Good Luck. Have Fun. Just Die. Trump's 20 Minutes of Mental Collapse

by Rick Wilson - Apr 2

My God. As always, one has to ask, “What the hell is wrong with Donald Trump?”

Let’s get to the meat of the speech…wait, let me revise that…the meat of the gloopy farrago of half-slurred word vomit that dribbled from Trump’s lie hole. While the speech was notionally about Iran, it was so incoherent, so scattershot, and so full of lies and contradictions that it would take a team of semioticians, backed by a server farm of cutting-edge semantic AIs, decades of compute time to parse it into something understandable to English speakers.

Let’s summarize the state of Trump’s regime after last night’s disaster of a speech as best we can.

Trump has no idea how to escape the disaster he’s created. The speech was a smoke machine, alarums and excursions, a flailing, desperate attempt to pump the markets just one more time.

It didn’t work, given that oil futures are screaming northward this morning, markets are down, and the certitude that the TACO effect would always let Wall Street (and Trump insiders) make money on the upside and downside of markets is fraying, perhaps permanently.

His strategic objectives, if you can even call them that, shift by the hour, and even shifted throughout the speech. Regime change? Nuclear disarmament? Containment? Who knows? Maybe tomorrow it’ll be a crusade to liberate Zoroastrianism. With Trump, policy isn’t a framework; it’s a mood board in a nursing home for criminal dementia patients.

Trump either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the global economic bomb he’s detonated.

He semi-shrugged off the idea of getting his grubby little lemur paws on Iran’s nuclear material stockpile. “It would take months to get near the nuclear dust” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

He thinks America’s energy market is disconnected from the global market. Wake up and smell the $106 Brent Crude, Donald. He doesn’t understand, even in the loosest way, the gift he’s handed Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. Posit that we’ve destroyed their entire military all you like, but with the revenues they’ll derive from controlling the Strait, they’ll just buy a new one from China.

As Vladimir Putin’s special boy, Donald Trump still hates NATO more than he hates Russia, China, or Iran, but Trump isn’t leaving NATO. Set aside the legal impediments to that insanity, but that float was clearly one more Trumpian sop to the Bannonite deadenders who believed Trump’s “no more wars” nonsense.

Trump still doesn’t even have the vaguest understanding of asymmetric warfare. He doesn’t understand that Iran doesn’t need a navy or an air force to wreak terrible economic and military destruction against American military and civilian targets, even…perhaps especially…here at home.

Let’s not look aside from the continued promise to bomb Iran’s power plants, desalination plants, and other civilian infrastructure “into the Stone Age.” Grunting stooge and chronic embarrassment SECDRUNK Pete Hegseth repeated those words on Twitter, to the squeeing delight of the “but muh warfightur” fanboys. Nothing says, “We won!” like bombing civilian targets. Seems…war crimey, but what do I know?

At the end of World War II, which remains the all-time champ for tonnage of weapons delivered by the U.S. military, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that while bombing civilian populations may have lowered German morale, it never pushed the German people toward regime change. Bombing industrial targets made a difference in Germany’s capacity to wage war, to be sure, but targeting civilians didn’t.

I’ve made the point several hundred times by now that Donald Trump circa 2026 isn’t the Donald Trump of 2016.

Hell, he’s not even the Donald Trump of January.

Last night sent a massive, chilling shockwave through the MAGAverse because they understand that Trump’s inevitable, grinding end is no longer a “someday”, but a “right now.”

A sarcastic friend sent me a Signal message last night with a picture of Trump at the podium, looking withered, tired, and weak. Riffing off the Sam Rockwell movie title, he said, “So Trump’s message is ‘Good Luck. Have Fun. Don’t Die.’”

I told him he was wrong.

Because whether it’s our troops, our economy, or our place in the world, the real message of Trump’s America right now is much simpler:

Good luck.

Have fun.

Just die.