I came here to say exactly this. And THIS is what my pastor, who hosts an online service several times a week, has to say about it.
There are, by now, gazillions of videos out there from people of all political and religious persuasions. Me, personally? I hope the God I believe in recognizes that some people are trying to precipitate something that is not our decision. KWIM?
Sorry, I don’t feel like watching a YouTube video right now. You care to summarize?
You can go to the video, click the video description, and it’ll give you the option to select “Show Transcript” which will open an auto generated transcript to the bottom right of the video pane. You can toggle the “show timestamps” option off for better readability, but it’s an awkward cut-and-paste option and enough of it would run afoul of fair use. I’d say the short version is that lots of people, mostly Christians and some Jews and Muslims are reporting substantial worries caused by their superiors stating that this is about “getting God off his ass” and bringing about the Kingdom. And that the preacher says this is not only theologically wrong, but supporting it means they’ve lost their way.
There’s reporting on the issue in the sister thread, but here’s the key link:
He’s the forty-seventh president. It’s been forty-seven years since the Iranian revolution. That means it’s destiny. Just think of the memes!
Actually, pretty much every single post in the thread is right. Trump is known for being easily convinced and taking the positions of the last person he talked to…..which usually has him bouncing back and forth like an incoherent ping pong ball….like every time he tries to negotiate between Russia and Ukraine.
But, by either accident or engineering, he was bouncing between people who all wanted a major conflict with Iran…Bibi….MBS…..Kushner and Witcoff…Hegseth…..the Christian nationalist crowd….his pollsters……Rubio….all who wanted the same thing for different reasons.
So he ping-ponged inside the Yes to War with Iran bubble for awhile, and came out wanting war, and when he’s questioned he tries to remember the boring parts of what all these people said, and he usually can’t remember and scrambles it like eggs.
But I guarantee that what he does remember is the 47 connection. Just think of the memes!
I think the analysis William Spaniel has been running on his YouTube-channel makes some good points:
The second one in particular emphasizes that while final decisions to act are made by Trump and his associates, the options for war and military interventions typically originate in operative layers of the Pentagon’s infrastructure that are more well-versed in the geopolitical realities. So when we’re speculating about Trump’s reasoning for initiating the attack, we may well be talking about something the existence of which we have little compelling evidence for.
In particular, I think the suggestion that both the Iran war and the abduction of Maduro have ultimately a similar goal (or at least, have one common goal among them—reducing each to a single coherent aim is probably misleading) in deterring China from an invasion of Taiwan is interesting. The latter is responsible for a large chunk of the world’s best high-end microprocessors, and in the event of an invasion, it would be incredibly easy to throw a spanner into those finely-calibrated works. China, on the other hand, is heavily dependent on oil imports, and in a pinch, the three countries that could be relied on to supply them were Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. With taking two of these options off the board, their means to successfully execute and economically survive an attack on Taiwan dwindle significantly. Plus, it doesn’t need a coherent strategy for the future of these countries to achieve these aims—chaos is just as effective at preventing oil exports.
He thinks that a hot major war will give him an excuse to cancel the elections and remain in power. That is why dictators start wars.
To respond to this in the more appropriate thread:
No, the motivation for this war is not religious and not even political, it’s mental derangement. It’s just really about pathological narcissism and unbounded ego – if you’re a pathological narcissist, you need no more justification for war than “because I can”.
I’m wondering about Trump’s statement some weeks or months where he said, “We’ve got nukes? Why don’t we use them?”
Not saying that Trump would use nukes this time around, but I can easily see him saying, “We’ve got this huge military that’s doing nothing? Why don’t we use them?” And so, we’ve got today.
I note that I was initially a bit skeptical of the claims because the articles I read on this said things like “There was this report, and this other report, and that report - this always happens when there’s a war in the Middle East”. If Christian whackjobs come out of the woodwork each time something like this happens, that’s not good - it shouldn’t happen at all - but it does make me question if there’s anything unique about this situation that might be related to the actual causes of the war, or if it’s just the usual whackjobs stirring up when Israel is in the news. It seemed more likely to be the latter than the former.
Here’s the quote, front the Guardian article:
So if this happens any time things are stirring in the Middle East, that really undermines the narrative that this has anything special to do with this war.
And then I read @Cervaise’s linked article and I’m even more convinced the story is horseshit.
How does nonsense like this blow up so big it runs in “legitimate” papers like The Guardian? Did none of the journalists or editors realize that the quote they themselves put in the article severely undermines the narrative they’re building, not to mention the other uncovered issues with the claims?
Also discussed in my pit thread….
Though that’s not a reason for Trump to do this. He is not even slightly Christian he thinks Revelation was an 80s soft porn flick 
That said he is seriously delusional and demented it’s not completely impossible that the Christian Nationalists in his circle of lackeys have convinced him he is actually the embodiment of biblical end times prophecy and on a divinely ordained mission to bring about Armageddon.
I don’t buy this. Obviously the details of these attacks has nothing to with Trump and are clearly the result of skilled military planners who know what they are doing.
But I don’t see any evidence this is something the upper echelons of the Pentagon really really wanted and then convinced Trump to give them what they wanted. That’s true of the military actions he carried out in his first term, but not these. This is Trump deciding he wants to be remembered as a great military leader.
And even if it’s true thats still the reason Trump initiated the attack: that he initiated the attack because high level military figures convinced him to do so.
My speculation? Iran has always been a problem, Iran getting a nuclear bomb is a serious problem. Solving it diplomatically is incredibly challenging, the JCPOA was in place and wasn’t perfect, but now it’s been torn up. So the only options are restarting diplomacy - incredibly hard, and not an interest or strength of this administration, or just use violence and YOLO through it with Israel.
We have a bunch of he-man stick-swingers in the White House who have always suspected that such problems can be solved by bombing the shit out of them. We have Israel influencing them for their own aims. And the White House would desperately like the focus to be shifted from Epstein, ICE, and other domestic failures, toward a high-spectacle operation like a bombing campaign.
That’s basically it. It’s like “let’s solve Iran, we can bomb our way out of it, this will distract from unwanted attention on scandals and domestic issues.” There’s no plan beyond that. Hopefully Israel will be able to exfiltrate the bulk of Iran’s nuclear stuff before the they and the US abandon the effort.
Here’s Tucker Carlson’s speculation about the motives for the bombings. As you might expect from Tucker Carlson, it’s disgusting Anti-Semitic idiocy:
Well, part of the line you’re responding to was a joke about there not being any such thing as ‘Trump’s reasoning’, but playing it seriously for a minute, I don’t think that’s really what’s being argued. Rather, the lower echelons of the Pentagon have been war-gaming for potential scenarios across administrations and large-scale strategy shifts, which generates options that eventually land on the table of the decision-makers. Now, it’s true that Trump made the final decision, and it’s also true that Trump’s reasons may have little to do with the reasons that went into drafting a particular option, but I think there’s a case to be made that one should also look at plausible reasons for why that option was on the table in the first place.
I’m not sure it’s the likeliest option that Trump dreamt it up out of the whole cloth rather than just that he went shopping for something he didn’t have to invest much time in that served his needs, whatever those may be.
My speculation is Trump’s making money off this somehow. I don’t know how-maybe Netanyahu or MBS offered him a big fat bribe. Maybe he plans to sieze their oil, sell it and personally take a cut. And that’s not to say that other considerations like ego and resentment aren’t part of it. But somewhere, somehow, he is profiting off of this. It’s what he does.
I am sure we will all be surprised at the creative ways the temper tanTrump has found to personally profit from this war, he, his family and his friends, if it ever comes to light.
More on Trump starting wars as self-care for a profoundly damaged psyche:
As Trump grew less popular and less powerful at home, he would need to compensate to maintain his psychic equilibrium. He’d lean more and more into the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has. He’ll be increasingly aggressive and violent in those realms of power as he becomes more constrained and limited in others. In Trump’s world, there is dominating and there is being dominated. For him, the latter is a psychic death. So leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.
All of this is is rooted in Trump’s psyche, which is as transparent as he is malevolent. His need to compensate for ebbing power is inevitable and unstoppable. Each day there are more interview monologues like this with grandiose expressions of his absolute power, now more abroad than at home. Every president has his needs and his drives, his levers of compensation to pull when things go south. But there’s never been a presidency this deeply personalized, with almost all the padding and assistanting and delegation already stripped away. So all of us, not just at home but increasingly abroad, are along for this ride.
Well I guess the way to make a quick buck from geopolitical events is by insider trading on prediction markets, and indeed there have been several high-volume bets placed just before the air strikes:
Other sizable and well-timed bets, placed mere hours before airstrikes began, correctly predicted that strikes would soon occur, raising questions from critics about whether there was insider trading by government officials or others who knew the war plans ahead of time.
It’s certainly believable. Trump is a corrupt man who surrounds himself with corrupt people; them engaging in insider trading is about as surprising somebody losing their wallet at a pickpocket convention.
Among his numerous other failings, Trump has always been a terrible businessman. So he might think he’s figured out a way to make a profit off of this war. But he’s most likely wrong.