Losing the War on Truth

Iran and what to make of it

Lying is an art, and Trump is an artist. But he is an artist of diminishing capacity; and he has now chosen to apply his art to war, a subject he finds appealing but about which he knows nothing except that he likes it.

Trump seems lost as to which lie he wants to tell. Lies are always parasitical upon truth, in the sense that you have to have some idea of what is true in order to say what is not true. But we are now in a realm where Trump knows only his own pleasures.

If we accept that nothing is true, we find ourselves among aspiring and real dictators who have good stories and media monopolies. But even if lying works in politics, truths about the world do not cease to be: civilians slain stay dead, airplanes shot down crash, actions lead to unpredictable reactions. Post-truth fascists will wander into terrains of ignorance and find themselves trapped.

But unless we diverge from such people on the basic point about truth, they will bluff themselves through anyway. Almost no matter how great the catastrophe, they will build back their power on the basis of the half-lies we repeated, the atrocities we ignored, the contradictions we let slip by, the rationalizations we found for ourselves.

In this war, any talk of “national interest” is such a rationalization. There is none such at stake.

There is only personal interest, or personal pleasure. The basic truth is that Trump likes what he is doing. Trump seemed intoxicated in the days after the abduction of Maduro. He clearly was experiencing a good deal of pleasure, he felt like he was “on a roll.” That, of course, is magical thinking. There is no such thing, in the real world, as being “on a roll.”

The contradictions can be named. Trump’s intoxicated feeling is built on one.

The institutions that worked in Venezuela, both intelligence and military, were built over generations on the foundations that Trump and his administration deny: that career civil servants matter; that the government works; that science is true; that research is valuable; that immigrant scientists do valuable work; that long-term planning works; and, ultimately, that facts are facts. Trump and his people could never have built such institutions. They can only exploit their existence. And as they exploit, they weaken.

American power is being used to destroy the order that America made. There is a law of war and by violating it and laughing at it we make the world more dangerous and ourselves more vulnerable in it. The serial imagination of enemies, the ones that feel good to attack, weakens the ability of the United States to defend itself against actual enemies. The missiles being fired in the Middle East to uncertain purpose are not available for meaningful conflicts, as in Ukraine. The three American fighters that our allies shot down might have been useful at some point. (And it is a bit troubling that Kuwait can shoot down three American F-15s on a single day.)

A war in the Middle East risks terrorism in the United States. But we have shut down the relevant institutions and diverted the relevant personnel to immigration enforcement.

Trump is telling lies about the war that not only contradict one another, but contradict themselves internally. Is it about a nuclear program that doesn’t exist? Or is it about a regime change that we haven’t thought through? Or is it about an imaginary Iranian threat to elections?

Trump has claimed both that he already destroyed Iran’s nuclear program and that he is now destroying it. This is not just contradictory. It is productive of real danger.

The net effect of this war will be to spread nuclear weapons around the world. Despite what CBS News is telling its viewers, Iran has no nuclear weapons. It agreed to give up its program under Obama, and then Trump tore up the agreement. It is the countries that are attacking Iran -- Israel and the United States -- that have a nuclear arsenal. This confirms a lesson that Russia taught in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: countries that have nuclear weapons are free to start wars of aggression. The only conclusion that can be drawn by others is that nuclear weapons are needed to deter such attacks.

Trump has said that the purpose of the war is both to enable the Iranian people to rule themselves and to create a situation where the existing regime negotiates. This is not just contradictory. It was productive of real atrocity.

Weeks this war began, Trump urged the Iranian people to rise up. And when they did, the regime killed thousands of them, most likely tens of thousands. Among them were some of the most courageous Iranians, people who might have helped create a more humane form of government. But now they are dead, and with their death diminishes the chance of such a transformation.

Trump has argued that a purpose of this war was to respond to Iranian interference in American elections. It is patently obvious that this claim is meant to justify the suppression (”federalization”) of US elections in November. This is all so unutterably predictable that we are all to blame if it works.

To prevent it, though, we have to start from the simple, small truths, the ones that can sometimes get lost in breathless reporting about both war and elections.

Foreign powers do indeed try to influence US popular opinion during elections. Russia and China consistently run social media operations in favor of Donald Trump. In 2020, Iranians did indeed run an electoral influence operation. It was unambiguously meant to suppress Democratic voting, and favor Donald Trump. The Department of Justice, under the Biden administration, prosecuted the Iranians who broke American law while trying to get Trump elected. There is no sign that the Iranian influence operations made a difference.

In office again from January 2025, Trump has eased the way for foreign influence operations, presumably because he knows that he is almost always the intended beneficiary. The government departments designed to track them have been shut down, and researchers who study them have been attacked and defunded. His allies in social media have also removed restrictions that were designed to hinder foreign actors from carrying out propaganda campaigns inside the United States.

And so we see a series of enormous contradictions. We are at war with Iran, says Trump, because of Iranian electoral interference. But it was in favor of Trump. And it was prosecuted under the Biden administration. And Trump, again in office, deliberately made foreign electoral interference easier. And then the foreign electoral interference which was in Trump’s favor and which he permitted is, Trump now claims, against him to such an extent that that he has to fight a foreign war to stop it and then extend that foreign war all the way to the American ballot box. This is utterly ludicrous.

The emperor has no clothes, and is standing in front of the mirror, asking who is the fairest of them all. The answer might be unexpected. War can create opportunities for the liar, but it can also expose the shabbiness of the lie. Trump seems to think that he can say anything; but in fact he is giving his opponents ever more opportunities to build coalitions in all of the domains where he is so obviously selling everyone else out for the sake of himself.

Is the war about nuclear weapons, or regime change, or electoral interference? It is about none of these things, of course; it is about feeling good and staying in power. It is a war on truth; but truth can win -- if it finds friends.