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“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly.”

That statement was made by former President Dwight Eisenhower who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during WW II. He knew war up close and personal.

Donald Trump doesn’t, draft dodger that he was. That’s why he could start a war with Iran without any substantive reason for doing so.

A recent online NPR headline read, “Trump sends mixed signals on when the war will end.” That should surprise no one. When you don’t know why you started a war in the first place, being confused about when and how it will end is no surprise.

He’s not even sure if he started a war or something else. Initially he called it a war. Now he’s saying it’s a “skirmish” or “a short-term excursion. Wonder if he knows what the “absolute surrender” he is demanding from Iran looks like at the end of a “skirmish” or “short-term excursion”?

Trump may be confused, but the American public isn’t. We know what’s going on here.

If we follow the Occam’s Razor principle, attributed to 14th century British theologian William Occam, that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the explanation, Trump’s war of choice with Iran is all about the Epstein files.

Before the war he tried everything he knew to get Epstein out of the headlines and failed. Starting the war with Iran was all he had left.

It was a moral failure of massive proportion. Lives are being lost, including 8 American soldiers and many others wounded, 165 children and adults killed when the U.S. mistakenly bombed a girl’s school, and untold numbers of Iranian civilians.

Once the Epstein files become front-page headlines again he will likely do something else chaotic. Both Trump and the mentally disturbed Republican Senator Lindsey Graham say an attack on Cuba may be next.

But as tragic and stupidly foolish as war is, and as morally repugnant as a war of choice is, Trump’s war with Iran is actually symptomatic of the meta-narrative of his entire presidency – chronic chaos.

War is pure chaos, but the impact of everything Trump has been doing since taking office reveals his need for chaos to such an extent that it has become chronic, an obsession he doesn’t seem to get enough of.

Presidential chaos is extremely dangerous and damaging because it has such extensive consequences, creating uncertainty, instability, anxiety, worry over what might happen next on a global level. At this point no one can predict what Trump will do next about anything.

The chaos started the first day he took office when he issued an executive order attacking DEI programs all across the country based on lies he was telling about their purpose and impact.

He quickly moved to try to exert unconstitutional control over businesses, industry, law firms, universities, public schools, and then quickly threw the economy in chaos with his foolishly stupid tariffs he still falsely insists are paid by foreign governments and businesses.

Across the federal government agencies have reached the point of being unable to function because of politically motivated firings, including the FBI where Kash Patel has fired counter-terrorism experts with special knowledge of Iran.

The USAID office became the poster child of Trump’s chaos within the government, shutting down completely and putting as many as 600,000 of the world’s poor at risk of starvation and death by disease, including 400,000 children.

The chaos then turned deadly here at home with the deaths of American citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of lawless ICE and Border agents. Words cannot adequately capture the level of impact of Trump’s chaotic assault on Minneapolis has had.

But it was only a part of his nation-wide mass deportation program that, interestingly enough, he has recently told his people to stop talking about because of the chaos it is creating.

Perhaps the worst chaos Trump has wrought is with the American judicial system with courts across the country inundated with lawsuits brought by states, universities, civic groups, and individuals trying to stop Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional actions.

But Trump’s constant chaos hasn’t stopped at America’s borders. He upset our Canadian neighbors with stupidly foolish talk of Canada becoming our 51st state. He has inserted chaos into U.S. relationships with our NATO allies with his stupidly foolish insistence that he was claiming Greenland, even if by force.

Foreign governments need stability in order for leaders to trust what one another might do. Unstable international relations are fertile ground for something very bad happening that good communications and trust could avoid, but Trump shows no interest in building trust with other world leaders except the dictators he wants to emmulate.

That’s the effect the Trump presidency is having both at home and across the world. Iran is but another example of the chaos Trump is willing to create in order to exert power and protect and enrich himself.

But it’s the fact that Trump’s drive to create chaos is chronic that multiplies the danger it poses. It was psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton whose research on the impact of war, and especially the struggle of people to cope with the prospects of a nuclear holocaust, who coined the phrase, “psychic numbing.”

It is a defense mechanism wherein we choose to ignore past trauma or future threats whose impacts was or can be massive, such as a nuclear holocaust. Yet, it can happen in regard to almost anything we find too much to handle or think about.

I suggest a kind of “psychic numbing” can happen to us because of the chronic nature of Trump’s chaos. It happens so often that we feel overwhelmed by it and then choose not to think about it or dwell on. That means we also ignore its dangers.

Trump’s chaos is so chronic that we have to work at paying attention to everything he is doing, work at taking it seriously, work at seeing how out of the norm his behavior is.

So what the American public has to bear in mind with Trump virtually every day is that he not only creates chaos around something that is very serious, such as starting a war, but he does it so often that the sheer chronic nature of his actions makes us want to ignore him.

That, of course, is precisely what he is hoping will happen. It is an intentional strategy to entice us to give up, drop out, tire of fighting, step away as he steps in and takes more power and control.

It doesn’t help that congressional Republicans and MAGA voters seem totally unconcerned about the damage the chaos is doing. You and I don’t have that luxury. We must be concerned. We cannot to allow the chronic nature of Trumpian chaos to dull us to its dangers and effects.

More than that, it must be a primary motivator to do everything we can between now and November to ensure that the results of the mid-term elections will be a resounding defeat for MAGA voters as we take power away from congressional Republicans and Donald Trump and give it to those who want to preserve our democracy and our government of, by, and for the people.