(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



The Trump/Truman Doctrine - How Far Will He Go? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2026-04-06  

Three days ago Donald Trump was comparing himself to Jesus. Now, it's midnight on Easter Sunday and I'm watching a futures terminal like a cold war radar operator looking for incoming. Twice in this war, the markets have signaled what was coming before the president did — $580 million in oil futures dumped fifteen minutes before a Truth Social post, new Polymarket accounts created the day before bombs fell. Tonight, with Trump's Strait of Hormuz ultimatum expiring in hours and the 82nd Airborne in theater, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is the real situation room.

Right now, the Sunday night futures open is screaming. WTI surged past $115, Brent cleared $111, stock futures dropped across the board — the classic pre-strike positioning of long oil, short equities. That's the broad market pricing in Tuesday's deadline, because Trump posted "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one" and then told Fox News he's considering "blowing everything up and taking over the oil." Israel is reportedly preparing strikes on Iranian energy facilities and waiting for U.S. approval. Gas is already at $4.11 a gallon, up from $2.98 before the war started five weeks ago. All of that is public. All of that is the market doing what markets do.

But here's the precise signal you're looking for: a sudden, massive spike in oil futures volume in a quiet overnight window between now and Tuesday at 8 PM Eastern, with no headline to explain it. A burst of contracts in a single candle, 8 to 10 times normal volume, the way $580 million moved in one minute, fifteen minutes before the last Truth Social post that moved the world. That's not the market reacting. That's the canary, and it's not singing — it's cashing out before the rest of us hear the explosion. When it happens, you'll know as certainly as everyone in the Oval Office — the ball has dropped.

Kharg Island handles ninety percent of Iran's oil exports. It's not "a" target — it's THE target. Trump has talked about it publicly. Axios reported the Pentagon has plans to seize it. A neocon analyst who worked the Iraq occupation called it a "no-brainer." Whoever knows the strike order is dropping is holding the most valuable insider information in the history of futures trading. And if this war has taught us one thing, it's that somebody always knows.

So, we know exactly what to watch for, and exactly what it looks like when the canary drops dead right before the rest of us hear the explosion. Because the money always talks first — and right now, the people who are supposed to be listening have been fired, defunded, or quit. Given all that, it's just a question of what these utter morons are going to do next.

We start at the top with our megalomaniac in chief, the aging narcissist who has flipped to the dark side. There was a time when the narcissism worked in a direction you could almost live with — he wanted the deal, the building, the crowd, the gold letters on the tower — because the validation he craved came from being seen as a builder of things. What clinicians will tell you is that when that architecture starts to collapse, when the polls turn and the courts close in and the cognition slips, the narcissist stops caring whether the attention comes from creation or destruction, because the psychological need was never about outcomes — it was about attention and permanence.

That's where the religion walks in and finishes the job. A collapsing narcissist needs new scaffolding for the false self, and messianic framing is the most powerful replacement available because it doesn't just restore the ego, it promotes it — from dealmaker to instrument of God, from politician to Providence. Once that merger takes hold, opposition isn't political anymore, it's demonic, and compromise isn't pragmatic, it's apostasy. Now every guardrail that used to keep the behavior inside normal bounds — self-interest, reputation, the deal — gets overridden by a framework where escalation is the righteous thing to do.

His people built this on purpose. Paula White, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office, has spent years explicitly mapping the Passion narrative onto Trump's biography — the persecution, the suffering, the resurrection — and on Easter Sunday that identification isn't metaphorical for the base, it's structural, it's the air they breathe. The feedback loop between a decompensating narcissist and a congregation that believes he was sent by God is the most dangerous political dynamic in American life right now, because neither side has any reason to pump the brakes and both sides have every reason to escalate.

Then there are the cheerleaders left in the room, and at the front of that pack stands the head of the Department of War, Pete Hegseth, a man who has turned the Pentagon into a megachurch with a bombing budget. Hegseth held a Christian service in the Pentagon auditorium on March 25 where he asked God to break the teeth of the wicked, deliver the enemy to eternal damnation, and grant his forces clear and righteous targets for violence. That wasn't some off-the-cuff moment of battlefield emotion, that was a scripted, polished, carefully read liturgy delivered in the building where the nation's wars are planned. His particular strain of evangelical Christianity doesn't just tolerate the idea of raining hellfire on Persia — "I will rain down on him, on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, flooding rain, great hailstones, fire, and brimstone" — it celebrates it, because for these people Iran isn't a geopolitical adversary, it's a biblical one.

For the fulfillment of prophecy, the enemy that must be destroyed before Christ returns. The man has a Jerusalem cross from the medieval Crusades tattooed across his chest and "Deus Vult" — God wills it, the Crusader battle cry — inked on his bicep, he wrote a book called "American Crusade" and closed it with those same words, and he invited a Christian nationalist pastor who wants to repeal women's suffrage to preach at the Pentagon — and now he's running a war in the Middle East while quoting Psalm 144 — "Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle" — over the coffins of dead Americans at Dover.

The infection has already spread past him and into the ranks. Hundreds of troops across more than fifty installations have reported that their commanders are telling them this war is part of God's divine plan, that Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the fire in Iran that causes Armageddon and marks Christ’s return to Earth. Thirty Democratic members of Congress have asked the Inspector General to investigate, and Hegseth's response has been to keep preaching, because if you truly believe biblical law is the highest authority then the Constitution and its quaint separation of church and state are just suggestions. Trump is his captive audience and his perfect mark — a decompensating narcissist who needs to believe he was chosen, being told every day by the man running his war that he was in fact chosen, and that the righteous thing to do is escalate.

The war in Iran is not merely supported by Trump's evangelical base — it is theologically required by it. Three distinct but converging streams of Christian nationalism feed the same fire. Classical dispensationalists like John Hagee have spent decades preaching that Ezekiel 38 names Persia as the nation God will destroy by fire before the Rapture, making Iran's annihilation a prerequisite for their personal salvation. The New Apostolic Reformation — the network of self-appointed apostles and prophets including Lance Wallnau and Trump's own spiritual adviser Paula White, who now runs the White House Faith Office — goes further, teaching that believers must actively seize dominion over government and military power to prepare the way for Christ's return. And Hegseth himself belongs to a third current, Christian Reconstructionism, through his denomination the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, whose adherents believe biblical law governs every dimension of life including the prosecution of war.

All three streams converge on Iran. NAR leaders have openly celebrated the bombing as a last-days moment. Military commanders have told troops that Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon. Trump himself posted a spliced-together video of dead NAR prophet Kim Clement on Truth Social to justify the war. And Secretary of State Rubio, without apparent irony, has accused Iran's leaders of making foreign policy decisions based on "pure theology" — the same week American officers were invoking the Book of Revelation in combat briefings. The theological infrastructure doesn't merely tolerate escalation. It demands it.

And then there are Trump's global superpower advisors who aren't in the room but might as well be, because they have the most to gain manipulating him into every single thing that's happening. Vladimir Putin watches this war and sees the price of oil climb past a hundred dollars a barrel, which alone would be enough to make his year, but the real prize is so much bigger than money — if he can engineer the permanent removal of the United States from the pinnacle of hegemonic power it has occupied since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he will have accomplished everything he has spent his entire political life working toward without firing a single shot at an American, simply by letting the Americans bring themselves down a peg while he sells oil at wartime prices.

The other is MBS, bonesaws himself, Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. To understand how MBS thinks, remember the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Persia didn't start with this war or the last one or the one before that — it goes back to the death of Muhammad himself in 632 AD, when the question of who would lead Islam fractured the faith and created a wound that has never healed. The Persians speak Farsi, not Arabic, and they may follow Islam but they are a fundamentally different civilization with a fundamentally different culture, and the hostility between Riyadh and Tehran makes the pre-Fort Sumter American North and South hostilities look like a family squabble, except this one has been running for nearly fourteen centuries. MBS doesn't need to whisper in Trump's ear to escalate — he just needs to not whisper stop, because every bomb that falls on Iran weakens the only regional power that has ever seriously threatened Saudi dominance of the Gulf, and he gets to watch it happen on someone else's tab while collecting record oil revenue for the trouble.

So now the stage is set for the Trump Doctrine to express itself. We'll all pay the price with a Trump Gas Tax, but he's being prepped to write his name with indelible Sharpie marker in history books. Forgive me for being hysterical, accuse me of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But remember — there's never been an assault on manners, morals, or people he has flinched from. Heck — he brags about them. Because:

IF you were a deranged aging malignant narcissist craving attention and IF you were swearing in tweets at a nation who embarrassed, belittled and emasculated you on the global stage and IF you were surrounded by yes men who bought all your BS and IF those yes men happened to be led by a Secretary of the Department of War-mongering whose religion called for Persia to be destroyed by fire rained down from heaven as a prerequisite for their upcoming rapture AND IF you were the single person in the world who could do something everyone would remember your name for forever BECAUSE you have the nuclear football, THEN you might do something like drop an itty bitty almost harmless tactical nuke onto the oil terminal island of a country which had really pissed you off.

Now admittedly we've just said the unspeakable, but please, let's be rational, because with this regime nothing is off the table. Would Trump do such a thing? Why wouldn't he? No really, let's consider — there are virtually no reasons for that man not to do that thing. He has the sole authority, he has the psychological need, he has the religious permission, he has the yes men, and he has no one left in the room who would tell him no. Which brings us back to the conclusion — our country is led by a madman surrounded by religious fanatics and sycophants.

With all of this as a backdrop, further escalation is not a question of if but when and how much. You have a decompensating narcissist who has merged his identity with a messianic narrative, a Dry Drunk Secretary who believes he is fighting a holy war ordained by God, and advice from two foreign leaders with the most to gain from American overreach watching the price of oil climb while their strategic objectives accomplish themselves. If the betting markets have it right, and the fanciest math on the planet says they usually do, an Ohio Class sub like the USS Tennessee could be flooding the tubes on a missile bearing a W76-2 low-yield tactical nuclear warhead anytime now. Nobody in that room has a reason to stop, nobody in that room has the psychological capacity to stop, and the one man who has the legal authority to order the unthinkable is surrounded exclusively by people who will tell him God wants him to do it.

If you're planning to travel this summer, my suggestion is: start buying camping gear and look for someplace close to home, cheap to drive to. You might consider getting your bike tuned up for those short errands to keep the fuel costs down. Also, gardening makes a very soothing habit that can really reduce the anxiety you may be feeling from day to day. It's a little early up here in the northern part of the country, but down south you can absolutely put in things like Swiss chard, cabbage, lettuce, and broccoli right now. Cheap veggies might be useful in a few months. I've always been one for growing food as compared to ornamentals, but if you like flowers go for the pretty stuff. Either way, get your hands in the dirt. It helps.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/6/2376547/-The-Trump-Truman-Doctrine-How-Far-Will-He-Go?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/