Jumping to Conclusions

by Bill Lasarow

July 1, 2025

Vik Muniz, “The Tower of Babel, after Pieter Brueghel (Gordian Puzzles),” 2007, photograph of puzzle pieces, 72 x 96 1/2”. Courtesy of the artist.

A defining feature of Trump34’s political method has long been to jump to conclusions based on nothing approaching due diligence. But there is an inevitable second part to it, because usually (not always to be fair — which he never, ever is himself), his conclusions are wrong. Once proven wrong he dispenses blame and returns to the original falsehood. The third part of this formula is that the false conclusion is not just repeated, it is repeated performatively with increasing insistence. It is this last that is his true talent, and it is a talent that has been honed for more than 40 years.

He may have been taught how to do this by the truly malign Roy Cohn, who first tried to obliterate democracy through the vehicle of Joseph McCarthy; but today Trump34 is the unsurpassed master of this style of deception. It is the most singular reason he once more occupies the White House. Today — along with his assault on immigrants living in America and his budget bill now before the Senate — the bombing of Iran once again proves it his aggressive know-nothingism is his primary weapon in transforming the American presidency into a dictatorial perversion of the Founders’ vision.

Johannes Vermeer, “The Art of Painting,” 1666, oil on canvas.

The irony is that it is also the source of his greatest vulnerability.

Let’s review how this is now playing out in the days since the bombing of three major Iranian nuclear facilities. On June 22nd, less than one week ago as this is written, it followed a brief bombing campaign by Israel’s Netanyahu government and at the Prime Minister’s urging, our largest non-nuclear warheads were loaded on a squadron of B-2 Spirit bombers, which dropped their payloads on three underground nuclear facilities. They returned to base with no loss of American lives or hardware. From a tactical standpoint this was a successful operation.

Reniel Del Rosario, “Gun Depot” from installation of “Guns, Beauty, Donuts,” 2025. Courtesy of Gallery 16 San Francisco.

Also, consider the regime that we attacked. The Islamic Republic of Iran has wielded a barbaric single-party dictatorial theocracy over 90 million Persians for nearly half a century. It is overtly antisemitic and anti-American, and no American or Israeli government has failed to recognize this — though to listen to Trump34 tell his fictitious tale you would think at least the three Democratic presidents during that time collaborated with the mullahs. Thus the explicit snap judgement he delivered on June 23rd, ahead of any assessment based on actual evidence, sounded like great news: total obliteration of Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity along with all of its high grade material.

This declaration was just as fact free as so many of Trump34’s other past leaps of self-serving faith, starting with the insurrection of January 6, 2021. What crosses the usual ethical and legal red lines is that once facts start to emerge, the original wishful thinking does not change. It becomes dogma and the very yardstick of personal loyalty by subordinates.

Kent Monkman, “Resurgence of the People,” 2019, acrylic on canvas, 132 x 264”. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Let me share my personal view of the Islamic Republic, just to be clear: the world would be better off without it. They deserve what both Trump34 and Netanyahu say they delivered, and therefore just hearing those words uttered, in spite of everything done to destroy our Founders’ enlightenment-era project, felt wonderful. My emotional inner voice was all: Gosh, I sure hope that “obliteration” is what occurred. My artist’s eye, however, told me: This looks and sounds all too familiar, let’s wait and see.

There is no doubt that the Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), along with Tomahawk missiles released massive destructive power, and that they carried out the strategy laid out by Netanyahu. The damage done to each facility was undoubtedly severe.

Mark Bradford, “Mithra”, 2008, plywood, shipping containers, steel, 840 x 240 x 300”. Courtesy Mark Bradford and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.

But that is not what Trump34 has settled on as his narrative. It is that the facilities were obliterated, that the progress of Iran’s nuclear weapons ambition has been reset back to square one. And now, as a result, the U.S. president becomes the great peacemaker, calling for a full ceasefire between Israel and Iran, and the promise that the U.S. will be generous with a vanquished enemy.

Needless to say, starting with reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA, which has not been permitted access to directly inspect the bombing sites), the truth is that the damage done to Iran’s nuclear program was extensive but limited, nothing more, since the damage is underground. Further, satellite images have widely reported that a convoy of trucks appeared at the Fordow facility days prior to the bombing mission. The likelihood that the facilities were evacuated along with fissile material and centrifuges may be a matter of speculation, but Iran’s subsequent response, their bombing of an American air base in Qatar that followed their warning to clear out personnel, suggests that a regime that truly belongs in history’s dustbin instead sees the past few weeks as a temporary setback, not an existential threat.

Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (1987); and Visual Art Source (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain.  In 2025 he launched Square Cylinder with Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.