Trump Rides Crazy Train Straight to Hell

The president threatens to bomb a nation of 93 million people "back to the Stone Age, where they belong."

After listening to President Trump ignominious, incoherent, and depraved address about the Iran War, I racked my brain to think of other leaders in history who combined mendacity, stupidity, and arrogance in such equal measures.

I couldn’t think of any other foreign policy utterance in history that matched the lowness of Trump’s. However, as an association of ideas, I thought of Herodotus’s portrait of the Persian King Xerxes in The Histories. The story’s tragic disaster begins with Xerxes boasting that he will bridge the Hellespont and march all the way through Europe, claiming he will extend Persian territory to “the heaven of the gods.”

It’s a testament to Herodotus’s literary prowess that the reader know Xerxes is setting himself up for overreach and humiliation before the action even begins. And yet, despite his bluster, glimmers of insecurity flicker forth. Part of Xerxes senses he’s embarking on a dangerous path, but because he suffers from emotional instability (which the Greeks considered the ultimate form of weakness in a man) he is susceptible to external influences. Ultimately he is influenced by the aggressive counsel of Mardonius while ignoring the prudent counsel of his uncle Artabanus, who foresees disaster in underestimating Greek resolve. Though Mardonius is largely responsible for inciting the disaster, he redeems himself by dying on the front line of battle at Plataea—an act of manly courage we NEVER see from our flabby old warlords in Washington.

The main difference between Xerxes and Trump—and this is a testament to the extraordinary genius and humanity of Herodotus—is that the former is a tragic and even sympathetic character, despite his innumerable flaws.

Being Greek, Herodotus could have easily lapsed into a jingoistic screed about Greek superiority. Instead, he frequently criticizes the Greeks for their political disunity, greed, and arrogance. Despite writing for a Greek audience, he doesn’t shy from pointing out the fractiousness of the city-states, the brutality of some Greek leaders, the perils of Greek hubris as well as Persian.

Trump’s speech about his war of aggression against Iran was remarkable in that it didn’t contain a single honest, noble, or redeeming quality. Listening to it, I was reminded of the famous wooden sculpture of Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig of Dr. Faust riding a wine cask out of the cellar—a cheap and demonic trick performed by Mephistopheles (the devil), symbolizing the madness and disorder of drunk, greedy, lustful, out of control humanity, ungoverned by reason and wisdom. Though initially tempted by this element of life, Dr. Faust ultimately becomes disgusted by it.

The carved wooden sculpture is endlessly fascinating and mesmerizing to behold.

Right at the beginning of this Iran misadventure, I knew that Trump would eventually lapse into the revolting Curtis LeMay “bomb them to the stone age” school of Satanic warfare, in which civilian infrastructure and helpless civilians are ultimately targeted. The monster LeMay killed hundreds of thousands—possibly a million civilians—in North Korea and destroyed 85% of all the buildings in all the cities.

Even though LeMay’s air war against North Korea failed to bring about its capitulation, the cretin remained Air Force Chief of Staff until 1965 and advocated bombing North Vietnamese civilian infrastructure just as he’d done to North Korea’s civilian infrastructure.

During his 1968 campaign as George Wallace's running mate, he proclaimed that rather than negotiating, the U.S. should "bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

Sure enough, just as I predicted—amid the incoherent, contradictory gibberish of the rest of his diatribe—Trump issued the same pronouncement straight from hell.

“We will bring Iran back to the stone age where they belong.”

And so, we see how the United States government has come unmoored from the Greek and Christian roots of Western civilization, and has sunk into atavistic, technologically sophisticated barbarity.