Trump's push for one-man rule can no longer be denied

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as he speaks to reporters onboard Air Force One, on travel from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., February 16, 2026. REUTERS Elizabeth Frantz

The United States is now at war with Iran.

A single person, Donald J. Trump, has released the dogs of war on one of the most dangerous countries in the world — and done it without the consent of Congress or our allies, or even a clear explanation to the American people.

Four days after delivering a State of the Union address in which he boasted of ending eight wars and spent just three minutes discussing Iran and a preference for “diplomacy,” we are now bombing, maiming, and killing.

Anyone who has doubted Trump’s intention to replace American democracy with a dictatorship should now be fully disabused.

I share your despair, sadness, and fear. Even if our president were a wise and judicious man, surrounded by thoughtful advisers with impeccable integrity and wisdom, this would be a highly dangerous move.

Trump is facing the consequences of his decision in his first term to abandon the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated with Iran by Obama and backed by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China.

Trump walked away from that treaty because it was Obama’s — and he hates Obama because Obama negotiated safeguards against Iran enriching uranium to weapons grade. Obama also got Obamacare through Congress, addressed climate change and nuclear proliferation, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama was a winner. Trump is a loser. Trump cannot stomach this.

But why should America and thousands if not millions of innocent people pay the price of Trump’s egomaniacal stupidity?

Trump claimed in June to have disarmed Iran. He claimed again in his State of the Union last Tuesday to have “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear weapons program (an assertion rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency).

Since then, Iran has taken steps to dig out the nuclear facilities hit during those strikes and has resumed work at some sites long known to American spy agencies.

But those same spy agencies say there’s no evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.

Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium remain buried after June’s strikes, making it nearly impossible for Iran to build a bomb “within days,” as Trump and his lapdogs claim.

Trump says he wants “regime change.” But unlike Venezuela, the Islamic Republic has nearly a million men under arms. Any attempt to overthrow that regime will require American troops on the ground and almost surely inflict mass casualties on Americans and Iranians.

Besides, Trump won a second term promising “no regime change,” and in 2024 he campaigned as “the first president in decades who started no new wars.”

He hasn’t prepared the American people for this.

In his State of the Union, he said Iran has refused to foreswear any nuclear weapons ambitions. Yet just hours before his address, Iran’s foreign minister reaffirmed on X that his country would “under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

Trump noted the Iran regime’s killing of thousands of protesters, but this hardly justifies a war that may cause the deaths of thousands more innocent civilians. (This morning, Iran’s Red Crescent said more than 60 children were killed in the strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab — a toll that has since been raised to 85.)

Make no mistake. The costs of this war — mayhem and deaths in the Middle East, higher oil prices (as Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz), increased risk of terrorism in Europe and the United States — could be catastrophic.

Yet Americans don’t support this war. They haven’t been told why we’re waging it. Trump’s MAGA base doesn’t want him to engage in regime change. Congress hasn’t voted for this war.

Trump is going to war for himself and his boundless, malicious ego.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

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