By Patrick Lawrence
Consortium News
Patrick Lawrence for Consortium News
You have to hand it to Sara Jacobs, the California Democrat and the youngest member of the Golden State’s House delegation.
She has an O.K.–plus voting record — at least by Capitol Hill standards — as a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, but this is not why you have to hand it to Sara Jacobs.
You have to hand it to Sara Jacobs because she has just forced the question of Donald Trump’s lapsing sanity into an open debate in the U.S. Congress.
Jacobs accomplished this during the very heated grilling of Pete Hegseth during his testimony in Armed Services hearings on Wednesday.
The defense secretary was a belligerently incoherent mess, but we already knew he was a hopeless Dummkopf, and his appearance on the Hill — his first since the U.S.–Israeli attacks on Iran began Feb. 28 — is merely par for his course.
Jacobs stole the show with her opening question when her time came. Here is a video of her five minutes with the microphone, and here is the query that may find some small place in the annals of the Trump II regime when they are written:
“Mr. Secretary, you are with the president a lot, and it pains me even to have to ask this about our president, but my constituents’ lives are at stake: Do you believe the president is mentally stable enough to be the commander-in-chief?”
Sara Jacobs, you go girl.
I asked Secretary Hegseth a straightforward, yes or no question today: Is Donald Trump mentally stable enough to be Commander in Chief?
He didn't say yes. And that speaks volumes. pic.twitter.com/ncWhEBAX9r
— Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (@RepSaraJacobs) April 29, 2026
The Trumpster’s mental instability — indeed, his relationship with reality — is much remarked upon these days.
Threatening to destroy one of humanity’s oldest civilizations, blowing his cool so badly his adjutants recently locked him out of the Situation Room so they could coherently discuss… the situation; “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” and so on: It reaches the point where there is a better-than-even chance America’s rotund leader will not make it to the end of his term.
I see little chance of it, honestly.
And Sara Jacobs just pushed open the door, slightly ajar at this early moment, to 25th Amendment proceedings. O.K., she’s a Democrat in a GOP–controlled House, but there are now Republicans sporting beads of sweat over Trump’s failing sanity, and, in any case, they may not have a House majority come the midterm elections.
And here’s the thing. Donald J. Trump — setting aside clinical symptoms unrelated to the global calamity he has set in motion — has very good reasons, two of them, to lose his mind.
One has to do with American ideology and the other with Israel. It is important to know this because whoever succeeds Trump will be similarly taxed to stay compos mentis.
Trump is trapped. And whoever follows him will be trapped, too.
The Imperium’s Sunset Phase
Hegseth before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. (C-Span)
It is not a good time, to put this point differently, to be president of these United States.
This was bound to be the case, I should add, once the imperium entered its sunset phase — which began, as I have argued severally in this space, on Sept. 11, 2001. And as many have remarked, if the Iran crisis forces one truth on Americans above all others, it is that the sun is going down even more swiftly than anyone could have anticipated.
Of the two reasons the Trumpster is discernibly slipping his grip, the first has to do with America’s exceptionalist ideology. America cannot lose in its confrontation with Iran for the simple reason America cannot lose anything. Defeats, reversals, failures — history altogether — are what befall other nations, never the United States.
This imperative, a function of a collective neurosis now four centuries old, cancels all possibility of a leader or leaders setting a wise, imaginative, even modestly courageous new course into the 21st century. Join me in counting this the essential tragedy of our fading republic.
Think of it. Fifty-one years after the rise of Saigon (as I insist we consider it), the United States has yet officially to acknowledge it lost the Vietnam war to the Vietnamese people. Officially, Washington still nurses the “peace with honor” delusion.
This is what I mean by Trump’s trap. He has lost the war he started with Iran — or at the very least he has no chance of winning it — but accepting defeat and repairing the damage of the error is simply beyond his reach. It is irrational, an ideological blocage, but the “American experiment” (curious phrase) has never been a rational proposition.
At the moment, DJT must listen to various military options to continue the Iran campaign, one more cockeyed than the next, while squirming in desperation to get out of it.
So does he descend into fabrications, fantasies and, let’s just say it, other symptoms of clinical psychosis — taking Hegseth and the rest of his cabinet with him as he watches the war he cannot win — but cannot lose — disrupt the global economy to the point that it drifts toward a depression which could match or exceed 1929.
Conversations & Questions
The New York Times building. (Ermell, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons) I have to note some interesting conversations bearing on the trap wherein Trump finds himself. “The United States can accept some degree of geopolitical embarrassment as the price of ending our war with Iran, without that embarrassment being an era-defining debacle or inflection point.” This is Ross Douthat, the thinking man’s conservative, making his case for a rational way forward in an April 21 column in The New York Times. A couple of questions arise. Ross, do you honestly think the Trump regime can accept the humiliation and loss of credibility attaching to any retreat from the Iran debacle? I don’t. It would be a fine thing for America to accept that it has embarrassed itself before the world — a big step toward becoming “a normal nation” — but history is persuasive on this point. There is also America’s “civil religion” to think about. It remains far too strong to permit of any such acceptance. Second question, in two parts. Were the United States wise and brave enough to accept some “geopolitical embarrassment,” how could it be other than “era-defining?” And what under the sun is wrong with defining an era in this way? If America and the rest of the world need one thing more than any other, it is a humbler, post-hubristic, post-hegemonic American republic. I need to hear why Ross Douthat proposes the embarrassment but wants the present “era” to remain intact. Ben Rhodes is a curious figure. He served in the Obama administration as a consent-manufacturing propagandist but seemed aware his work was as insidious as it gets even as he got it done. Rhodes now writes opinion at the Times and has recently published an interesting piece on Graham Platner after traveling through Maine with the Down East oysterman running for a Senate seat as a left Democrat. This is an important piece. (And I accept Rhodes’s apology for his errant past). His conversations with Platner, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, ranged widely as they drove along in Platner’s pickup truck, but Rhodes, at heart a foreign policy man, is interested primarily in Platner’s “radical honesty” as to the imperium’s incessant violence in the post–Sept. 11 years and mainstream Democrats’ abject refusal to stand against it. On the past 25 years of the Pentagon’s invasions and interventions:
On the Democrats’ limp-wristed objections as Iran joins the list of forever wars while they vote consistently for bloated defense budgets and implicitly reaffirm the late-phase imperium’s reigning ideology:
On the current impasse in Washington:
In effect, Rhodes via Platner makes the case for a fundamental renovation of American foreign policy — a turn toward 21st century realities, chief among these the end of U.S. preeminence and the arrival of a multipolar order. Platner’s voice is to be altogether welcomed for this. Is such a turn possible — and possible via the Democratic Party, as both Rhodes and Platner implicitly propose? This is our question. And I simply don’t see it. The trap that springs on Donald Trump as we speak will spring again and again until the trap itself is destroyed. After Gov. Janet Mills’ withdrawal from the primary race, Platner, now the Democratic Party presumptive nominee, is looking ahead to the general election. Drop Site News, in an excellent piece published April 28, reports that billionaire donors — all of them from out of state — are spending multiple millions of dollars via a super PAC in support of Susan Collins, the doddering Republican incumbent Platner is at the moment projected to unseat. This is how the trap often springs. Part 2 follows below 
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Patrick Lawrence puts his finger on some central truths about America’s self-inflicted disgusting condition—moral, economic, political, and cultural, and we could also say now, with relief, military—and in so doing he stands almost alone in the entire field of “respectable” punditocracy of the establishment left. That said, I feel the piece suffers from some serious bloat. Lawrence’s detour, his homage to Sara Jacobs and Ben Rhodes, is superfluous, even fatuous. That whole segment is really a tedious nothingburger. Like most bourgeois thinking it is narcissistic and confuses elaborate detail with profundity. The US is what it is in its time of undeniable decline as a capitalist superpower because the country has squandered its good fortune in arrogant interventions around the globe since it began flexing its muscles as a world power in 1898, by defeating (after a blatant false flag, mind you) the exhausted Spanish empire. History shows, by the way that ALL empires decline and collapse, eventually, and this is all the more clear for a capitalist entity, since no one has yet found a solution to this system’s “overproduction crisis”, nor its massively inegalitarian disease, pronounced in all class-divided societies but grotesquely exacerbated by modern bourgeois and the rising productivity of modern technologies.
America’s ruling elites had a comparatively long run, aided by a crucial bunch of factors—all exogenous to capitalism—that made “the American Way of Life” the envy of many observers, not to mention the El Dorado for the always desperate hoi polloi that the old world, still immersed in brutal and largely naked class exploitation, made available to the new nation. Let’s face it: mass emigration of the lower orders was long seen as a valve to relieve social unrest at home. The Brits practiced this shamelessly with the creation of many of their colonies, chiefly America and later Australia.
In any case, America, from the start, benefited from many accidental factors, its resource-rich continental size and isolation from any threatening powers next door, made it a natural strategic island, and as mentioned earlier, an abundant, largely uneducated injection of cheap labour from overseas and poorer neighbors to the south contributed plenty to its competitive industrial vitality. These “accidents of history”, or lucky historical parallels, as we might say, helped the native capitalist class quickly consolidate its grip on the national consciousness.
Exploiting these good breaks, and quick to utilize the tools of modern propaganda—commercial, cultural and political—the leadership class in the US systematically built powerful mythologies to present the US as an “exceptional nation” in every regard, to which, by implicit corollary, the laws of historical decay —let alone justice and punishment—would not apply. In this mix of blessings that served to confuse the masses, all of them as I said earlier, external to capitalism, perhaps none contributed more to the victory of capitalism as the foundation of US exceptionalism than the ruin of competing powers at the end of WW2, the so-called Eisenhower Years, wherein the US found itself as the world’s only standing industrial engine capable of rebuilding the world, this event also serving to create the first mass middle class in history (China would later surpass this accomplishment by several magnitudes). The postwar period, the so-called “unipolar moment” (to be repeated in similar fashion after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991), gave US capitalism—the American Way of Life—the credibility and level of profit needed to seduce the masses with a toxic and unrelenting brew of anti-communism that has lasted to this day, making even a gradual transition to a more socialist base impossible. This is the meta-reality that no US politico can or dare to surpass, the trap Patrick Lawrence rightfully denounces, although the nation has seen figures that, in their own way, rose to the challenge, Huey Long, for example. Equally ignored by its apologists, capitalism never managed to climb out of the depression all by itself. It was the accident of the postwar, and later the institutionalisation of the permanent war economy (AKA The Pentagon Economy) that has kept the nation bumbling through the usual inevitable highs and lows that typify the “free market” cycles.
What will it take then to uproot the congenital disease of exceptionalism, and as John. Gerassi once called it, the “immaculate conception of US foreign policy”?
I feel at this point, given the self-congratulary echo chamber of the ruling circles, that no single isolated man, no matter how gifted, can lead the nation to the new horizons it desperately needs, along with a long suffering planet. But cumulative history—hard defeats, incurable economic crises at home—can subtly create the receptivity among the masses for a leader of the requisite kind to emerge. Eventually it will be an unstoppable mass movement that will bury America’s narcissistic idiocies, especially its claim to exceptionalism. The rest will follow organically.
Incidentally, for a clear-eyed analysis of the rise of US imperialism and the exceptionalist disease, do check out John Gerassi’s masterful essay: Violence, Revolution, and Structural Change in Latin America (Revised and expanded) Of equal merit, check Ron Ridenour’s The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert (Kindle and paperback, for a superb analysis of exceptionalism.