Madison and the Founders of his generation had it right: what Trump is doing violates both the Constitution and the foundational norms of democracy…
We can talk about the millions of reasons President Trump had to attack Iran, but it all really boils down to this: Trump realized he was about to be exposed as a predator/child sex criminal and on the verge of losing his job as president. The reason for his Iran invasion was what so many were speculating prior to the attack: Invading Iran would distract from his soon-to-be-exposed crimes on Epstein’s island. So far his strategy is working brilliantly-The TBPR Editor
By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ March 2, 2026
Operation Epstein Fury — with a bonus to help Bibi get re-elected so he doesn’t have to face charges for his criminal behavior — is rolling on as Trump ignores the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war.
He’s also violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that dictates the president, if he reacts to an actual attack on America like Pearl Harbor, must notify Congress within 48 hours and have authorization within 60 days. In this case there was no actual or even imminent attack against America.
To further confuse things, Trump is throwing the Iranian protestors under the bus by saying that he’s willing to talk with the Iranian regime now that Kahmenei is dead, much like he crapped on pro-democracy voters and protestors in Venezuela when he kept that repressive regime intact after illegally removing Maduro and promising democracy.
This conflict is also now spreading. Kahmenei was to many Shia Muslims around the world something akin to what the Pope is to Catholics (there’s no equivalent among the Sunni Muslims). Imagine the Catholic world’s fury if a country had assassinated Pope Leo XIV: we’re now seeing Shia protests and outrage from Bangladesh to Pakistan to Lebanon.
And here at home Trump is musing about using Iranian interference in our 2020 election as an excuse to issue an emergency executive order to seize control of the upcoming November midterm election.
Which is particularly ironic, given that the well-documented Iranian intervention that year was designed to help get Trump reelected (after all, he’d just torn up the JCPOA nuclear deal) and avoid a Biden administration from coming into power.
Four Americans are dead and five in critical condition because of Iranian retaliatory strikes, as are civilians in several other US-aligned countries in the region. Along with around 200 young people in Iran after we bombed a girl’s school and a gymnasium.
And it’s early days. As Winston Churchill famously said in 1936 about war:
“Once the signal is given, no one can predict how far events will go.”
America’s Founders and the Framers of our Constitution not only would have agreed with Churchill, but saw a president seizing war powers from Congress as an existential threat to the republic. On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
Reflecting on the ability of a president to use war as an excuse to become a virtual dictator, Madison continued his letter:
“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war…and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.
“No nation,” our fourth President and the Father of the Constitution concluded, “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Since Madison’s warning, “continual warfare” has been used both in fiction and in the real world. In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by having a continuous war.
The lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime President’s party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a President in peacetime.
And, as George W. Bush told his biographer in 1999:
“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”
Every Republican president since Reagan has had his own “little war.” Now it’s Trump’s turn, after all the times over the years he warned that if Obama was ever in trouble he’d start a war with Iran to distract us:
“In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” (2011)
“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective…” (2011)
“@BarackObama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.” (2012)
“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (2012)
“I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!” (2013)
“Remember what I said about @BarackObama attacking Iran before the election…” (2012)
Given that Baron, Don Jr, and Eric Trump all apparently suffer from hereditary bonespurs and no Trump has ever served as a “loser” or “sucker” in our military (and his grandfather came to America as a German draft-dodger), it’s unlikely this war will mean anything other than profit-making opportunities for the Trump children.
But it compounds his constant ignoring of constitutional limits on presidential power ranging from gutting federal agencies without authorization to having ICE routinely ignore court orders, flagrantly violate the Fourth Amendment, and daily lie to the American people.
Nobody invested in peace or democracy is mourning the death of the Iranian dictator or the possible unraveling of its theocracy. But must we do it in a way that breaks both US and international law?
Trump apparently thinks so; not only will it distract from the news reports that he raped at least one and maybe more 13-year-olds and his naked corruption and bribe-taking but it also carves another “screwed Congress” notch in his belt.
There was no attack on America, as required by the War Powers Resolution. There wasn’t even a serious possibility of an attack on America.
Madison and the Founders of his generation had it right: this is a naked crime by Trump and Hegseth against our Constitution and our laws and requires a strong congressional response such as impeachment.
thebigpicturereport ™ 
Dear Arlen,
Like you, I have continued to shed light on the grim reality of blatant corruption, continued carnage, calamitous inhumanity and unrelenting brutality, as evidenced by some dreadful statistics pertaining to Ukraine and Palestine as well as other regions in dire conflict. For instance, of all major Arab-Israeli conflicts assessable with calculated percentage of fatalities for each war, the deadliest is the 2023 Gaza War, which amounts for almost half of all casualties. The plights of those suffering people have been so immense and protracted that I have not enough tears to cry for them. They are so searingly painful to witness! For some of us, it can be too emotionally distraught to witness such tragedies and annihilations. We have heard the phrase “Never again!” being uttered after each major war, and yet tragic history keeps repeating itself. It is all getting to the point of “Never say never again!”
As never before, we need to take even more time and reflect on the wretched state of the many ongoing conflicts and abject sufferings throughout war-torn areas. There is a post entitled “A Tale of Two Soldiers: Pacifism, Activism or Armed Resistance in the Face of Aggression?”, which I have taken a lot of time to revamp and improve very recently. I shall improve the said post even more when I can fork out the time to do so later in the week. The said post echoes many of your viewpoints and sentiments, and is available to you at
This post embraces deep respect and introspective regard for the sanctity and dignity of human lives, whilst revealing the absurdity and moral bankruptcy of the war-mongering culprits and mendacious perpetrators, as well as analysing the complex developments and trends in geopolitics, in conjunction with offering some solutions for dealing with ruthless aggression riddled with the truculent (re)action of attacking even without provocation and the escalating normalization of disinformation, immorality, iniquity and corruption.
Indeed, we need to summon the power of people, as it has often been the impetus for social change and social movement, and for holding authority and power to account and scrutiny.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅
Dear Arlen,
Hello! It has been quite a long while since we last communicated. I hope that 2026 has been treating you well so far. Since my comment here is going to be very long, I am going to split it into two comments.
Thank you, Arlen, for your commendable effort that you put into this latest post, which I have perused with great interest. Thank you very much for your insights and revelations. I concur with your findings and conclusions.
There is an important piece of work that sheds light on the sorry and sordid state of the US democracy and partisan politics marred by disinformation and corruption. Published on 13 March 2025 and entitled “A Movement to Destroy U.S. Democracy Controls the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court—But What’s Behind It?“, this is a great article from Religion Dispatches, which “is a publication of Political Research Associates, a social justice research and strategy centre that has been researching, monitoring, and publicizing the agenda and strategies of the U.S. and global Right for over four decades.” I very much concur with the author Katherine Stewart, and I am very impressed by how well and detailed she has described some of the issues. I would like to add some of my own observations and analyses.
The “disease” of the corrupt is spreading far and wide. Rather than the “Bloody Immigrants” as scapegoats, it is actually the bloody plutocrats and their ill-informed supporters, and the matter is much more than a backlash against globalization. There is also the ongoing Christian institutions’ war on knowledge and alignment with power. Some factions of Christianity have even evolved into clerical fascism (also called clero-fascism or clerico-fascism), which is an ideology that combines the political and economic doctrines of fascism with clericalism. For instance, the Silver Legion of America (also known as the Silver Shirts) in the United States led by William Dudley Pelley has combined American Christianity (specifically Protestantism) with American white nationalism.
Indeed, there are numerous compelling and irrefutable reasons as to why there is no justification in supporting such corrupted Christian organizations and their doctrines, whose leaders and followers have aligned themselves with the likes of Trump, and by extension, other corrupt entities, including Putin and numerous wretched rulers, politicians, plutocrats, autocrats, officials and corporations. Sadly, many of those who are supposedly more morally or spiritually attuned to the wise and virtuous seem to have fared even worse, given that a large percentage of Trump’s supporters have been disproportionately Christians. So much for Christianity being the guiding conscience and ultimate salvation!
The blame game is still very much rampant in Homo sapiens, which has firmly ushered in an apocalyptic age of deplorable politics, outright complicity, devious duplicity, shameless mendacity, excruciating inhumanity, extraordinary brutality and unrelenting cruelty! Considering the countless wretched situations and dire outcomes that humans have repeatedly created for themselves and nonhumans through war crimes, holocausts, slaveries, genocides, environmental destructions and ecological disasters plus a litany of gross injustices, unconscionable exploitations and staggering corruptions, any reasonable person may insist or conclude that there is emphatically no longer the need, excuse or justification to blame the old serpent, Devil or Satan, who can permanently retire from being the stigmatized scapegoat, catch-all villain and evil incarnate.
On the whole, how shocking and deplorable it has been that despite these staggering amount of reasons and overwhelming evidences against Trump, he is still becoming the President for the second time as a convicted felon!
The salient issues of democracy versus autocracy (and plutocracy) aside, there are many sobering implications of authoritarianism, which is a very topical area for exploring the many outstanding tensions between (the sociopsychological states of) sanity/stability and insanity/instability, affecting even the very existence and survival of humanity. In recent years, many citizens have willingly aligned themselves with misinformation, disinformation, post-truth politics, demagoguery, plutocracy, oligarchy, ochlocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, narcissistic leadership, neoliberalism, globalization, clerical fascism and Trumpism. We can also agree that the ongoing chaos inflicted by the Trump presidency finally culminated in the infamous riot at the Capitol. You and I can be justified for being cynical, snide, snarky and facetious in characterizing Trump as the symbolic messiah who is going to lead his misguided supporters, sycophants and funders to glory on Earth and the promised land! It is often futile to reason with such misguided folks. Perhaps only when the country truly becomes autocratic or fascist, or when it plunges into a civil war, will such folks wake up, but then it will be too late. Consequently, any reasonable person can conclude that the USA has been plagued by ignorance, dogma, falsity, blind faith, spiritual stagnation and epistemological impasse . . . . .
To make matter worse, even those who are supposed to know better, who are in the most privileged position or at the highest echelon, have displayed objectionable conducts, caused much disunity, and/or generated unwisdom. We have been witnessing so clearly the insidious nature of Trumpism, Machiavellian conservatism and inimical illiberalism perverting democracy for nefarious purposes and for justifying, obfuscating or muddying the waters of systemic sexism, racism, historical negationism, discrimination, marginalization and curtailment of civil rights. In a similar vein, one of my latest posts highlights not just the various traps awaiting us from the fallouts of the main event regarding the SCOTUS’ decisions on abortion and its striking down Roe v. Wade, but also how the capacity of laws and legislation to be legally valid, binding and enforceable in different contexts is both contingent (acceptable only if certain circumstances are the case) and circumscribed (restricted to certain roles or situations), given that the content, relevance and quality of laws and legislation are fundamentally filtered and moulded by class structures, social stratifications, cultural reproductions and communication frameworks as well as by the interaction between legal cultures, and the social construction of legal issues, as discussed in my post entitled “🏛️⚖️ The Facile and Labile Nature of Law: Beyond the Supreme Court and Its Ruling on Controversial Matters 🗽🗳️🔫🤰🧑🤝🧑💉“, published at
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅