The President says so!
Donald Trump used a prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.
In remarks from the White House, Trump argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”.
“We are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world,” Trump said in the 19-minute speech, delivered from Cross Hall of the White House. “We have all the cards. They have none.”
If you believe that, you are so gullible you probably voted for Trump.
A lot of people with a lot of money didn’t believe him, since the S&P 500 declined in real time over the course of the speech.
(I do wish to complain: not basing the Y-axis on zero tells me this segment of the chart was selected to emphasize the drop.)
So what’s next?
Ticking through a list of claimed achievements, Trump said Iran’s navy and air force had been decimated, leaving the country weak and “no longer a threat” to the US and the world. He, however, said the US would continue to hit Iran “extremely hard” for next several weeks.
“We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” he said, even as he said “discussions were ongoing”.
The war is nearly over, so now is the time to throw even more bombs, and the goal is to send a nation of over 90 million people back to the stone age. That’s not a reasonable conclusion, and says we aren’t at all interested in the welfare of the citizens of Iran. More bombs also won’t rescue his terrible poll numbers with the citizens of the USA, which is his real goal.
Market futures are doing a nosedive this morning. Trumps buddies are going to clean up today.
drksky @1 might well be right. I just added a comment about that to a stock market-related post over on Mano’s blog.
I think Trump cares more about the stock market than he does about the polls. His true backers are the wealthy.
Maybe the alleged rise in Satanism is related to Trump’s second term? 🙂
Pope Leo hosts exorcist summit at the Vatican over fears of worldwide surge in Satanism: .https://nypost.com/2026/03/24/world-news/pope-leo-hosts-exorcist-summit-at-the-vatican-over-fears-of-worldwide-surge-in-satanism/
Myself @ 4
….and Trump’s war? The Lord of Flies will be busy this year, buzzing all over the corpses. Hmm…If DJT has an affinity to Baal Shebub it would explain his gross dermal condition.
PZ- “If you believe that, you are so gullible you probably voted for Trump.”
After Trump said he would make Mexico pay for his big, beautiful wall, and they cheered, I started calling them The Gullibles. I also started addressing them as followers, not supporters.
People so easily fooled by a conman deserve what they get, while the rest of us have to suffer. Hopefully, the experience of Trump’s presidency serves as a lesson for individuals who chose not to vote for a Black Woman.
I spent two or three times as long watching Artemis II take off yesterday. But I was content to just catch a few clips of this mess and a summary. Sure feels like the right call. He won’t have anything useful to say until after he figures out how to blame the whole thing on someone else. Before then it’ll just be one lie after another to prop up his ego as he tries to pretend he’s not an abject failure. Impoverishing and killing as many people as possible along the way.
Last night at 10pm EDT (after his speech) I checked the price of crude oil, in about 30 minutes the price jumped over $7 a barrel. This morning I notice it is up over $12 a barrel (since his speech). Maybe people will finally catch on to his deceit.
Yesterday before his speech, gas was over $4 a gallon by me, and I noticed diesel is $6 a gallon. The cost for fuel will spread through the economy, higher prices for everything that needs to be transported.
BTW, we will be charged for gas based on the highest price of oil but if the price drops, the price of gas won’t drop at the same rate.
In Trump’s murky world, “two weeks” means absolutely nothing. It could be two years, two centuries, or never.
I just read summaries of that speech but it is clear that he has no idea how to end his war in Iran. None, whatsoever.
His best idea is one he casually threw out recently, to just walk away and let the rest of the world deal with it.
Ironically, it is his best idea yet although he doesn’t know it.
The USA has become so chaotic, stupid, and malevolent that no one could or should trust us any more. No credibility, no adults in charge.
Really, the EU and Asia should just get together with Iran and negotiate some sort of end to the war.
Almost no one is benefiting from it right now.
I think my favourite quote on this is from someone on BlueSky, quoted on Liars, Guns, and Money: “Anyone watching that speech has no idea whether Trump is escalating or deescalating the war with Iran. But to be fair, neither does he so [shrug emoji]”.
To be fair, the S&P 500 has been around since 1957, so it often makes sense to only look at much more recent data, and if you were to still base the Y-axis on zero, 99.9% of your chart would be empty space.
To use an analogy, anthropogenic global warming disappears into the noise if you consider the entire history of the Earth, but there are perfectly valid reasons why we don’t do that.
Tulsi Gabbard is facing the hangman next, but I suspect Pete Hegseth will be following her shortly. This war is such a catastrophe, and Trump such a coward, that I predict the Trump cabinet is going to get shaken up a bit.
I don’t get this war with Iran at all.
It’s never made much sense to me.
The reports are that we didn’t even plan it or start it.
Two groups asked the USA to beat up on Iran.
.1. Israel, meaning Netanyahu asked Trump to start the war with Iran.
.2. The Gulf Arabs, mostly meaning MBS of Saudi Arabia also asked us to attack Iran.
So, it is a case of, “Why don’t you and Iran fight each other”.
Why are we fighting a major war just because some other countries in the MIddle East asked us to?
We could have said no, fight your own wars.
This is a major mistake on the part of the USA. Wait, not of the USA.
This is a major mistake of Trump, the GOP, and that Fox NoNews host running the Department of Defense.
They never asked anyone and the majority of the US population isn’t in favor of the war.
This moron is being outmaneuvered by Iran at every turn. They’re even winning the social media propaganda war. Now he’s sending in troops and chiding Europe to fix the problem he (and Israel) started.
I never thought tge US could decline this quickly.
“Decimate.”
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
^ Walter Solomon: “I never thought the US could decline this quickly.”
I did not think so either until Trump was reelected. Then I feared what has now actually happened it to be a real possibility.
re raven@9:
You could surely say that if there is any way The Orange Turd Grifter in Chief can profit from it, he is doing so.
PZ: Don’t be so quick to celebrate a Cabinet shake-up. If Whiskey Pete gets replaced, his successor may agree with Trump that they have to “show improvement” by waging a bigger, better, more destructive war. That’s kind of how Nixon responded to apparent failure in Vietnam.
I believe the awful truth is: because Trump and Hegseth thought it would look cool on Twitter / Truth Social.
I don’t even buy the “it’s a distraction from [whatever]” theories, because even that assigns too much intelligence to these fucking dumbasses. I literally think they did it because they’re addicted to posting, they needed content, and someone floated this idea past them at the right time.
TRUMP: “Ugh, I’m bored. What are we gonna post?”
HEGSETH: “Blowing shit up is always cool. Could we blow something up and post that?”
WITKOFF: “My dear friend and very lucrative business partner MBS is really pissed off at Iran right now.”
KUSHNER: “Benny has been on at me to do something about Iran for ages. He’s getting to be a real pain about it.”
HEGSETH (excitedly): “Blowing up Iran would look really cool on Twitter! Back when I was in Iraq, they said ‘Real men go to Tehran’, and I’m a real man, aren’t I? We’d look so tough! We could post really cool mashups of Call of Duty with real footage of stuff getting blown up! Can we? Canwecanwecanwe?”
TRUMP: “Oh, OK, Iran it is then…”
The only news about Dump I care about is either that he is dead, or permanently confined to a mental institution for the criminally insane. I prefer dead. I want to be first in line to buy tickets to p1$$ on his grave.
re AstroLad@19:
Now THAT, if applied to the national debt, could go a long ways to paying it off.
Iran is not the only oil problem for the world, Ukraine just destroyed the two Russian Baltic sea oil terminals that allowed Russia’s shadow fleet to ship oil out to various nations still buying Russian oil. Plus eliminating Russian pipe lines and refineries. Russia is proving incapable of defeating Ukraine’s drones.
“Bomb them back to the Stone Age” That was the mantra of Curtis LeMay, the head of the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, back in the 1950s. Look how well it worked in Vietnam! B-52s or B-2s, it doesn’t make any difference.
@7 . Lanir : “(Trump) ..won’t have anything useful to say until after he figures out how to blame the whole thing on someone else. “
If there was any justice the person going udner the metaphorical bus here will be Netanyahu. “King” Bibi has pushed for this and started it with the USA finally has the war he’s been calling for for decades with, finally, the only “Gawd Emptyroar” POTUS foolish enough to actually wage it with him. But there ain’t no justice so it probly won’t be..
I thought the answer to “why this war” was clear, at least for Dumpster: The Files. You’ll notice that revelations about The Files have very much curtailed. As I recall Bibi also has legal issues threatening his tenure, though those are more about graft and corruption. Dumpster has those kind of issues as well. There are some other side issues around incompetence. Then there are the mid-terms when it’s widely expected the Dems can make significant gains. Dumpster…with his best bud Stephen Miller…might think he can declare a national emergency and suspend elections. The GOP congress is about to pass legislation which could significantly change the way people have to vote, which will surely end up in the courts. The war distracts from that as well,
Everything is a mess. In the confusion the crooks can rule the roost.
@Dunc:
Yeah, I saw that post on Lawyers, Guns, and Money too.
This is why other fields that deal with growth (like, say, biology) use logarithmic graphs, which inherently scale any major shift like this as a percentage drop rather than an absolute drop.
PZ @ 11
Oh, no! Too bad. (Sarc)
AstroLad @ 19
I have posted this before, but it is still apt.
Mock The Week – Frankie Boyle on Thatcher’s Funeral
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=xmmomV-ax-
Dunc @ 18
Considering he brought those classified documents presumably because he felt entiteld to it rather than planning to sell secrets… yes, the lot are so petty, dumb and vile it makes sense.
It would not have made sense for someone like Nixon or other clever criminals, but this is Trump.
.
BTW Viktor Orban is so impopular he has problems with the election, despite all the cheating. This (and Putin) is the European leader favored by DJT.
Pam Bondi is out!!! Todd Blanche will be the Acting AG.
I’ve read so much here and elsewhere about the chaotic, corruption and deterioration of humanity that the only accurate term that keeps coming to mind about society is:
Death Spiral.
And, I dare anyone to provide a workable solution that is beneficial to the populace (other than the magat technique of blowing everything up figuratively and literally) that will pull us out of it.
Apparently nobody was impressed by his speech?
The most striking summary of the speech that I saw was: “what the f*ck was that?”.
Why do it for Israel and others?
Epstein files.
The ridiculous thing is, if the Iran bombardment was started to distract from the Epstein files, it has been a disaster. His approval has fallen dramatically. After all, MAGA sycophants can always rationalise or spin conspiracy theories about FBI documents, but gas prices hit them right in the pocket.
Once upon a time this century, a Republican presidential candidate singing, to an off-key rendition of the Beach Boys, “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran” was just cringeworthy. And at least the guy singing it actually knew how to drop a bomb.
Now… it’s an expected press briefing. And the guy saying it had bone spurs, coincidentally at the same time the other guy didn’t.
@ ^ Jaws : Not a candidate. The actual POTUS.
Now I’m just hoping Trump doesn’t actually drop The Bomb on Iran.
Which I predict he will probably do given his sociopathy and lack of understanding of nuclear WMDs and his comments about them in the past and once American ground forces get defeated and costing many American soldiers lives as seems highly likely to be happening soon.