lives.

Fast- forward to 2026. The echoes are difficult to ignore, right down to the recycled script and the familiar cast of characters. A “national security” threat being exclusively peddled by the same country, Israel. Better hurry, they say, before Iran can make a nuclear bomb — urgency having established itself as the go-to substitute for evidence.

An American president is now being egged on by advisers with opaque interests, not much different than Vice President Dick Cheney leaving his gig as CEO of the oil service company, Halliburton, in 2000, just in time to help get the administration of George W. Bush neck-deep in Middle Eastern wars for oil. The Iran war almost makes U.S. oil companies from the Iraq war era look altruistic by comparison. Because the current conflict doesn’t seem to benefit any enterprises beyond Trump’s own entourage. Trump’s war is so strategically confused that he’s managed to fumble the oil advantage — in the Middle East. It may be the first time that his Atlantic City casino bankruptcy has some serious competition.

In 2026, it’s Trump real estate pal, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, doing the honors as envoys. Witkoff scored a $245 million Israeli land deal last year in Beit Shemesh, according to Israeli press, and Kushner is up to his eyeballs in Israeli investments to the tune of hundreds of millions.

British reps involved in nuclear talks said that Iran had even agreed to a deal right before the missiles started flying, adding that there was “no compelling evidence of an imminent threat of an Iranian missile attack on Europe, or of Iran securing a nuclear weapon,” according to the Guardian.

Trump’s own top intelligence brass agreed. And his counterterrorism chief has just resigned. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” former Green Beret and combat veteran, Joe Kent, wrote in his resignation letter. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The average Trump supporter likely has much more in common with Joe Kent than they do with Trump at this point — though you wouldn’t know it from the cheering section. So what is there even left to support? Particularly when they find themselves riding in the same team van as warmongering neocons like Senator Lindsey Graham and former Trump official and ambassador John Bolton — whose argument is that Trump hasn’t even gone far enough yet. That it would be a failure if he didn’t keep going. Until what, exactly? A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the apocalypse?

Let’s ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu how this fiasco ends, shall we? Since he’s running the show anyway, according to the more lucid Trump officials. “Just have oil pipelines, gas pipelines, going west through the Arabian Peninsula, right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports and you’ve just done away with the choke points forever,” Netanyahu said last week.

Sure, why not just let the country that keeps dragging Washington and its allies into war lord over the fuel supply for the entire Western world, too. Trump doesn’t have an exit strategy, but he’s certainly doing the bidding and heavy lifting for the guy who does. He’s acting like an intern who thinks he’s running the company.

Ask your Trump-loving pa ls what the average American gets out of all this, except sky high gas prices from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz or the bombing of Gulf oil refineries. Price shocks that will work their way through every supply chain from your car to your plate. Patriotism, apparently, now comes with a surcharge that benefits a foreign country.

Meanwhile, European allies have checked out, preferring to wait out the insanity rather than contribute to its escalation, despite Trump threatening that they don’t know what’s good for themselves. As if they didn’t already learn a lesson from their citizens dying in the Iraq War, only for Trump to recently qualify that military service alongside the U.S. as having “stayed a bit back.” All because they aren’t interested in sticking around for the encore.

About the only promise on which Trump is delivering has come as an inadvertent result of his failures. Having sent fuel prices into the stratosphere, he’s now decided to remove sanctions on Iranian and Russian oil. That’s one way to get to normalization, I guess. If we could just leave the bombs and missiles out, too, then we’d be all set. Or at least back to pretending that we learned something the first time.