New Objectives
CA–001 · Mar 22, 2026
On March 18, 2026, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stood outside the White House and smiled. This is, of course, her job. But what she was smiling about requires a moment of stillness.
She was announcing, with visible satisfaction, a war. Not a specific fact about it — the facts kept changing — but the war itself, as a mood, as a brand, as a series of confident declarations that contradicted each other across days and weeks without apparent discomfort.
The justifications for attacking Iran had been, depending on the day: imminent threat, regime change, not regime change, nuclear capability, ballistic missiles, the reopening of a strait. Each delivered with identical conviction. Each superseding the last as if the previous version had never been spoken aloud, in public, on camera, into microphones.
The smile did not flicker.
Operation Epic Fury — the name alone deserves examination. Epic. Fury. The language of myth and emotion deployed as military branding, as if the operation's legitimacy resided in its dramatic register rather than in international law, evidence, or coherent strategic purpose. The objectives of this epic fury were, depending on which day you asked: regime change; not regime change; destroying nuclear capabilities; destroying ballistic missile capabilities; ensuring Iran could never possess nuclear weapons; reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Each stated with equal confidence. Each superseding the last. Each presented as the obvious and always-intended goal.
"We've defined the objectives of Operation Epic Fury very clearly," Leavitt said, on the day the stated objectives changed for the third time.
This is not incompetence dressed as confidence, though it is also that. It is something Vlad Vexler has called post-truth in action — not merely deceptive communication, but actions themselves untethered from any real-world logic or destination. The administration does not have a plan it is concealing. It just does not have a plan. What it has is a need for spectacle, for the narcissistic supply of destruction and dominance, for the feeling of power exercised without the burden of consequence or coherence.
The tragedy, as Vexler notes, is that millions of lives have to be lived and died inside that fantasy.
New Objectives is CA–001 in the Current Affairs series — manufactured ephemera, an artifact of NOW pressed into a form designed to last.
The magazine cover was chosen because it is the form that most honestly performs what power does: it takes a face, frames it in authority, surrounds it with competing claims for attention, and sells it. The cover of TRIUMPH does not distort Leavitt's image. It does not need to. It simply applies the logic of the form to the content of the moment, and allows the gap between them to speak.
New Objectives will be disposable by Tuesday. The feed will move on. The next objectives will be announced with equal clarity. The smile will not flicker.
That is why it is also a collectible. That is why it carries an accession number. History has a habit of preserving the things nobody thought worth keeping — the pamphlet, the stamp, the magazine left in a waiting room — and finding in them, years later, the truest record of what a civilization believed about itself in a particular moment.
This is that record. CA–001. March 2026.