Donald Trump’s latest meltdown in response to “ceasefire” violations by both Iran and Israel but especially Israel brings out the uncanny quality of everything that has happened over the last week – the simultaneous existence of a very real hot war with what amounts to a social media campaign. They’re both happening. They’re clearly interacting with each other. But the dynamics of the two are so separate, distinct, operating according to total different rules that watching the two together looks deeply unreal.
Subsequent reporting by The New York Times and other publications seems to confirm my initial assumption, which was that the entire US involvement in this conflict was driven by especially Fox News’s reporting of Israel’s onslaught against Iran’s military infrastructure and nuclear program. Israel was “winning” and Trump wanted in on that winning. And that was really the entirety of it. But Trump’s decision to escalate the crisis to a level of destruction of underground facilities that only the US is capable of had a very real result. And it’s not just whatever level of destruction those bunker buster bombs created – which appears substantial but not total.
