The Iran War Did Not Take Place(?)

 It is a characteristic of the Trump presidency that even his worst atrocities have an air of unreality to them. 

Of course—for Trump's victims—the results of his actions are all too real. To this day, there are hundreds of innocent people who wake up every morning in a forever-prison in El Salvador—because Trump sent them there; to be confined on the U.S. taxpayers' dime; in rank contravention of U.S. law and treaties and the orders of a federal court. 

But Trump himself, meanwhile, seems to have already lost interest in their fate. He's bored with the whole scenario. I'm not sure he'd even remember sending them there, if you asked him about it. He's a kind of one-night-stand dictator; the world's worst comedian. The joke was never funny; and now we realize—he's not even committed to the bit. 

After all, the only reason these men are confined right now in a notorious dungeon—possibly for the rest of their lives—is because Trump spent years falsely vilifying immigrants and Venezuelan asylum-seekers. But now—even as they languish on his orders in this "tropical gulag"—Trump is musing on social media about how maybe some undocumented immigrants are good, hard-working folk after all; as if none of this had happened.  

On the advice of some of his business constituents, after all, Trump briefly decided this week that maybe he would exempt farms, hotels, and restaurants from workplace immigration raids. He had lost interest, it would appear, in the theme of "mass deportation" that had dominated his every campaign rally. 

But now, just days later, he appears to have lost interest in his newfound change of heart in turn. The orders to exempt certain businesses were rescinded. ICE is supposed to raid chicken farms and golf courses again. Trump must have gotten bored again. He doesn't have the attention span to stick with either his atrocities or his redemption arcs. 

He is, in short, the ultimate ersatz president. The only thing he's actually committed to is the spectacle and the appearance. 

And this means that he is able to inflict the ultimate indignity upon his critics: that of not even appearing serious. For Trump not only says and does horrifying things that cause real harm in the world—he also manages to trivialize them by his own indifference and trivial-mindedness, in the very act of perpetrating them. 

Even his most heinous acts remain at the level of superficiality—because Trump doesn't even seem to regard them with any degree of reality. 

Remember how Trump spent months torpedoing Western alliances and mocking our closest neighbor and ally Canada, to the point of triggering an open rupture between the two nations? But then, all of that just sort of stopped. He seems to have lost interest. The game wasn't fun anymore. 

He talked about invading Panama and Greenland. But the idea never progressed beyond the point of J.D. Vance donning a dorky puffy jacket, looking like an idiot at a frigid Arctic press conference, and complaining to a bunch of U.S. troops about how Greenland turned out to be much colder than he was expecting. 

Contrast this with a phenomenon like the George W. Bush administration of yesteryear. They too had evil schemes—but they actually carried theirs out. They were committed to them. They actually went through with invading another country and remaking global history for the worse. 

I don't praise them for it. But at least their seriousness of purpose bestowed a kind of moral grandeur on their opponents. They were worth standing against. The Iraq War created one of those critical moments in history—those "moment[s] to decide," as James Russell Lowell called them, "for the good or evil side." It mattered where people positioned themselves on the great moral question of the hour: to invade, or not to invade? 

Trump, meanwhile, succeeds only in presenting an endless series of ludicrous outrages, to which intelligent opposition seems absurd and could not possibly make any difference. There are no serious intellectual issues raised by the things Trump does. A person who believes the U.S. should deport people to a Salvadoran prison-camp or invade a NATO ally is not someone to be argued with—but to be dismissed from the stage with catcalls. 

And yet, the things Trump does are often genuinely evil. They have real victims: like the people now stranded in El Salvador. So, Trump's deeds seem actually worth opposing. I will keep opposing them. 

But I will have to do so without even the benefit of dignity. For Trump has ensured that opposing him can only ever be a ridiculous exercise; because even he doesn't really believe in what he is doing. 

We seem to be witnessing the same pattern over again with Trump's stance on the Israel-Iran war. The question itself of a potential U.S. intervention in the conflict would be a serious one; in any other administration's hands. We'd have to call in good arguments as to why Israel's preventive strike was not authorized under international law, and why we should not become complicit in the deaths of Iranian civilians by sending our own bombs and planes. 

But Trump—with his sinister genius for unreality—has managed to trivialize even this question too. He has made a TV spectacle of his own indecision. He knows the art of suspense. He has transformed a too-real war—one that has already caused the deaths of hundreds of innocent people in both Iran and Israel—into another episode of his reality TV presidency. 

I do think it is virtually guaranteed that Trump will drop some bombs on Iran at some point. He is too motivated by pig-headed testosterone to let such an opportunity pass. But just as certainly, after having done so, he will immediately move on to the next distraction.

He may have been railroaded into this path by the Israelis and the forces of history. I don't think he exercised any real influence over Netanyahu's decision to enter this war. 

But now that he is on this train, Trump will surely take the opportunity to send some planes and kill some people—to "spatter a few red drops for history to remember," to borrow a phrase from Carl Sandburg. But then, just as certainly, he will "forget"—as Sandburg says in the next line. 

In other words, Trump is guaranteed to lose interest. He is not like Bush—who would carry the whole nation and world with him on a doomed ten-year quest to remake a country and upend life in an entire global region. Trump's attention-span simply does not last for that long. He would change the channel well before that.

In this sense, Trump is the most postmodern president we've ever had. It's the presidency of the spectacle; of the simulacrum. 

A lot of what the postmodern theorists had to say in the late twentieth century has not aged well, to be sure. Their relentless attacks on truth, humanism, and secular democracy—their belief that liberalism had become an impregnable global hegemony, which could be condemned without consequence—now read as naïve and childish; since we have had to realize all over again just how fragile these institutions really are. 

But in one respect at least—the postmodernists seem not so much to have been wrong as just a couple decades ahead of their time. They foresaw the possibility of an ersatz presidency, waging an ersatz war.

Whatever we think of Jean Baudrillard's theory of the Gulf War as the ultimate TV war—the CNN war—the fake spectacle of ersatz war—as applied to its original context—it certainly applies to Trump's approach to Iran: 

By virtue of having been anticipated in all its details and exhausted by all the scenarios, this war ends up resembling the hero of Italien des Roses, [... D]isappointed and overcome by the suspense, exactly as we are today by the media blackmail and the illusion of war. It is as though it had taken place ten times already: why would we want it to take place again? [...] we know that his imaginary credit is exhausted [...] and in the end nobody gives a damn whether he jumps or not because the real event is already left behind. (Patton trans.)

The passage comes from Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (an essay named in allusion to Giraudoux's play—The Trojan War Will Not Take Place). And again, we've lost sight over the decades of whether or not this was an apt description of George H.W. Bush's war against Saddam Hussein. But it certainly describes Trump's careful construction of an unreal reality TV version of the war in Iran. 

This, surely, is the thrust of Trump's pointed temporizing about the war—his effort to create fake suspense—his clumsy attempts to conscript real events into a reality TV scenario that he can control. He won't actually be able to determine what Israel or Iran do. But he will be able to generate a news cycle or two by sending in planes to kill people—generate shock and opposition from segments of the Left and even parts of his own base—and then change the channel on the spectacle of his own making, as soon as he grows tired of it. 

Or maybe he won't. Maybe he'll lose interest and get distracted even before that. Indeed—why should he go through with it? We've already had the ersatz debate over the ersatz war. We've already had the Left make its predictable arguments against intervention, and we've already witnessed the turmoil within the MAGA coalition over their fake ideological positions ("hawks" vs. "isolationists")—as if any of them had ever stood for anything; as if there were some question of principle that had ever animated the whole phenomenon.

The real and meaningful intellectual debate we had twenty years ago over the Iraq War has now happened again, but in spurious, condensed, opera buffa form. 

History repeating itself—as Marx put it—first as tragedy, then as farce.

The whole Iraq War drama has happened all over again—except it has now been compressed into a weekend. The over-abundance of rhetoric and information (both real and fake) on social media has ensured public scandals that once would have taken years to litigate can now exhaust themselves in a matter of hours. 

What's the point of even having the war now, since we've already had our podcast arguments about it?—since we've already had the spectacle? 

it is as though it had taken place ten times already: why would we want it to take place again? [...] and in the end nobody gives a damn [...] because the real event is already left behind. 

Of course—if Trump does send his planes—the "real event" will be all too real for the people under the shadow of those planes—people like the hundreds of civilians who have already lost their lives in this unnecessary war. But Trump yet again will not extend to his victims even the honor of noticing their real, independent existence. For him, they will continue to be a part merely of the reality TV spectacle in which he lives. 

And so, when we condemn him for it—when we say: Trump the murderer; Trump the butcher of children; behold the corpses of the innocents being laid to rest in Iran on his orders!—we will not even seem serious. The worst thing about fighting with a trivial person is that one becomes trivial oneself, merely by stooping to joust with them. 

But since the stakes are real, despite Trump's spectacle and pervasive unreality—despite his own Trump-l'oeil nature, if you will; 

Since the real stakes are actual human lives—and that is the most serious thing there is; in spite of Trump's unrelenting unseriousness, which spreads with such contagious force, even to his critics—joust with him we must. We must joust with the clown, even if our own face gets spattered with clown paint in the process. 

So, critics of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our dignity. And, as the murdered civilians of Iran can attest—as the people imprisoned for the rest of their lives in El Salvador on Trump's orders can confirm—there are far more serious things to lose than that.