Trump just set off alarms with an unhinged Sunday evening threat against Iran

When things begin to heat, Trump begins to tweet.

With the Democrats moving inexorably towards impeachment — joined now by a lone Republican congressman breaking the wall of party solidarity to face the reality of their leader’s criminality — Trump has turned to Twitter to bleat out his pity-seeking denials while pointing fingers everywhere except where they belong, right in his own chest.

It’s the sign of a desperately guilty man lashing out in anger and frustration at having finally been unable to fight off the leaks and betrayals that have him cornered and facing the consequences of his actions, an entirely new experience for this child of inherited privilege who has never had to deal with the repercussions of his abominable actions.

Trump’s desperation, combined with the bellicose rumblings of the noted neo-con war-monger National Security Advisor John Bolton towards Iran, have raised fears that the president may attempt a “Wag the Dog”-type distraction from his legal issues by inventing an excuse for a brand-spanking-new Middle East war to take media attention away from his obstruction of justice charges.

That fear was amplified if not yet validated by Trump’s most recent tweet this afternoon promising total destruction of the Islamic republic in a series of escalating threats between Iran and the U.S.

The verbal altercation with Iran comes after the U.S. made a sudden decision to accelerate the deployment of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf and send a contingent of B-52 bombers to Qatar in the wake of intelligence reports supposedly indicating that Iran was mobilizing to attack the sizable number American forces still in the region.

The fact that the intelligence reports were denied by a senior British general in the coalition fighting the Islamic State who said that there was no enhanced threat from Iran in Iraq and Syria and that none of our formerly close European allies are willing to commit to joining the accusations against the Shiite-led state indicates that the Trump administration may be attempting to leverage inconclusive intelligence reports to fit its own political purposes as the Bush Administration used false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction to initiate the disastrous war in that country.

The danger of an already unstable president trying to save his own skin with a distractionary measure of this proportion is truly horrifying and only increases the pressure on Democratic Congressional leadership to begin impeachment hearings as soon as possible.

Any reluctance to do so out of political expediency is at this point far too hazardous to contemplate seriously given the potential consequences of inaction.

If Trump does indeed violate the Constitution to declare war on Iran without congressional approval, any opportunity to hold him accountable for his documented obstruction of justice as revealed by the Mueller report will fall by the wayside as the new crisis dominates the public discourse. #ImpeachNow.

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Vinnie Longobardo

is the Managing Editor of Washington Press and a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.