- Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the past few days and puts events into context;
- (With asides about having read Fail-Safe and watched the movie, this past week; and a Facebook meme about Emperor Hirohito bombing Pearl Harbor and then expecting peace);
- Trump’s God-talk;
- And Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch spelling out why MAGA hopes the Israel/Iran conflict will bring about the End Times.
First of all, Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the past few days, and puts things in context that at a glance might not have anything to do with one another. But many people have noticed this pattern over the years: Trump diverts attention from a relative failure to something new and outrageous.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: June 22, 2025
Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”
A meme post has gone around on Facebook in the past couple days, which mimics and mocks Trump, from Emperor Hirohito:
We have completed our very successful attack on Hawaii. All planes are now outside of America air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Pearl Harbor. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great Japanese Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Richardson:
For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.
(An odd coincidence of my own, as mentioned previous post, is that I re-read the book Fail-Safe this past week, and watched the movie version last night; a 60-year-old story about the United States dropping atomic bombs for the first time in history. In that case, by accident.)
Moving on with Richardson. Trump’s next standard move, yet again, is to walk back his claims.
It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.
Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”
Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.
Trump, of course, is berating any reports that cast any shadow of a doubt of his claims of total victory.
And then the story of the past couple days takes a weird turn into God talk.
In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
*Everyone* thinks God is on their side. After patriotism, it’s the refuge of the scoundrel.
And yet, MAGA seems split on these events. Richardson again:
But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”
Some right-wing extremists are condemning Trump for starting a new war, more or less, since he vowed to stop the endless wars started by previous presidents.
JMG, 23 June: MTG Accuses Trump Of “Complete Bait And Switch”
This is especially rich:
Salon, Alex Galbaith, 22 Jun 2025: “Back then we had dumb presidents”: Vance explains key difference in current Middle East war
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There’s something analogous between the cluelessness and myopia of the current administration, beholden as they are to conservative ideologies despite evidence about the real world, and the cluelessness and myopia of the religious, even the intellectually religious, despite the same.
Recent examples of the intellectually religious include stories about William F. Buckley (e.g. in this post), who denied intellectual freedom as “superstition” because he felt the Catholic religion of his childhood was the absolute truth of the universe, and that recent Ross Douthat book in which he advised that religion is good but especially *his* religion because that’s the one that’s true.
The bridge:
The Daily Beast, Catherine Bouris, 22 Jun 2025: Trump’s Strange God Talk Has People Concerned, subtitled “The president’s multiple mentions of ‘God’ in his Saturday address raised eyebrows among his critics.”
And then this, as noted before, several times. Why are so many Americans obsessed with defending Israel?
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 20 Jun 2025: MAGA Evangelicals Expect The Israel/Iran Conflict To Bring About The End Times
..[R]eligious-right activists have been nearly unanimous in their demand that the Trump administration lend its full support to Israel in the growing conflict.
The reason for this is that Trump’s evangelical base believes that the Bible commands them to support Israel in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ and the End Times, as former Rep. Michele Bachmann explained during a recent “World Prayer Network” program.
“This is the one thing a president can’t get wrong according to the Bible, according to Joel 3,” Bachmann said. “A president can’t get Israel wrong. They can’t. This is the one most decisive issue that will either take down a presidency or it will lift up and create great promise for a presidency.”
“This is a spiritual battle,” she continued. “Israel’s at her greatest hour of need right now, every nation on Earth should thank Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu. We should all kiss the ground and be so grateful that Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister and that he had the guts to take on this greatest evil terror state that has defined plans. And so the United States, in my opinion, we need to be decisive. This is not a negotiation. It can never be a negotiation.”
As neither a Christian nor a Jew, I find this dangerously nonsensical. Every religion thinks it’s the only one that possesses the absolute truth. Now the world is on the brink of war, perhaps nuclear war, because of rival supernatural claims to the ultimate truth.
It’s like living in someone else’s fantasy novel.
