February 28, 2026: Donald Trump Starts a War He Can't Finish

NOTE: Although this entry is from after 2022, I have backdated all entries from after that year to the corresponding date in 2022.

February 28, 2026: Donald Trump starts a war. With his usual bluster, he says he will win it quickly. Quickly, he says he has won it.

Except he didn't win it quickly. Six months into the war, he hadn't won it at all.

With the American economy in tatters due to his incompetence, and his name connecting with heinous crimes in the Epstein Files, Trump needed a distraction. What better distraction than a war? Oh, sure, just as he had campaigned in 2024 on lowering prices and had instead raised them, he had campaigned all three times he ran for President on "ending wars." Instead, he started one.

In 2015, President Barack Obama and his diplomats negotiated a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, in which that country promised to never build a nuclear weapon, and would allow verification by outside sources. In return, the U.S. would never attack Iran first. Angry that a black President had done this, the racist Trump violated the agreement, and attacked Iran.

Trump, lying as usual, claimed that Iran was mere weeks away from building a nuclear weapon, and that both America and its ally, Israel, were in danger; and so, his attacks were justified. On the 1st night of attacks, the supreme leader of the country, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed. He had ruled Iran since the death of the similarly-named Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 37 years earlier. (Khomeini had 2 sons, but both died relatively young, and would not succeed their father.)

Khamenei was a protégé of Khomeini, who had led the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and had ruled with an iron fist for 10 years. Khamenei ruled the same way, crushing all dissent -- and there was plenty of dissent to his hardline rule. He was 86 years old, and said to be in ill health. If Trump had simply waited a while, he might have been able to deal with a less hardline successor, and work something out. (Then again, this is Trump we're talking about, so, maybe not.)

Instead, he was succeeded by his son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, 56 years old, and believed to be even more conservative than his father, and certainly inclined to want to avenge him rather than be scared into negotiating for peace.

Iran responded by attacking U.S. military bases in the Middle East: In Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. And Iran cut off foreign access to the Strait of Hormuz, effectively strangling access to the region's oil for everyone but themselves and their allies.

Through the end of June 2026, the cost of the war to the US was estimated at $113.3 billion. By August 18, the official count -- which some have speculated has been kept as low as the Pentagon dares -- is 19 soldiers and 1 civilian contractor killed, and 624 wounded. And the choking off of the Strait of Hormuz has meant that oil prices, and thus gasoline prices, and thus the prices of everything residually affected by those prices, has gone up, higher (though not yet with a higher rate of inflation) Trump than it ever was under President Joe Biden.

And the main American unit in the region, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, has been at sea since late 2025. Reports have reached American shores, detailing severely depleted supplies on board, and mental health issues for the sailors aboard, including suicide attempts. On August 11, Iranian media reported that seven navy personnel died during a brawl on the ship.

The Trump Administration, of course, has denied all of these reports. When asked on August 14 if the ship had been at sea too long, he said, "No. no. no. Not nearly long enough." This is the man who had 5 draft deferments during the Vietnam War, and who previously called live American military personnel "suckers," and those who died in service "losers." 

Even if Trump stopped the Iran War at any time in its 1st 6 months, this would still be absolutely the dumbest war in American history -- not for the lives lost, but for the effect on "the home front." And if Trump does get an end to it, America will still be worse off: The nuclear deal he rejected would be restored, but Iran would still control the Strait of Hormuz, which it didn't before.

But Trump won't finish the war. Because he still needs the distraction from the bad economy and the Epstein Files. Except the war is not distracting people from how bad the economy is: It's making the economy worse, which is usually the opposite of what a war does for America. Plus, ending the war would make him "look weak." And if there's one thing Trump hates more than nonwhite people, it's people who look weak -- especially making himself look weak.

Steve Schmidt is a Republican campaign operative, who helped get George W. Bush into the White House in 2000 and 2004, and ran the 2008 campaign of Presidential nominee John McCain. That campaign lost, but no one blames Schmidt for it. In 2019, he founded The Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans opposed to Trump. It ran ads against him in the 2020 and 2024 campaigns.

On August 15, 2026, a year and a half into Trump's 2nd term, and nearly 6 months into the war, Schmidt was interviewed on cable news network MSNOW, formerly MSNBC. In response to a very general question regarding the Trump Presidency, he said this:

Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump Presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.

When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don't use those words to name-call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior, his comportment, his actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude, so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country who's ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.

It's just astonishing that this man is President of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman.

Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale.

And, let's be clear: This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.

If a President who belonged to the Democratic Party had done any one of a dozen things that Trump has done, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would have impeached him, and the Republican majority in the Senate would have gotten enough Democratic Senators to break ranks to form a two-thirds majority, 67 out of 100, to convict him and thus remove him from office.

The Republican-controlled Congress has made no effort to impeach and remove Trump. Because they approve of what he is doing. But millions of people who supported him in 2024 because they believed in him on the issues of the economy and keeping America out of war have abandoned him. Opinion polls released in August 2026 show Trump at 33 to 36 percent approval. The people who said Biden was too old and not good for the economy had joined with Trump's true believers to put him back into office.

They are now experiencing buyer's remorse, and even a few of the true believers have broken away.

*

February 28, 2026 was a Saturday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 5 games in the NBA:

* The Toronto Raptors beat the Washington Wizards, 134-125 at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

* The Charlotte Hornets beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 109-93 at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte.

* The Miami Heat beat the Houston Rockets, 115-105 at the Kaseya Center in Miami.

*  The New Orleans Pelicans beat the Utah Jazz, 115-105 at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors, 129-101 at the Chase Center in San Francisco.

And there were 13 games in the NHL:

* The New York Rangers beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 3-2 in a shootout at Madison Square Garden.

* The New York Islanders beat the Columbus Blue Jackets, 4-3 at the Nationwide Arena in Columbus. Simon Holmström scored the winning goal with 3:13 left in overtime.

* The New Jersey Devils beat the St. Louis Blues, 3-1 at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis.

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Washington Capitals, 6-2 at the Bell Centre in Montreal.

* The Philadelphia Flyers beat the Boston Bruins, 3-1 at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia.

* The Carolina Hurricanes beat the Detroit Red Wings, 5-2 at the Lenovo Center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

* The Buffalo Sabres beat the Tampa Bay Lightning, 6-2 at the Benchmark International Arena in Tampa.

* The Dallas Stars beat the Nashville Predators, 3-2 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. Jason Robertson scored the winning goal with 3:13 left in overtime.

* The Ottawa Senators beat their arch-rivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs, 5-2 at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.

* The Colorado Avalanche beat the Chicago Blackhawks, 3-1 at the Ball Arena in Denver.

* The Los Angeles Kings beat the Calgary Flames, 2-0 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

* The San Jose Sharks beat the Edmonton Oilers, 5-4 at the SAP Center in San Jose.

* The Seattle Kraken beat their arch-rivals, the Vancouver Canucks, 5-1 at the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.

* And the Winnipeg Jets, the Anaheim Ducks, the Florida Panthers, the Minnesota Wild, the Vegas Golden Knights and the Utah Mammoth were not scheduled.