As I write, it’s about 11 AM Eastern Daylight Time in the United States. Two days ago, Orange Mussolini told everyone he was going to start bombing Iranian power stations at 7:44 PM today, unless Iran capitulated on the Strait of Hormuz. This morning, out of the blue, he changed his tune, claimed to have “very good talks”—with an unnamed person or persons in Iran—and “extended” his “deadline” by five days.
Iranian officials denied that any talks are going on and reasserted their maximalist demands for an end to hostilities, including monetary reparations.
Logically, there are three alternative explanations:
The official Iranian sources are lying through their teeth, and Trump is telling the truth.
A la Venezuela, Trump is actually talking to someone in Iran, just not to those who are officially in charge.
Trump pulled the claims of “peace talks” out of his ass.
I think you know my guess as to which of these three possible alternatives is accurate.
More Fools They
The markets, keenly anticipating a Trump TACO on Iran, reacted to Trump’s announcement of Operation Epic Bullshit by leaping higher. Right now, the Dow is up around 1100 points.
More fools they.
It’s a Good Thing Trump Didn’t Become a Lawyer
Down here in Georgia yesterday, our Supreme Court listened to oral argument on a murder case. At the end of the argument, the chief justice had a few questions for the prosecution, including
Why did she cite five cases that do not exist?
Why did she cite another five cases that don’t actually stand for the propositions for which they were cited? and
Why did she quote three passages legal opinions that di not actually exist?
The prosecutor promised to look into the matter and report back.
I look forward to Trump’s report on the “very good” “ongoing negotiations” that are supposed to be taking place this week.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As I write early this Sunday morning, the talking heads are talking and the poohbahs are pontificating about the Middle East. Last night, I caught Elliot Abrams on the TeeVee. Wikipedia calls him “one of the Bush administration’s intellectual architects of the Iraq War.” So it’s good to know that Abrams thinks that Iran will soon capitulate.
Yesterday, the New York Times Editorial Board expatiated on Trump’s lies about the Iran War. I am sure that the members of the Editorial Board are prime examples of the great and the good, and I am equally confident that their knowledge of international affairs exceeds my own. But I do not think “liar” is the best term for Orange Mussolini.
A rational liar knows the truth but intends to deceive others. A rational liar knows that successful deception requires a certain finesse. You do not make claims that are easily shown to be false. That causes you to lose credibility, which in turn greatly impedes your plan of deception. Likewise, and for the same reason, you do not make claims that are internally inconsistent, nor do you make assertions and predictions that are highly implausible.
Which Comes First—the Assassination or the Nuclear Bombs?
Trump has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against his foes. (Don’t think so? Ask your favorite AI source about his nuclear musings, and then read the sources it serves up.)
These threats are no secret to the mullahs. For that reason and others, in this world of great uncertainty, we may be confident that Iranian-inspired assassination teams are gearing up.
The big question, in my view, is whether the assassins get Trump before he orders the Air Force to drop some nukes.
All seriousness aside, this is a good time for the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center to get out of Dodge, because there is some big time terrorism on the way from the Middle East, and it’s understandable that the Director doesn’t want to be blamed for failing to counter it.t
If Trump proclaims victory, stops the bombing and begins to withdraw the huge air and naval assets he assembled in the Middle East, it could soothe global markets, at least in the short term, and reassure American voters uneasy about the prospect of another forever war.
But leaving in place Iran’s theocratic regime—angry, defiant and in possession of its nuclear stockpile and what remains of its arsenal of missiles and drones—would essentially grant Tehran control over the world’s energy markets. It would also sacrifice the security of America’s partners and allies, and possibly make another, more devastating, regional war likely.
Sensing impatience in Washington, Iranian officials say they will fight on, until an agreement is reached on Iran’s terms, including America paying reparations to Tehran. “We must strike the aggressor in the mouth so it learns a lesson and never again thinks of launching an aggression against our dear Iran,” Parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said Tuesday in a social-media post.
Oil held hostage
Iran is still believed to have plenty of short-range missiles and drones—not to mention naval mines—that it can use to choke off oil and natural-gas exports by making the Strait of Hormuz too risky for tankers. Around 20% of the world’s oil supplies transited the strait daily before the war started. Just on Wednesday, three vessels were hit in the area.
“If the regime holds on—even a rump regime—what is to stop its missiles and drones from threatening tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, and the energy infrastructure of America’s Gulf allies at the time of their choosing?” said Andrew Tabler, a White House official in Trump’s first administration and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Its ability to impact energy prices would be enormous.”
An additional twist is that Iran is letting its friends, including China, take oil out of the Gulf, while preventing everyone else.
Now that Tehran has demonstrated the capacity—and global implications—of choking off the Hormuz strait, it has created significant geopolitical leverage for itself, and an incentive for Gulf states to appease it in the future. Reopening the strait, military analysts say, may require a ground operation to seize the Iranian coastline. That would mark an open-ended escalation, potentially leading to much higher American casualties.
American deterrence weakened
The performance of the U.S. military is, of course, closely watched by China—and America’s Asian allies. The U.S., alongside Israel, has unleashed high-precision firepower, establishing air superiority over Iran and eliminating much of its navy and air forces.
Yet 12 days into the war, Iran keeps firing missiles and drones across the Middle East, albeit at a slower rate. Iran’s ability to destroy with precision strikes some of the most sensitive and scarce U.S. military targets in the Middle East, such as radars for air-defense installations, didn’t go unnoticed. Should America abandon its Gulf partners after exposing them to existential danger, there will be inevitable repercussions in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
“This war hugely damages U.S. standing in the world, which means that China has much more scope to establish its own standing in the Middle East and the Global South generally,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.
“Meanwhile, everyone is observing that Iran has, at best, a middling military capability—and the Americans can’t take them out,” he said.
Nuclear-weapons race
“There is no easy way out of this once we’ve started it,” said Marc Sievers, a former U.S. ambassador to Oman who is now a political commentator based in Abu Dhabi.
“The regime lost a lot of its military capability, but not all of it clearly,” he said. “If they are left standing, they will do everything they can to rebuild, and to do once again all these things that they were doing that triggered this.”
Iran’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium—close to weapons-grade in its purity and buried underground after last June’s American airstrikes—remains as a potential pathway to a rapid nuclear breakout.
“The bad news is you would leave Iran potentially in a position where it can produce nuclear weapons, and you also leave Iran potentially with more motive to produce nuclear weapons,” said Eric Brewer, an expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative who served in senior nuclear-related roles in the White House and the U.S. intelligence community. “That’s a big risk.”
Taking out this enriched uranium, if the regime remains defiant, would require a risky ground operation. “America and Israel are witnessing the limits of what air and naval power alone can do,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
“Strategic priorities, like opening the Strait of Hormuz and securing what remains of Iran’s nuclear stockpile, will likely require some ground troops if no diplomatic options are pursued,” he said. “What we are looking at is potentially a very messy situation.”
Gulf monarchies under threat
One nightmare scenario, in particular for America’s Gulf partners now bearing the brunt of Iranian attacks, is that the U.S. and Israel would stop, then Iran would continue harassing strikes to cow these oil-rich monarchies into submission. The fear is that Tehran will try to pressure them to expel U.S. bases and sever their dependence on an America that failed to protect them.
“There are many dangers. A wounded, angry Iran is not the best-case scenario for the Gulf states. While the U.S. has to a large degree castrated Iran in terms of its ability to attack Israel, this gives Iran only one other option: to attack the Gulf states and to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz,” said Dania Thafer, executive director of the Gulf International Forum think tank. “Militarily speaking, the U.S. is on the winning side. But politically speaking, the U.S. and Israel have really gotten nowhere when it comes to Iran.”
Gulf leaders aren’t voicing in public their anger with the Trump administration, which dragged them into this war. This is in part because their nations are so dependent on American air-defense supplies to protect from the expected next round of Iranian attacks, something that neither China nor Russia can provide. Yet under the surface, many are starting to wonder whether the alliance with the U.S. is more of a liability than an asset—especially if the Iranian regime survives and rearms after the war.
“We are stuck between two outcomes, each of them worse than the other,” said Mahdi Ghuloom, a fellow at the ORF Middle East think tank in Bahrain. “One is that the regime stays intact, and the second is the power vacuum in Iran. The Trump administration’s Middle East policy has not been thought through completely, the decision to conduct this war was taken in haste, and its ramifications miscalculated.”
“While the Gulf-American relationship will remain resilient, a lot of diplomatic frustration will be expressed,” he said.
This morning, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has four important points to make. I’ll summarize them and then let Mr. Bouie speak for himself.
1. In an alternative universe, in his second term, a politically skilled and disciplined Trump could probably have engineered a dictatorship in the United States.
2. But in this universe, Trump is “so solipsistic, so plainly consumed with narcissism, so deeply indifferent to the details of governance and so eager to satisfy his basest impulses that there was little chance he’d ever complete the authoritarian consolidation of his dreams.”
3. The second Trump term, we have “a presidency in terminal decline, if not outright collapse.”
4. If you don’t understand that “presidential commands are never self-executing,” then you don’t understand what the hell is going on.
There is an alternate universe in which Donald Trump isthe popular, successful president of his imagination.
In this world, Trump has a clear view of the political landscape. He knows he won a narrow victory, not a landslide. He knows that his key voters — the ones who put him over the top, as opposed to his core voters — elected him to lower the cost of living and turn the page back to where it was before the pandemic. And while he has the advantage of an unpopular predecessor — an easy repository for blame should things go wrong — he also starts the clock with a small and finite amount of political capital. The modern American public is wary, fickle and quick to anger. The right move is to invest that capital carefully, not gamble with the people’s trust.
This hypothetical President Trump would take the path of least political resistance. He would work with the Republican majority in Congress to send a new round of stimulus checks, rehashing the most important political success of his first term and fulfilling his promise to lower costs for most Americans. He would work with Congress to pass modest tariffs on critical goods and he would take a less draconian path on deportations, focusing, as he promised, on people in jails and prisons — “the worst of the worst.” And he would put hard political limits on his most fanatical aides and deputies, like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller. This Trump wouldn’t give Elon Musk his run of the executive branch and he would sideline his own desire for retribution against his political opponents, or at least channel his rage into something more productive. He would also decline to hand management of the federal government to an ignominious cadre of hacks, apparatchiks and television personalities.
In short, this Trump would rerun the approach of his first term. He would still be corrupt. He would still stretch the limits of common decency. He would still be bombastic, transgressive and contemptuous of political norms. But he would be restrained, somewhat, by the practical realities of governance. And this restraint would give our hypothetical Trump the leeway to pursue his more authoritarian goals; to curtail civil society and consolidate power over the entire federal government, courts and Congress included.
From the perspective of liberal society and constitutional government, this alternative world, in which a more cautious and methodical Trump successfully builds public and political support for the transformation of the United States into a full-throated authoritarian regime, would have been the worst-case scenario for a second Trump term.
We are lucky, then, that this alternate reality is unimaginable. There is no apparent evidence that Trump is capable of even the slightest bit of deferred gratification. If life is a series of marshmallow tests, then he has failed one after the other, kept afloat only by his immense wealth and privilege. The actual Trump is so solipsistic, so plainly consumed with narcissism, so deeply indifferent to the details of governance and so eager to satisfy his basest impulses that there was little chance he’d ever complete the authoritarian consolidation of his dreams.
All of this is simply to contrast what might have been with what plainly is: a presidency in terminal decline, if not outright collapse. Consider the big picture. Trump is nearly as unpopular now as he has ever been. His average approval ranges from a net negative of about 13 points to a net negative rating of nearly 20 points. He is underwater on every issue of consequence. The Supreme Court nullified his signature economic program and his immigration enforcement actions are so toxic with voters that they’ve forced him to fire his head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. He has wrecked the coalition that brought him into office with major reversals among Latinos, young men and Black Americans, and he is treading water with his core supporters, white voters without college degrees.
Trump insists, of course, that he is as popular as ever, but even Republican lawmakers see the writing on the wall. There has been a historic number of retirements from Congress, led mostly by Republicans.
Last, but far from least, is the president’s foolhardy, reckless and immoral war in Iran, which was launched with neither public buy-in nor Congressional authorization. It didn’t take long after the bombing began before it destroyed an elementary school, killing more than 175 people, most of them children. Just two weeks in, the conflict has already grown beyond its initially limited scope, involving other belligerents and threatening the global economy. It is no surprise, then, that this is also the most unpopular war in modern American history, with few supporters beyond the president’s fellow partisans.
It is tempting to think that the president’s political collapse doesn’t really matter — that, as the Teflon Don, he suffers no particular consequences for his bad behavior. And it is true that the shamelessness, celebrity and cult of personality that defines Trump (and Trumpism) also works to buoy him in the face of political catastrophe. He might sink below water, but he’ll never go under. To end the story there, however, is to miss the larger relationship between presidential standing and presidential power.“Presidential commands are never self-executing,” the political scientist Jeffrey Tulis observes in his book “The Rhetorical Presidency,” paraphrasing another political scientist, Richard Neustadt. “Their efficacy depends upon artful wielding of informal power through bargaining — by showing other politicians that they will be helped, or at least not hurt, by doing what the president wants.”
The second Trump administration is defined by its total embrace of the “imperial presidency” and the “unitary executive.” But a key weakness of both concepts is that they treat presidential power as rigid, well-defined and highly formal — the “core duties” of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United States.
The reality ismore complicated. It may seem as if presidents have the power to command, to issue orders and see immediate results. But as Tulis reminds us, successful presidents do not order as much as they coax, cajole and persuade, for the straightforward reason that the formal authority of the presidency is limited compared with other actors in government. A skeptical lawmaker or recalcitrant bureaucrat can derail a presidential agenda and leave the chief executive at the mercy of an angry public. It’s for this reason that the most able men to hold the office of chief executive have rarely seen fit to act as tyrants, raining demands down onto the rest of the executive branch. They act instead as conveners, working to align different interests in pursuit of a single goal.
Presidential standing, in this paradigm, is the currency that makes presidential power work. A popular and well-liked president has more resources to deploy in pursuit of his agenda. He has the informal power he needs to bolster his more circumscribed formal authority. A distrusted, divisive and unpopular president, on the other hand, quickly finds that he is unable to work his will on political actors who are more worried about their own fates than the president’s interests and appetites.
And that is what we’ve seen with this president, a year after he gambled his political capital away in a disastrous attempt to reshape the nature of the American political system. His fast-eroding position has curtailed Trump’s ability to pressure lawmakers into backing his agenda: See the president’s empty demands for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act or the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. This rapid decline has also lowered the cost of institutional resistance to the administration’s attempts to curtail civil society and done the same for judicial opposition to the president’s most aggressive power grabs. I do not think it is an accident that the two most consequential rulings against Trump issued by this Supreme Court were decided as the president’s standing entered a tailspin.
You will notice that after months of teasing the possibility, Trump has mostly stopped talking about serving an unconstitutional third term. Perhaps he still intends to. Or perhaps he has enough self-awareness to know that he is not the triumphant leader of his imagination. That he is, instead, a lame duck whose White House is in disarray and whose actions have plunged the world into chaos. He thought he might remake the country in his own image. Instead, he’s likely to leave it like one of his casinos: broke, broken and in desperate need of new management.
If impeachment weren’t a dead letter, then we could remove him and end his misrule. As it is, we have nearly three more years to live through. It’s an open question whether we survive it intact.
Facing MAGA 