PBS FRONTLINE, May 26, 2026: "The War Cabinet" (WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2026)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“The powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must.” That’s how David Sanger of The New York Times summed up Donald Trump’s philosophy of the world and humanity’s role in it in an interview for a recent episode of PBS’s long-running TV documentary series Frontline, “The War Cabinet,” aired Tuesday, May 26. Directed and co-written by Michael Kirk, with the familiar dulcet tones of Will Lyman as narrator, “The War Cabinet” was an attempt to show how a man who sold himself during all three of his Presidential campaigns as a “peacemaker” morphed into an all-out war leader after he regained the White House in 2024.

Another reporter interviewed for the program, Eric Cortellessa of Time, said, “Part of the appeal with President Trump is that he is going to reshape the world in a way that outlasts him. That there will be a pre- and post-Trump world. Part of what he wants his legacy to be is to be able to say, ‘I did what nobody else could.’” I’d long suspected that Trump wants to be so profoundly transformative a U.S. President – more so than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan – that the history of America will be divided into B.T. and A.T.: “Before Trump” and “After Trump.” Now Cortellessa, who’s done at least two major interview features with Trump for Time, suggests that that ambition extends to the entire world.

“When I talk about [Trump’s] foreign policy doctrine, it’s the ‘me, me, me’ foreign policy doctrine,” said The New Yorker reporter and essayist Susan Glasser. “For Donald Trump there’s another factor, and that is the glory of Donald Trump. It seems so incredible that a great nation of 350 million people could actually be acting in the world because of the whims and interests of one guy who wants to pursue his self-aggrandizement.” Not that it hasn’t happened before. Do the names “Alexander the Great,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Joseph Stalin,” “Mao Zedong,” and “Adolf Hitler” mean anything to you?

The idea that a President of the United States is comporting himself under the philosophy that “the powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must” is chilling enough, especially in this 250th anniversary year of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. It’s exactly the opposite of the belief that “all men are created equal.” Even though when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words he effectively meant, “All white male landowners are created equal,” it was still a philosophy that definitively rejected the idea that a handful of people are destined to rule, and everybody else is supposed to accept, meekly, humbly, and gratefully, whatever crumbs their overlords are willing to dole out to them.

The Frontline documentary began with a montage of clips from Trump’s three Presidential campaigns in which he repeatedly declared himself an anti-war candidate. That was the claim he made in his second-term inaugural address on January 20, 2025, in which he said, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.”

That got a lot of horselaughs from people all too aware that Trump’s whole strategy as a politician has been to seize on the divisions within the American people and exploit them for votes. Trump’s rhetoric began to change with a bizarre series of demands to acquire territory held by other countries. He insisted that Canada become “the 51st state.” He threatened to attack Panama in order to retake the Panama Canal, which had been U.S. territory until it was returned to Panama by a treaty negotiated by the Carter administration in 1978. Trump also threatened to attack a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, Denmark, to seize control of Greenland.

And though thus far he hasn’t attacked Canada (except for starting a massive trade war with them), Panama, or Greenland, Trump has ordered bombing raids in Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and Venezuela. The Frontline show actually began with an account of Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on February 28, which went off the rails when Vice-President J. D. Vance upbraided Zelensky for not wearing a suit and tie to the meeting.

“Mr. President, Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said. “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. Have you said ‘thank you’ once in this entire meeting? No, in this entire meeting, have you said, ‘Thank you’? Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country – and let’s go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong. We know that you’re wrong.”

“Vance brought that righteous indignation to that meeting,” Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative and one of a number of true Trump believers who agreed to participate in the Frontline telecast, said. “For a lot of the people on the so-called New Right, who are the national populist or the hard-core MAGA base or people who really want to see change in American foreign policy, and I’m one of them, it was the coup de grâce of a new generation of approach. In some ways it was the high-water mark of Vance’s political career to that point.”

The program also discussed U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ran for President against Trump in 2016. The Frontline documentary included some of the bizarre posturing between Rubio and Trump over the relative size of their “hands” (presumably a metaphor for a body part just below the waist) as well as a clip from a campaign debate in which Rubio endorsed George W. Bush’s war against Iraq – and Trump said, “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, all right? We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” Trump overwhelmingly defeated Rubio in the 2016 primaries, including in Rubio’s home state of Florida.

“I think Marco Rubio spent a couple years after that defeat wavering over what course to take,” said Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. “He believed Donald Trump was a dangerous force in the world. He believed what he was doing was antithetical to American interests. But then he looked at what happened to those Republicans who spoke out against Donald Trump and essentially ended their own political careers, and Marco Rubio’s political career – he didn’t want it to be over.”

So Rubio wrote a book, Decades of Decadence, in which he basically reinvented himself as a Trump-style phony “populist,” and by the 2024 Republican National Convention he was giving full-throated endorsements of Trump’s re-election as “the only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again.” Rubio’s conversion was so complete that long-term Trump ally Steve Bannon appeared on the Frontline show and said that when he read Decades of Decadence, he had a hard time believing Rubio wrote it.

A number of interviewees for the Frontline program made the point that Trump, during his first term, had had a number of Cabinet members and other high officials who tried to talk him out of some of his nastier initiatives. Trump had wanted to bomb Mexico to deal with the drug cartels, and to send U.S. military troops into the streets of American cities to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. In his second term, as Cortellessa of Time explained, his goal was “to remove people who saw themselves as guardrails, to eradicate any possibility of having people who were going to act as brakes on his desires.”

One of Trump’s key appointees in that campaign was Pete Hegseth, Iraq combat veteran and co-host of a weekend program on Fox News, whom Trump chose as his Secretary of Defense – or, as Trump and Hegseth have unilaterally renamed him, “Secretary of War.” The Frontline depiction of Hegseth began with a speech from one of Trump’s televised Cabinet meetings in which he demands fulsome praise from all his appointees. It’s a ritual Trump started in his first term and has continued in this one. “From the troops directly, which they ask me to say all the time, thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity, for providing a shield for the rest of us to put America first and to apply peace through strength,” Hegseth told Trump. “We’re in the strength business, that’s our job.”

Among Hegseth’s priorities was a housecleaning of America’s top military leadership, targeting anyone who’d been promoted by the Biden administration, anyone who wasn’t a white male, and, as Hegseth himself put it, “any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] woke shit.” Hegseth particularly targeted the Judge Advocates General (JAG’s). Among their responsibilities are to warn commanders whether the orders they are about to give are illegal.

In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth recalled one JAG officer told his company it was illegal to shoot somebody just because they were carrying a weapon. Once the lawyer walked away, Hegseth told his troops, “I will not allow this nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed.” As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth called the entire U.S. officer corps to an in-person meeting at Quantico, Virginia and laid down the message: either get with the program of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” or leave.

The new Trump doctrine would face its first test in dealing with the Houthis, Iran-backed rebels in Yemen. The Houthis were attacking civilian vessels in the Red Sea, and Trump’s war Cabinet called a remote meeting to discuss what to do about it. Amazingly, they not only used a commercial messaging app, Signal, they inadvertently invited a journalist, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, to join the chat. At first, Goldberg told Frontline, “I thought it was a disinformation operation or some elaborate spoof. … The senior-most officials of the United States government were using Signal to talk about upcoming bombing campaigns, and inadvertently invited a journalist. I’ve never been involved in anything this absurd or surreal.”

As a result, Goldberg ¬– and, ultimately, the entire world – got a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the current U.S. government decides issues of life and death. Vance was reticent about ordering a bomb strike against the Houthis, calling it a bailout of Europe since almost all the ships the Houthis had targeted were European. Hegseth was gung-ho to do it. Then Stephen Miller, Trump’s most controversial aide and one who’s been a continuous part of both Trump Presidencies, entered the chat with the message, “The President was clear: green-light.” At that moment, all debate ceased and the conversation turned to planning the details of when and where the attacks would take place, itself a serious breach of security protocol.

After the attack, Trump, as is his wont, declared it a complete and total victory. “It’s not even close to true,” said Jamie McIntyre, reporter for the conservative Washington Examiner. “That war went on for 52 days. Achieved almost nothing, except the expenditure of billions of dollars. The Houthis are still there.” Meanwhile, Trump and his administration needed a scapegoat for the security breach of allowing a journalist onto a top-secret chat planning military actions, and they found him in National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Trump fired him and gave the post to Rubio, the first person since Henry Kissinger to be both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the same time.

“Donald Trump treats even the most senior officials of the U.S. government as courtiers,” Susan Glasser told Frontline. “It’s the sort of Trump 2.0 version of the adults in the room. People like [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio essentially have a sort of shoulder-shrugged, you know, ‘what-can-you-do’ kind of version of playing the adults in the room. Maybe they have different opinions than the president, but in the end they’re not going to really do anything to stop him from doing whatever he wants.”

Trump’s next attack on a foreign country came about in June 2025, two months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House to discuss a coordinated U.S./Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Rubio made statements to the effect that the U.S. would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Vance, who like Hegseth served in the Iraq war, said an attack on Iran “would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” But Trump went ahead and ordered the strikes anyway, then claimed they had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Right-wing activists like podcaster Steve Bannon and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills saw the parallels between Trump’s attack on Iran and George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq – and they didn’t like them. Bannon said, “This is exactly the same pitch as the Iraq War – weapons of mass destruction – you have to get it. So they understand one thing: They think the playbook works. This could suck us into a war that make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Sunday afternoon picnic. You’re talking about a major country, an ancient civilization, 90 million people, the Persians. These are the same folks the Romans fought, and the Greeks.”

Another person within the Trump administration who argued against the attack on Iran was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who insisted based on the intelligence agencies that reported to her that Iran was nowhere near developing either a nuclear weapon or the capability of delivering one. But after Israel launched the attack on Iran, and Trump joined in with American forces, he bluntly told a reporter who asked about Gabbard’s comment, “She’s wrong.” As a result, Gabbard became persona non grata in the Trump administration. Members of Trump’s staff joked that the initials of her title, “DNI,” now stood for “Do Not Invite,” as she was frozen out of key meetings. More recently, she has resigned, ostensibly to take care of her husband, diagnosed with advanced cancer.

Trump’s next aggressive campaign against another country’s leadership targeted Venezuela, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the Florida-born son of Cuban expatriates – heartily supported. “He has very strongly held beliefs, from a very young age, about left-leaning dictatorships in Latin America,” said Ashley Parker of The Atlantic. “And there is also a sense that if Venezuela can fall, and there can be regime change in Venezuela, then Cuba might be next.”

Knowing that Trump couldn’t care less about free and fair elections, either in Venezuela or in the U.S., in order to get Trump to authorize an attack on Venezuela he needed an ally. He found one in Stephen Miller, and the two decided to use drugs as the issue to persuade Trump to attack Venezuela, “They changed the argument to drugs – that was a big deal,” said American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “The president is undoubtedly prudish about drugs. He is a teetotaler himself. I think it’s a very underexplored element of his psyche. His older brother died of alcoholism. That was a richer vein to persuade the president.”

Trump began the campaign against Venezuela by ordering air strikes against small boats in the open seas off the Venezuelan coast. The claim was that the boats were being used to smuggle cocaine and fentanyl into the U.S., even though Venezuela does not produce fentanyl at all. Not only did they target the boats and destroy them, Trump posted on his Truth Social Web site, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. Beware!” Eventually the boat strikes killed 110 civilians, including two sailors who were the victims of a so-called “second tap” attack, illegal under international law because once you have rendered your enemies helpless, you’re supposed to take them alive.

When Venezuelan President Maduro continued to defy Trump – even mocking him by dancing at a rally the way Trump does – Trump ordered a U.S. ground invasion of Venezuela to capture Maduro and bring him to the U.S. for a so-called “trial” on drug charges. Rubio was hoping that the successful capture of Maduro would restore democracy to Venezuela. Trump wanted no such thing; instead he allowed Delci Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice-president, to take formal control of the country on condition that she sign over Venezuela’s vast oil resources to U.S. companies. “We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said of Venezuela’s oil industry, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will be paid for by the oil companies directly.”

“If I were Marco Rubio, I would be deeply pained and distressed by the course of events in Venezuela,” said Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. “You have to wonder what rationalizations he’s telling himself to justify what’s just happened. He’s finally now gotten the results he wants in removing Maduro from power, but none of the reasons why he believes Maduro should be removed from power are actually being respected on the merits. The Maduro regime persists. There’s this explicit claim made about the value of extracting oil from the country. You basically have now the [same] Chavista regime in power in Venezuela, but answering to the Americans. I mean, it’s a pretty tangled situation for somebody like Rubio, on the ideological merits, to defend.”

New Yorker and former New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins believes that the quick and easy success in Venezuela emboldened Trump to do another all-out assault on Iran, either at Netanyahu’s behest or with his help. “Trump is on a roll, and I think he knows he’s on a roll. He believes he’s on a roll,” Filkins told Frontline. “I think the Venezuela operation emboldened Trump to believe that he could do these very effective one-shot missions. Go in, do what you need to do, destroy what you need to destroy, get out, done. No consequences.”

“One factor that people don’t talk about enough is luck,” Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic told Frontline. “So far Donald Trump is one of the luckiest people in the history of the planet. He sends American troops into the middle of Venezuela. Pulls it off. He practically destroys the Iranian nuclear program without losing a plane or a pilot. Luck is a factor, and momentum is a factor in all this. It’s luck, it’s roll of the dice, it’s the pure expression of power.”

In February 2026 Netanyahu came to the White House for another visit with Trump. This time there was no official ceremony, no joint press conference, no fanfare. This was when Netanyahu allegedly talked Trump into an all-out air campaign against Iran involving killing the long-time Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to American Conservative editor Curt Mills, “Netanyahu is pretty canny at saying, ‘You’ll be one of the great presidents. You’ll be like Reagan or Lincoln or Roosevelt if you do something substantial. No other president has been able to handle the Iran portfolio – Carter, Reagan, H.W., Clinton, Obama, W., Biden. And you can just solve it.’”

Instead Trump’s war against Iran – launched without any Congressional approval, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, which states only Congress can start a war – has lasted four months so far and produced exactly the sort of quagmire Trump used to criticize George W. Bush for getting us into in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s also upended the global economy and raised U.S. gasoline prices by 50 percent. And it has sent Trump’s already negative poll numbers into dismal territory, with just 33 to 37 percent of Americans surveyed saying they approve of the job Trump is doing.

Not that Trump really cares about all that. It’s become clear that Trump has no intention of allowing himself or the Republican Congress ever to be voted out of power. His total dominance of the Republican primary electorate has enabled him to destroy the political careers of Senators Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) as well as Congressmember Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). These, along with the other metaphorical trophy heads on Trump’s wall – Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and many others – successfully intimidate any Republicans in either house of Congress who might otherwise stand up to him.

Trump has also launched an aggressive campaign to redraw Congressional districts to make sure Republicans keep their House majority in 2026 despite the growing unpopularity of their policies. He was aided in this by the Right-wing revolutionary (often mistakenly called “conservative”) majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which in May hammered the final nails into the coffin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Trump is on a roll to make sure not only that he transforms the American Republic into the American Empire, but that he does so without any chance of being reversed, either in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 Presidential election. Either he will declare an “emergency” that allegedly requires him to suspend the 2028 election and remain in power indefinitely, or he will run what the Latin Americans call an imposición candidate: a totally loyal stooge who will allow him to maintain effective control of the U.S. government even though he won’t technically hold the title, “President of the United States of America.”