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Trump’s TV-Warped Brain Is Putting the World in Danger

The president is experiencing the Iran War almost entirely through misleading video clips—and that’s very bad news for all of us.

Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Thursday, March 26, 2026.

Everything about America’s reckless and baseless attack on Iran flies in the face of objective reality, from the failed round-robin competition within the Trump White House to identify a coherent casus belli to President Donald Trump’s fabricated anecdote about a conveniently unnamed former president’s professing envy over the war to his invention of nonexistent ceasefire negotiations to climb down from the next war-crime escalation of the conflict he was poised to unleash.

Our president is, of course, a bottomless fount of this sort of auto-generated delusion, going back to the days when he posed as his own PR flack to manipulate New York tabloid coverage of his flailing real estate empire. But harnessing Trump’s defective grasp of the real to the towering Moloch of the American war machine represents an unprecedented new level of imperial nihilism—and the chief motive force behind it is the same thing that transformed this inert Caligulan stooge into our commander in chief in the first place: television.

Amid the senseless mounting carnage of the Iran war, NBC News’s report on how Trump’s daily briefings on the conflict consist not of substantive information but of bite-sized video montages came off as a deflating afterthought. Nor was it shocking to learn that these clip reels appear to be little more than glorified cheerleading exercises, documenting the scale of destruction wrought by the American air war while pointedly omitting the deflating news of Iranian counterattacks and diplomatic resistance to the shambolic succession of jury-rigged American “off ramps.” One administration official characterized the daily clip round-up as a nonstop loop of footage devoted to “blowing stuff up.” Condensing each day’s new digest of carnage from on high into a tight two-minute compass calls to mind the “two-minute hates” immortalized in George Orwell’s 1984—only where those rancorous hallucinations of current events were crafted for mass consumption, these videos are curated for the Maximum Leader’s delectation.

This poses a very fraught problem in terms of what cultural studies mavens used to call “audience reception theory”—the notion that consumers of media aren’t passive automatons, but active interpreters endowing texts with new layers of meaning. In Trump’s case, the reception field is very much a closed loop—so much so that the president is reportedly upset and disoriented by actual news reports on the conflict that contradict the warm bath of bombing montages that start........

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