Where’s My F*cking Peace Prize?*
As with most weeks during this administration, the list of weighty topics to address was overwhelming for someone with limited time. I briefly comment on Trump’s “bomb bomb bomb, bomb-bomb Iran”[i] below.
I will leave for another day
· the Supreme Court’s revival of the ghost of Dred Scott in the birthright citizenship case
· the astonishing, successful campaign of 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist/Muslim American, who will likely be New York City’s next mayor, and the resulting, predictable bigoted attacks and vitriol from right-wing Republicans and Christian nationalists. See The Democratic Party is ripe for a takeover (Christian Paz, Vox, June 28, 2025)
· Pam Bondi’s, “I’ll take Things that Everyone Knows Go Together for $200, Alex. . . . What are guns and drugs”
· the whistleblower complaint against Emil Bove that reveals what everyone already suspected — the DOJ would consider telling courts that enjoin renditioning Venezuelans and others to a death camp in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, “fuck you” — which should be the death knell of his nomination to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals[ii] (it won’t be)
· the inevitability that Republicans will remove health care for millions of Americans, significantly so in red states, while increasing the deficit by over $3.3 trillion, so the Bezos of this country have enough to pay for grotesquely opulent weddings, and
· the irony that Justice Thomas — whom Anita Hill credibly accused of having favorably compared himself to porn actor Long Dong Silver — would pen the majority opinion affirming the Texas law that requires people who visit online porn sites, such as Pornhub, to verify they are of age.
Trump’s Obliterations
Iran and Israel “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” Trump said, without a hint of irony, self-awareness, or historical insight, after being “forced to neutralize an Iranian threat of his own making.” Israel and U.S. Smashed Iran Nuclear Site That Grew After Trump Quit 2015 Accord (Brian J. Broad and Ronen Bergman, The New York Times, June 28, 2025).
Without congressional authorization, Trump entered the United States into Israel’s war against Iran, bombing three sites which included two nuclear enrichment facilities, and one believed to store uranium. Iran was able to enrich uranium to weapons grade after Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (“JCPOA”) in 2018 because it was “one of the worst deals he ha[d] ever witnessed.” Trump: U.S. ‘Will Withdraw’ From Iran Nuclear Deal (Brian Naylor and Ayesha Rascoe, NPR, May 18, 2018).
The JCPOA was a complex agreement negotiated and entered in 2015 during the Obama Administration, which prohibited Iran’s nuclear weaponization activities and limited Iran’s ability to enrich and stockpile uranium. The JCPOA gave the International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”) the ability to inspect and monitor Iran’s centrifuges for twenty years. “It was working very well when Trump pulled out.” The Dangerous Consequences of Donald Trump’s Strikes in Iran (Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, June 22, 2025).
Trump, who told attendees at this week’s NATO summit in the Netherlands, “we feel like warriors,”[iii] a comment Lawrence O’Donnell savaged, had his “mission accomplished” moment when he claimed the bombings “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. An early US intelligence report suggests the bombing only set back Iran’s nuclear program by months — certainly not the twenty-year deal Obama had struck under the JCPOA.
Trump also claimed a ceasefire was reached between Israel and Iran — which both sides promptly violated. Trump intimated that by attacking Iran, it was he who had ended the hostilities which would bring permanent, lasting peace to the region.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who “defiantly declared that Iran would ‘never surrender’ to the United states,” claimed victory over Israel and, by extension, the U.S. That did not sit well with Trump’s ego and his aggressive public campaign to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt, whose lack of self-awareness rivals that of her boss, commented during a White House briefing on the Supreme Leader’s “never surrender” statement:
“Look, we saw the Ayatollah’s video, and when you have a totalitarian regime, you have to save face. I think any common sense, open-minded person knows the truth about the precision strikes on Saturday night. They were wildly successful.” Without a trace of irony (“Critics mockingly declared the Trump White House an irony-free zone on Thursday following talk of totalitarian regime tactics by press secretary Karoline Leavitt”) (emphasis added).
Then, there’s the embarrassing press conference in which the dangerously unqualified and incompetent “Secretary of War,” as Trump now calls him, attacked the media for accurately reporting the leaked assessment that the “total and complete obliteration” set back Iran’s nuclear program by a few months. Pete Hegseth is a crybully — and a perfect fit for Trump’s administration (Anthony L. Fisher, MSNBC Daily, June 29, 2025) (“The defense secretary had a public meltdown and the president threatened lawsuits all because news outlets did their jobs.”). We need an SNL cold open on this one.
After kickstarting Iran’s enrichment program in 2018 when he withdrew the United States from the alliance that was keeping Iran in check, maybe all Trump did was endear its citizens to an unpopular regime and cause Iran to dig a little deeper. Iran may see as its only meaningful defensive deterrent the need to round up the weapons-grade uranium it moved from the underground facilities while Trump was telegraphing the 30,000 pound bombings, expedite the construction of a bomb and delivery system, and test the bomb for the world to witness.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. His second novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. It is a literary masterpiece.
[i] Trump reaches new low with disgraceful Iran posts (Marc Sandalow, San Francisco Examiner, June 27, 2025) (Trump posted an “update” on Truth Social which featured a video of B-2s “maneuvering around apartment buildings and dropping multiple bombs, accompanied by the parody of the Beach Boys’ song ‘Barbara Ann,’” which first appeared in 1979 after 66 Americans were taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Iran.
[ii] See Letter from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to United States Senators, explaining why they should “Oppose the Confirmation of Emil Bove to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.”
[iii] The New York Times ran a series of articles and opinions titled At the Brink about the “threat of nuclear weapons in an unstable world.” In Sole Authority, which is part of that series, W.J. Hennigan explains:
In the United States, it’s up to one person to decide whether the world becomes engulfed in nuclear war. Only the president has the authority to launch any of the roughly 3,700 nuclear weapons in the American stockpile, an arsenal capable of destroying all human life many times over. And that authority is absolute: No other person in the U.S. government serves as a check or balance once he or she decides to go nuclear. There is no requirement to consult Congress, to run the idea by the defense secretary or to ask the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his or her opinion.
That means the American president is charged with the physical safety not only of some 334 million Americans but also of millions of people in other countries who, out of necessity, must rely upon his or her prudence and steady nerves to make a decision that could alter the course of human history. . . .
No other aspect of U.S. military power is legally conducted this way. Authorizing drone strikes on terrorism suspects, for instance, requires approvals up and down the chain of command, from a commander in the field to the general overseeing the region to the defense secretary to the president. Larger operations, like a ground invasion of another country, require the president to ask Congress for a formal declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force.
The idea that one human should have to make such a consequential decision in 15 minutes or less is nearly beyond comprehension. In reality, as long as nuclear weapons exist, there’s most likely no better option if the United States comes under attack. It is, however, unacceptable for an American president to have the sole authority to launch a nuclear first strike without a requirement for consultation or consensus.
Putting so much unchecked power in the hands of one person is not only risky but also deeply antithetical to how America defines itself. It also makes people deeply uneasy: Recent polling found that 61 percent of Americans are uncomfortable with the president’s sole authority. Over the years, several organizations have issued studies regarding the policy, providing recommendations on how it could be improved. Yet it survives.