Trump Discovers Wars Don’t Come With Unlimited Ammo

After selling Iran as a made-for-TV show, Trump is running into the realities of depleted stockpiles, supply chains, global shipping, and Congress asking the question: what’s the plan?

Good morning! We are so back in kakistrophic territory today. As these things so often do now, it began with a joke that wasn’t supposed to be a joke. The White House, unaware of both irony and American history, posted an image of Donald Trump standing alongside King Charles III and captioned it “Two Kings.” This, just days after the president insisted on national television that he is, in fact, “not a king.” Which would be more reassuring if his own communications team didn’t keep wandering into medieval cosplay like a Renaissance fair but with nuclear codes.

James O’Brien, watching all this from across the Atlantic, went searching for a word to describe something that is simultaneously ridiculous and grotesque, something so absurd it makes you laugh, right up until you remember the stakes. He didn’t quite land it, but we will: kakistrophic. Government by the worst people, colliding at speed with reality, and somehow still trying to sell the crash as a victory lap. Within my own tiny sphere of influence, I am determined to make this word an accepted part of the lexicon.

The White House state dinner for King Charles and Queen Camilla proved once again that no ceremonial occasion is too formal, no diplomatic setting too delicate, and no room too full of world leaders for Trump to turn it into Open Mic Night at Mar-a-Lago. Instead of a dignified toast to the U.S.–U.K. relationship, we were subjected to a wandering colonial nostalgia buffet, complete with real estate commentary about Windsor Castle, “it just went on forever,” a weird riff on William the Conqueror, praise for the British Empire “spread[ing] more civilization than any nation before,” and a mid-speech detour to shout out Rory McIlroy, “Where’s Rory McIlroy? Can stand up, Rory?” because apparently even a state dinner with the King must bend to Trump’s golf brain.

He also bragged that Charles got Democrats to stand during his speech, “I’ve never been able to do that. I couldn’t believe it.” Nothing quite says “special relationship” like nursing your congressional insecurities in front of the monarchy.

Then came the darker turn. Trump framed early settlers as people who came to “settle and civilize this continent,” before waxing poetic about “the liberties and ancient rights of the Anglo-Saxons” and the “great gift” of British law and custom. At a dinner meant to celebrate diplomacy, he delivered a speech that sounded like it was ghostwritten by a powdered wig with a Fox News subscription.

What made the moment even uglier was the contrast with Charles’s earlier references to Magna Carta and the rule of law. Charles at least gestured toward the complicated legal inheritance that shaped Anglo-American democracy. Trump, meanwhile, reached for the crudest colonial mythology available, describing settlers as people who came to “settle and civilize this continent.” The Indigenous nations already here, with their own governments, cultures, languages, economies, diplomacy, agriculture, trade networks, and spiritual traditions, did not need to be “civilized” by Europeans. That phrase is not just historically ignorant; it is the vocabulary of conquest, dispossession, and white supremacy dressed in a tuxedo.

At a state dinner meant to honor diplomacy, Trump managed to resurrect the old imperial fantasy that colonization was a benevolent gift rather than a catastrophic project of land theft, forced removal, broken treaties, cultural destruction, and mass death. Nothing says “special relationship” quite like praising empire while standing in a country built on the survival of people empire tried very hard to erase.

Because he is Donald Trump, he could not simply toast the King and sit down. He veered into the Middle East, nuclear weapons, and his own imagined toughness, assuring the room that “Charles agrees with me even more than I agree with myself,” a sentence so perfectly Trumpian it should probably be engraved on something fragile and then immediately subpoenaed.

Which brings us to the part where reality quietly walks in and corrects the record. Trump has been telling anyone who will listen that the King agrees with him on Iran. Buckingham Palace responded with what may be the most British sentence ever constructed: His Majesty is “naturally mindful of his government’s long-standing and well-known position on the prevention of nuclear proliferation.” Translation: absolutely not, but we are not about to call the president a liar while the soup course is still being served.

That tension between the theatrical and the real is now defining everything else. On Truth Social, Trump followed up his imaginary royal endorsement with a picture of himself in sunglasses holding a machine gun in front of burning buildings, captioned “No More Mr Nice Guy,” and warned Iran that they “better get smart soon.” It’s the kind of image you’d expect from a teenager who just discovered Photoshop.

Behind the bluster, the situation is… not exactly under control. The administration has now shifted into preparing for an extended blockade of Iran, effectively settling into a long, grinding standoff with no clear endgame. The logic is simple: bombing risks escalation, backing down looks weak, so instead we’ll squeeze indefinitely and hope the other side breaks first. Inertia with consequences rather than strategy.

Here’s where the kakistrophic reality really sets in: the war Trump sold as a demonstration of overwhelming, unlimited power is already running into limits. According to CBC’s framing, Trump and Pete Hegseth defended the Iran attacks by saying the war would last “as long as necessary,” while insisting it was “not endless,” which is a very comforting distinction, assuming you enjoy your wars served with a side of semantic tap-dancing.

Reality, as it turns out, runs on supply chains. The U.S. has reportedly used more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles and up to 2,000 air-defense missiles since the war began, depleting stockpiles that could take up to six years to fully replenish. Not weeks, not months, but years. Turns out you can’t just pop down to the missile store and grab a fresh batch of Tomahawks on the way home.

Worse, Iran didn’t sit still and absorb the punishment like a cooperative prop in a Pentagon briefing. It shifted the battlefield to the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows, and where clearing Iranian mines could reportedly take up to six months. The war moved from Trump’s preferred terrain, spectacle, to the real one: constraints.

If you think the dysfunction and kakistrophe stops at foreign policy, think again. Back home, the administration continues to push legal theories that would allow it to detain immigrants indefinitely without bond, reclassifying people who have lived in the United States for decades as if they had just arrived at the border yesterday. Courts, in large numbers, have rejected this argument, but the administration keeps trying anyway.

Then there’s the quiet little story that might actually be the most alarming of the day: a federal judge is now asking the Justice Department whether it intends to oppose Donald Trump… in a lawsuit he filed against the government he currently runs. Trump is seeking $10 billion from the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, and the court is now grappling with a basic constitutional question: can there even be a real legal dispute if one side ultimately answers to the other? Or are we now at the point where the government can be both plaintiff and defendant, with taxpayers picking up the tab either way?

This is what kakistrophic governance looks like in practice. The absurd and the dangerous are no longer separate categories; they are the same thing, viewed from different angles. It would all be hilarious if it weren’t so kakistrophic.