The president didn't do this because he cares

At approximately 10 p.m. last night, Donald Trump walked into the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago wearing a white “USA” cap, a dark blue suit, and a deep red tie. “God Bless the USA” blared from the speakers as he greeted the crowd of his most loyal donors. He looked animated, almost giddy, but also like he couldn’t wait to get it over with. At a million dollars a ticket, with the money flowing straight into his MAGA super PAC, there was no skipping it. So he gave them three minutes and a little dance.

He threw his hands in the air and did his usual stiff-shouldered sway while the room clapped and sang along. He smiled, waved, and shook a few hands. Secret Service formed a circle around him, keeping everyone at a distance.

Aside from the awkward swaying, he stood in place, soaking it all in. Someone shouted, “I love you, Donald.” He raised a hand in acknowledgement. “Have a good time, everybody,” he said. Then he glanced to his left and muttered, “We gotta go to work. I gotta go to work.”

He turned, legs moving stiffly as he shuffled out of the room. Roughly three hours later, the United States would be at war. The “peace president” would announce shortly after in an 8‑minute video posted to Truth Social that American missiles were falling over Iran and that America and Israel had begun a major combat operation against the Iranian regime.

The President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, did not direct this serious military operation from the Situation Room. It wasn’t even from the Oval Office. It was from his private club in Palm Beach, Florida. That’s where the order came from. That’s where he launched a campaign that has already killed untold numbers of people and destabilized an entire region.

And he didn’t even inform the nation the way the leader of the free world always has. There was no address or conference. No attempt to reassure the country or the world about the scope or the stakes. Just an 8-minute video posted to his own platform, Truth Social.

The video itself was strange, glitchy, filtered, and distorted. He was still wearing the same suit and hat as earlier, but the tie was gone. You could barely see his eyes. And when it ended, most of us were left with more questions than answers. Yet those questions would have to wait because the White House said he had no plans to address the nation.

But in that moment, my heart went straight to the people who will pay the real price of this war, the brave men and women in our military, their families, and the innocent civilians who are once again caught in the crossfire.

I thought of the stories my grandmother used to tell me about Iran. She and my grandfather lived in the Middle East in the 1970s, when he worked for a company that relocated them to Tehran for two years. She filled my mind with stories of the food, the people, the culture, and how modern it all was. She shared such beautiful memories of a country that felt alive with possibility.

And then she would talk about how it fell. How the Islamic Revolution swept through, and the country she had known lost nearly all of that beauty overnight. And how their friends barely escaped in time and resettled here in the US, and how our country welcomed them with open arms. I was a kid when she told me those stories, and I didn’t really understand what she meant. But I do now. I understand it in a way I wish I didn’t.

Because two things can be true at the same time. The Iranian regime is brutal. It is oppressive. It has murdered thousands of its own people, crushed dissent, tortured women, and funded violence across the Middle East. The Iranian people, especially Iranian women, deserve so much better than what that government has given them. And for millions of Iranians and Iranian Americans who have waited decades for this regime to fall, what happened to its leaders is not a tragedy. It is long overdue. Nothing takes that away from them. Nothing should. And it is also true that what Donald Trump just did is unconstitutional, reckless, impulsive, and driven entirely by self-interest. The question was never whether the Iranian regime deserved to fall. The question is whether one man had the right to launch a war in violation of the Constitution he swore to protect.

Caring about the Iranian people and opposing this war are not contradictions. They are the same moral position. Because this war has nothing to do with helping the people of Iran. It never has. Trump promised Iranian protesters he was sending help back in January, and he sent nothing. And now he’s bombing their country and telling them to “rise up” while their infrastructure crumbles around them. Rise up with what? Rise up how?

What this is really about is oil, control in the region, Netanyahu’s legacy, and distraction for a president whose walls are closing in.

And in that Truth Social video, Trump told us everything we need to know when he said the following words: “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.” He said the word. War. He admitted it. And he told the American people that their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, and fathers may die, and that’s just what happens.

The casual admission that there very well might be casualties from someone who dodged military service matters just as much as his accidental admission that he has, in fact, declared war. Because our Constitution is explicit. Article I, Section 8, gives Congress, and only Congress, the power to declare war. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows a president to deploy military force without congressional approval only when there is an imminent threat to the United States. And then the president must justify such action to Congress within 48 hours.

Trump has presented no imminent threat. Not to Congress, nor to the public. Because there isn’t one. Even the mediator facilitating U.S., Iran nuclear talks in Oman said negotiations were ongoing and making progress before the strikes began, with a breakthrough and peace “within reach” just hours earlier.

And his own words condemn him. Between 2011 and 2013, Donald Trump posted at least seven times on social media, warning that President Obama would start a war with Iran to get reelected. On November 29, 2011, he wrote, “In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” He said it again and again, in tweets, in videos, insisting Obama was too weak to negotiate and would use war as a political tool. And yet Obama never attacked Iran. Instead, he did the hard, slow, unglamorous work of diplomacy. He negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, a multilateral agreement that placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. International inspectors confirmed Iran was complying. It was working.

Trump withdrew from that deal in 2018. He destroyed the framework and reimposed crippling sanctions that devastated ordinary Iranians while strengthening the hardliners in power. And now he is bombing the country he refused to negotiate with in good faith. The contrast between the two approaches tells you everything you need to know about the man holding the office and his weakness as a negotiator and his strength as a showman.

At his campaign rally in Pittsburgh in November 2024, Trump told the crowd: “I will stop the chaos in the Middle East, and I will prevent world war three.” On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, standing on the steps of the Capitol, he said: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”

So why now? Because his approval ratings are in the tank. The midterms are closing in, and he’s losing ground in every direction. The Epstein files keep getting worse, and his name keeps surfacing in new and damaging ways. The Clintons just testified. There are growing calls for Trump himself to testify. And the State of the Union was a disaster. War is the ultimate distraction, and for a man who told us that governing is ‘boring as hell,’ it’s also the ultimate spectacle. And we can’t forget the oil. Trump took Venezuela’s, and now he wants Iran’s. He sees what the Saudis have, the wealth, the leverage, the global positioning, and he wants in.

The young pro-democracy generation in Iran has been risking their lives to protest their own regime. They want freedom, not theocracy. But they don’t want American bombs either. And telling them to “take over your government” while leveling their country is not liberation. That is blatant cruelty.

And we need to stop pretending this is the first time. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence (MI6) overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister to protect Western oil interests and installed the Shah. We backed him for 26 years while his secret police tortured and killed dissidents with our knowledge and our funding. When the revolution came in 1979, the hostage crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in the same building where we had planned the coup.

Then we backed Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, gave him intelligence and economic support, and looked the other way while he used chemical weapons on Iranians. Up to a million Iranians died. And then, in 2003, we invaded Iraq, captured Saddam, and encouraged his execution, citing the very atrocities we had enabled. We helped create the monster, then used him as the justification to go back in. For decades after, we crushed ordinary Iranians with sanctions that destroyed their economy while leaving the regime untouched. In 2015, diplomacy finally gave them hope. The nuclear deal was working. Iran was complying. In 2018, Trump ripped it apart. And now he’s bombing them. Again. That is what the Iranian people see when they look at the United States. Seventy years of broken promises, betrayal, and destruction. We are not a liberator or an ally. And we need to stop pretending otherwise.

As expected, Iran retaliated within hours. Missiles and drones were fired at Israel and at U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. Airports in Dubai and Bahrain were hit. Jordan engaged 49 missiles and drones. At least one person was killed in Abu Dhabi. The entire region is now engulfed in a crisis that didn’t have to happen. And it’s going to hit us at home, too. Iran sits on the Strait of Hormuz, which carried a third of the world’s seaborne crude exports in 2025. When you destabilize that corridor, energy prices spike globally. And it’s not just that. We are also burning through our weapons stockpiles at an alarming rate, Venezuela, the June strike, and now this, leaving us exposed to adversaries who are watching every move we make. We have no coalition behind us. After September 11th, NATO invoked Article 5. In the Gulf War, 35 nations stood with us. This time it’s us and Israel. That’s it. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom all issued statements saying they did not participate. Macron said France wasn’t even warned. For nearly a century, the United States was the stabilizing force in the global order. That is over. And the man who campaigned on “America First” has left America more alone and more vulnerable than it has been in decades.

I spent the entire day trying to piece together what happened. Hours watching the UN Security Council session, reading what our former allies were saying, tracking the legal arguments, listening to lifelong military analysts and constitutional law experts break down what it actually takes to declare war under our system of government, and what it means that this president ignored every one of those requirements. I would not have been able to do any of that without all of those experts, seasoned journalists, legal professionals, military analysts, and independent voices who are explaining it all so we can understand what is happening to our country.

This is not a story for just one night. We are going to have to see how this plays out. And during this time, we need to rally around our military. Because, as unsettling as this all is for us, there are real people “in the trenches” fighting yet another unnecessary war, because the president of the United States of America doesn’t want to lose power. The men and women in uniform right now did not choose this war. They are being sent into a potentially illegal conflict by a president who called fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers,” who stood at Arlington Cemetery beside the grave of his own chief of staff’s son and asked, “What was in it for them?” He does not care about them. We do. If there is a military family in your community, reach out. Make them a meal. Donate to the food banks and organizations that serve them. Show up for the families this president never will.

We are getting critical information right now because real journalists, analysts, and legal experts are doing the work outside of corporate media. Each day, I am more thankful to each one of them for bringing all of this to light so that I’m able to share it far and wide. We must make sure they can keep doing it. And we need to support independent voices. With the continued collapse of corporate newsrooms, it is on us to keep the truth alive. I keep my own work free so everyone can access it, and that is only possible because of those who support it through paid memberships. Those who can offer that support are the reason everyone else can read this tonight. Beyond my work, find the voices you trust and invest in them. Subscribe, share their work, and amplify. That is how we fight the war on truth.

The coming days are going to be increasingly complex and difficult. We are going to have to really push through and remember that two things can be true. We can grieve for the Iranian people and oppose the regime that brutalized them. We can support our troops and condemn the man who sent them. We can feel overwhelmed and still refuse to look away. And we can condemn the unconstitutional tactics our president took while still acknowledging the relief from the removal and death of a violent and repressive leader. The American story is one of trial and reckoning. Where we hold ourselves to the highest standards of principle and restraint. We fail often, but we never stop striving to live up to the promise we made to ourselves and to each other. This is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.