My columns normally address one issue at a time, but this one offers reflections on two matters that confront me on a daily basis—and probably confront you as well.
On Trump’s War with Iran
Donald Trump is currently engaged in war with Iran using the military power available to him as commander in chief. He has surrounded himself with a mixture of incompetent toadies and dedicated ideologues who shield him from accountability and indulge his fantasies about domestic and international affairs.
A friend recently remarked that events do not seem to be unfolding the way Trump and his associates planned them. My question is simple: who says they planned anything?
This appears less like a carefully considered strategy than something they simply wanted to do—and so they did it. I doubt they seriously anticipated the consequences, because it may never have occurred to them that serious consequences would follow.
The result has been global economic and moral turmoil. The cost is incalculable: civilian deaths in Iran, destruction of infrastructure, further erosion of the confidence other nations once had in the United States, rising prices at home and abroad, and the growing likelihood that terrorist attacks against Americans will once again become part of daily life.
Commentators have rightly pointed out that the Iranian regime has inflicted brutality on its own people and has financed terrorism throughout the Middle East and beyond. It offers little to admire. But this reckless, irresponsible, and likely illegal war was not the right answer—and the administration’s fumbling execution has made a dangerous situation even worse.
There is also increasing speculation that Trump has functioned less as an independent strategist than as a gullible surrogate for Benjamin Netanyahu. If that proves to be true, it would leave us with the rather cartoonish image of a tail wagging a tail wagging a dog.
On Culpable Ignorance
I was recently listening to a lecture by Richard Rohr on biblical hermeneutics when he used a phrase that wonderfully captures an entire field of meaning: culpable ignorance.
Consider the public record of Donald Trump’s life: decades marked by racism, sexual misconduct, failed businesses, and blatant corruption carried out largely in public view. Add to that the disastrous consequences of his first term as president. Together they form a technicolor mural of misconduct stretching from one end of the country to the other.
Yet he was elected to a second term by voters who said they did not know, or who believed he had changed, or who trusted promises that had no foundation in reality.
That is the very definition of culpable ignorance.
When he is gone, many will claim they did not know about the brutality of immigration enforcement, the detention camps in which people were confined without due process, the destruction of America’s credibility abroad, or the economic policies that consistently favored the wealthy over the working poor.
They will say they did not know.
But they did know. Or they could have known.
We are all culpably ignorant from time to time. But seldom are we ignorant in ways that contribute so profoundly to the destruction of our own nation.