The global crisis that America and its allies now confront, as well as the multiple threats to our country’s prosperity, democracy, and security at home, arise from the same singular source: Donald Trump’s unshackled and rampant egomania.

The president is pursuing his instincts and gratifying his conceits, in a world where nobody exercises the power or the will to thwart him. He believes, as he always has, that he alone deserves attention and obedience. He believes that he is the smartest person in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the Mar-a-Lago terrace or anywhere else he happens to go.

We are now surrounded by the ruinous evidence of how wrong he is about himself and everything else.

The immediate consequences of Trump’s wholly unnecessary and apparently pointless war on Iran are driving the world toward economic crisis – for reasons that were entirely predictable and that he nevertheless failed to foresee. In the first days of the conflict, according to an initial investigation, US forces perpetrated a hideous war crime on an Iranian girls’ school.

What Trump thought would be a quick triumph – just like the overnight capture of Venezuela’s dictator -- is turning into a panic room without any clear exit. He ignored warnings from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many others that Iran is nothing like Venezuela, and in fact still seems to think that purloined Venezuelan oil will swiftly solve the current shortage.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows that is a false hope, just as they all know that Trump’s tariffs are causing grave damage to the American economy, that he isn’t restoring manufacturing and is wrecking agriculture, and that his dismantling of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and US intelligence agencies leaves us vulnerable to the rising terror threat provoked by his war.

Did his enablers in the White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Republican Party and America’s corporate suites always see the shallow fraudulence and bone stupidity behind his blustering self-confidence? To those of us who have been following Trump’s career for the past four decades or so, the void of intellectual substance and personal achievement has long been obvious. But now the disjunction between his image of himself and the reality of his ruinous reign must be plain even to his most sedulous servants.

Those who promoted the myth of Trump as a brilliant business man, a “genius” in his own estimation, ought to have realized how dangerous it would be to place the nation’s fate in his hands, without any constraints. His perennial bankruptcies were not a byproduct of clever strategy, and his constant scamming offered the clearest possible warning of a defective character.

The only spark of genius, as his early political adviser Roger Stone understood 20 years ago, lies in Trump’s capacity to manipulate the political media, to insist on lies against truth, and to bamboozle the low-information masses. That was enough to launch him into Republican politics.

Many of those around Trump have long been aware of his real nature but chose to use their proximity to him for their own advancement. Others are simply dim-witted figures, chosen by because they look like they’re from “central casting.” Characters of both varieties are playing major roles in this disastrous war, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio exemplifying the former and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth the latter.

Unlike nearly every other member of Trump’s incompetent cabinet, Rubio has at least some qualifications for his job and is less stupid than average. Indeed, he was smart enough to realize during the 2016 primary, when he ran against Trump, that the New York real estate heir had committed enormous frauds and should never be president, as Rubio said at the time.

What the former Florida senator doesn’t possess is the spine to oppose a catastrophic decision.

As for Hegseth, whose personal history as a sexual harasser, notorious drunk and bully ought to have disqualified him from any public trust, Trump selected him precisely because he lacks any standing to oppose presidential excesses. In fact, his own pronouncements on war – he admires lawless killers and hates rules of engagement – foretold the disgrace that now haunts our assault on Iran.

The countervailing forces that ought to have constrained Trump – in Congress, the courts, the free press, or the world community – have barely been able to slow him, let alone stop him. Even if he pulls back from this war, there can be little doubt that he will do more and worse so long as his authority remains largely unchecked. The only way to oppose him now is to limit the power wielded by him and his party and erect constitutional obstacles in their path.

That is what elections are supposed to do.

.Our only hope is for those voters to fulfill their worst political nightmare.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.