It’s time for a new Iran War thread.
I just read that the Sec of Navy may have been fired because he didn’t agree with silencing the great American, Sen Mark Kelly:
“BREAKING: Fox News just reported that Pete Hegseth fired United States Secretary of the Navy John Phelan because Phelan would not ignore a federal judge's orders!’Hegseth and Phelan reportedly butted heads when Phelan refused to ignore a recent federal judge’s ruling that said punishing Senator Mark Kelly for making a video which he reminded military officers of their constitutional duty to not to not follow illegal orders would violate his First Amendment rights.’”
Thanks, Larry!
These were the previous Iran titled threads:
Iran war 4-8-26
55 responses |
Started by metmike - April 8, 2026, 9:16 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119356/
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Iran War 3/25/26+ (cont. from 3/8-25/26 thread)
52 responses |
Started by WxFollower - March 25, 2026, 8:01 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/118980/
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Israel attacks Iran-just in
81 responses |
Started by metmike - Feb. 28, 2026, 1:33 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/118250/
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Additional threads related to this:
Iran nuclear weapons false narrative-new
Started by metmike - April 25, 2026, 9:07 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119788/
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Most Devious yet!
Started by metmike - April 22, 2026, 9:23 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119747/
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Mark Levin
Started by metmike - March 29, 2026, 12:39 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119065/
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Easter weekend message
Started by metmike - April 4, 2026, 11:26 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119221/#119227
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Continuing the purge of qualified people
Started by metmike - April 5, 2026, 6:53 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119258/
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Choosing MAGA/Donald Trump or Jesus
51 responses |
Started by metmike - Jan. 28, 2026, 5:06 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/117561/
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Psychopaths in Power
Started by metmike - Jan. 20, 2026, 9:33 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/117371/
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Opinions vs authentic facts
Started by metmike - March 13, 2026, 11:24 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/118642/
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Allied Countries helping Trump
Started by metmike - March 18, 2026, 7:57 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/118814/
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Donald Trump's Diagnosis NAILED!
29 responses |
Started by metmike - April 6, 2026, 9:44 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119295/
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Trump accuses Democrats of ‘seditious behavior, punishable by death’
Started by metmike - Nov. 20, 2025, 8:12 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/116090/
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/116090/#119285
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Trump's bombing countries illegally
Started by metmike - March 4, 2026, 8:45 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/118393/
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Psychopaths
Started by metmike - March 16, 2026, 10:50 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/118728/
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Powers of the President
Started by metmike - Jan. 31, 2026, 11:21 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/117653/
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Partners in crime Netanyahu and Trump
Started by metmike - March 6, 2026, 2:32 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/118410/
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Israel committing genocide in Lebanon
Started by metmike - April 7, 2026, 11:58 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/119319/
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Antisemitism is WRONG!
74 responses |
Started by metmike - April 23, 2024, 11:36 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/103460/
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Most important message to get from MarketForum:
Hate (and love)
Started by metmike - Oct. 17, 2023, 4:15 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/99752/
By metmike - April 24, 2026, 11:02 a.m.
Trump accuses Democrats of ‘seditious behavior,
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/116090/
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Least qualified Secretary of Defense in history-Hegseth
Started by metmike - Oct. 14, 2025, 6:11 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/115244/
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Trump calls for using US cities as a ‘training ground’ for military
20 responses |
Started by metmike - Sept. 30, 2025, 10:36 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/115003/
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https://lucid.substack.com/p/pete-hegseth-and-the-autocratic-strategy ...
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Houthi war plans discussed on group chat that included journalist
42 responses |
Started by WxFollower - March 26, 2025, 10 a.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/110679/
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Continuing the purge of qualified people
7 responses |
Started by metmike - April 5, 2026, 6:53 p.m.
By metmike - April 24, 2026, 11:06 a.m.
Hegseth got this job by being a weekend anchor at Fox News who adulated Trump during his time there!
Pirro is the 23rd current or former Fox News employee Trump has recruited for his administration since taking office earlier this year. However, his relationship with the network runs far deeper and longer than just this year nominees.
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The insatiable ego: why some people need constant flattery
So these individuals must continually look outward to know who they are. They need to see themselves reflected as great, admirable, brilliant, victorious, not because they genuinely believe these qualities reside within, but because they fear they do not. The mirror is not for preening; it is for survival.
Trump’s orbit reveals this pattern with almost clinical clarity. Aides who deliver praise are elevated. Those who offer truth are exiled. Advisors who flatter remain close; those who contradict are replaced. He constructs a world in which disagreement is treason and doubt is disloyalty. Only admiration feels safe. Only devotion feels tolerable. Only affirmation soothes the internal tremors.
For those who depend on flattery to prop up their self-worth, criticism is not merely unpleasant; it is existentially threatening. As noted before, praise is oxygen. Criticism is suffocation.
Over time, the leader becomes isolated inside a bubble of praise, precisely the condition that worsens the fragility at their core.
Again, Trump illustrates this structure with almost theatrical clarity. His firing patterns, midnight tirades, public feuds, impulsive purges, and explosive reactions to even the gentlest criticism reveal a psyche that experiences dissent not as democratic discourse but as a personal wound. Staff members routinely describe entering meetings prepared not with facts but with flattery, knowing that one misplaced comment could ignite hours of fury. Foreign leaders who discovered this dynamic exploited it; domestic rivals suffered beneath it.
In such environments, truth no longer functions as a shared standard; it becomes a provocation. Disagreement is interpreted not as a contribution but as betrayal. Correction feels like humiliation. Delay feels like defiance. Reality itself becomes negotiable. Those who tell inconvenient truths are dismissed as traitors; those who flatter are elevated as visionaries. Policy becomes indistinguishable from psychology. What the leader needs emotionally determines what the government attempts politically.
The consequences are far from abstract. Entire systems begin tiptoeing around one person’s fragility. Intelligence agencies soften their briefings. Legislators tend to mute criticism to avoid retribution. Diplomats recalibrate alliances around a leader’s vanity rather than strategic interest. Government becomes a mirror palace, calibrated to reflect only one person’s preferred image back to him. The irony is that leaders who demand constant praise believe they are projecting strength — yet everyone else can see that they are merely shielding weakness. Their power looks immense, but their emotional life is flimsy, breakable, desperate for applause. And because they cannot bear being ordinary, the country is forced to participate in a national performance designed to keep them feeling extraordinary.
This is the tragic nucleus of flattery-addicted leaders: people loudly performing invincibility while internally clinging to praise as if it were oxygen. They preside over a kingdom of mirrors — shimmering, reflective, and catastrophically fragile. And the public pays the price for the instability at the core, bearing the burden of governing around an ego that must be endlessly managed, appeased, and inflated. In the end, the nation bends more than the leader does, contorting itself around a single, unsteady psyche. And what begins as a personality disorder becomes a political disorder — one in which the country must continually shield its most powerful figure from the sharp edges of reality.
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June 22, 2025:
Netanyahu praises Trump's 'bold decision' to strike Iranian nuclear sites
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL4rmsJHX08
After watching that video, ask yourself how anything he said could be true if less than 9 months after it, Israel and the United States had to start a NEW war with Iran.
Bibi Netanyahu would make an excellent diabolical psychiatrist! He knows how Donald Trump's mind works and is using it ……exploiting it to the MAX to accomplish his own agenda in Iran.
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Continuing from the article:
Flattery addiction is, in the end, both tragically human and painfully absurd. Tragic, because it reveals a psyche so precarious that it cannot stand without constant propping. Absurd, because the props must be rebuilt every day, like a stage set that collapses each night and must be reassembled before the curtain rises again. The flattery-addicted person must be inflated endlessly because they cannot tolerate being human-sized. Their emotional life becomes a loop: praise enters, but it never adheres. Approval is absorbed and immediately evaporates. The ego drinks but never hydrates. No amount of applause lasts until morning.
And the final irony, the one that turns this entire psychological structure from merely tragic to genuinely heartbreaking, is that those who need flattery the most intensely are the least capable of feeling loved. Love, unlike flattery, requires vulnerability. Love requires reciprocity, humility, the willingness to be seen without the armor of performance. Love demands an emotional nakedness that the flattery-addicted personality cannot risk. Praise reassures; love exposes. Praise stabilizes; love transforms. And transformation is precisely what they fear most.
Thus they remain trapped in a gilded psychological cage of their own making, surrounded by people but starving for connection, fed by applause but famished for affection. The world may see confidence, dominance, swagger, command. But beneath the spectacle lies a person who fears that without constant applause, they will collapse into the emptiness they have spent their entire lives trying not to feel.
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These are the credentials of the author of this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_F.R._Kets_de_Vries
Kets de Vries has written more than 50 books, 400 articles and book chapters on leadership, and organizational and personal change.
Kets de Vries has won(numerous) awards for his work in the leadership field.
President Donald Trump told Fox News on Saturday he unilaterally canceled U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner's trip to Pakistan, as a second round of in-person negotiations with Iran remains uncertain.
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The president wrote on social media that in-person talks with Iranian leaders would be too much "time wasted on travel, and too much work!"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-cancels-iran-talks-better-deal_n_69ed2754e4b0f3a433cb45c6
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Riiiight
The one factor that we can count on, with by far the highest likelihood of confidence is that whatever Donald Trump says, it's a lie.
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https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/25/world/live-news/iran-war-israel-pakistan-talks
• In Lebanon: Meanwhile, Israel has launched more deadly strikes on southern Lebanon, despite a ceasefire agreement recently extended by three weeks. Iran-backed Hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel."
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Lies from Netanyahu were also very expected.