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Weekly-Opinion
Thomas Friedman on Trump's Iran War: It's Bad... Now Let's Make It Worse
To be fair, Friedman didn’t last this long by not knowing just how stupid you’ve got to talk nowadays if you want to stand out for stupid during the second Trump administration.
May 14, 2026
Perhaps I haven’t up kept as well as I should, but I can’t recall New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coming out with such a spectacularly bad idea for some time now. But he’s certainly broken that streak—if ever streak it was‚ with his article, "NATO, Please Help. Trump Has No Strategy for Iran," in which he calls upon NATO to “get all your navies together and proceed to the Persian Gulf immediately to join the American armada.” And just so’s we’re clear here, polling tells us that the attack on Iran is the first war to be rejected—not later on but from its outset–by the American public, since before the Second World War—perhaps the first in 100 years. And Friedman thinks Europe should sail right in.
"This does not come out of nowhere; Friedman does have a serious history of sh*t-talking, the highlight of which might be his appeal to “Give war a chance” during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo War (one of our country’s “little wars” that no one is expected to recall outside of an Advanced Placement History class.) What kind of chance did he propose to give man’s oldest profession at that time? “It should be lights out in Belgrade,” he wrote, “every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted,” Whatever it took, so that no one would be “holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides.”
It was understood, of course, that this advocacy of attacking civilian infrastructure—presumably including merry-go-rounds if need be—was legitimate if was done to “them.” If it were to be done to us it, would be called by its rightful name: terrorism—and you’d be able to read about that in a Friedman column. And, truth be told, this is the unspoken understanding underlying most public debate and discussion of our foreign policy—then and now—even if few choose to be quite so crude as Friedman.
But hey, Friedman didn’t last this long by not knowing just how stupid you’ve got to talk nowadays if you want to stand out for stupid during the second Trump administration. While allowing that “it would be a lot easier if either Trump or the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would ever summon the integrity to apologize for launching this war,” he quite reasonably assumes that this will never happen. So, he reasons, if you can’t stop a war, what’s the next best thing to do? Well, join it—of course.
Here we have the nation’s most prominent newspaper proffering this argument as worth an estimated 8 minutes and 11 seconds of your reading time.
Friedman does allow that “Trump sounds more and more unhinged every day,” but he writes as if it hasn’t occurred to him that the surest way to divert people from noticing the hinges coming off would be to legitimize his war. All justification would then be retroactive: Trump and Netanyahu would have played a vanguard role in starting a war that “the West” ultimately realized was a just war—otherwise, why would they come aboard?
Now if this were just someone on the bus or train talking about how the best way to stop stupid stuff from happening was by doing more of it, you’d just move away—if it wasn’t rush hour—and that’d likely be that. But unfortunately here we have the nation’s most prominent newspaper proffering this argument as worth an estimated 8 minutes and 11 seconds of your reading time. And really, the problem goes much deeper than just the New York Times. Three years after assuming the mantle of the anti-John Lennon with his endorsement of destroying Serbian civilian infrastructure, Friedman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (one of three he’s won) for Commentary, cited "for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat." If there were a Pulitzer for Irony, the Committee would have little choice but to award it to itself.
Such are the blinders shared throughout the American journalism profession—and well beyond. Barack Obama is reported to have consulted Friedman during his presidency—this despite Friedman’s ardent support of the Iraq War, during which he wrote, “There is a lot about the Bush team's foreign policy I don't like, but their willingness to... be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.” At the pinnacle of American power, neither “crazy,” nor supporting too many wars is disqualifying... as long as it’s happening to “them.”
It is only fair to note, however, that even Friedman may have limits. He does not favor the “extreme Christian nationalist beliefs” of Pete Hegseth who prays “for US troops to deliver ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy … in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.’” Friedman appears genuinely appalled by the Defense Secretary’s suggestion that “it’s now our religious warriors against Iran’s”—even as his writing continues to water the violent soil from which Hegseth grew.
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MAGA Supreme Court OKs GOP Overthrow of American Democracy
Disenfranching 40% of a state’s citizens cannot be reconciled with representative democracy.
May 14, 2026
Last week the Supreme Court gave a “two-fer” to white supremacists and proponents of Republican autocracy: First, six right-wing justices completed the erasure of the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act. Second, in the same case, Louisiana v. Callais, the right-winger judges approved of states shaping legislative districts that deny the opposing party any role in government.
In essence, the Supreme Court OK'd the destruction of Congress as an instrument of American democracy.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and ratified five years after the Civil War. The amendment confirmed—in principle—that African-American citizens have the right to vote and to have their votes count.
So said the Constitution. But for almost a century the former Confederate states negated African Americans’ right to vote.
The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The 15th Amendment also gave Congress the power to enforce its mandate. After years of struggle over civil rights—after peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham confronted snarling police dogs, mass arrests, and lethal bombing; after hundreds of nonviolent students worked for freedom in Mississippi in the face of murder, assaults, and the burning of Black churches; after peaceful marchers for voting rights returned to Selma after being clubbed by state troopers and ridden down by racist possemen—Congress tackled the white supremacist obstacles to African-American voting.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the myriad legal schemes that Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans and terminated the ploys used to deny African Americans a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
The outcome: Even as the segregationist white South moved to the Republican Party, African Americans gained substantial voting power and Black legislators were elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local government offices in meaningful numbers. The promise of the 15th Amendment, that all groups are entitled to a meaningful voting opportunity in a multiracial democracy, was mightily advanced.
But white supremacists and MAGA Republicans never accepted the new reality, so their right-wing agents on the Supreme Court finally throttled the Voting Rights Act for them. When the conservative justices threw out a congressional map that upheld Black voters’ right to have their votes count, they unleashed a new wave of state gerrymandering laws, enacted with extraordinary speed, and designed to make African-American voting futile.
To make things worse, the court justified its decision by affirming the power of states to deny meaningful representation to opposing party voters through gerrymandering.
As the right-wing justices explained, carving congressional districts for the purpose of denying representation to Black people may be forbidden (and good luck proving intent to discriminate, when Republican legislators don’t say so out loud). But doing precisely the same thing is fine when the stated purpose is denying representation to an opposing party’s voters.
Get that? The right-wingers of the United States Supreme Court say that judges must stand by and look, powerless to take action, if a state dominated by Republicans decides to manipulate congressional district maps to weaken or destroy the voting power of Democrats.
In practice it amounts to the same thing. The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The GOP’s ultimate goal is the same either way: a Congress under MAGA Republican control regardless of voters. A nation in which African-American political influence is crushed.
What does this look like?
After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature promptly redrew its congressional maps. They sliced up the one district held by a Black Democrat, with the intended outcome that all nine of Tennessee’s representatives will be Republican.
One-third of Tennessee citizens voted for Democrats in 2024. This year that one-third of the population—including the Black voters of Memphis—are to have zero representation in Congress.
South Carolina has begun the same process and anticipates a similar result. Republicans now hold 6 of 7 House seats, and intend to eliminate the one Democrat.
Forty percent of South Carolinians voted Democratic in 2024, and will have zero representation in Congress following redistricting. The one-quarter of South Carolina’s population that are Black will have no district in which their political voice will be heard.
US President Donald Trump has pressed for a similar outcome wherever Republicans control state government. In bright red Indiana (but 38% Democratic), Trump seeks to zero out Democratic representation in Congress.
GOP redistricting is only marginally less extreme elsewhere. In Missouri, for example, 38% of “Show me” state voters are blue, and their representation will be reduced from two to one of the state’s eight congressional seats (12%).
We have separate district elections for Congress so that the range of local communities, with their different racial and ethnic populations, different beliefs, interests, and occupations can have a fair opportunity for representatives of their choosing. Disenfranchisement by gerrymandering thwarts that purpose.
Even more disturbing, Trump’s gerrymandering offensive seeks to flout majority rule by creating a voter-proof Republican Congress.
American voters are increasingly seeing through the failures and the fakery of Donald Trump’s presidency, the broken promises, the corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. And voters see the price they are paying for Trump’s senseless grandiosity, from inflation to healthcare costs to measles, war, and climate change.
But through it all, congressional Republicans have remained Trump’s loyal, submissive toadies.
Voters will certainly make Republicans pay the price this fall. But Trump—with a big assist from MAGA Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—hopes to keep his hold on Congress, voters be damned. If a solid majority of voters cannot shake a would-be totalitarian’s hold on power, what will be left of our constitutional democracy?
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Trump Isn't Mentally Ill; He's Evil
Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
May 14, 2026
Dear public figures, media folks, and journalists, please do not suggest that President Donald Trump is crazy. It is not helpful and, in fact, it is hurtful... not to him but the rest of us.
There are two main reasons for this request. First, calling Trump crazy is harmful to people who have a mental health condition or who have loved ones with a mental illness; second, it is inaccurate and leads to a serious misunderstanding of the man, his behavior, and it’s origins and consequences.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfair, hurtful, and false seterotypes of the mentally ill that are propagated and repeated over and over again in our society. For instance, media figures and journalists often describe perpetrators of violence as mentally ill. Generally speaking, this is not true. Study after study points out the the mentally ill, in fact, are not violent. Indeed, they are more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Most people with mental health diagnoses are law-abiding contributing members of society. Epidemiological research indicates that 97% of those with mental illness do not commit violent acts.
Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding. It is pretty common to hear or read that those whose behaviors are irrational, unpredictable, or erratic must have a mental health condition. This, also, is a harmful and erroneous stereotype. After all, irrational thinking is pretty common. We are all irrational some of the time and in some situations. and also rational and predictable in others. Irrational thoughts are completely normal. Researchers sometimes point out that some kinds of mental illness may include a deficit in common sense or deviations from social norms but not a deficit in logical thought or “reason.”
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump.
Another common misconception about those with mental illnesses is that they are dysfunctional and unable to live as honest and contributing members of their communities. This, too, is not true. The majority of those with a mental illness are simply ordinary folks. In any given year 20% or more of the population has a mental health diagnosis. Therefore, at any given time, there are millions of people with a mental health condition making positive contributions to their communities.
So, why do so many of us hold these false and damaging steretypes about those with a mental health condition? Perhaps the most common communicator of these misconceptions are the media of mass communication, both fictional (television, movies, internet sites, etc) and nonfiction (talk shows, news media, politicians, etc).
This brings me to Donald Trump. Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.
The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel's raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world.
And, of course, actions of this president also have caused harmful and deadly damages within the United States. Consider: the terrible harms, injuries, and deaths caused by his orders to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in the detention of over 50,000 adults and children in dangerous and deadly detention centers; he also has deported millions of individuals, some to dangerous countries or to the very life-threatening situations they fled. In addition, he has empowered his ICE agents to injure and even murder US citizens who were exercising their political and personal rights; Trump’s defunding of federal programs in the areas of healthcare and the environment has stripped men, women, and children of their access to food and medical care, causing pain, injury, and death to many people; and his administration’s reductions of environmental protections and general disregard of climate change threatens the health of all living beings,
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump. Nearly every day he posts messages that threaten his critics and opponents. He says he will use the power of the government to bring them down. He tells his supporters, “I am your retribution.” Time and time again, he threatens to destroy Iran, razing it to the ground and killing millions of Iranians. He announces planes to annex Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela. He hints that he is going to use force to change the political-economic system in Cuba. He says he will prosecute his political opponents for treason and has threatened to shoot those protesting in the streets. And, of course, he regularly declares that he will imprison immigrants and deport them to dangerous places. In just one year he has threatened to punish, invade, or take control of Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Nigeria, and Iran.
So, dear news anchors and pundits, please stop suggesting that President Donald Trump is mentally ill. Doing so defames and insults those of us who have a mental illness and misunderstands the problem that is Donald Trump. He is not “crazy.” He is prejudiced, cruel, violent, hateful, uninformed, dangerous, and immoral. Our president is not mentally ill. Our president is evil.
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Like the Suez Canal for the Brits, Could Strait of Hormuz Spell Doom for US Empire?
The crisis with Iran is at least as catastrophic for US imperialism as the Suez Crisis was for the British Empire.
May 11, 2026
Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.
In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.
Britain’s imperial domination of Egypt began with its purchase of Egypt’s 44% share in the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven years later, the British invaded Egypt, took over the management of the Canal and controlled access to it for 70 years.
After the Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in 1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956, and to return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.
The only silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s...
But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain, France, and Israel. Through the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the British recruited Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian alliance modeled on NATO in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, and France was threatening Egypt for supporting Algeria’s war of independence.
Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forging new alliances with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other countries in the region, and, after failing to secure weapons from the US or USSR, Egypt bought large shipments of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia.
Upset with Egypt’s new alliances, the United States, Great Britain, and the World Bank withdrew their financing from Egypt’s Aswan Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and pledging to compensate its British and French shareholders.
British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away with it’, we are done for. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall. It may well be the end of British influence and strength forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and overseas."
British Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a secret plan with France and Israel to invade Egypt, seize the Canal and try to overthrow Nasser. The US rejected military action against Egypt, and President Dwight Eisenhower told a press conference, on September 5, 1956, “We are committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else.” But the British assumed that the US would ultimately support them once combat began.
Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, and then Britain and France landed forces in Port Said at the north end of the Suez Canal, under the pretense of protecting the Canal from both Israel and Egypt.
But before Britain and France could fully seize control of the Canal, the US government intervened to stop them. The US began selling off its British currency reserves and blocked an emergency IMF loan to Britain, triggering a financial crisis. At the same time, the USSR threatened to send forces to defend Egypt and even hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons against Britain, France, and Israel.
The UN Security Council used a procedural vote—which Britain and France could not veto—to convene an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” process. Resolution 997 called for a ceasefire, a withdrawal to armistice lines and the reopening of the Canal, and was approved by a vote of 64 to 5.
Four days later, Prime Minister Eden declared a ceasefire. British and French forces withdrew six weeks later, and the Canal was cleared and reopened within five months. Egypt subsequently managed the Canal effectively, and did not block British or French ships from using it.
The Suez Crisis was the pivotal moment when the British government finally learned that it could no longer use military force to impose its will on less powerful countries. Like Americans today on Iran, the British public was way ahead of its government: opinion polls found that 44% opposed the use of force against Egypt, while only 37% approved. As Prime Minister Eden dithered over the UN’s ceasefire order, 30,000 people gathered at an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square.
Eden was forced to resign, and was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who withdrew British forces from bases in Asia, expedited independence for British colonies around the world, and repositioned Britain as a junior partner to the United States. That new role included arming British submarines with US nuclear missiles, which is now a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But Macmillan’s successor, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, would later keep Britain out of Vietnam.
Britain charted a successful transition to a post-imperial future through its relationships with the United States and the British Commonwealth–an association of independent states that preserved British influence in its former colonies. On the domestic front, there was broad political support for a mixed capitalist-socialist economy that included free education and healthcare, publicly owned housing and utilities, nationalized industries, and strong trade unions.
Macmillan was reelected in 1959 with the slogan, “You’ve never had it so good.” When a cartoonist mockingly dubbed him “Supermac,” the nickname stuck.
Britain’s Tories were dyed-in-the-wool imperialists, much like Trump and his motley crew today. But they did not let their imperial world view blind them to the lessons of the Suez Crisis. They could see that the world was changing, and that Britain had to find a new role in a world it could no longer dominate by force.
Most Americans today have learned similar lessons from failed, disastrous US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But like the British people who opposed Eden’s invasion of Egypt, Americans have been repeatedly dragged into war by the secret scheming of leaders blinded by anachronistic, racist, imperial assumptions.
Trump is now encountering the same kind of international pressure that forced Britain and France to abandon the Suez invasion. Another Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly and a new “Uniting for Peace” resolution might also be helpful.
But ultimately, the resolution of this crisis, and the future of the United States in today’s emerging multipolar world, will depend on whether US politicians are capable of making the kind of historic policy shift that Macmillan and his colleagues made in 1956 and the years that followed.
Macmillan was not an opposition politician, but a senior member of Britain’s Conservative government, up to his neck in the Suez fiasco. The secret plot with the Israelis was his idea. President Eisenhower personally warned him at the White House that the US would not support a British invasion of Egypt. But unlike the British Ambassador who sat in on the same meeting, Macmillan assumed that, when the chips were down, Eisenhower would stand by his old World War II allies.
Maybe it was the shock of getting it all so wrong that persuaded Macmillan and his colleagues to take a fresh look at the world and radically rethink British foreign and colonial policy.
Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades.
The crisis with Iran is at least as catastrophic for US imperialism as the Suez Crisis was for the British Empire. The question is whether anyone in Washington today is capable of grasping the gravity of the crisis and making the required policy shift.
To follow Britain’s Suez example would mean closing US military bases around the world; renouncing the illegal threat and use of military force as the main tool of US foreign policy; and relying instead on multilateral diplomacy and UN action to resolve international disputes.
But where is the Macmillan in the Trump administration or the Republican Party? Or the Harold Wilson in the Democratic Party, whose leaders have never even tried to formulate a progressive foreign policy since the end of the Cold War? Obama’s belated outreach to Cuba and Iran in his second term were their only flirtation with a new way forward.
The only silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s and now cornered Trump into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choice between an unwinnable war with Iran and a historic diplomatic defeat.
Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades. Trump’s dead end in the Persian Gulf must also be the final end of this ugly, criminal neoconservative era, and the beginning of a transition to a more peaceful future for Americans and all our neighbors.
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