It's Just World War 3......if we're lucky.

by Rick Wilson - Apr 7

I feel like I’m on a treadmill, writing the same warning over and over, a Substack Sisyphus, screaming that he’s going to kill us all, and we are as a nation still shrugging off his drunken stumble into the Apocalypse.

Someone asked me on Monday if I thought he would start World War III.

I replied: “Only if we’re lucky. It could be so much worse.”

Donald Trump has the strategic depth of a parking lot puddle and the historical curiosity of a lobotomized goldfish raised in a vodka aquarium. He views the map of the Middle East not as a complex lattice of ancient grievances and nuclear ambitions, but as a giant, gold-plated Monopoly board where he can just flip the table when the bank starts calling in his debts.

After all…he’s done it his entire life. When he wrecks everything, he creates a newer, bigger, uglier crisis to cover the first raging disaster. It’s not working anymore.

He honestly believes Iran is playing by his rules, but his rules are the Roy Cohn con, the Roger Stone syphilitic shuffle, the Steve Bannon bellow, the third-rate Atlantic City casino grifter tout.

He’s wrong, and every day he’s left to his own devices, America sinks deeper into danger.

Tehran is playing the long game, a centuries-old Persian chess match, while Donald is busy trying to eat the decorative marble pieces. They have the cards. They have the patience. They have a timeline that extends beyond the next polling cycle, which is a concept Trump’s chicken-fried synapses simply cannot process.

They don’t care if he reduces the country to rubble; it means the theocrats stay in power, forever. They want Trump to attack their bridges and power stations. They want Trump to destroy the cosmopolitan modernity they loathe. They want Trump to hit more schools and to start on hospitals and power plants.

No one could launder the horrific IGRC, Basij, and mullah’s images more than Trump on a war crimes spree.

They’re monsters with no reason to be better; he’s an American President, who should always be better, although he’s defined that term down so far as to be largely indistinguishable from the evil men running Iran.

Then there’s the endless, self-fellating victory talk. The Monday press conference was the hottest of messes, with SECDRUNK Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratliff, and a cast of spear-carriers all predicating every sentence with “ONLY TRUMP THE MAGNIFICENT!”

You’d think Trump was an Air Force Pararescue jumper himself, plunging into the hot LZ to rescue the downed F-15E WSO, or that no other President had ever even dreamed of trying to rescue a downed American pilot.

And he’d be right…Except for the inconvenient fact that every other American President in the last 90 years has done the same. CSAR is a thing we do, and have done under different names since World War II; after all, George H.W. Bush was rescued by the USS Finback submarine in 1945.

The shootdown of an F-15E led to the loss of one A-10, two MC-130s, at least four AH MH-6 Little Bird helicopters, in addition to several damaged helicopters and aircraft. The Defense Department (sorry, Pete, not using your branding) has been remarkably unwilling to discuss casualties of any kind. As with everything regarding our military, of course, it was an act of amazing skill and heroism.

But it also reflects something Trump is entirely unready to face: the capture of a U.S. airman by Iran. If we continue the escalation, it’s only a matter of time.

Trump, with his feral cunning, would kill a thousand men to keep one captive from showing up on television. He knows that this war has slipped from his control, and that would cement the public image of failure in a way that nothing would dislodge.

Meanwhile, he’s out there braying that “to the victor belong the spoils,” envisioning a future where he’s looting Iran’s ruins for oil and ego props. Good luck with that.

But the irony is going to be delicious and dark: that mantra is about to be inverted. When the dust settles on this avoidable catastrophe, the only spoils left will be the shattered remains of American influence, handed on a silver platter to the mullahs, and the shattered remains of Trump’s obedient political party.

And that “Praise be to Allah” line? Of course, it was a troll. It was a cheap, neon-lit wink to a base that loves a vulgarian performance. But in the cold reality of geopolitics, it was a move of transcendent stupidity. It wasn’t a masterstroke; it was a toddler throwing a lit match into a room full of gasoline just to see the pretty colors.

The most damning part of this entire burlesque? Everyone in that room with him, at any time, from the sycophants in the Cabinet to his terrified aides lurking in the wings, knows the truth.

They see the dull, bovine stare when the briefings get too complex. They know he can only understand simple pictograms and one-syllable words. They know their fingerprints are all over a disaster being steered by a man who couldn’t find Tehran on a map if you promised him golden…statue.

And when he demands “the nuclear” not one of them will say, “No, sir.”

They know he is utterly, fundamentally incapable of understanding the gravity of the fire he’s ignited. All of them: the military team, the intelligence folks, the State Department, Susie Wiles. All of them know. Marco knows. So does J.D. So does Scott Bessent.

He’s killing our nation, and they’re his little handmaidens.

The economic fallout will be a masterclass in self-inflicted systemic collapse, a fiscal Hindenburg ignited by a man who thinks "macroeconomics" is a type of pasta. As he pivots from one manufactured crisis to the next, the global markets, which crave stability the way Trump craves a camera lens or a preteen model, are already pricing in the "Chaos Premium."

We’re looking at an energy crisis to rival the 1970s, a supply chain decapitation that will make the pandemic look like a minor logistics hiccup, coupled with an inflationary spiral that will turn the average American’s 401(k) into a very expensive stack of kindling.

He’s not "running the country like a business"; he’s running it like one of his defunct casinos after making a deep commitment to methamphetamine, stripping the copper from the walls, stiffing the contractors, and hoping the suckers at the slots don't notice the “OUT OF BUSINESS” sign being hammered into the front door.

So, Donald does the only thing he knows how to do: he escalates.

He detonates a new crisis to incinerate the headlines of the last one. It’s a scorched-earth policy applied to domestic PR, and it’s going to lead us into a darkness we aren’t prepared for. He’ll keep throwing matches until there’s nothing left to burn, convinced all the while that the explosions are actually applause.

They should be reaching for the 25th Amendment like it’s a lifeboat off a sinking ship. They should be screaming from the rooftops that the pilot has left the cockpit and the plane is hurtling toward a mountainside.

But they won’t. We know they won’t. They’re too busy measuring the drapes for their own political survival, for their 2028 runs, for their modified limited hangout walkbacks of the near and far future. No one should ever let any of his minions and minders anywhere near power or responsibility again, and it’s on us if we do.

God help us all