The B-Roll Presidency Goes to War

From promo-video statecraft to a spiraling Middle East fiasco, this administration keeps mistaking image control for leadership.

Good morning! Yesterday I wrote about the way Trump has been co-opting state visits and appearances with foreign leaders into glossy little presidential promo reels, the kind of soft-focus pageantry meant to lazzle the eye just long enough to keep people from noticing the rot underneath. That instinct matters now, because there is something uncomfortably Epsteinian in the way Trump collects people in images. Not relationships, just images, trophy photos, proof of proximity. The point is not whether the encounter meant anything; the point is that it can be displayed later, recut into propaganda, and made to imply status, intimacy, or power. Epstein put the pictures on mantels. Trump folds them into White House promo videos. Same hunger, different set design.

The reason to bring this up is that the Epstein stink still hangs over all of this no matter how many flags they drape across the screen. Conjecture is not proof, and nobody should pretend otherwise, but the speculation keeps surfacing here and abroad for a reason: because this administration has the emotional texture of a regime that is always in need of a new spectacle, always hungry for a larger crisis to swallow the old one whole. When commentators mutter that this Middle East fiasco is functioning as a giant distraction from the Epstein files, they are not inventing that suspicion out of thin air. They are responding to a White House that has spent years substituting image management for truth, noise for accountability, and choreographed power for actual legitimacy.

Unfortunately for them, this war is not behaving like a clean distraction. It is a fiasco, a kakistrophe (please indulge me). Even as Trump insists the fight is “militarily won,” the Pentagon is sending thousands more Marines and sailors into the region aboard the USS Boxer group, on top of the tens of thousands of US troops already there. Israel is still striking Tehran. Iran is still hitting energy infrastructure and launching attacks on Gulf states. And the administration is floating ideas so reckless they sound like parody, including reported consideration of occupying or blockading Iran’s Kharg Island, the terminal that handles most of Iran’s oil exports, while Trump publicly berates NATO allies as “cowards” for refusing to join what he absurdly describes as a “simple military maneuver” in the Strait of Hormuz. If your war is supposedly under control, you do not need to beg allies to clean up the chokepoint you helped set on fire.

The human cost is already being laundered into propaganda. Pete Hegseth, who has spent this conflict sounding like a man auditioning for the role of war in a movie trailer, told reporters that grieving families of the six service members killed in last week’s tanker crash urged him to “finish” the job in Iran and “do not stop until the job is done.” But now one of those fathers, Charles Simmons, says he said no such thing. Instead, Simmons recalled telling Hegseth: “I understand there’s a lot of peril that goes into making decisions like this, and I just certainly hope the decisions being made are necessary.” Asked directly whether he had said anything about continuing the war, Simmons was unequivocal: “No, I didn’t say anything along those lines.” In other words, Hegseth appears to have taken private grief and converted it into a public sales pitch for more escalation. Ventriloquism with the dead.

While Washington tries to package all of this as resolve, the rest of the world is staring at the bill. France has explicitly rejected any “forceful opening” of Hormuz under current bombardment and instead called for “the immediate implementation of a moratorium on strikes targeting civilian infrastructure, especially energy and water facilities.” Spain, meanwhile, is scrambling to cushion the blow at home: Pedro Sánchez has unveiled a €5bn relief package, saying the measures are meant to “ease the impact of energy price rises” as Europe absorbs the shock. Switzerland has halted new arms export licences to the United States, a pointed reminder that some countries want no deeper part in this disaster. And the International Energy Agency is warning that this may be “the greatest global energy security threat in history,” with Fatih Birol cautioning that it could take “six months” for some disrupted Gulf oil and gas flows to come back. This is what American “leadership” now looks like: allies scrambling to protect their own populations from the economic fallout of a war they did not want, do not trust, and increasingly want no part of.

Even the shipping picture alone is a catastrophe. Traffic through Hormuz has collapsed, insurers have backed away, and thousands of seafarers remain trapped in the Gulf as attacks, port refusals, and fear turn one of the world’s most vital trade arteries into a floating bottleneck. The International Maritime Organization is now discussing how to get ships and crews out of the area safely. And as Sal Mercagliano pointed out, this is “well beyond the energy crisis” people are fixated on. It is a crisis for the crews themselves. One mariner stuck aboard a ship in the Gulf told him that a nearby vessel had “call[ed] in desperately to port control, saying they’re officially out of water,” only to be denied entry. Sal warned that this is “turning into a disaster for the crews on the ships,” with people “overdue for our stores and fuel, water, and trying to ration ourselves.” That is what this administration’s blundering has produced: not just higher prices, but thousands of seafarers stranded in a war zone, running short on food, water, fuel, and options while Washington flails. And the White House response so far has been exactly the kind of improvisation Sal mocked, considering whether to unsanction Iranian oil already at sea and issuing a 60-day Jones Act waiver that looks less like strategy than, in his words, “throwing spaghetti at the wall here trying to figure out what to do.”

Because the farce must always have one more layer of insult, Trump is publicly scheduled to leave Washington later today for Palm Beach and remain at Mar-a-Lago through another taxpayer-funded golfing weekend. So there you have it: a widening regional war, a global energy shock, dead service members turned into messaging props, allied governments trying to contain the damage, and the president once again decamping to the resort. He treats the presidency like a stage set, war like a branding environment, and crisis like something to be managed through camera angles until it is time to board the plane for another taxpayer-funded weekend. The reels will be glossy, I am sure. The consequences already are not.

So that is where we are this Friday morning: a war sold as strength that looks more like improvisation, a White House still trying to bury reality under glossy presidential scenery, grieving families used as stage props, allies left to absorb the shock, and thousands of ordinary people, from sailors trapped in the Gulf to families staring at the price of fuel and food, paying for the vanity and recklessness of men who will never bear the real cost themselves.

Marz and I continue to hold all of you in our thoughts each night during our moonbeam vigils. Now, with the weather apparently behaving itself for once and one pair of very soft brown eyes giving me The Look, I am being informed that it is time for a romp. Stay safe, stay loud, and take good care of yourselves out there.