In Donald Trump’s fantasy world, America is invincible and impregnable.

Its military is so advanced and skillful that it can pluck a sitting head of state from a hostile country and deposit him in a New York City jail cell without losing a single soldier. It can slap punitive tariffs on any nation it likes, abandon longstanding alliances on a whim, bomb any country at any time and freely blow up boats it may suspect of carrying drugs. America’s awesome power means it is unfettered by any rules, untroubled by any consequences. As an unfathomably rich and sprawling nation, blessed by geography and protected from its enemies by two vast oceans, why shouldn’t it do what it will?

Over the past six days, as Trump plunged the United States into a war with Iran, that fantasy of omnipotence has come crashing into reality. Undertaken for unexplained and perhaps unexplainable reasons, the war is being waged in a central node of the global economy against a disciplined, well-armed opponent with nothing to lose. America and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a dozen Iranian leaders on the first day of fighting, but Trump has clearly given little thought to what comes next. Recklessly, he has ignited a widening conflagration with no obvious end in sight. The death toll has already surpassed 1,000 people.

Dubai billionaire businessman Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor has slammed US President Donald Trump over war risks. He questioned on what basis the American leader took the “dangerous decision”. His post came after Iran’s attack on US bases in the UAE in retaliation for America and Israel’s strikes on Tehran.

“His Excellency President Donald Trump. A direct question: Who gave you the authority to drag our region into war with #Iran? And on what basis did you take this dangerous decision?” reads a translated tweet shared by Al Habtoor on March 5.

He continued, “Did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? And did you consider that the first to suffer from this escalation will be the countries of the region itself!”

Slamming the leader, he posted, “You have placed the countries of the #GulfCooperationCouncil and the Arab states at the heart of a danger they did not choose. Praise be to God, we are strong and capable of defending ourselves, and we have armies and defences that protect our homelands, but the question remains: Who gave you permission to turn our region into a battlefield?”

Let’s not simply gang up on Kristi Noem, the abundantly ignorant, tirelessly self-promoting and mean-spirited former head of Homeland Security that Donald Trump has just fired.

Yes, she falsely stated, for example, that Renee Good, the unarmed 37-year-old Minneapolis woman who was shot in the head three times by an ICE agent, was engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism”. And that V.A. nurse Alex Pretti was murdered by her masked police thugs because “This individual impeded the law enforcement officers and attacked them”. However, she was vehemently supported in her lies by other administration officials.

Let us not forget that Vice-President J.D. Vance said, in the immediate aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, that her behaviour constituted “an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people”, and that her death was a “tragedy of her own making”. He then added that “The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace…” and “…puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day.” Donald Trump, justifying her murder a bit more cautiously, offered that Good was “very disorderly” before she was killed.

Regarding the subsequent Alex Pretti murder by varyingly incompetent and poorly trained bullies unleashed and sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller justified it by saying that Pretti was an “assasin”. Vice-President Vance reposted Stephen Miller’s claim that Pretti was an “assassin” who “tried to murder” federal agents. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino immediately piled on with his own lie that Pretti had ambushed law enforcement with his gun and “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre” them. Donald Trump, keeping to his somewhat more mollifying yet unmistakably defamatory tone, claimed that Pretti “was not an angel”, just like he claimed that Good “was not an angel.”

There are many more disgraceful lies that have been publicly told by Trump, Vance, Miller, and other White House officials about these two killings, and about countless other criminal abuses committed by the masked secret police agents that they command in Minneapolis and across the nation. The Trump administration is clearly promoting a culture of unchecked state lawlessness, misogyny, racial profiling, and bald-faced lying. Kristi Noem’s firing will be a footnote to this ongoing reign of terror.

V.M.

EU internal market commissioner Stéphane Séjourné is the latest high-profile name to express solidarity with Madrid over Trump’s threats to “cut off all dealings with Spain” last night (8:55) over its criticism of the Iran war.