Rachel Maddow

Iran isn't about to have a nuclear bomb.

And I think it's fair to say this is not about Donald Trump's emotional desire to provide support to the Iranian people.

If it were, we might actually be supporting the Iranian people.

So why is it?

Maybe it's for oil, as the president daydreams himself into another 19th century war fantasy of conquering some foreign land he doesn't understand or care about, but he would like to rob them of their natural resources.

Maybe he thinks Iran and its proud 92 million people will happily and easily become a new colony in an empire, an empire helmed by an American emperor.

Maybe that's what he thinks.

But as this now becomes the seventh country Trump has bombed just since being back in office for one year, cui bono?

Who benefits?

It seems like a disturbingly easy question to answer.

Why has the US government been pushed in this direction?

Follow the money.

Why is Donald Trump willing to let that happen?

Well, with this president, sadly,

We keep learning over and over and over again that the easiest answer is almost always the truest one.

He does not play four-dimensional chess.

There's just him and what we know he's like, right?

This president appears to have grown his enormous and excitable new appetite for military intervention in just this one year back in office, apparently because he just thinks war is easy.

It's exciting.

It earns him not only close attention, but even occasionally plaudits from the very serious people who are professionally inclined to believe that there's some rationale, some strategery, some good thinking behind the start of every war, particularly in the Middle East.