The Best Thing

 The Wall Street Journal published a pretty remarkable story yesterday based on unreleased footage from an upcoming Lindsey Graham documentary. Apparently, it shows just how closely involved Graham was in cheerleading and directly inspiring Trump's Iran war. 

By the Journal's account, both men took an unsettlingly personal delight in the destruction and mayhem they had unleashed. In the war's opening days—when as we now know a U.S. Tomahawk missile annihilated an Iranian school and took the lives of more than a hundred children—Graham and Trump were crowing together over the TV images of their fiery handiwork. 

"Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried," Graham apparently says in the documentary footage; "How long have we been pushing this?"

He then apparently describes Trump's reaction: "I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, 'best thing I have ever done.' He loves blowing stuff up."

That "best thing I have ever done" reminds me of the kidnapper and serial killer in John Fowles's horror novel, The Collector. In describing the abduction at the center of the novel, he declares: "To sum up, that night was the best thing I ever did in my life. [...] I mean it was like something you only do once in a lifetime and even then often not." 

There is a certain kind of person and regime who cannot create, and who therefore content themselves to destroy—people who measure their own success and power by the pain and horror they have inflicted on others, because that is the only way they can reassure themselves they have managed to imprint their personality on the world. 

I'm reminded too of that scene in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, when the narrator tries to confront his Stalinist captors with the long litany of the Soviet regime's crimes and depredations. His chief jailer doesn't get his point. "Don't you find it wonderful?" he asks; "Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history?"

That seems to be Graham's and Trump's attitude to burning alive countless soldiers, sailors, civilians, and children in an illegal war of aggression: "Isn't it wonderful? I nearly cried. Best thing I ever did in my life!" They sound like no one so much as the sadistic speaker of Harold Pinter's poem "American Football"—whom Pinter intended as a parody of U.S. military triumphalism: 

Hallelullah!

It works.

We blew the shit out of them.

"He loves blowing stuff up," Graham said of Trump. I always suspected that was true, which is why I thought all the people saying Trump was just moving aircraft carriers around the globe as a negotiating tactic were kidding themselves. Deep within Trump is the wounded narcissism of the born bully, who needs to hurt others in order to convince himself that he exists. 

It makes sense that a character like that would be first to strike people when they appear wholly defenseless—and first to run weeping when the victims make the least show of resistance. And so, now that Iran has proven itself capable of striking back and taking the global economy hostage, Trump is desperate for any possible off-ramp to the war he started. 

As Hazlitt once wrote of the character of Cobbett: "Like an overgrown schoolboy, he is so used to have it all his own way, that he cannot submit to anything like competition or a struggle for the mastery; he must lay on all the blows, and take none. He is bullying and cowardly; a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush them by his weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and is soon staggered by a few smart blows."

So long as Trump could just crush Iran by the weight of the U.S. military, he was happy. It was the "best thing he'd ever done," as he crowed in Graham's telling. But as soon as Iran fired back, he was completely "staggered." 

And now he doesn't even have Graham anymore to egg him on and tell him what to do.