"What Trump understands intuitively, from decades of practice, is that his base does not track contradictions. They track emotional states. The profanity, the exclamation points, the theatrical deadlines — these are stimulants, engineered to produce a feeling of vicarious toughness in people who are frightened and angry. The cycle is familiar to anyone who has lived inside a narcissistic system: manufacture urgency, perform dominance, declare victory, repeat. The audience never notices the goalposts moved because each new threat erases the memory of the last one.

"[…] There is no endgame. There is only the need — raw, insatiable, and utterly indifferent to the consequences for the people of Iran, for global oil markets, or for the American service members already dying in this war — to be seen as powerful."
https://alisav.substack.com/p/trumps-batshit-iran-threats-are-not