Military-Industrial Complexities

The Great MAGA Crack-Up Continues

“If we get sucked into this war, which inexorably looks like it’s going to happen on the combat side, it’s going to not just blow up the coalition. It’s also going to thwart what we’re doing with the most important thing, which is the deportation of the illegal alien invaders that are here. If we don’t do that, we don’t have a country…this is actually, potentially a real civil war in our biggest cities.”

-Steve Bannon, The Tucker Carlson Show: 6-17-25

It’s been a big couple weeks for America’s military. Marines and National Guard deployed against civilians in LA. Trump’s tank-happy, street-rending military parade. And now — the top piece of bread on this collosal shit sandwich — Israel is doing their level best to drag us into a forever war with Iran: a country over twice the size of Texas with terrain nearly as rough as Afghanistan, over three times as many people as Iraq in 2003, plus the factories that make the Shahed drones currently fucking up Ukraine.

The worst thing about getting older is watching people — often the same people — making the same awful mistakes for the same stupid reasons. At least we were in the driver’s seat back in 2003, choosing our own shitty adventure. Now we’re supposed to wade into another quagmire and risk World War III because Israel decided to pick a fight? We’re fucking things up just fine on our own, thank you: we do not need any new projects at this time. We’re busy.

Two weeks ago, I wrote an article about Trump’s fracturing coalition. I scarcely mentioned foreign policy because it didn’t seem like we were on the brink of war at the time. It’s suboptimal that we’ve arrived there, but here’s the good news: the Great MAGA Crack-Up is cracking worse than ever. Billions and billions of cracks, like nobody’s ever seen before.

How The Factions Feel

When it comes to Wall Street, look no further than the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page: the compass that almost always points straight to hell. They’ve spent the last couple months going after Trump’s economic policy, but they’re bullish on this war. Their op/ed page is filled with war-thirsty headlines like “Why Israel’s War is Ours Too,” “Iran’s Nuclear Pursuit and the Pakistani Example,” and my personal favorite: “Iran Is Trump’s Deterrence Moment: The President can reverse Biden’s Afghan legacy by helping Israel eliminate Tehran’s nuclear threat.”

Much of the Tea Party Rump State, the Evangelical MAGA Cultists, and Project 2025 are also excited about the prospect of regime change in Iran. They all yearn for war in Israel as a sign of the end times and no, not just at the fringes:

Trump posted this. I hope God tells him to [REDACTED]

(as an aside, I’ve read erotica less horny than this text. Forgive me, premium subscribers, for the erotica voice in the audio version)

As for the tech bros…well, executives from Palentir, Meta, and OpenAI just joined the military. Don’t worry: they won’t have to roughen their soft programmer hands in bootcamp or even slum it with the plebs in Officer Candidate School; they swore in as Lieutenant Colonals: a rank many officers don’t reach in 20 years of service. The military industrial complex has horseshoed around to selling commissions: a strategy that has worked out extremely well for every country that’s tried it.

Elon Musk, thoroughly punished and frightened for his precious SpaceX contracts, has almost entirely stayed out of this debate, choosing instead to hype his various companies and post memes from 2016 and prove to the world that he’s totally not on drugs, man, he’s clean and sober despite very clearly being blitzed out of his fucking skull on TV. The only indication of where his sympathies lie is his alleged decision to restore Starlink Internet connectivity to Iran to facilitate communications between Iranian rebels yearning for the bunker-busters of American Freedom to rain down upon them. This truly is the Iraq war come again.

And then there are the National Socialists, who thought they were coming in from the cold but might be farther outside Trump’s inner circle than ever before. These guys are hardcore anti-interventionists, at least when it comes to forever war in the Middle East. Charlie Kirk is prevaricating, but clearly nervous about the prospect of this war. Josh Hawley’s against it. Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson? Beside themselves. Here’s Carlson brutalizing Ted Cruz on his show, I think Cruz might actually be dead now:

I’ve watched this clip at least two dozen times since I saw it last night: it is magnificent, a tour de force, flawless rhetorical victory of the type rarely seen. Tucker Carlson is pure hot garbage 99.9% of the time, his brain is worms and Russian flags and racism, but every once in a while he gets something catastrophically, unequivocally right and this is one of those times, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Which brings us back to that Bannon quote at the beginning.

The Trump Trap

The Trump administration has already declared war: not on Iran, but on America’s largest population centers: New York, Philly, Chicago, and especially LA. Protests in LA are dissipating and have been completely, unequivocally peaceful for days now — nary a flaming Waymo to be seen. And yet, the Pentagon just anounced the deployment of another 2,000 National Guard troops. That’s 6,000 total, plus those 700 marines who have “temporarily detained” a civilian trying to go to an appointment and nothing else. Everything is so stupid all the time.

Bannon is right that we are either on the cusp of civil war or already fighting one. Yesterday morning, I woke up to an article from The Hill headlined “These are the Democrats who’ve been arrested, detained or charged under Trump” because that’s where we are as a country. Here they are:

• A staffer for New York Rep. Jerry Nadler

• Newark Mayor Ras Baraka

• Judge Hannah Dugan

• New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver

• California Senator Alex Padilla

• NYC Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander

And then, of course, there is Minnesota, where a gunman dressed as a police officer wounded state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, and killed state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband. The killer was a Trump-supporting evangelical who had a hit list of 45 other elected officials including Tim Walz and Ilhan Omar. Vance Boelter doesn’t work for the government and these assassinations weren’t ordered by the administration. Here’s the thing, though: ten years ago, when “lock her up” remained a scandal for months, these killings would have shocked the country. Here and now, it shocked no one. After all, conservative news spends all day every day calling Democrats criminals who are actively attempting to destroy America by facilitating an invasion of foreign hordes and transing all our children. Boelter simply took that argument to its logical conclusion.

And now, as Trump’s longed-for civil war gets underway, Israel tries to pull him into a war with Iran. It is, strategically speaking, a terrible idea to fight a two-front war. This is true when the enemies are outside our borders and doubly true when one of those wars is civil. So what’s it going to be? Iran, or our fellow Americans, or both?

Can Trump win either war?

As those of you who follow me on social media alread know, I was in Washington DC last Saturday for the Army’s 250th birthday celebration. I attended the morning’s festival and watched the parade. You can read my live coverage of those events on Bluesky by following those links, no account needed.

The thing that sticks with me about the birthday parade is the smiling, waving soldiers who crewed Trump’s precious tanks. When you watch parades carried out by dictatorships — North Korea, China, etc — there is no smiling or waving or any human emotion. It’s eyes front or eyes right, it’s perfectly synchronized movements: crisp, dramatic, impractical. Tanks and soldiers arranged in wide rows and endless columns intended to awe and overwhelm. A projection of unstoppable, disciplined power.

I’m not the first person to point out that Trump’s parade was not like that at all. The smiling, the waving, the offset tank formations which ensured that only two or three could be photographed at once. No crisp Class A’s here: uniforms of past wars to celebrate the Army’s history, combat uniforms to showcase its present. Slightly off-kilter marching, consistent enough that it began to feel on purpose. Somebody online set footage of the parade to Spongebob music. It worked.

People are saying it’s the worst parade they’ve ever seen, but I humbly disagree. It was a magnificent parade, perfectly and beautifully American. We do not do menacing displays of military might, nor should we (though we are certainly capable of marching better than that). That lackluster performance delivered a clear message: you are not our enemy. Do not be afraid of us. We signed up to protect you, not hurt you, and we don’t like this any more than you do.

The festival beforehand was similarly boring and similarly perfect: a cross between a small-town carnival and a business conference. It featured booths for sponsors like USAA and military contractors, a night-vision demo, a trailer where you could play Mortal Kombat for some reason. There was a rock-climbing wall, hamburgers and ice cream for sale, one of those old-timey strength tests where you hit a lever with a sledgehammer and send a weight rocketing towards a bell at the top. A lot of booths sat empty the entire time, as though several sponsors had pulled out when Trump attempted to change the tenor of the event.

Some people showed up in MAGA gear. Most did not. A few people carried anti-Trump signs. Most of the sign-holders I spoke to said the reaction was about 50/50 negative/positive. One woman said it was closer to 70/30, and that a couple active duty soldiers very quietly thanked her for what she was doing. I received a similar message, after my thread was done.

Don’t let Trump fool you. There’s MAGA in the Army, but the Army isn’t MAGA. Scotty Hasting, a former Army infantryman turned country singer who was wounded in Afghanistan, sang the 1960s protest song “Fortunate Son” as part of his scheduled set. You can’t sing a song without knowing the lyrics, which means Hasting knows what that song is about and, I suspect, knew that he could sneak the song onto his setlist under the nose of the knuckle-draggers who never listened to anything beyond that first verse.

Some folks are born, made to wave the flag
Hoo, they're red, white and blue
And when the band plays "Hail to the chief"
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord

It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no senator's son, son
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no furtunate one, no

I highly doubt that the Army will rebel outright, but a lot of them sure do seem unhappy and take it from a person who wore the uniform: no one is better at passive resistance than soldiers, of doing a shitty job out of sheer spite. Look at that marching. Look at those tank crews, smiling and waving and ensuring that the media could not get a single photo that looked even remotely menacing. Plenty of them have friends and families in those big blue cities, they don’t want to point their guns in that direction. If Trump wants effective shock troops for his civil war, he’s going to have to look elsewhere.

And Iran? That’s not a war we win either. Oh, we’ll win in the beginning, like we always do: we’ll bomb the country into the stone age and declare victory, maybe hang another hubristic banner while we’re at it. And then the Iranian people will wear us down, casualty by casualty, over years or decades. Again. Because nothing has changed. We’re not more ready to fight this war than we were in 2000, only more ready to commit atrocities, and that’s not a winning strategy either.

The overheated factional warfare. The failed parade. The catch-22 of Iran. The Trump administration can tell all the lies it wants -- 250k people in the parade audience, the No Kings rallies that attracted 5 million people across the country as “a complete and utter failure with miniscule attendence,” the Minnesota assassin is a demonic Marxist Democrat — none of it changes the fact that Trump’s control is slipping. The parade was a middle finger and an embarrassment; if reports are to be believed, the first thing that's actually made the birthday boy mad at the perennially incompetent Pete Hegseth. Pressure from Wall Street and the agriculture lobby forced him to throttle back deportations on farm and hospitality workers until pressure from his furious base made him reverse course just four days later. Trump says he knew about the planned Israeli air strikes on Iran in advance, but sources suggest he only went along with it because Israel was ready to drop bombs without his blessing, and that would have been embarrassing. "It never would have happened if I were president" he said over and over -- Russia invading Ukraine, Hamas' October 7th attack. Well, now he’s president and wouldn’t you know it: violence keeps on happening.

If Trump allows Israel to goad him into war with Iran, the Bannon types will turn on him and the anti-Trump protests will get a nitro boost of anti-war outrage. If he refuses, he'll lose the Israeli lobby and the elements of his coalition salivating at the prospect of firing up the meat grinder. Trump has given himself two weeks to work out a deal, but in this case it takes three to tango. If he can’t figure this out, or if either party escalates? He’s fucked. There’s nowhere left to go.

No dog is more dangerous than a cornered one. The MAGA coalition worked because it shared a common enemy, and Trump's only real way out of this impossible mess is to bring that enemy back to life. He needs LA to riot. He needs an injured ICE agent. He needs a Democrat to kill someone. Anything, anything to convince these warring factions to set aside their differences and, for the sake of self-preservation, destroy the Red Menace and their unwashed foreign hordes.

The bad news is: Trump needs a catastrophe. He needs a Reichstag fire, and he needs it yesterday.