I had thought the United States government had hit a new low point last week when the Federal Commission of Fine Arts approved a Semiquincentennial 250th anniversary commemorative 24 karat gold coin featuring President Donald J Trump leaning on his his desk with clenched fists and scowling but that was before Secretary of War Pete Hegseth demanded $200 billion from America's taxpayers to continue to fight the war against Iran, saying "It takes money to kill bad guys!"

Admittedly the approval for the coin was a slam-dunk as Trump had appointed all the members of the Commission, just as he did when he loaded the board after deciding to destroy and rename the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The only concern during the discussion with US Mint officials was over the size of the coin, with the president urging the commissioners to go big with coins of maximum size measuring three inches in diameter. It is now expected that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, another Trump loyalist, will ‌order the coin to be minted.

I would point out that a president having a coin issued with his own portrait on it is not exactly an established American governmental tradition. In fact, most Americans just might find it absolutely in poor taste and even disgraceful, the act of a megalomaniac who just might be considered insane based on his own utterances and other behavior. Last week, Trump was meeting in the White House with the woman Prime Minister of Japan Sanae Takaichi when he made a joke responding to a journalist's question about his decision to "surprise" Iran by attacking it, saying "Who knows better about surprise than Japan? OK? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor? OK? Right?" Takaichi was clearly shocked.

Earlier in the week Trump was also in top form in terms of inappropriate commentary, stating that he was open to using "ground troops" against Iran, which would kill a lot of American military personnel for absolutely nothing in terms of benefitting US interests or needs. He has also threatened to tear apart NATO if the member states do not rally around the US effort to defeat Iran and open the Straits of Hormuz. He has inevitably called those unwilling to fight "cowards."

NATO, which has admittedly outlived its usefulness, rightly recognizes that Iran is Trump and Israel's war, not Europe's. Spain has bluntly told Trump to take a hike and has blocked use of its NATO bases to US military aircraft supporting the war. Sweden, meanwhile, has boldly declared Israel MUST be ISOLATED and EXPELLED from international institutions like the UN & EU over escalating Gaza crisis and West Bank annexations! Swedish leaders slam settlement violence, NGO bans, and aid blocks as "catastrophic," urging sanctions on "extremist" Israeli ministers and trade freezes. Several other nations have also declared that they will arrest Netanyahu, if he is still alive, under the International Criminal Court arrest warrant that has been issued should he ever appear in their countries. They have also denied their airspace to any Israeli plane bearing Netanyahu, which has made it difficult for the prime minister to travel outside Israel. French three-star General Michel Yakovleff, who once commanded the Foreign Legion, just compared joining Trump and Israel's Iran war to "buying cheap tickets for the Titanic" after it already hit the iceberg.

And hold on because there is still more! Trump is threatening to pull the licenses of US broadcasters who are reporting stories relating to the Iran attack that do not agree with the approved narrative on the war that is coming out of the White House and from the War and State Departments. The White House is calling such reporting "fake news." If approved, the move would make free speech by the news media conditional on who is president and what his or her politics are, a quite possibly fatal blow against the First Amendment. And there are also reports that the Justice Department is going after conservative war critics including Tucker Carlson, who will reportedly be investigated for "acting as an agent of a foreign power." One AIPAC linked Congressman is demanding that he be investigated on charges of treason, which is the one crime in the Constitution of the United States that carries with it the death penalty.