Republicans Chose Armageddon Over Checking Trump—They Just Got Lucky

I called it “The Humiliation of Donald Trump” for two reasons. First, because schadenfreude is more powerful than my restraint: It’s good when bad things happen to him, and we should rub it in his face. Second, more importantly, because he and his loyalists will never concede defeat—even obvious defeat—which makes it incumbent on the rest of us to tell blunt truths just as vigorously. If we don’t jeer their pathetic claims of victory, they will bombard us with lies—e.g., the United States achieved regime change in Iran (no it didn’t)—until history itself is contested.

Reflecting on it overnight, though, I realized this framing, while important, is a bit too parochial on its own to capture the historic magnitude of events culminating in his April 7 surrender. Yes, we should insist on keeping score: Trump fucked up, he blew it, he got his ass kicked, and embarrassed the country in doing so. Mock his puppets mercilessly when they try to insist otherwise. The unfolding of American politics has critical ramifications for every living person.

But homing in on that alone—as if this were just another embarrassing Trump episode—is an error. It obscures a bigger picture, in which we can see the whole world white knuckling it and contorting itself, at immense cost, to weather the destructive whims of a single sociopath. In a way, myopia plays to Trump’s preference that this be a story about him and the quality of his performance—as if it were a figure-skating or gymnastics routine, and he were trying to play off a minor tumble. Some say he succeeded, some say he failed, and in any case, it’s just one more forgettable scene from the never-ending Trump show.

But that’s not what it is. It is, instead, a historic crisis that revealed the full danger of unchecked imperial power.

The Iran debacle was not and is not a historically inert event. Many of Trump’s idiotic gambits, even some of the high-stakes ones, are just as ridiculous, and threaten similar harm, but in practice can be contained, and the consequences reversed, if and when he backs down. Allies were and remain rightfully pissed at Trump (and thus the U.S.) for strong-arming them with tariffs and threatening to seize their territory. Trump squandered good will and wasted jobs and wealth. His actions gave our partners no choice but to begin making new, potentially redundant trading and security arrangements, in order to reduce their dependence on America. But looking at those episodes in the rearview, we see little rubble, real or metaphorical—at least relative to what happened this week. It is (or was) even possible to imagine those things blowing over with time, leaving pre-existing arrangements largely intact. A parenthetical in the history books, to help future humans comprehend Trump’s aberrance as a world leader.

This instance is different. It may feel similar. Many people quite understandably processed it as a new Trump provocation, and anticipated Trump would back down at some point. And at some level, that’s what actually happened. But any future history book that recalls the events of April 2026 as just one in a series of Trump dramas can be safely thrown in the trash.

Trump’s illegal war against Iran was (is?) a bizarro amalgamation of historic crises and defeats—a dash of Napoleonic hubris, a morsel of Cuban Missile Crisis, a tablespoon of 1914 Sarajevo, blended on high-speed with a sprinkling of the USSR in Afghanistan—all willed into existence by one crazy person who should have no power over others, yet has lucked into more power than anyone else on Earth. We make ourselves his subjects if we convey, in word or deed, “glad he got it out of his system, now let’s move on.”

Suffice it to say, that is not an acceptable outcome.

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In the final analysis, we may have to tolerate it for a time, because we can’t change it on our own. But we can not acclimate to or forget it. We need to find ways to make the enormity of the crisis clear and paramount. When we ask, in earnestness or frustration—what will it take before Republicans in Congress decide they’ve had enough?—we usually intend it as a rhetorical question, or a note of sarcasm. But this week they answered it once and for all: Republicans will stand back and allow armageddon to unfold before using the only tools in existence that can stop it. Nothing matters to them more than preserving Donald Trump’s unchecked power, and so they will let him destroy the world if that’s his preference.

This is more important than domestic public opinion, or the battle for narrative control over Trump’s capitulation, or even the lasting geopolitical consequences of this illegal war of choice. Yes, Trump has degraded the U.S. and may have inverted the balance of power in the Middle East and empowered America’s greatest adversaries for a generation, and he did it all on a whim. All of that is quite bad enough, worthy of Trump’s impeachment or resignation in disgrace.

But the main thing is the usurpation of power—the full power of the United States—for the purposes of holding the entire planet hostage. Trump did that. Our greatest Cold War nightmares seldom contemplated the possibility that the Soviet empire might fall, through succession crisis, into the hands of a madman who&#