If you're not already aware of it, on Tuesday Trump announced that he's going to move the United Stated embassy to Jerusalem and officially recognize the city as the capital of Israel. This is the diplomatic and religious equivalent of a nuclear first strike, intended to incite widespread anti-American and anti-Israeli violence across the entire region.

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Donald Trump needs a war and this is how he's going to get it.

I can only assume that Trump's generals finally convinced their Idiot-in-Chief that a war with North Korea is not winnable. Obviously in a one-on-one contest, the United States would mop the floor with the far less advanced nation, but China would never allow it and it's not at all clear that we could take China on their own turf and win without resorting to nuclear weapons. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of South Koreans and Japanese civilians (aka, our very close allies) would be slaughtered.

This is not the war Donald Trump needs.

Donald Trump needs a war where the American military can go in, kick some "bad guy" ass and look awesome doing it. He needs a war with villains, innocent victims, and patriotic fervor. By moving the embassy to Jerusalem and deliberately inciting the Muslim world to violence, Trump will inevitably get the first two but not the third.

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Terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL, knowing exactly what Trump is doing and why, will happily play along. They want nothing more than to be the Big Bad that America is "at war" with so they will, sooner than later, either blow up the embassy with car bombs or overrun it with suicide bombers. The result will be all the American martyrs Trump could ever need to justify a war against (Iran) whichever country (Iran) his advisers tell him (Iran) will be the most (Iran) politically (Iran) advantageous (Iran) and (Iran) easy (Iran) to (Iran) sell (Iran Iran Iran).

That is the war Donald Trump needs. Or so he'd like to believe.

It's true that Fox News, AM Hate Radio, right wing hate sites and the Republican Party of Molesting Teenage Girls will immediately wrap themselves in the flag and demand utter loyalty and obedience from the country. They've been trying to resurrect "toxic patriotism" since before Trump was even sworn in, insisting that anyone opposing the president reeks of treason because it was such an effective tool during the Bush years.



But that only works when the president himself does not already exude the stench of treason or has spent the past year essentially selling off the country to the highest bidder. It also only works when the president is not the single most hated/incompetent/dishonest president in modern American history. His own staff doesn't trust him with the nuclear football, why would anyone trust him to be a "war president"?

Aside from his general unfitness for office, the whole "obey me because we're at war" thing ran its course a decade ago. Republicans and the right wing media overplayed that trope long before their was any kind of coordinated left wing response and that will never work again. The "liberal" media may fawn over how "presidential" Trump is by bombing Muslims in the Middle East but the opposition to Trump will not be beaten into submission by accusations of being unpatriotic; especially not by people who colluded with Russia and then deliberately got Americans killed to use them as political tools.

Just as an aside, Trump is going to find that his white nationalist base isn't so eager to go to war fighting on Israel's behalf. They hate Muslims, true, but they hate Jews more than anything else in the world. Maybe Steve Bannon should explain that to Trump before he does this?

Trump may think that kicking the hornet's nest in the Middle East will give him the war he needs to suppress his critics and bolster his approval ratings but America is already sick and tired of war and sick and tired of his bullshit. Being dragged into yet another never-ending conflict that everyone knows didn't have to happen won't earn Trump the praise he so desperately craves, it will make him even more despised and make his removal from office even more urgent.

There are 334 days left to the 2018 elections.

- This article kills fascists

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