Grifting Us To War
A war in Iran no one asked for, the making of an American King and his con of post-truth authoritarianism
The United States was founded on a radical rejection of monarchy. The very identity of our nation was forged in the crucible of revolution against a king who, as the Declaration of Independence meticulously lays out, had “combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation.”
We built a system of checks and balances, a separation of powers, and a Bill of Rights specifically to ensure that no future executive could ever aspire to such unaccountable rule. We have no kings. That’s part of the civic catechism we’re taught from grade school.
But don’t tell Donald Trump that.
In a moment of startling candor, Trump was asked by The New York Times whether there were any limitations on his power. His response was not a recitation of Constitutional constraints or a nod to the wisdom of the founders. It was something far more revealing. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
For many, this was written off as classic Trumpian bluster—the hyperbolic bravado of reality TV star turned politician. But to those who study the architecture of authoritarianism, the statement was less a gaffe and more of a mission statement. It is the core philosophy of a leader who sees himself not as a servant of democracy, but as the embodiment of the state itself.
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose work Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present meticulously dissects the playbook of autocratic leaders, would recognize this immediately. Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues that the modern strongman’s power relies on a “cult of the leader” that deliberately erodes institutional legitimacy, replacing established law and custom with the whims of a single personality.
When the leader’s conscience is the only check on his power, the Constitution, Congress, and the courts become mere suggestions—obstacles to be negotiated or ignored, not authorities to be obeyed.
What we have witnessed since is the logical conclusion of that philosophy put into practice. The Trump administration, in its current iteration, has waged a war of attrition against the very concept of limited government.
When the Supreme Court ruled his initial tariffs were beyond the scope of his executive authority, Trump simply fired off a round of new ones, daring the system to stop him again.
When the Constitution’s guarantee of due process stood in the way of his mass deportation plans, his administration simply ignored it, engaging in state-sanctioned kidnapping of people off American streets, many of them US citizens.
And when the law mandated that war must be approved by Congress, Trump decided that the separation of powers was an antiquated nuisance for “woke libs” and launched military strikes, effectively starting a war on his own authority.
If this isn’t the behavior of a self-styled king, one must ask: what would a king even look like?
We now have a king. And as historian Timothy Snyder warns in his work On Tyranny, the peril of such a moment is not just in the leader’s actions, but in our collective willingness to normalize them.
Snyder, who has spent his career studying the collapses of democracies into fascism and communism, reminds us that the seeds of tyranny are often internal, not external. They are sown when a society or its leadership exploits crises (real or manufactured) to erode the very freedoms that define it. We are living through that exploitation right now.
The Sword of “Redemptive Violence”
Kings start wars. This is a historical truism as old as time. From Xerxes to Louis XIV, the projection of royal power has always been inextricably linked to the projection of military might. And while kings make the decisions, they rarely die in the conflicts they ignite.
As the prophet Samuel grimly warned the elders of Israel when they demanded a monarch, a king would take their sons for his chariots and his horsemen, and some would fall by his sword. The dying is done by the sons and daughters of the common people.
Trump himself offered a chilling, offhand acknowledgment of this reality in a video announcing his strikes on Iran. With the casual detachment of a monarch discussing the weather, he noted, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.”
Trump spoke of “American heroes” as if they were a resource to be spent. He said nothing of the casualties inflicted on the people of other nations, save for a bizarre warning to the Iranian populace to “stay home” because “bombs will be dropping everywhere.”
This detached calculus was given a quasi-theological veneer by Trump’s “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth. Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, Hegseth framed the coming violence in the language of salvation: “The warrior who is willing to lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his creator, that warrior finds eternal life.” He continued, “To preserve the soul of America, we must continue to wield not just the physical sword but the sword of truth.”
This is a classic trope of authoritarian regimes: the sacralization of violence. Jason Stanley, the Yale philosopher whose books How Fascism Works and How Propaganda Works have become essential guides to the contemporary political landscape, identifies this as a key component of fascist politics.
By framing war as a noble, redemptive mission, the state transforms its soldiers into martyrs and its enemies into existential threats. It creates a hierarchy of humanity where the lives of the in-group (patriotic Americans) are sacred, and the lives of the out-group (Iranians, or anyone who stands in the way) are collateral—acceptable losses in a divine crusade to “preserve the soul of America.”
This language of “eternal life” and “the sword of truth” isn’t just rhetoric; it’s a psychological weapon designed to short-circuit moral reasoning. It asks citizens to stop thinking about the messy reality of war: the maimed children, the orphaned families, the shattered cities—and instead focus on the abstract, glorious destiny of the homeland.
But something vital is lost in these celebrations of redemptive violence. Historian Heather Cox Richardson often points to the recurring battle between two visions of America: one that seeks hierarchy and exclusion, and one that strives for democracy and expansion of rights.
The warmongers who celebrate state violence as a purifying force are profoundly out of touch with reality. They are the ones trying to convince us, despite the overwhelming historical evidence of the past thirty years in the Middle East, that war is an effective tool for bringing about peace and justice. They insist that death can be a net gain for life, and that the slaughter of innocents is a price worth paying for an abstract national soul.
This logic is far more delusional than any adherent to nonviolence could ever be.
The 19th-century “prince of preachers” Charles Spurgeon observed with piercing clarity:
“What pride flushes the patriot’s cheek when he remembers that his nation can murder faster than any other people. Ah, foolish generation, ye are groping in the flames of hell to find your heaven, raking amid blood and bones for the foul thing which ye call glory. Killing is not the path to prosperity; huge armaments are a curse to the nation itself as well as to its neighbors.”
Spurgeon’s words echo across time, landing with uncomfortable precision on our current moment. They remind us that the “glory” of military triumph is too often built on a foundation of human misery.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., drawing inspiration from Gandhi, understood this astutely. He saw nonviolence not as passive submission, but as a form of active, courageous resistance. “Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister,” King wrote. “But true pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.”
From Fringe to Policy
How did we get here? How did the idea of a president who openly flouts the law, launches unauthorized wars, and speaks of himself as the sole arbiter of his own morality become normalized? The answer lies in a powerful concept known as the Overton window.
Named after policy analyst Joseph Overton, this model describes the range of ideas that the public is willing to accept as politically possible at any given time. The window includes policies that are considered “popular,” “acceptable,” “reasonable,” all the way down to “unthinkable.”
The genius, and the danger, of modern political manipulation is the ability to shift the window. You don’t have to convince the public that an extreme idea is good; you only have to make a more extreme idea seem plausible, thereby making the previously unacceptable idea now seem moderate by comparison.
We have seen this tactic used with devastating effectiveness. For decades, openly attacking the press, calling for the suspension of the Constitution, or suggesting the military be used against political opponents was firmly in the “unthinkable” category. But by having fringe figures float these ideas, and by having a President constantly test the boundaries with rhetoric, the window shifts.
The propaganda machine of Nazi Germany, masterminded by Joseph Goebbels, used this exact method. The Nazis spent years incrementally escalating hatred and xenophobia in German society. They first targeted political opponents, then social groups, and eventually, millions of people were being herded into death factories without significant resistance from the general populace. It took years of shifting the window of what was acceptable, of making the brutal feel normal.
Today, we see the same mechanism at work. The “unthinkable” act of a President ignoring a court order is now debated on cable news as a “Constitutional crisis” rather than being treated as the immediate impeachable offense it is. The kidnapping of Americans off the streets is discussed within the framework of “immigration enforcement.” The launching of a war is framed as a “noble mission” to protect the future. Each step is a push, moving the window of acceptable discourse just a little further, making the last outrage the new baseline for normal.
Sarah Churchwell, an American studies scholar who has meticulously traced the history of American fascism, warns us that this isn’t a foreign import. In her work on the “America First” movement, she reveals that the rhetorical tools of exclusionary nationalism have deep roots in American soil.
The phrase “America First” wasn’t born with Donald Trump; it was a loyalty test for immigrants in 1915, a slogan of the eugenicist, anti-immigration movements of the 1920s, and the rallying cry of the isolationist (and often explicitly antisemitic) America First Committee of 1940-41, which sought to keep the US out of World War II, not out of pacifism, but out of sympathy with the Axis powers. When these historical echoes are ignored, we are doomed to mistake a recurring illness for a new disease. The ideas are old. Only the packaging is new.
The Psychology of Compliance and the Machinery of Cruelty
To understand why people go along with this, we have to look beyond politics and into the dark recesses of social psychology. The most famous and chilling experiments of the 20th century offer some terrifying explanations.
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in the 1960s demonstrated that ordinary people, when instructed by an authority figure they trusted, could be compelled to administer what they believed were painful, even lethal, electric shocks to a stranger. The subjects weren’t monsters; they were average Americans. They continued because they were told it was necessary for the science, because they were assured the authority would take responsibility, and because they were gradually eased into the process—starting with a small, harmless shock and incrementally increasing the voltage.
Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment took this further, showing how quickly individuals internalize the roles of guard and prisoner when placed in a situation that legitimizes power and dehumanizes the “other.” College students, randomly assigned to be guards, began subjecting their peers to psychological torture within days. Zimbardo, who later wrote The Lucifer Effect, dedicated his career to understanding how good people can turn evil. He concluded that it is not just a “bad apple” that spoils the barrel, but the “bad barrel” itself: the system, the institutional culture, the unquestioned authority that corrupts everyone inside it .
We are witnessing a national-scale Stanford Prison Experiment. The “guards” in the Trump administration, from the top down, are being given license to act without restraint. The bad barrel is being actively constructed through executive orders that gut oversight, through rhetoric that dehumanizes immigrants as “animals,” “illegals” and “invaders,” and through a relentless propaganda campaign that portrays any resistance as treasonous.
Legal scholar and historian Mae Ngai, in her seminal work Impossible Subjects, has shown how the very category of the “illegal alien” was constructed over the 20th century, creating a class of people who exist outside the bounds of legal protection. Once a group is legally and rhetorically placed outside the protection of the law, they become the perfect targets for the “guards.” Violence against them is not seen as violence; it is seen as enforcement. This is the psychological foundation upon which mass deportation and family separation are built.
Carol Anderson, an Emory University historian, has documented this pattern of state-sanctioned cruelty in her work on voter suppression and racial inequality. In White Rage, she argues that the backlash to black American progress has never been a series of spontaneous outbursts, but a calculated, systemic policy response. From the Black Codes after the Civil War to the rollback of the Voting Rights Act, the state has consistently been the tool used to maintain racial hierarchy.
What we are seeing now, the kidnapping of brown-skinned people, the militarized response to protest, the open disregard for the law, is the latest, most unvarnished iteration of that same white rage, now amplified and aimed at anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
It’s Already Backfiring
And so, here we are. All hell is breaking loose. Trump’s “preemptive strikes” that were supposed to be a quick, decisive show of strength have backfired spectacularly. The assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, far from triggering the collapse of the Islamic Republic that neoconservatives and armchair warriors fantasized about, has done the exact opposite. It has united a fractured Iranian nation.
In city squares across Iran, hundreds of thousands are chanting “Death to America.” They are not protesting their own regime; they are rallying behind it in the face of foreign aggression.
This was the outcome that every sober-minded general, every CIA intelligence specialist, and every expert on Iranian culture warned about. They understood a basic principle of political psychology: nothing consolidates support for a regime faster than an attack from an external enemy.
The Trump administration, in its arrogance, thought it could manipulate the Iranian population, assuming that a shocked populace would welcome a new, US-friendly regime. They forgot (or willfully ignored) that nationalism is a double-edged sword. It can be stoked at home for redemptive violence, but it can just as easily ignite abroad in resistance to it.
The repercussions are cascading across the Middle East. Missiles strike Dubai International Airport. Thick black smoke billows from the US air base in Erbil, Iraq. Hotel complexes in Bahrain, known to house American soldiers, are hit. In Baghdad, protesters attempt to storm the US Embassy. In Karachi, Pakistan, demonstrators break into the US consulate. The entire region is a giant powder keg, and our self-styled king in Washington just threw matches and gasoline on it.
Back home, the response is one of confusion, fear, anger and, among the MAGA faithful, a crisis of faith. Polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran. The promises of Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns—to end the “forever wars,” to bring the troops home, to put “America First” by disengaging from endless foreign entanglements—lie in ashes. In their place is a new, unauthorized war, justified by the same old neoconservative delusions of “regime change” that failed so spectacularly in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.
The cognitive dissonance among the administration’s supporters is painful to watch. When confronted on CNN by Jake Tapper, MAGA Senator Rick Scott was asked what he would say to a voter who feels betrayed. “President Trump said he was going to end regime change wars. He was going to end military entanglements abroad. And this is the exact opposite.” Scott’s response was a masterpiece of Orwellian doublethink: “Well, what this President wants to do is he doesn’t want forever wars. He’s against forever wars.” The war he just started, in this framing, is not a “forever war” because he is the one starting it. Trump’s war is a “peace” mission. It is a “noble” war. It is a “good” war.
Meanwhile, the administration’s propagandists are busy purging heretics. On CNN, Scott Jennings dismissed critics Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie as not being “actual Republicans” or part of the MAGA movement. “They’ve just become political enemies of the president,” he said.
This is the final, predictable stage of authoritarian consolidation. Dissent, even from the far Right, is no longer tolerated. The party is not a coalition of ideas, it has become a cult of personality. The leader is the movement, and the movement is the leader. To question the war is to question the king. And questioning the king is treason.
Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who fled Putin’s Russia, has watched this transformation with a sense of grim familiarity. In her writing for The New York Times, Gessen has chronicled the incremental shocks that accompanied Putin’s consolidation of power: the shelling of a school, the imprisonment of protestors, the elimination of elected governorships, the branding of journalists as “foreign agents.”
The pattern is always the same. It is a “death by a thousand cuts,” Gessen writes, where each new outrage is just shocking enough to paralyze, but not shocking enough to mobilize.
We get used to it. We normalize the unthinkable. We adapt to the new normal, and then the regime pushes a little further. As The Washington Monthly recently noted, in America, this transformation is happening not over decades, but over months— “everything everywhere all at once.” The speed of the assault is designed to overwhelm our capacity to resist.
But we must resist. We must break the spell of normalcy.
This ad hoc bombing of other countries. The kidnapping of people off our streets. The open disregard for established laws. The deployment of the military against our own cities. The celebrations of violence as “noble.” Do not get used to it.
What we are witnessing is the legitimization of brute state force. The goal of any aspiring autocrat is to make the population accept this force as normal, as necessary, as the price of security or national greatness. We are supposed to take all of this in, shrug our shoulders, and go back to streaming our shows. We are supposed to let the Overton window slide until the “unthinkable” becomes the “acceptable,” and the “acceptable” becomes “policy.”
Historian Anne Applebaum, in her work Twilight of Democracy, provides a crucial insight: the people who enable authoritarianism are not always evil monsters. Often, they are former friends, colleagues, and intellectuals who get seduced by the promise of “law and order,” or by the thrill of belonging to a powerful movement. They convince themselves that the ugliness is temporary, that the strongman is necessary to defeat a greater threat. They are wrong. The ugliness is the brand. The cruelty is the point.
Political theorist Danielle Allen, at Harvard, has spent her career studying what makes democratic citizenship work. She argues that democracy is not a machine that runs itself; it requires constant attention, participation, and a spirit of “civic friendship”—a willingness to see our fellow citizens as partners in a shared project, even when we disagree. That spirit is being systematically poisoned by a politics that teaches us to see our political opponents not as adversaries, but as enemies to be destroyed.
And yet, despite all this darkness, we are not powerless. The way of nonviolent, peaceful protest, which Dr. King championed, reminds us that the call for peace is most radical, most forceful, during points of armed conflict. It is easy to be a pacifist when there is no war. It is a radical act to demand peace when bombs are falling.
We have seen recent examples of this courage. In Minneapolis, citizens took to the streets to demand accountability, at cost of their own lives. In Chicago, communities have organized to protect their neighbors from ICE raids. These are not abstract acts of resistance, they are people like you and I putting their bodies on the line to say “no.” They are the living proof that the machinery of authoritarianism can be stopped. Fascism relies on our passivity, and that when we refuse to be passive, the machine sputters.
None of this is a call to despair. It is a call to clarity. We must see this moment for what it is: a direct assault on the idea that no one is above the law. We must call out America’s rapid drift toward authoritarianism, enabled by a billionaire-funded propaganda machine designed to shift our sense of what is normal. And we must act on it.
Our self-styled king wants you to believe his power is inevitable, that resistance is futile, that the only morality that matters is his own. He is wrong. The power of a king is only as strong as the submission of his subjects. And we are not subjects.
We are citizens. We have the power to refuse. We have the power to say, loudly and clearly, that this war is not our war. These kidnappings are not our justice. This king is not our leader. We have the power to tell our self-styled king: No.
The bombs are dropping. The machinery of fascism is grinding into high gear. But the spirit of freedom is our birthright. We will not bow. We will not get used to it. And we will never, ever stop fighting for the freedoms that are outlined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights—that we are a nation of laws, not of men; a democracy, not a monarchy.