Carpe Momentum: 'The Apprentice' Goes to War
Trump’s hollow cabinet, Netanyahu’s playbook, and the collapsing machinery behind America’s march toward illegal war with Iran.
As of this week, we are watching the final breakdown of the very system Trump spent the last five months hollowing out. And it could bring us directly into war with Iran.
For weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu has been baiting Trump toward a strike on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility. That drumbeat is nothing new: for nearly thirty years, Netanyahu has warned that Iran is ‘months away’ from building a nuclear bomb. What is new, dangerously new, is how much influence Netanyahu now exerts over U.S. decision-making. As one analyst noted, Trump publicly disregarded his own hand-picked DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, who said there is no evidence Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. Trump’s answer: “I don’t care what Tulsi said.” He instead parroted Netanyahu’s assessment.
That might be the single most revealing statement of this crisis. Because it shows that Trump doesn’t just dismiss career intelligence professionals. He now dismisses his own loyalist appointees. This isn’t a chain of command; it’s a cult of personality unmoored from institutional process.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has descended into full farce. Under Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense has become a paranoid circus, where imaginary leak investigations lead to polygraph threats, wiretap rumors, and public purges of longtime MAGA loyalists. As one fired adviser put it: “These aren’t people who know what to do. They’re just making it up as they go.” If you were hoping that maybe someone, somewhere in the building was quietly steadying the ship, think again. This is like an unpleasant episode of The Apprentice, but with real nuclear codes.
The result? Critical vacancies across the Defense Department. No fully functioning policy process. Key decisions consolidated into an ever-shrinking circle of terrified loyalists, personal lawyers, family members, and media handlers. Hegseth’s office now exists mainly to react to Trump’s tweets, tantrums, and television habits.
And now add war. Trump’s public posture has grown more detached from reality by the hour. “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he shrieked online. Asked whether the U.S. would intervene directly, he replied: “I may do it. I may not do it.” He wants the world to see unpredictability as strength. In truth, it’s just mood swings with nukes.
Iran, for its part, has made clear that any U.S. military strike would trigger “irreparable damage.” Iranian missiles are already positioned to strike U.S. bases across the region. The war Netanyahu so eagerly wants could erupt in hours.
Inside Israel, Netanyahu’s ministers are now fully open about their regime-change ambitions. “A tornado is sweeping through Tehran,” boasts the Israeli Defense Minister, while airstrikes pound civilian infrastructure far beyond any nuclear sites. This is not nonproliferation. It’s a campaign for regime collapse, one that hinges on dragging the U.S. in to finish the job.
And here we sit, with the Pentagon fully armed but politically paralyzed. B-2 bombers and bunker-busters are positioned. The trigger remains with one man: a president who takes daily calls from Netanyahu, ignores his own intelligence community, and who seems more fixated on his club golf scores, petty feuds with CNN, bizarre rants about CBS editing Kamala Harris interviews, threatening construction workers on his own lawn with deportation, and, of course, erecting massive flagpoles while giggling about not saying the word “erection” on camera.
This is a man incapable of staying on topic at his own flag pole reveal, while the world teeters on the edge of a conflict that could kill thousands.
And here’s the part that should make every American deeply uneasy: if Trump orders a strike on Iran without Congressional approval, it would be flatly illegal. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the sole power to declare war. There is no standing Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that covers an unprovoked attack on Iran’s sovereign territory. The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, which have been abused before to justify various interventions, do not apply here. Nor would any plausible claim of “imminent threat” hold up under the War Powers Resolution, especially since Trump’s own DNI testified there is no active nuclear weapons program. Such a preemptive strike would violate both U.S. law and international law. This is not a gray area.
The American public may believe this is a rational process, that there are safeguards, that serious deliberations are occurring behind closed doors. They are wrong. There is no process, there are no guardrails.
Worse than authoritarianism, this is incompetent authoritarianism. A hollowed-out government, a kakistocracy stripped of expertise, staffed by frightened loyalists, trapped inside a foreign leader’s agenda, standing on the brink of a war we may not be able to control.
Carpe Momentum. Because the cracks are visible, the regime is off balance, and we may not get many more moments like this to expose just how dangerously brittle this entire project has become.
What can you do?
Contact your representatives immediately. Demand that Congress assert its constitutional war powers. There is no legal basis for a unilateral strike. Congress must publicly oppose any unauthorized use of force.
Support independent media that continue to expose the dangerous hollowness of this administration. Mainstream coverage is often too timid. The real reporting is happening in independent outlets willing to call this what it is.
Educate others. Share credible reporting, remind people that Netanyahu has been warning of an “imminent Iranian bomb” for nearly 30 years, and point out the collapse of process within Trump’s own cabinet.
Stay loud. Stay visible. Authoritarian regimes feed on public silence. Speak out while it still matters.
Because once the bombs drop, the debate will be over. And we will all be living with the consequences.
Shared.
So dam scary. I’m not the one capable of it, but he needs to be assassinated asap.