Donald Trump in 2007 launched overpriced frozen meat in a campaign he called “The World’s Greatest Steaks“, using a paper catalog for a technology gadget store. A mail order frozen steak for $999 was supposed to be an attractive item to include with your electric screwdriver, or a pair of headphones. Everyone with a brain knew this would be a disaster. It launched anyway.

The Rockefeller Center was described as the largest press crowd the Sharper Image CEO had ever seen. Flash. Bang. Boom. Smoke. And then, two months later, Trump withdrew from it all completely as if he had never been there. A business disaster.

The CEO estimated total sales across all channels had reached… basically nothing. He expressed surprise that it had reached even that. And it doesn’t matter, because whether a few steaks sold in an orchestrated campaign like the Melania documentary-denial-of-service opening day or not, the Trump plan was a bust as usual.

Bombing Iran without a clue now stands as just the latest chapter in Trump’s long pattern of being a big show with no go.

When he withdrew from Steaks, let alone his retreats from Vodka, Casinos, Airlines, Education… an endless list of cruelty covering up tactical and strategic blunders, it all added up to a different league than today’s topic of disaster.

The difference? Body count.

Who Pays Trump to Fail

Trump Steaks was a plain harm to ranchers, distributors, and investors who bought in on the ruse. The guy who made it happen walked the other direction from those he had pushed over a cliff. He moved on. They didn’t, financially.

The Iran war follows the same structure yet with an immoral scale of historic military disaster. Thirteen US service members dead, revealing command failures. More than 1,500 Iranian civilians dead, including nearly 200 school children triple-tapped to death in a war crime using millions in American weaponry. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a second school was bombed a week later. Upward of 5,000 Iranian military casualties. The Gulf states hosting American forces have been exposed for weakness and battered. The global economy clearly has been absorbing the Hormuz shock.

The man who launched Trump Steaks is already repositioning like he knows nobody is buying, again. Regime change went from done, and done, and done to now “a very big hurdle” that someone will need to do. Every day he keeps calling the war won, then starts promising a short war, then says negotiations are ongoing and war takes time. Negotiations? Tehran says they don’t exist.

The people working the line are hit hardest by the bad Trump brand. The owner is arguing about his pivot to the next thing.

Competent Complicity

This asymmetric resolve dynamic was well known in advance. Every serious analyst of US forever wars knew Iran would not fold.

A stronger power with less determination to fight starts a military conflict with a far weaker state whose government’s survival is on the line. The weaker side fights harder. Always has, always will. The Scythians checked Darius I. North Vietnam outsmarted and outlasted the United States blinded by Nixon. The Taliban outlasted the Soviet Union and then outlasted the United States again. The Eritreans outlasted the Soviet Union and the Ethiopians.

Rubio’s weak attempt to claim Iran is “weaker than ever” was a dishonest assessment. It was painting a dumb decision already made as analysis. Imagine him choking on his very first bite of Trump Steak and saying it’s more delicious than ever.

The professionals who remained in office under Trump to execute his plan had access to the literature telling them not to do it. They knew the history and the models. They chose to perform analysis that was asked of them, not report the analysis that was true. That’s a choice they made, to feed the decline of America.

The institution participates in its own corruption.

Mirror Image

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has now written an open letter to the American public asking whether the war serves “America First.”

It’s mocking America in a way that never could have landed before Trump. Iran is highlighting a distinction Trump has made himself between his administration and the people. Appealing over the head of the government directly to the population is possible because 60% oppose the war, and Trump popularity levels are dropping so low they remind us of Hitler in 1933.

This is what Israel and the US had planned to do to Iran. Encourage the population to separate from its government. It didn’t work there, despite massive violent clashes with the government and casualties in the tens of thousands. Pezeshkian has more raw material to work with because Trump himself has given American adversaries the audience.

Iran is simply appealing to what already exists, because of Trump. Deepening opposition that’s already there. The Iranian government is doing to American public opinion what information operations tried to do to Iranian public opinion. And the targeting of America is better because Trump spent a year painting targets domestically for foreign states to focus on.

The supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen or heard publicly since the war began. More than a month of the unknown. If he’s dead, the succession question is live and the regime the US is fighting may already be something different than what it says it targeted. If he’s alive and hidden, the decapitation theory failed at its primary objective while generating every cost it was supposed to avoid.

Trump avoids admitting the failures by saying every day his war is “nearing completion”, just like his late and over budget ballooning “ballroom” boondoggle. The 200, no 300, no wait, 400 million development project funded by Lockheed Martin and Google, built illegally without congressional authorization, on the demolished site of the historic White House East Wing. A judge halted it yesterday as Trump claimed it was ahead of schedule, just like Trump War and Trump Steaks.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz stays closed like everyone said it would. Trump calls it other peoples’ problem. Daily missile strikes continue like everyone said they would. Trump calls it other peoples’ problem. The Iranian president is writing letters to the American public, because Trump is less representative and more unpopular than ever. All this can’t coexist with the President declaring he’s “nearing completion” on anything.

The Architecture of Impunity

The Americans opposed have all the polling numbers and no leverage. That’s the interesting new development in terms of political science.

Nixon proved how a president could run a criminal war, get caught, and avoid real punishment. The system response was impeachment processes, resignation, pardon, and institutional reform that looked like accountability while actually removing all the mechanisms that would prevent the next one.

The War Powers Act of 1973 was passed explicitly to constrain presidential war-making. And it has never stopped a war. Every president since has ignored it, worked around it, or gotten retroactive congressional cover. The architecture of accountability became the architecture of impunity with extra steps.

The Church Committee unfortunately has shown the same weakness. It documented CIA abuses in detail. It created oversight committees. Those committees became the institutional laundering mechanism for the next generation of abuses. Oversight clearly exists. The committees are set up and talk about the abuses. The abuses continue.

The post-Nixon settlement thus has created the performance of democratic control over war. It is more durable than absence, because it preempts a demand for the real thing and real accountability to prevent another Nixon-level debacle.

Pezeshkian writing to the American public brings this into focus, because it acknowledges this. He’s going around the American architecture of holding the President accountable, because it is little more than decorative fluff.

The people who executed this war knew what Trump was selling and did it anyway. Sharper Image went to market with Steaks. The post-Nixon system was engineered to produce the appearance of accountability while preventing it, and that’s exactly what Iran doesn’t understand about regime change in America. Or do they?

A federal judge who orders the compilation of lists of Jews, dismisses Jewish historical objections to the compilation of lists of Jews, and wraps it in calm institutional reasoning is performing the function of Nazism. Nothing could be more precise about what “never again” was built to identify than this.

A federal judge dismissing Jewish objections to the creation and compilation of lists of Jews is literally performing Stage One of Raul Hilberg’s destruction process.

Hilberg, the founding scholar of Holocaust studies, identified the “process of destruction” as consisting of stages: definition, discrimination, physical separation for concentration, and annihilation. These categories have remained the basic framework in Holocaust historiography.

The deep historical scholarship on the Holocaust says you don’t get to call this judge’s order of “Stage One” something else just because he doesn’t post on X, wear an X on his sleeve or carry a Nazi party card.

• Ruether wrote that antisemitism is structural before it is personal.
• Heschel wrote that supersessionism is colonization: the replacement of Jewish meaning with Christian meaning while claiming universality.
• Jackson titled his book after Mordecai, the Jew who wouldn’t bow and was marked for destruction because of it.
• Arendt said the whole Holocaust ran on the calm people like this judge who found Jewish objections to be an inconvenience.

And I believe there is substantial evidence to explain how and why this judge is so antisemitic.

Penn doesn’t have a list. Pappert ordered one

Penn stated it “does not maintain employee lists by religion.” This is critical. Pappert isn’t ordering release of any existing record. He’s ordering a new instrument of identification of Jews. That’s not administrative compliance. That’s creation of the Holocaust mechanism itself. Hilberg’s Stage One speaks to the role of existing lists for targeting and creating new ones. The Germans used “synagogue membership lists” and “routine but mandatory police registration forms” alongside records “provided by neighbors and municipal officials.” The EEOC subpoena demands a list be created with contact information for employees affiliated with Jewish organizations. The parallel of the judge’s words to Nazism is exact.

The Jewish community unanimously opposed

Chabad, Hillel, and MEOR all filed separate briefs opposing the antisemitic subpoena. I’m not talking about lawyers managing liability. These are the three institutional pillars of Jewish campus life at Penn. The entire organized Jewish community spoke with one voice and said no: never again.

Pappert unilaterally overrode all of them and went out of his way to erase history. Every Jewish organization intervened in court and was dismissed by a judge for having “unfortunate and inappropriate” concerns about their own fate based on basic history.

The EEOC itself is compromised

The “stated purpose” defense has no legs.

Pappert’s entire reasoning rests on the subpoena having a legitimate purpose. But NPR reported yesterday that the EEOC under Trump-appointed chair Andrea Lucas has set “a new agenda” at odds with the agency’s traditions and mandate.

Trump fired two Democratic commissioners before their terms expired, something “no president had ever done before.” Former EEOC chair Charlotte Burrows called it “a real radical effort to advance one ideological perspective.” The EEOC has explicitly listed “campus antisemitism probes” as a stated enforcement priority under Lucas.

The agency requesting the list of Jews has been purged, captured, and repurposed. Pappert’s reasoning assumes good faith from an institution that has been stripped of it. Pappert’s “understandable purpose” is a concealed threat to Jews. He wrote procedural reasoning to justify “never again” doesn’t exist to him as a moral imperative.

This appears to be because he comes from a formation that trained him to treat objection to state documentation as obstruction, when the objection is the entire point.

Thirty-two pages of measured legal reasoning were created to force a university to compile and hand over lists of Jews to a federal agency, run by known antisemitic extremists who boast the White House is “already 40% Nazis“.

The Jewish community’s objections, rooted in the specific historical knowledge of where this leads, were dismissed by the judge despite having a legitimate concern. His measured erasure of this Jewish concern is what aligns Pappert with the pattern of Nazism. It is the exact calm pattern.

Pappert likely will continue to claim he wrote a ruling about administrative law. The scholarship says he performed the operation of Nazi Germany: took Jewish knowledge, declared it illegible, and replaced it with a Christian-derived framework of erasure he believes is neutral ground.

Nazis were calm and organized, orchestrating erasure of Jews. The entire Holocaust apparatus ran on procedural confidence that the purpose was legitimate and the process was sound. The literature says that’s exactly how it works. The reasonable government administrator, the institutional voice that tells the Jews their pattern recognition is rhetorical excess, is the precise mechanism of oppression and genocide. Not the exception to it.

“Ineptly worded”

Pappert acknowledged the EEOC’s request was “ineptly worded” but ordered compliance anyway. The judge admitted the instrument was flawed and still forced the university to hand over the list. If the request is so badly constructed that even the judge calls it inept, how can Jewish concern about that same request be “unfortunate and inappropriate”?

Pappert’s own language convicts him: the request was bad, the Jews were right to worry, and he ordered compliance anyway.

Supersessionism

Supersessionism is the technical term. It operates as default architecture in people formed by it. Pappert’s Albany-Villanova-Notre Dame (Catholic) pipeline didn’t teach him to recognize Jewish survival knowledge as a legitimate interpretive framework. It taught him that institutions with stated purposes deserve absolute deference to Christian authority, and that people who refuse that deference for any reason are escalating.

The Forward reported days ago that supersessionism is driving modern antisemitism among Christian influencers, with figures like Prejean Boller declaring “The Catholic Church is the True Israel” and “Christians are the spiritual Semites.” The USCCB itself has had to admonish Catholic influencers, pointing to the 2015 Vatican document “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable.”

Ruether’s framework says antisemitism is structural before it is personal. Heschel says supersessionism is colonization, the replacement of Jewish meaning with Christian meaning while claiming universality. Jackson says the pattern is Mordecai: the Jew who won’t bow is recast as the problem.

Pappert did all three antisemitic markers in a single ruling.

He replaced Jewish historical knowledge with institutional trust. He claimed his framework was neutral while theirs was emotional. And he told the Jews who wouldn’t bow to the subpoena’s stated purpose that their refusal was the “unfortunate and inappropriate” one, not his own.

Arendt saw it in Jerusalem. The banality wasn’t a footnote. It was the finding. The machinery ran on people like Pappert who trusted process, followed procedure, and found the objections of Jews to be an inconvenience to the orderly functioning of the system that harmed them.

Pappert isn’t at the end of that sequence. He’s at the beginning of it. And “never again” correctly identifies him as the beginning, to prevent the end that he isn’t equipped or willing to prevent.

The American Catholic pipeline did NOT teach Pappert to overtly hate Jews, like the Christian Front, whose Irish-Catholic members organized seditious and antisemitic violence in Boston and New York, or Father Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest whose broadcasts reached tens of millions with pro-Nazi antisemitism he called “buy Christian“. It taught Pappert to refuse to recognize Jewish concerns as structurally legitimate. That’s the more dangerous output.

The scholarship doesn’t hedge

A federal judge ordering the compilation of lists of Jews while dismissing Jewish objections is performing Stage One of Hilberg’s destruction process. The copious literature names Pappert for what he is and why he’s doing it.

“Never again” was built to stop him.

Here is further reading on Pappert’s deeply antisemitic roots and his related ruling:

• USHMM “Locating the Victims” for the direct parallel to institutional record compilation
• Gregory Baum, Is the New Testament Anti-Semitic? (1961)
• Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (1974)
• Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus (Princeton, 2008)
• Timothy P. Jackson, Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism (Oxford, 2021)
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961, revised 1985) for the stages framework
• Charles Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Harvard, 2021) for the Irish-Catholic pipeline
• Mary Christine Athans, The Coughlin-Fahey Connection (1991) for the Irish seminary roots of American Catholic antisemitism
• Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (2001) for how institutional data collection enabled identification