Everything Trump Touches Dies Goes Global

When I tell you that everything Trump touches dies, some of you still try to find exceptions. Little limited-case counterexamples. Tiny lacunae of denial where the Rule somehow does not apply.

You are, as always in those cases, quite wrong.

I am famously not a ray of sunshine when it comes to the impact and outcomes of Trump’s corruption, cruelty, ignorance, and moral rot. My expectations for the damage he can do are generally high, and in fact, asymptotically approach infinity.

But something has been haunting me for the last two days. It was a thought that sprang to mind during a livestream on Friday. I did not articulate it then because it felt too dark even for me.

The Rule has expanded.

Everything Trump Touches Dies now applies not just to people, institutions, and political careers. It now applies to the world.

ETTD has gone global.

Donald Trump has blundered us into a war that will carry blood and tragedy across the Middle East and the world not for a day, not for a month, not even for a year, but for decades.

The only path that might have changed this outcome is the one Trump would hate most.

Iran desperately needed to be free of the shackles of the ayatollahs, the morality police, and the medieval clerics who have strangled that country for nearly half a century. It needed the slow pressure of the outside world. It needed time, openness, commerce, and the gradual corrosion of authoritarian power.

Those students and young protesters in the streets, willing to die for their country, looked to America for hope. For a lifeline. For an example. For a hand reaching out in solidarity.

Instead they got bombs.

China, meanwhile, continues its accidental good fortune under Donald Trump. First it was boosted economically by Trump’s idiotic tariff war. Now it finds itself sliding neatly into the role America once played as the responsible superpower.

Beijing does not need to fire a shot to win this moment. While Trump and his fools thrashe around like drunken amateurs, China expands its influence, its diplomacy, and its economic reach with the quiet patience of a nation that understands the long game.

Trump, of course, understands none of this.

Not content with insulting and alienating our NATO allies for years, he now piles insult on injury. First he demands that Europe join the fight. Then he demands they stay out of it.

We have become the ugliest Americans, louder and more unhinged than anyone imagined possible.

Iran itself was in the middle of a profound demographic shift. The clerical regime was losing its grip over a young population that despised it. Removing the mullahs would have been difficult, bloody, and expensive.

But the cracks were real. Now those cracks have been sealed with fire.

As I write this, we are on day eight of heavy bombing raids across Iran. Their air defenses have been shattered. Their surface fleet has been neutralized. Last night we attacked one of the largest refineries outside Tehran. A retired Air Force general sent to me in a message last night: “We’ve started the civilian targeting phase earlier than I thought.”

The next step, according to the warfighters whispering in Trump’s ear, is to destroy Iran’s power grid. Knock out the energy infrastructure. Darken Tehran. Break the population.

They believe this will bring the Iranian people to their knees. Instead of winning hearts and minds, it will do exactly what every intelligence professional warned it would do. It will weld the population back to the regime.

Reports from the National Intelligence Council warning that this war was unwinnable are now leaking as the administration’s folly becomes clearer by the hour.

The Iran that emerges from this will not be freer. It will be poorer, angrier, and more dangerous. The theocracy will franchise itself downward. Power will localize. It does not require a grand headquarters in Tehran for the clerics to maintain control of a town or village.

All it takes is a loudspeaker, a Toyota Hilux full of armed men, and the constant drumbeat of propaganda.

“Obey us. The Americans are coming.” (While not specifically an American problem, I assure you that Bibi Netanyahu has absolutely no desire to see a peaceful and democratic Iran. He needs a permanent enemy.)

Meanwhile Trump’s reversal of energy sanctions is quietly flooding Vladimir Putin’s coffers again, sending billions back into the Kremlin to fuel the war against Ukraine. While Ukrainian soldiers bleed to stop Russian expansion, Trump has once again opened the financial valves that keep Putin’s war machine running,

And then there is the American military.

I will now set aside the toll in lives, because we don’t know where we stand beyond the six acknowledged to date. I will also set aside his grotesque disrespect at Dover AFB, unwilling to even remove his branded Trump merch baseball cap as the first dead heroes of his war returned. When I return to this matter, it will be with venom.

The machine Trump now deploys so casually is not the arsenal of democracy we once possessed. Our weapons are not mass-produced at wartime scale. They are bespoke systems, exquisitely engineered and extraordinarily lethal.

And painfully slow to replace.

Trump boasts that production will quadruple. Even if it does, we will run out of critical systems long before defense firms catch up.

And when we do run low, he will be tempted by the siren song of weapons no same president would ever deploy. The ultimate transgression, the ultimate distraction, the ultimate history, defining active insanity will be to deploy a nuclear weapon. Don’t put it past him.

The truth is that Trump has taken the most powerful military alliances in history, the strongest economy in the world, and the greatest diplomatic soft power network ever assembled and turned them into props in a reality show about his own ego and madness.

He wanted fireworks. He wanted Americans to look away from Jeffrey Epstein and a faltering economy. He was bored and restless. He wanted a chest-thumping moment on television. He wanted a Call of Duty kill streak.

Instead he has lit a fuse that will burn for a generation. He started a forever war that will haunt us long after he’s dead and gone.

Everything Trump touches dies.

Honor.

Values.

Careers.

Alliances.

Institutions.

Truth.

And now, on a scale almost too large to grasp, the Rule has expanded again.

Everything Trump touches dies. And this time, the casualties won’t just be political.

They will be a world where a broken and corrupted America’s mad king titters and squeals as the flames rise and the death toll mounts.