TonyCarper.com

 

  Somewhere inside the American economy sits a black jelly bean. Think of the economy as an enormous glass jar containing a thousand different possibilities. Each jelly bean represents an economic choice, a political decision or an unforeseen consequence. Tariffs are red. Treasury bonds are green. Inflation is yellow. Immigration is purple. Energy is pink. War is blood orange. A competent president studies the jar. He weighs the risks, understands how the pieces interact and tries not to pull several dangerous choices at once. Donald Trump plunges his hand blindly into it. He does not understand the jar. He does not care how the beans are connected. He simply grabs whatever satisfies his vanity at that particular moment, announces victory and leaves everyone else to discover what he has broken. The danger is not merely that Trump will eventually pull the black jelly bean. The deeper danger is that he has already overturned the jar and is stamping on the glass. Consider oil. When th...

  THE VANITY WAR AND THE RECKONING Trump’s Iranian quagmire is no longer merely a military disaster. It is becoming an economic contagion. Donald Trump now assures the country that his war against Iran is proceeding “better than anybody expected.” Such declarations might be comical were they not being issued by the man commanding the most powerful military on earth while oil approaches $100 a barrel, shipping lanes choke, interest rates rise, and the world economy edges toward another convulsion. The war is not going well. It is merely continuing. Those are not the same thing, although Trump has spent a lifetime confusing motion with progress, noise with strength, and personal boasting with objective reality. The campaign has become a quagmire sustained not by strategic necessity, military logic, or a clearly defined national interest, but by the wounded vanity of one man who cannot pronounce the words, “I was wrong.” The war’s central objectives began collapsing almost immediately...

  THROUGH THE NUCLEAR LOOKING GLASS Iran Gets Bombed. The Saudis Get Centrifuges. Somebody Gets Paid. Donald Trump’s Middle East policy has finally passed beyond hypocrisy and entered the realm of moral hallucination. The United States is fighting Iran over nuclear enrichment while negotiating to help Saudi Arabia develop the same nuclear infrastructure. American aircraft attack one Middle Eastern nation because its enrichment program might someday produce a bomb, while American diplomats discuss giving another Middle Eastern dictatorship access to the technology, expertise and industrial foundation required to travel the same road. One nation gets bunker-busters. The other gets blueprints, contracts and a presidential handshake. Apparently uranium becomes less dangerous when it is enriched by a prince who flatters Donald Trump, invests in his family’s orbit and understands the diplomatic power of a gold-plated ballroom. Saudi Arabia is not a liberal democracy, a trustworthy consti...

  The United States is at war again. Not conducting an “operation.” Not performing some limited military errand beneath the threshold of public concern. Not merely rearranging Iranian military installations with precision-guided explosives. We are fighting a war, American service members are dying in it, billions of dollars are disappearing into it, and the Trump administration is behaving as though refusing to pronounce the word will somehow make the consequences vanish. For nearly two weeks, American aircraft have once again struck targets throughout Iran. What began as attacks against military facilities has expanded to civilian infrastructure the administration claims serves military purposes. Yet President Trump has offered no serious explanation to the country, senior officials have avoided sustained public questioning, and Congress has reportedly received little of the classified information necessary to judge where this campaign is going. The Pentagon has not held a meaning...

For nearly a decade Americans have been treated to the same sermon. The country, we were assured, had become hopelessly corrupted by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Promotions supposedly went to the undeserving. Excellence had been sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Government no longer rewarded competence, only ideology. The cure, naturally, was Donald Trump. He and his disciples promised something bordering on divine intervention. The adults would return. The best people would take over. Every office in government would be occupied by brilliant professionals chosen solely because they were the most capable individuals available. They even found the perfect word to sanctify the movement: meritocracy. It was a magnificent slogan. Unfortunately, slogans have an irritating tendency to collide with reality. Reality noticed that cabinet appointments increasingly resembled the casting call for a cable news panel. Reality noticed career experts being escorted out the door while ...

### Trump and Hegseth Have Turned American Power Into a Monument to Their Own Incompetence The most frightening question in any war is not how many bombs have fallen, how many ships have sailed or how many targets have disappeared beneath pillars of smoke. The most frightening question is simpler: **What is the war supposed to accomplish?** After months of American attacks on Iran, thousands of sorties, shattered cities, dead soldiers, burning ships, disrupted commerce and enough official chest-thumping to awaken Caesar from the grave, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth still cannot provide a coherent answer. They have announced targets. They have issued threats. They have recited casualty figures and bomb-damage assessments. They have strutted before cameras and described destruction as though destruction were self-explanatory. But they have never identified a strategic objective. Not one. The White House proclaimed three military objectives at the beginning of Operation Epic Fury: destroy...