By Jason Renard Walker 

“We did not start this war but under president Trump we are finishing it” 

                          –A blatant lie as told by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth 

With the help of seething Israeli forces, on February 28 2026 Donald Trump ordered his military to unleash a barrage of missile strikes on Iranian soil. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his wife, dozens of his top officials and many innocent children and citizens were reported to have been killed in an attack that has led to Iran targeting emissaries of the UK, ruffled the feathers of the UN and drawn in eleven other countries. 

While the beginning of what could be another decades-long protracted war took form, Trump greeted champagne drinking guests at a party he’d thrown on his Mar a Largo resort and spa. 

As of date six Americans have been killed in retaliatory strikes by Iran on a U.S. tactical operation center in Kuwait; civilians in Israel were killed and injured in strikes there. And according to Trump, many more will ‘sadly’ die. Not only has he failed on his promise to lower grocery prices and end the war in Ukraine on day one, or not involve the U.S. in foreign wars, regime changes, or nation-building. He is panning out to be a model of these same self serving acts, with war-mongering Republican Senator Lindsey Graham rising as MAGA’s pro war poster child. 

It’s true that Iran has a long unethical practice of repressing women, executing gays, and gunning down those who protest Shari’a law. But to Trump, this is not about liberating women, freeing a nation from religious entanglement, or eliminating threats against Americans. We already know his stance on women’s rights, freedom of religion, or those that take to the streets to protest the deaths of American protesters killed by law enforcement agents. This is simply another shot at falsely solidifying his legacy in world history, at the cost of chaos and havoc, as the greatest man to have seized power. To think otherwise is buffoonery. 

What the Trump administration didn’t explain to the public was why they felt diplomacy efforts weren’t being fruitful — even though Iran had just said talks between both sides were positive, with more expected to come. What the Trump administration did do was explain how the CIA and Israel had been monitoring the Ayatollah’s daily routine for months, had a date set to bomb the country, but had to act prematurely when their intelligence suggested he and his top officials would be outside of his bunker, having a discussion and in striking range. Which could have been discussions about the best way to satisfy Trump and retain their dignity. 

To some this explanation may sound like Trump boasting. But to those critical of his competency and motives, this shows that Trump was never engaged in any real talks with Iran or interested in anything other than helping fulfill Netanyahu’s psychosexually charged desire to destroy the country, draw a clearer path towards turning Palestine into an Israeli/U.S. asset and distract from his pending corruption charges. 

In 2016 Donald Trump used anti regime change and no foreign wars rhetoric in his diatribe during the primaries to defeat every challenger, including Graham, who has long supported bombing Iran and sending American troops into senseless wars. Events that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and only benefited oil magnets and corporate elites. 

Unsurprisingly, many pacifists of the flower power era and antiwar voters latched on to the thought of a warless nation and gave Trump their votes so he could finally bring peace to the world. In fact modern era presidents like Richard Nixon, George Bush and his son, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all pulled the U.S. into senseless wars and regime change attempts, using lies and deceit. So a president explicitly saying no more foreign wars must have been appealing to them.

After he was ‘snubbed’ from receiving the Nobel Peace prize, unable to swoon Vladimir Putin into ending the war in Ukraine, caught up in the Epstein drama and having to watch his mass deportation plan receive mass push back, carving a legacy out of this mess would do him no justice. 

With this war what Trump has revealed is that the U.S. foreign policy is not to protect America or “kill people who wish us ill will” as Graham suggested. But it is based on a tether of lies that swing in whatever direction the spread of U.S. hegemony takes it, while manufacturing a legacy for himself as a wartime legend. 

For example the notion that Iran’s uranium enrichment program posed an imminent threat to Americans, served the basis for the first attack that had supposedly obliterated the facilities in question and pushed them back three decades. This has now shifted to Iran being moments away from having an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach U.S. soil. When the holes in these reasons for bombing Iran couldn’t be filled, Trump’s all-purpose lapdog Marco Rubio gave a press release, suggesting that Israel was about to bomb Iran themselves and the U.S. struck first because they knew Iran would retaliate and strike their regional emissaries. To believe that Israel would pull this move in the face of U.S. naval hardware surrounding the entire middle east and during supposed attempts at diplomacy is absurd. 

Everything about this endeavor are lies wrapped in an illegal war that Congress didn’t approve and wasn’t briefed on. Even Bush had the audacity in 2003 to consult Congress and send former Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN to sell Bush’s weapons of mass destruction ploy. 

But this is not the politics of yesterday, we are presently in the stage of neoliberalism, where it’s not about making concessions but taking them back. Trump has already shown that this can be done blatantly and that the left and Congress are toothless against it and can only hope for court orders. 

The U.S. maintains a global network of over 800 military bases and a Navy that is more powerful than the rest of the world’s combined. With such military might in the hands of an oaf that is willfully abusing it, we can expect more wars and more crises. And as a means to get over these crises, the response will be to level up resources for the destruction of opposing productive forces, by conquest of small countries the U.S. hasn’t already wrapped its tentacles around and a more thorough shakedown of the ones, uninterested in war, that they have. 

Even MAGA loyalists are beginning to question Trump veering off course.  The MAGA movement is more rooted in fear of having their guns taken away, Islamic families moving next door to them and the U.S. becoming less white (low birthrates among them make this inevitable) and more multicultural than in a need to meddle in foreign affairs. Much of the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, and the interest in IVF treatment is directly related to this fear. 

Under this conservative umbrella, which absorbed the Dixiecrats under Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Reagan’s Evangelical Christian movement,  they embrace overt fascism in much the way that bourgeois liberals were attracted to Obama’s covert fascism. If Nixon and Reagan were a part of today’s Republican party they would be viewed as liberals. 

What Trump did is normalized abnormal thoughts, actions and reasoning in an era where neither the left nor the right want to promote critical thinking and an informed society able to intelligently discuss political, social and economic issues. 

Under this two party system the left and the right’s strings are being pulled by one puppet master. The Trump presidency is merely a test to see how far overt fascism can be pushed. When it reaches its breaking point, a more moderate puppet can always be installed to quell resistance. 

Jason Renard Walker 1532092 

Powledge unit 

PO Box 660400 

Dallas, Tx 75266

Jason Renard Walker is a prison journalist who has published articles and essays in various print and online media outlets since 2016. His work can be viewed at: www.jasonsprisonjournal.com You can also purchase his paperback book ‘Reports From Within The Belly Of The Beast: Torture And Injustice Inside Texas Department Of Criminal Justice’ available on amazon.com