The news that a U.S. aircraft carrier has had to dock in Crete to deal with thousands of seamen needing to leave it in order to, as the saying goes, “take a dump,” should not come as a great surprise to sceptical geopolitical observers. Many might see it as ominous for Trump’s strategy to go ahead with an attack on Iran – an attack which no one outside of his cabal of nodding dogs believes can work, neither in the short nor longer term. This is not only because Iran is hugely better prepared than it was in the June attacks of last year, but also because the U.S. is too vulnerable on too many levels. Iran does not have to win this war. It only needs to deliver precise yet devastating losses, even in low numbers, to Israel and the U.S. The USS Gerald R. Ford’s poorly designed toilet system is a sort of stinking metaphor for America’s weakness: the plumbing of all the ship’s toilets is configured so that if one toilet is blocked, the whole system suffers the same fate, and suddenly thousands of sailors are standing in their own waste.

The Trump armada is the same. Its size is its vulnerability, and it is entirely possible that the joint chiefs of staff – whom Trump personally installed – and the coterie of Pentagon yes-men have not told him that Iran can easily sink the Ford, with or without a failing sanitary system. One hypersonic missile, which cannot be intercepted, is all it would take. If these aircraft carriers are so afraid to come too close to the Straits of Hormuz now, due to the Houthi threat from much less sophisticated missiles, then surely there is a plumbing crisis in the planning of what Trump is trying to achieve by taking on Iran. It is, without any doubt, the most ill-conceived, plainly mad military operation that America has ever undertaken, and it will certainly lead to Trump being impeached when it all goes horribly wrong.

The most extraordinary element of this crisis is that it has been entirely manufactured by Trump’s own uniquely childish, chaotic, and absurdly stupid ideas on how to induce new power and growth in the U.S. economy. Trump’s tariffs strategy is failing on a grand scale and has forced both China and Russia to diversify their economies away from the U.S. market – in particular China, which is enjoying new growth in Central Asia. The Venezuela coup, which has almost certainly given the Trump circle a new lease of optimism about what it can pull off around the world, has forced Russia and China to think harder and deeply about how to deal with a madman in the Oval Office. They have come to the conclusion that he has to be stopped and that a conflict with Iran is the right time and place to do it, given that Trump has given them no choice in the matter. Russia and China simply cannot afford to let their alliance with Iran be destroyed by a U.S. president who is trapped by an Epstein-like blackmail tryst with Israel. Arguably, this is less to do with their affection for Iran and its leaders and to do with survival. If Trump were to succeed in overthrowing the regime in Tehran, where would he go after that? Russia and China believe strongly that he has to be stopped – and taught a lesson.

America’s miscalculation on the battlefield is legendary, as there are too many examples to point to, simply to see that this pattern never seems to make U.S. presidents stop and think when they are overstretching themselves. Afghanistan, Iraq, and of course Vietnam were all wars America lost with huge losses, with very little recalibration of understanding what America’s real power is in the world. Having a huge, well-resourced military is hardly a guarantee of winning anything. History has shown this. In fact, it is this vanity, this delusion, which feeds the brain fog and produces a mindset that America can win any war with anyone if it puts its mind to it. But this thinking is usually championed by half-wits who have never served in the military and only want to profit from the lives of young men from poorer families – like Lindsey Graham, or even in Europe, like Ursula von der Leyen, who seems almost sexually charged by the idea of war, but who simply smiles like a silly little girl when a journalist asks her if any of her children are in the military.

“America cannot even win a proxy war in Ukraine,” might be an argument that some advisers to Trump will dismiss by saying, “Well, yeah, but that’s a proxy war… Iran is different as it’s our boys and our ships and planes.” But even this argument is demented and gives a glimpse of just how much of a fake democracy America is, given that Trump 2.0 is modelled on a leader surrounding himself with sycophants, all egging him on, while all Israel has to do is wave its chequebook and remind Trump that his own failed policies are going to eject him from both houses when the midterms come around. It is America’s phoney democracy which has led to Trump’s mad Iran plan gaining the momentum it has managed in recent weeks, even though the whole world and his dog are pointing out that Iran has so many military options to strike the old empire at its weakest point. We should never forget that the perceived success that Trump might have gleaned in June of last year – when 12 days of bombing damaged Iran and its infrastructure – not only did not succeed overall in its objective of toppling the regime, but, perhaps importantly, only had the impact it did due to the element of surprise.

The only surprise now for observers watching this slow-motion train crash is just how stupid Trump has been to think he can survive this madness. There are no good outcomes. All roads seem to lead to him falling on his own sword. Have pity on those in America whose living comes from satire, as they are being robbed of their raw material by actual real events. No one is going to bother mocking up a cartoon of Trump standing in raw effluent, surrounded by naval officers looking at him with eagle eyes. Wasn’t it Rome that in the end collapsed under its own corruption and blocked sewers? You can’t make this shit up. Literally.