The poeseur poser president knows the power of a picture. He bombed with his bunker buster bombing photos. By Hal M. Brown He did manage to look like Donald Doofus wearing his stupid MAGA hat though.

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I wasn’t the only one who thought of how Trump didn’t come up with an iconic photo of himself in the situation room to compare with the photo of President Obama during the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. A verified poster on X named J. Leigh, who is from Hawaii, also came up with the idea. (As I write this they have posted many times.)

Below are some of the photos which were posted on the White House X page (link). Below, on the top is the group photo which comes the closest and an enlargement of the portion with Trump looking stern and serious and as if he just might be in charge.

If you don’t count the carefully orchestrated Golden Elevator video, Trump has had two iconic photos come out of his presidency, the mugshot photo and the post-shooting fist raised photo. 

I'd have thought he would have been able to come up with another iconic image from the Situation Room to show what manly man master of the universe he was. If there was such a photo articles like this on MSN would have had them on the top of their stories.

This is from USA Today:

If there was any dramatic photo which shows someone truly engaged and in charge during the attack it was the one below of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine who was sitting next to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

When I thought of writing this last night at 2:00AM I hadn’t seen any of these photos. I wondered whether Trump would be wearing his red MAGA hat in the photos. I pondered “does he even consider how ridiculous he looks when he wears the hat indoors?” Being a shrink, I asked myself whether at an unconscious level he feels exposed or naked when he’s not wearing his hat. We know he is very much aware of, and sensitive about, his thinning hair.

How successful this bombing was will be determined over the next days and weeks when we see if it leads to a sustained ceasefire and to Iran agreeing to an enforceable agreement not to develop neuclar weapons.

What was not successful is that there was no Trump iconography coming out of it. Trump certainly knows how powerful images are. He’s always posing. If he doesn’t have a real photo to post he’ll have one made with AI, whether for his superhero images or to be used in other self-aggrandizing endevaors. Here’s one he put on social media (read article).

As I thought about iconic images, before I even got out of bed this morning, many of them came to mind. I thought of the photos from Iwo Jima, of the naked napalm victim boy in Vietnam, of the march at the Edmund Pettus bridge, of the man on the balcony pointing after Martin Luther King was shot, of Jack Ruby being shot, and of course of Jackie holding JFK after he was shot, of the young woman cradling the student who’d been shot at Kent State, of a South Vietnamese General firing his pistol into the head of suspected Viet Cong. There’s obviously a theme here.

All of these, with the exception of the Iwo Jima photo which was posed to some extent and the Edmund Pettus Bidge photo, were taken in the moment. The photographer had little or no time to compose the photo.

Trump had ample time to set up his Situation Room photo. Instead all he managed to do was to make sure he looked approrpriately engaged and serious. In two of the photos he looked exactly the same way:

I can’t help not being able to get past that damn stupid hat…

If anyone looked like they were in charge it was General Caine:

He knows that soldiers don’t wear hats, or in military parlance, covers, indoors. 

Soldiers, from General like Caine, shown below on the left, to privates, wear their covers outdoors but not indoors.

In fact, he was asked duing his confirmation hearing whether he ever wore a MAGA hat. (Watch video)

Trump of course isn’t a soldier. He never was. He never will be. 

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Who will Trump wage war against next? Want to make a guess, Sparky? By Hal M. Brown

Trump loves being a wartime warrior wanker. Without a war he’s like a naked hot dog.

For him war is like a a hot dog loaded with ketchup, mustard, melted cheese, onions, and chili.

He has his tarriff war, immigrant war, war against political enemies, even Republican members of the House like Thomas Massey (who you may never have heard of), and best of all for his massive manly misery making munching machine, now he has his bunker buster war. He even has a potential hat for this war MIGA: Make Iran Great Again.

Coming sooner than many want to believe is his war against any American who opposes him. Who's that, Sparky?

If you’re reading this, that’s you. If you don’t realize this yet you have your head in the clouds. 

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Politely Put or Just Plain Weird: "Thank you for your attention to this matter." Now is the time for peace or you sign your own death warrant, thank you, says Donald J. Trump

 

Trump, oddly, ended his Truth Social post announcement of the attack on Iran with the phrase typcially used to close a collection letter. This is also called a dunning letter.

This comes from a president known for not paying bills.

In the two historic “truths” he used the phrase “thank you.” While it is odd, a head scratcher, in the first context, it is totally bouncing off the walls odd in the second. This is an outright warning, a death threat, against Iran. Who, in the name of holy hell raining from the heavens, is he thanking? Is he thanking the reader of his message for reading the message? Is this his version of closing a letter with “sincerely yours” or “yours truly?”

Is the “thank you” meant for the leaders of Iran? Is he saying “thank you for not signing your own death warrant?’ This is macabre.

While others are writing about far more serious matters like whether or not Trump has fired the first shot in what will turn out to be an endless war, this oddity stood out to me. 

Trump doesn’t seem to care, if he even knows, that these messages will be studied and parsed by students of history. We know he has speech writers who can craft words that actually sound like they come from a sane person. (He only meandered off the written words a few time in this presentation about the attack.) 

His inserting “thank you” in these consequential posted messages may seem to some to be trivial, but obviously I view this as demonstrating that Trump, who takes every opportunity to call Biden a dumb and demented president, is either dumb, deranged, or both.

Nobody should be wondering whether or not Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was made with due deliberation and analysis of possibly short and long term consequences. Trump was being called Donald Two Weeks (web search).

This led me to wonder if he took this to mean Donald Too Weak. It is possible that his decision was ultimately a reaction to the perception that he wasn’t the Rambo-tough warrior he fancies himself to be. 

Recommended more serious reading:

Trump Claims 'Peace' With Iran Will Come While Threatening Further War

Scroll down to the bottom of this HUFFPOST article to see what Reid Smith, the vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together, an organization founded by the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, had to say.

There are more updates to this here.

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Trumpworld: Where experts go to die.

 

We could be on the cusp of entering another kind of war very different from the one we might find ourselves in against Iran. It could, for one example, be against a lethal and highly contagious form of Ebola, bird flu, or Covid. 

Regardless of the decisions a president must make, whether about tarrifs and their effects on the economy, cutting programs both Americans and people around the world depend on (check this out about Social Security), or the long term ramifications of his anti-immigrant mania, our current president should be listening to the best and brightest unbaised experts he can find. 

The image on the top of the page shows the group that Trump is getting advice from about authorizing the US to go to war with Iran:

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I’ve added my view as to who I trust to give Trump advice he doesn’t want to hear. Who will stand up to his mini-maxi Me Stephen Miller? You know Miller? He’s the guy who bears a striking physical resemblence to Goebells… 

Not only does he look like Goebbbels but he has the same position of influence and trust that Goebbels had with Hitler 

This is from RawStory today:

Excerpt (emphasis mine):

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday night that Trump 2.0 has Miller's fingerprints all over it, with Miller "emerg[ing] as a singular figure in the second Trump administration, wielding more power than almost any other White House staffer in recent memory—and eager to circumvent legal limitations on his agenda."

Miller has drafted or edited each of Trump's signed executive orders, according to the report, giving him considerable influence over Trump's second term. This comes after the president refused to give him a leading role at the Department of Homeland Security, reportedly telling aides he didn't see Miller as leadership material, according to the report.

The pressing issue today is, of course, what to do about Iran. Experts are weighing in. For example in this article in HUFFPOST >

Excerpts:

“An immediate, face-to-face U.S.-Iran meeting would offer the surest offramp to deescalate tensions,” said Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, in an email. “U.S. officials should provide Tehran with assurances that they won’t move forward with direct military involvement in Israel’s campaign while talks are in progress.”

DiMaggio told HuffPost the Trump administration could see a path to an eventual agreement on Iran’s nuclear program that involves significant concessions toward Washington. (Trump abandoned the previous Iran nuclear deal, calling it too weak, in 2018.)

“The U.S. has strong negotiating leverage — it would be a blunder of epic proportions not to use it,” she wrote.

Once upon a time, it seems like ancient history now, presidents, even Trump 45, selected real experts to advise them.

Today, alas, in the Trumpworld 47, it is the cemetery where real experts go to die.

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Why, oh why, did I post these on BlueSky?

 

Welcome to my house. Here I am watching MSNBC and drinking my coffee (photo above). 

The news is telling me (click audio on top of page) that the country may be at war with Iran any day now.

I did have some thoughts about the pros and cons of the US entering the war, which as we know would begin by trying to destroy the Iran nuclear site at Frodo. 

I wrote the following as a comment to Sabrina Haake’s Substack “Israel is pulling us into a forever war.”

This is a complex matter and I have said before that I doubt Trump will dispassionately analyze the long term consequences of getting into a war with Iran. Check out what eight experts have to say: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/18/us-attacks-iran-expert-predictions-analysis-00413901

I am hardly an expert but what I have been thinking wasn't even addressed by any of the experts. It seems to be an accepted given that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon which they can use to threaten Israel.

Is it worth risking a prolonged war in the region to have the US enter the conflict?

I haven't heard anyone explain how a nuclear exchange between the two nations would play out. Because they are so close to each other it seems like mere seconds for one country to retaliate a missile launch from ground based missiles which might or might not have a nuclear warhead. Even worse, a nuclear bomb if small enough could be smuggled into Israel.

The only way to guarentee the MAD (mutually assured destruction) scenario would be for Iran (who we assume will be the aggressor) knowing that Israel had a way to blow their country off the map with their nuclear weapons in retailation of a nuclear attack. I don't know for certain if they have their version of SAC with nuclear armed bombers always in the air but I assume they do. I just checked and I see that Israel has subs which I would guess are armed with nuclear missiles. https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/israel-submarine-capabilities/

This is all crucial since Iran would know that if they attacked Israel and managed a first strike their country would be still be destroyed even if it was an hour later and much of Israel was leveled.

So my question boils down to why can't we view this as similar to the situation with India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed and unable to attack each other, and to what it has been between the US and Russia ever since both had nuclear weapons? There is no country that can attack the US (or Russia and China) using nukes with impunity.

I can see the point of view of the Iranian leadership knowing that Israel (though they never admit it) can use their nuclear weapons against them. I don't see Israel as ever doing this even if provoked more than they already have been, but this doesn't mean that Iran's leaders will ever accept that their arch enemy has nukes and they don't.

Update: An then there's this via RawStory, a reminder from David Frum:

"One obvious move that the Iranians would have, for example, if the United States struck at them, would be to activate terror networks inside the United States," Frum continued. And standing against those terror networks, he said, are "an FBI, that has laid off all the counterterrorism professionals, headed by jokers. You’ve got a Department of Homeland Security that has spent ... millions and millions of dollars on an advertising campaign to say thank you, Trump, again, with a kind of play-acting director. You've got a Defense Department who is under leadership that no one would put this Defense Department under on the way to war. It just doesn't add up." https://www.rawstory.com/trump-frum/

Earlier this morning I read this in The NY Times (subscription). 

Excerpt: 

On the 10th floor of a federal building in Lower Manhattan, there is a holding area where immigration authorities have typically held a few dozen immigrants at a time for a few hours before transferring them to detention centers.

But as the Trump administration expands its immigration crackdown, the space has become overcrowded and people sleep sprawled on the floor, sometimes for days, according to those who have spent time there.

Descriptions of the conditions at the center, the New York City field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have prompted several congressional Democrats to demand that they be allowed inside for oversight purposes. Those demands have been denied.

These two peices of news led me to post what I did on BlueSky. 

My first message, sent out into the cosmic world of cyber space where in a mystical world it would fall from the heavens and thaw out the ice cold hearts of every ICE agent, was prompted by the aritcle about their NYC headquarters. 

The second about stupidity should be understood in the broadest definition of the word. I use it to mean that any decision made purely on emotion and not rationality and logic is ipso facto stupid. All decisions to not be stupid must be made with due consideration given to both short and long term consequences.

The message is meant for everything Trump and everything MAGA, not only as related to what Trump decides to do about Iran.

There is almost nothing Trump has done since being elected that is not stupid. He either does things based on his mood of the moment, or when he even thinks rationally it involves only what will happen in the short term, not the long term. For Trump and some of his decisions short term could be as short as one day. For other it could be a week or two. He is making decisions now that we can see will have a negative, even catastrophic, effect a year or two from now.

Addendum:

I bought my stupidity kills stickers in a store, but you can get them on Amazon here.

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