It’s Monday, and my husband is clutching his cell phone like an amulet, urgently scrolling for news or a text from his family in Iran.

As the country is pounded by bombs from Israel and the United States, internet and cell phones have been cut off, he cannot reach even one brother, sister, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew or cousin in his large and loving extended family. He has not been able to sleep for three days. As he reaches for yet another coffee, his hand trembles.

As for me, I wake up sweating after a nightmare: one of my high-spirited sisters-in-law vanishing in an attack on Shiraz, a city in south-central Iran. Now retired, she used to work as a teacher in a girls’ school. I thought of her when I read about the 158 young schoolgirls and 17 others killed in an air strike on an elementary girls’ school in southern Iran – part of the bombing campaign unleashed by the US and Israel. 

When my husband and I got married in California, his sister sent us a video via WhatsApp in which she and our other relatives paraded posters of us around their home – dancing, singing and waving scarves in a celebration that went on for hours.

During the pandemic I served as her weekly English teacher and she as my on-and-off Farsi coach – our video-call lessons marked by animated conversation and laughter. But today our home is quiet as a crypt.

Trump, who claims to be a “peace president,” has repeatedly broken national and international law.

He has ordered deadly strikes on fishermen in the Caribbean and Pacific, kidnapped Venezuela’s president, and now has launched  an illegal and unprovoked war with Iran that some commentators have dubbed “the Epstein War” – a wag-the-dog effort to distract the country from allegations in the Epstein files, including one from a 2016 lawsuit that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl in Epstein’s New York mansion, an account corroborated by the young teen’s Epstein handler. 

I think about one of my MAGA cousins in Georgia, who opposed our “endless wars” after her son returned home for a Mideast tour in the military with PTSD and a ravenous depression. I want to talk about all this with her, and see how her ailing cats are doing, but I’m too dispirited to call.

The launch of a new war – Iran has responded by striking U.S. bases and assets in neighboring states – comes on top of flagging confidence in the economy, ICE officers killing adults and detaining children, and what experts call Trump’s “unmistakable” signs of serious dementia.

Iranian-American writer and professor Shervin Malekzadeh notes that the US’s authoritarian turn leaves Iranians living in the US caught between two “unrepentant regimes,” both encouraging violence at home and abroad. 

“When the course of events renders Chicago, New Orleans, or Minneapolis indistinguishable from Mashhad, Karaj, or Tabriz, then our reward is perspective,” he writes in The American Prospect. “We know that Iran anticipates what may happen in the United States, that the pair of murders by the equivalent of roving basijis in the Twin Cities are a dress rehearsal for the brutality yet to come.”