"To war, to War, Fredonia's going to war."

                                                     If only Groucho were president
                                                     

Trump has FINALLY surprised me, not with his assassination of Qasem Soleimani--I expected an atrocity like this sooner--but the fact that he offered Iran peace afterward. That's a new level of cluelessness for Trump. I believe Trump assassinated Soleimani because he still held a grudge for the 1979 hostage crisis. He tipped his hand in a Tweet-storm after the assassination:



Iran being thousands of years old, those sites would be world treasures. Why 52 sites? Because 40-years-ago Iran violated our embassy and took 52 hostages. The crisis dragged out 444 days and was a real humiliation for Carter, and likely led to Reagan winning the 1980 election.Why would Trump refer to an incident that took place so long ago that half of today's Iran and a third of the US weren't even born yet? Because of Trump's revenge creed, documented by David Cay Johnson, who covered Trump for the New York Times for decades:

“Sixteen pages of Think Big [Trump's 1989 book] are devoted to revenge. All of them run directly contrary to this basic biblical teaching. Trump leaves no room for doubt that revenge is a guiding principle of his life—“My motto is: Always get even.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump

Once revenge was just Trump's personal and business policy. Now, it's now part of our country's foreign policy. When I posted the theory on Twitter that Trump still had a vendetta from 1979, I was criticized by the Left. Some people believe Trump was apolitical then and he never cares about anybody but himself. To the contrary, he cares about the US the way he cares about a piece of his property. Proprietorship is his version of nationalism. As for him being apolitical, I remember the 1979 hostage crisis, and I'll swear that even the most apolitical people were enraged by it. Everybody was.

Trump has shown outrage on issues on social/political issues long before he ran for president. One example pertains to the Central Park 5 in 1989, in which a female investment banker, Trisha Meili, was assaulted while jogging Central Park. She was bludgeoned with a rock, beaten, raped, tied up, and left to die. She was found hours later and saved, but suffered severe brain damage. The brutality of the attack stunned the whole nation. She was in a coma for a week during which she was unidentified. She seemed to be a teenager, which garnered even more sorrow and sympathy. When she awoke she no memory of the attack.

The New York Police Department responded in an accustomed way: they arrested every minority male who happened to be in that area of Central Park at the time, some 30 of them. Without any witnesses, the police made a racial identification anyway. They forced confessions out of four unfortunate African-American and one Hispanic youth. The real culprit, a serial rapist with no connection to the youths, came forward and confessed to the crime in 2002.

It's impossible to tell why this crime enraged Trump enough to weigh in on the issue, tipping the scales at $85,000 to buy a full-page ad in the New York Post, entitled "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police." 

The headline is a Tweet. Already he knew how to mislead in a few words as possible

Note that 1989 was not an election year. So, Trump wasn't running for president. Election campaigns weren't four-years long yet. Did Trump buy the ad with his own money? He managed to go bankrupt six times, so he might have. He was attention-seeking, but he always was, so why do this particular thing for attention?

My theory? Trump's outrage here is serious. The black-males-on-white-woman crime triggered him like it would any racist. I have no guess as to what degree classism motivated Trump, the fact that the unfortunate woman was an investment banker, i.e. wealthy. It's also possible Trump was acquainted her, or at least knew people who knew her. 

Trump is without a doubt a narcissist, but attachments to people don't define that disorder, their relationships do. A narcissist is capable of caring for people, but they'll always assert their own interests and needs over their friends and family and are obsessed with loyalty, like Trump.

But I digressed. Right now, it's therefore possible that Trump still harbored resentment over the Iran Hostage Crisis. In all fairness, many conservatives who are less sworn to revenge than Trump feel the same way. This is why his hard line on Iran is one issue that got him elected. Therefore, when his advisers gave assassinating Soleimani as an option, his principle kicked in. I would've thought Trump's advisers would know him better by now that to have offered it. 

The one thing you want to avoid in any simmering conflict is a revenge cycle: i.e. when people get too enraged to desire peace, and where each tit for tat blow exchanged simply creates the desire for more revenge.

Trump got conciliatory the next day because, as far as he was concerned, he got even, and thinking only of his own POV, peace was possible. However, his revenge has always been aimed at people on a lower social rung, those couldn't return his vengeance. He's oblivious to how it feels to be on the receiving end of retribution. Not only that, it's too late for him to learn about it, and unfortunately, he's dragged all of us along for the lesson. He's the one least capable of learning a lesson from consequences.