Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning. It’s seven o’clock in the morning of Friday the 13th—March 13th, 2026. I’ve been away for the last week. I haven’t really had much opportunity to talk about the war that Trump has got us in. And I wanted to share some thoughts on that.
David Ignatius, the columnist who writes about foreign policy for the Washington Post—and who’s usually pretty good about laying out what’s happening—referred to this metaphorically as Trump “taking us over the waterfall.” And that’s a perfect analogy for this. We got too close, we got too close, and now the bombing of Iran—you know, we don’t come back from that so easily.
I think up until this point, all of the stuff that Trump has done, while horrifying and awful, is also reversible, with the right leadership in place, over time. This is not. This completely changes the trajectory of the country and the world. And it helps Russia, of course, because everything Trump does helps Russia, as I’ve been saying for almost 10 years now.
So it’s a catastrophe, this war. It’s an absolute catastrophe. It makes me enraged. It makes me sad and heartbroken. It makes me embarrassed. I was in Germany last week and people ask about the war and I can’t defend it. You know, it’s not my war at all. Trump is a clown, and he’s done this for reasons that nobody seems to be able to articulate.
So just a quick summary of what’s going on here. This is day 14 of the war. So we’ve been at this for two weeks now. I guess it was supposed to be over in three days, right? Like Putin’s war in Ukraine supposed to be over in three days.
First of all, we have service members dying. We’re already losing American soldiers, sailors, pilots in this war, which is horrifying and unnecessary. And Trump doesn’t care at all, as he’s made very clear in his statements. Pete Hegseth doesn’t care at all. These people don’t care at all about the loss of human life. And I don’t know that we want leaders in a war that are like that.
The White House continues to make these disgusting meme videos, interspersing shots of the war with scenes from movies and football games and video games and other things that are completely disgusting and inappropriate, trying to get this whole rah-rah, frat boy, Hegsethian excitement—bloodlust, I think is the word—bloodlust revved up among the idiots who still support him.
There’s no clue on the strategy. There’s no coherent strategy. They’re not able to explain why we’re doing the war. Is it regime change? No. We killed the Ayatollah, but that was almost inconsequential. The regime is basically all still in place. So that’s not a thing. Taking out the nukes? Nah, that wasn’t really a war aim either. So why are we there?
Basically we’re there because Bibi Netanyahu told Trump to do it and Trump did it. And we can sit here and hash out the reasons why, but I think it’s pretty clear to me that the Epstein Files has a lot to do with this. Trump knows that the Israeli government has videos of him, and evidence of him, doing horrible things that we can’t even begin to imagine. So he feels obligated to go along with this. Netanyahu, this butcher, this genocidal madman, asks Trump for help and he delivers it.
And Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina—who looks more pickled than Scotch every time you see him—has been just disgustingly cheering this on, trying to twist Trump’s tiny arm into going to war because he, Lindsey Graham, went over to Israel and met with agents of Mossad and met with Netanyahu to try to coordinate the messaging to Trump to get us into war with Iran.
That’s where we’re at. This isn’t even our war. This is a war that a genocidal maniac asked us to help with, and we were like, “Great, let’s go!” Over the waterfall we went.
The generals up at the top have failed us by even doing this at all. It’s not legal. Trump didn’t ask Congress. He didn’t notify anybody. He just made a unilateral move to attack a country that can fight back. I don’t know if Iran can “defeat us” or whatever, but they can and they will fight back. This is something that Trump, being a bully, isn’t used to. He likes to pick on smaller victims. So this probably isn’t going the way that he maybe thought it would.
And then right off the bat, we kill all the girls in the girls school. That’s us. We did that. Our military did that. I don’t know why that happened. I don’t know if it was a failure of the intelligence on the ground or just a missile that hit the wrong place, I don’t know. But the fact remains that we killed a bunch of girls in a school, which is disgusting and morally reprehensible and indefensible. Indefensible, inexcusable.
And one of the Iranian foreign ministers, I forget which one, said basically, “In this Epstein administration, they either rape little girls or kill little girls.” And sadly, that’s true. That’s true. Morally, that’s the ground that we’re standing on now. Really pretty shaky.
Obviously the oil prices have gone up. Here in Ulster County, New York, it was about $2.98 a gallon when I left for Munich ten days ago. It’s now up to like $3.59, I think something like that. So it’s gone up 60 cents in the last two weeks per gallon, which is a lot. It’s going to go up more. The Straits of Hormuz are still pretty much choked off; that’s going to affect the oil prices. It’s also gonna affect other things, other commodities that depend on that as a trade route. So there might be supply chain disruptions—but hey, Bibi said to do it, so we had to do it.
And I feel like I have a little bit of egg on my face because, to be honest, I didn’t think that this would happen. I thought that Trump would not go to war with Iran because I thought that he knows Iran can fight back and he didn’t want that. I always said Trump doesn’t want to be a wartime president because that would interfere with his daily routine of golfing and ogling women at the Mar-a-Lago omelet bar and watching TV. What I didn’t consider is that he would keep on doing these things and just outsource the administration of the war to the lesser Fox News host with the hair gel and the very credible sexual assault claims against him.
That would be Pete Hegseth, whose rah-rah, frat boy statements to the press are so disgusting and immature and—you know, just small dick energy. There’s no other way to say it. He’s a horrible man. The fact that Trump and Hegseth are in charge of the war is mind boggling and so embarrassing.
And then you have Jared and Witkoff over there just ironing out deals. You have crypto, all this crypto payment stuff going on that Trump is launching. Then, you know, it’s bad enough that he wore his fucking MAGA hat to the dignified transfer, but now he’s fundraising using photos of the dead soldiers’ bodies coming home from the dignified transfer. This is all a game to him. It’s all a money machine. He doesn’t fucking care.
The people who are going to pay the price are us, you know, because these oligarchs have so much money, they can leave the country, they could do whatever. We’re here, we’re Americans, and we’re going to bear the brunt of this, whether it’s economic or, you know, international/geopolitical or a terrorist attack, which Timothy Snyder, the fascism scholar, I think correctly suggests is coming, and that this is something Trump wants in order to have an excuse to call off the midterms so that we don’t impeach him. So we’ll see.
I want to also talk about the economics of the war. Now, this is being compared obviously to the ill-fated, ill-advised foray into Iraq in 2003 under Bush II. That was a catastrophe, a blunder, and just the sinkhole of money.
Just to put this in perspective, money-wise, that war in Afghanistan cost $2.3 trillion. The war in Iraq cost $1.7 trillion. And at the same time, Bush and Cheney gave a tax cut to the wealthiest people—during a war, which is, you never do that—which cost $1.7 trillion by depriving us of that fund.
That’s $5.7 trillion total. That’s enough to pay off every student loan in the country, which is $1.83 right now—trillion and all the credit card debt in the country, which is $1.27 trillion right now, and fund USAID for 10 years. That would cost a mere $500 billion, for 10 years of USAID. And we’d have enough left over to write a check for $6,000 to every single person living in the United States.
That’s how much money Bush and Cheney wasted with those wars. And that’s not even considering the many lives that were lost, both American lives and Afghan and Iraqi lives, and all the other assorted horrors of war. It was just a colossal waste. Now we already are struggling from that enormous hit to our treasury, which resulted in nothing. We got nothing out of that war, not a thing.
On 9/11, in the days after, people were willing to make sacrifices, and Bush didn’t ask them to. He squandered the crisis. Now we were, you know, ostensibly not going to war with Saudi Arabia, but there was a lot of fingers being pointed there because what, nine of the terrorists were Saudi. So Bush could have set up an alternative energy plan right there. He could have used the crisis to convince people that we needed to stop our dependency on foreign oil, and really jumpstarted it in a way that by now, 20-whatever years later, things would be up and running with that. And we wouldn’t be relying on the fucking Straits of Hormuz so much.
But Bush didn’t do that. So he screwed up the money. He screwed up the opportunity, and he failed miserably. And I’ve been saying for a long time that years from now, when historians go back and look at the end of American empire, it will be the economic hits from those wars, combined with the tax cuts, that started the decline.
And that was then—that was before Trump. Now, this “Big Beautiful Bill” that was passed—that’s depriving us of an additional $3.4 trillion over 10 years.
The debt payments for the US were something like $330 billion yearly three years ago. They’re now over a trillion a year. So they’ve tripled in that time. We’re already on shaky ground economically because of all the fucking tax cuts and these Republicans doing horrible things—even though we’re also having our services cut because DOGE and Elon Musk and all that stuff. And yet we’re drowning in debt.
And now we’re going to this war. And, the first thing I thought about was, “This is it. It’s over.” We can’t sustain this. It’s not sustainable. We don’t have the money to pay for it. And we don’t have the credit, debt-wise, to generate funds to pay for it.
I’m not an economist, obviously. So I looked up some studies. A couple of years ago, the Penn Wharton Budget Model—which of course is Trump’s alma mater—they studied the debt. And the tipping point is when the service of the debt—meaning just the yearly payments—get to be 200 percent of GDP. We’re already at almost 100 percent of GDP. But when it gets to be 200%, that’s when you just—there’s nowhere else to get money from. You can’t borrow, you can’t pay anymore, because there’s no more money in the treasury to pay, and bad, bad economic things happen.
Whether it’s default—it’s hard for the US to default for various reasons, but: bad things happen to the economy. There’s massive economic fallout, huge inflation, whatever. We don’t know what would happen, but it will be bad and not something that we want.
And that was before this war. They forecast that this would happen, the 200 percent threshold, in 2040-2045, which is closer than you think. It’s really in the next 15 to 20 years that we’ll get to that point if nothing changes.
But now something has changed. Trump has accelerated it massively, because of this war. And that’s something to look out for. And I don’t mean to be like doom and gloom here on Friday the 13th, but I don’t know what to do about this.
And the thing that just blows my mind is: Why? For what? What do we get out of this? We make Bibi a little happier. Bibi’s flexing his muscles, saying Israel’s now the region’s superpower, because all the other Middle Eastern countries are getting hurt by this war that we’re helping him with and have lost American lives helping with, in addition to all the money.
There’s nothing—we get nothing out of this at all. The Iranians were not a threat to us; they just weren’t. The nuclear thing has always been just kind of a bullshit excuse to swing our dicks around, tiny as they may be. And now we’ve, you know, we’ve poked the, what is it? Poked the bear, awakened the dragon, whatever you want to call it.
Iran is one of the largest manufacturers of drones in the world. The Russians are helping the Iranians target the drones to maximize the damage on us and our allies. And Trump is just like, “Yeah, yeah, Putin’s fine. He said he wasn’t doing it, so it’s okay.” So once again: We have a Kremlin asset in the White House who’s delivered a massive, massive victory for Putin at the expense of everybody in United States. And expense meaning death, expense meaning loss of standing in the world, and expense meaning expense, like actual money lost and squandered by these people—just squandered.
The only way out of this economically is to seize funds from the oligarchs who are participating in it. All of those oligarchs who have ties to Epstein, all of the oligarchs fronting and helping this war effort, they all need to be tried and we need to have massive asset forfeiture. And we have to tax the shit out of them. Nobody needs to make $500 billion. I mean, it’s ridiculous. The money at that point, it gets to be mind boggling. What are they even doing with it? They’re spending the money they have to pay less money in taxes—which, when you’re at that stage, your taxes are just helping people.
So it’s really a bleak view that I have. Nothing about this is good, but the silver lining is this is going to accelerate people turning on Trump. And we’ve seen this bear out in polls. We’ve seen it bear out in some of the early voting that’s going on with the primaries and stuff like that. He’s going to try to, you know, not have the elections for the midterms. He’s going to try to tamper with the election, but there is a point at which so many people are going to stream in to vote against Republicans that it might be enough for us to impeach him.
Now we impeach him, we get Vance, we have to impeach Vance. So maybe the Speaker of the House in January is somebody different instead of Mike Johnson. It’s looking like that’s going to be the case anyway. He’s already on pretty flimsy ground.
So we’ll see what happens. But that’s the only good thing that I can see is that this will be so bad, and so widespread in how the effects are felt, that there will be real desire on the part of a vast majority of the American people to fix this.
And that’s how you fix it. You get out of the war. You tax all these gajillionaires to pay down the debt that we wasted. This is their war anyway, these AI fuckers. Let them pay for it. And if they can’t figure out a way to pay for it, write it into ChatGPT.
God. I don’t know. This is—it really does feel like we’re in a bad sci-fi movie that we can’t escape from. It really does, every day. Every week I say it can’t get crazier and worse; every week it gets crazier and worse.
But it’s Friday the 13th. The Ides of March are coming—Ides of March, historically not a great day for dictators. So I don’t know. Perhaps we will have some good news over the weekend. Stranger things have happened.
In the meantime, the weather at least is getting nicer. And I think that helps a lot. We’ve got No Kings marches coming up. We’ve got candidates to support. We have primaries. The midterms, every day get a little bit closer. And while I caution about putting all the eggs in the midterm basket, it’s still a way that we can make our voices heard.
In the meantime, try to enjoy the weather as much as you can. Try not to let all of this paralyze you into feelings of dread and grief and shame and rage. To be honest, this happened to me a couple of times in the last two weeks.
Remember, nobody likes this guy anymore. And that’s good for us. His days in the White House are numbered. They are. So I know it looks bleak right now, but I still feel like we shall prevail.
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