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It’s day 12 of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Iran War. Over 1,200 people have been killed in Iran. Hundreds more in Lebanon. Twelve in Israel. Eight American soldiers were killed, with around 150 more injured. More in other Gulf countries. And within this mounting death toll, 165 young girls were killed in a school strike that the President of the United States lied about, baselessly blamed on Iran, and moved on from within the same press conference.
These are not statistics. These are human beings. And the fact that much of the media conversation has been about whether this war has been successful militarily rather than the moral catastrophe unfolding in real time tells you everything about what war does to our collective capacity to feel things. And frankly, it highlights the dehumanization of Middle Eastern lives.
James Matthewson joined me for another episode of our weekly show, Across the Pond. We came in to talk about Trump’s contradictory war communications and Europe’s hesitance to commit. We did that. But we ended up somewhere more important: a real conversation about what it means to cover this without flattening the humanity of the people dying, about what that work costs you, and about why protecting your own stillness is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for doing this right.
The conversation went places I didn’t expect. James told me about an ex-SAS (Special Air Service) operative, someone who had held a border with 16 soldiers against 2,500 militants and earned medals for it, who was in tears watching Trump joke to Republican lawmakers about sinking Iranian vessels. That image stayed with me. If a man built for war is broken by the callousness, what does that tell us about the moral depravity of this president and his allies?
What it tells us is this: we are watching an unnatural thing. James put it plainly near the end of the Live. There is no hatred in nature. No desire to make people suffer. What Donald Trump is doing, the gloating, the flippancy, the way he talks about death like it’s a highlight reel, is an affront to what human beings are supposed to be. That word, unnatural, is the right one.
Once again, I left this conversation with James feeling recharged and like my nervous system was reset. Many people in the Live chat felt the same. So I hope you stay until the end of the conversation.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.
The Moral Case Must Be Made
The argument being avoided by too many people with platforms is simple: this war was launched on false pretenses, civilians are dying, and firm moral opposition is the only appropriate response. Not a process argument. Not a request for more data. A clear statement that this is wrong.
The school strike is the clearest test. 165 Iranian girls were killed. Trump blamed Iran. Every journalist who has looked at the evidence has pointed to the U.S. being responsible for the strike. And a preliminary military investigation has found the U.S. is at fault, according to The New York Times. The fact that there isn’t universal outrage over this atrocity is an injustice.
I want to be precise: there are Democrats doing the work. Senators Blumenthal, Murphy, and others have been coming out of classified briefings and telling the public the Trump administration has no plan. That matters. But Schumer and Jeffries have not provided the moral opposition this moment demands, and the absence of that leadership is itself a political choice with consequences.
The moral case has to be made now, loudly, while the window for potential de-escalation is still open. The same logic that made Gaza reprehensible applies here. The same standard. The same obligation. As I said on the Live: the people dying are human beings. And just because most are Iranian lives, because they are brown people in a far-off land, does not make them worth less.
Trump’s Mixed Messages & Lack Of A Strategy
Trump’s messaging on the Iran War is not just contradictory. It is evidence of a man trying to talk himself out of a situation he never understood, improvising in real time while people die.
James used the phrase “press release first,” and it’s exactly right. The White House narrative was that Kurdish forces were massed at the border, ready to move in. Channel 4 News actually sent someone to meet those groups. The reality was staggeringly different. These are disparate tribal factions, not a coordinated military force. They said plainly: we will go in, but only if we know the actual strategy and the endgame. They have no weapons. No equipment. They don’t even have radios. Nobody from the CIA has been in contact. The White House announcement and the ground reality had nothing to do with each other.
The path to this war is important to understand. Netanyahu pushed for strikes in April. Trump said no. Netanyahu went ahead without him in June. Trump, from what I’ve been hearing and from reporting, liked how it played on Fox News. He got high off the Venezuela success. He thought it would be quick. General Caine reportedly warned him about unintended consequences. They went forward anyway. Netanyahu knew exactly what he was doing. He used Trump’s desperation and his appetite for a quick Fox-ready win to finally get the full US commitment he’d wanted all along.
In a single day at the press conference, Trump said: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” Then: “achieving major strides toward completing our military objective.” Then, when asked directly whether the war was complete or just beginning, he said, “You could say both.” That is not a commander-in-chief. That is a man managing a news cycle. He contradicted Rubio and Hegseth within the first week. The administration has no agreed-upon endgame. A European diplomat told CNN: “We have no idea what they actually want to accomplish when this war is over. It doesn’t seem like Trump even knows.”
Who Is This War Actually Serving?
Behind the incoherence is something simpler and more dangerous: self-enrichment. James made the observation that we overcomplicate the motivations of these men. Most of the time, it’s just money.
James laid out the Putin model clearly: a man who came from nothing, used the Russian state to make himself one of the richest people in the world, spread assets everywhere, did it all with impunity. Trump looks at that and sees the size of the pie he wants. He spent decades convincing rich men with checkbooks to fund his projects. Now he doesn’t need to convince anyone. He just takes from the state directly. The crypto, the conflicts of interest, the market moves tied to his own statements. It is the same playbook, applied to the American presidency.
While the Strait of Hormuz tightens and oil prices climb, Russia is one of the primary beneficiaries. And in this same period, Trump has eased sanctions on Russian energy, citing rising oil prices as the rationale. The same day Trump told CBS the war was “very complete,” and markets moved, he had been on a call with Putin earlier that day. Coincidental? That is a question worth sitting with. I raised it on the Live. I’m raising it here. The Witkoff Ukraine proposal was essentially about rehabilitating Rosneft. The architecture of benefit is not hard to trace.
The prediction markets tell the same story. Anonymous bets of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the exact timing of the Iran strikes, on whether the Supreme Leader would be taken out. James made the point that what people call “speculation” is rarely actually speculative. It is people with access to power acting on what they know. You do not bet that kind of money on that kind of specificity without advance knowledge. We need to know who those people are.
The Cost of Covering This With Your Humanity Intact
We got somewhere real toward the end of this Live, and I don’t want to skim past it.
James told me he’s been struggling with this war. He described sitting on his sofa at 11 pm, cycling through news channels, five minutes each, cross-referencing with Ground News, and suddenly feeling a tightness in his chest. Not caffeine. Not anything physical. Just the weight of consuming horror while trying to stay plugged in enough to relay it accurately to an audience the next day. He acknowledged the privilege: he’s in a safe country, in a beautiful city, with nothing to complain about compared to the people being bombed. And then he said it anyway, clearly: seeing human suffering anywhere is not good for the human brain or the human spirit.
I’ve been grappling with the same thing. All of last year, I was running: media blitzes, analyzing Project 2025, chasing every development. Then burnout hit. And now this war lands on top of it and compounds everything. So this month I’ve pulled back from media appearances, stepped away from the PR circuit, and focused on what I can actually control: these Lives, these conversations where I know I won’t get yelled at by a lunatic on TV and my blood pressure won’t spike. The goal is stillness. Reestablishing my equilibrium before I go back out.
James has his own version of this. He’s driving out to the countryside for his birthday on Friday, sitting by a loch, writing his mom’s name on a stone, and throwing it in the water. She passed in 2020. He got her tarot deck when she died, started using it for mindfulness, and has the Empress card tattooed on his arm. A permanent reminder of her. Of the thread that keeps him grounded when the news tries to pull him under.
He dropped an affirmation that I’m still thinking about. “I attract. I don’t chase.” That’s the difference between operating from desperation and operating from power. I’ve spent a year in chase mode: more appearances, more reach, more external validation. I’m shifting gears. About to start reading “Stillness Is the Key” by Ryan Holiday, which is in the same stoicism vein as Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” Because the answer to grappling with the chaos of this moment is internal.
Lincoln had that stoicism. Obama has it. An unshakable calm that lets you fight harder because you’re not being rattled by every provocation. James put the stoic distinction well: being moved by suffering is not weakness. You are not meant to see children burned by napalm. You are not meant to read about 165 dead schoolgirls and feel nothing. What we have to resist is the transformation from feeling into paralysis, or worse, into the flattened affect you see on mainstream media panels where someone calls a dead civilian count a “strategic success” within 48 hours of the strikes.
Bottom Line
We are in a war that was launched on lies, is being prosecuted without a plan, and is being opposed without a moral spine. The toll is mounting. The man running it is trying to talk himself out of a situation he never understood.
James brought up the washing machine. In the late 1600s, the inventor who built the first one wrote that this machine would liberate humanity from drudgery and change the world. Hundreds of years later, we’re still having that conversation. We have AI now. We have tools to liberate people from all kinds of hardship. And instead, we’re watching a man who models himself on a kleptocrat use those tools to bomb a country. As James put it, if people like Donald Trump continue to hold the reins, he’s not going to use any of it to liberate people. He’s going to use it to enrich himself.
This generation is going to be radicalized against war. It happened with Vietnam. It’s happening now. The footage is everywhere. The moral weight is unavoidable. And the job, James’s and mine and yours if you’re reading this post, is to not let them make you feel hopeless about it. They want you exhausted. They want you disenfranchised. They want you separated from everyone else so it feels like there’s no justice coming. There is. The truth always comes out. The rats always flee the sinking ship.
Don’t buy into the rage bait. Don’t let the flood-the-zone tactic drain you. On your worst day, you are happier than Donald Trump. He cannot sit in his own stillness because there is nothing there but chaos, insecurity, and self-loathing. James called it right: empty vessel. No regime lasts forever. None. Zero. Decency will win. It just needs people willing to say so out loud, with their humanity still intact.
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