“Nobody’s Afraid Of Him”: Iran Humiliates Trump Again As His Imperial Bloodlust Surges

By Asawin Suebsaeng Photos: YouTube Screenshot|Wikimedia Commons This was supposed to be over. But Donald Trump has a problem. Basically, nobody takes him seriously anymore. Not in his own government, not in Iran or elsewhere – at least when it comes to his most malevolent threats against the Islamic Republic. “Nobody’s afraid of him right now,” one senior U.S. official tells Zeteo, as the U.S. and Iran exchange fire and accuse each other of collapsing a ceasefire that was never actually a ceasefire. Sure, President Trump can reboot his bombing campaign, as he already did late last month and is huffily doing this week, all while claiming that maybe he doesn’t even want to cut a peace deal with the Iranians anymore. (He does… but more on that in a moment.) Trump can name-call the Iranian leadership, and he can re-threaten the grand-scale war crimes and ground invasions he and his administration actively planned for but haven’t carried out. And he can keep lying to the world that time is on his side and that he’s in no rush to end the bloodbath that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started back in February. But ever since last month, the Iranian government has continued its campaign of humiliation against the Trump administration by refusing to bend to the U.S. president’s renewed threats of mass murder and his resumed bombing sprees. All of Trump’s violence and bluster clearly are not imposing an effective deterrence to aggressive Iranian activity, including in the key global economic leverage point of the Strait of Hormuz. There’s a good reason for that. In months past, various Trump administration officials and other sources kept leaking to Zeteo about how close Trump was to ordering an invasion of different parts of Iran, or ratcheting up the war on a truly apocalyptic scale. A solid number of these sources were leaking out of alarm, given how much they Did Not Want the president to do this, fearing it would blow up the world economy, tear down his administration, and drag the Republican Party down with him. Flash forward to today: Virtually none of these people think Trump has it in him anymore. Many senior officials within Trump’s own government do not believe he has the stomach for ramping the war back up to 11. They certainly don’t think he has the tolerance for a protracted conflict now, if he ever had it to begin with. And they really don’t buy his more recent threats, including, this week, to deploy ground troops to Kharg Island, the Iranian oil hub. “I’m betting my life savings that it’s not happening,” a Trump administration official with knowledge of these internal deliberations tells me. Trump is, they all believe, stuck flailing with periodic bombings for the time being, while refusing to commit to a full-scale conflict that would likely destroy what’s left of his presidency. Trump wants out. He’s just too stupid and too violent to get there. Thus, his horrifying-sounding threats are now being greeted with sustained eye-rolls, both at home and abroad, even in ways they weren’t in the very recent past. And the Iranians know it, too. How could they not? Everybody knows the U.S. midterm elections are coming up quickly, and Republicans’ hopes of staunching their losses lean heavily on lowering gas prices the war has spiked for months. And it isn’t difficult to figure out which side of the conflict holds the better cards when the president of the United States is openly announcing that he needs the war to end or else oil reserves will dry up and “bedlam” will break out. Hence, the Trump administration is reduced to doing what it’s doing now: attempting to show military “strength,” never admitting how sorely it lost a fight it picked, and jacking up the volume of Trump’s rottenly buffoonish brand of American imperialism and well-funded bloodlust – all so Donald J. Trump can feel like a Big Man. None of this stops at Iran. Sources with intimate knowledge of the matter tell me that the president is still deeply frustrated at his inability to quickly break the Cuban government, and that he keeps talking about his desire for regime change there – even if it requires military action. And this week, Trump also reignited his public push to annex Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. That mad-emperor-style fixation triggered a shambolic international crisis early this year (given how doing so would effectively put the U.S. on a path to military conflict with fellow NATO members), with sources later telling me that Trump never actually gave up on this expansionist scheme. Trump proved the point in Turkey, at the NATO summit, stating that Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” adding that because “they wouldn’t go along with it, and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia [and] we don’t have to spend any money,” the U.S. “could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe” if he didn’t get his