If you comb the stockyards of Chicago and search all the cattlelands of America’s great prairies, if you go from the hillsides on which attentive Japanese farmers cultivate Wagyu beef to the ranches of Argentina’s famed gauchos, you will find less bulls--t than uttered by President Donald J. Trump in 18 minutes and 39 seconds on Wednesday night.

The U.S. president, looking addled and unsure of himself, unleashed a torrent of lies, untruths, misrepresentations, deceptions, and distilled nuggets of crapola so vast that it may well live up to the most Trumpian of descriptive phrases: “nobody has ever seen anything like it before.”

Compounding the fact that he managed to speak for almost 20 minutes without uttering nearly a single truth was the equally mind-numbing reality that, despite the White House having advertised his national TV appearance as a major address on the Iran war, nothing newsworthy crossed his thin, ever-so-lightly glossed lips.

His address was not so much a speech as it was a greatest hits compilation from his Truth Social account since the beginning of the current war in Iran, known to those who know as Operation Epic Fiasco.

If you’ve been following his posts, the whole embarrassing performance was like an episode of déjà vu filtered through a post-traumatic stress flashback. We’ve been here before. We’ve heard this baloney already. Why do we have to listen to it again?

My guess is, with the war going as badly as it is, with virtually every ostensible major rationale for the war floated by the administration since its inception being unfulfilled, and with the president not having addressed the public directly to explain........

© The Daily Beast