The Donald Trump guide to multi-national calamity

The last time an American president and his entourage of dissemblers face-planted into an international calamity, there was at least the courtesy of a meticulously produced pregame show.

- Gene Collier, Tribune News Service

Colin Powell

George W. Bush, who was routinely blistered for his suspect intellect, but looks like a cross between Copernicus and Abraham Lincoln compared to the contemporary clown show, helped direct a months-long multi-front justification campaign in the ramp-up to the Iraq war that began 23 years ago this month.

Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sent before the United Nations with an elaborate prop arsenal of faulty intelligence, photos, charts, and power point presentations, all ostensibly proving that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Dick Cheney was busily lying about “yellow cake,” processed uranium turning up in Iraq from Niger, and Bush diligently animated himself like the college cheerleader he once was.

In an America that never seems to learn anything from international conflict, maybe because the very idea of diplomacy and its potentials and failures has long been considered the jurisdiction of dweebs and dorks, the next preventable disaster is always hurtling toward us at the speed of ignorance. So in the wee hours of Feb. 28, 2026, in the same building where party-goers the New York Times said paid $I million per ticket to be power adjacent, Donald Trump announced that we were at war with Iran in a converted Situation Room at his golf club, Mara-Lago, aka the South Florida Home for the Criminally Insane/US Military War College.