Tag: Maureen Dowd

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Iran’s Hostage

Irresistible Force, Meet Immovable Object

With the mutual Hormuz blocades, Iran is trying to inflict pain on the US while waiting for the US to capitulate, while Trump is trying to inflict pain on Iran while waiting for Iran to capitulate.

Iran’s pain tolerance is much higher than Trump’s, and he would be delighted to surrender if Iran would let him do so on terms that he could then proclaim as a victory. But, as a general matter, Iran wants no part of such a deal. More particularly, a sham surrender by Iran would require them to give Trump a better deal on nuclear weapons than Barack Obama got. And that is not happening.

I don’t know whether Trump will ever do what he has to do, to get out of this mess. But if and when he ever does it, it will be far too late to save his political bacon. Because, if the Strait of Hormuz opened tomorrow, it would take a long time for the newly reflowing oil to reach its destination. 

Today, Maureen Dowd writes Trump, Iran’s Newest Hostage:

“It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.”

That’s the opening of the classic O. Henry short story “The Ransom of Red Chief.”

The tale, written in 1907, is the ultimate parable about the perils of trying to seize and control a hellion so devious, so maniacal, so awful that the captors become the captives.

The story is about two small-time crooks who think they can make some easy money by kidnapping a 10-year-old boy, the son of an affluent landowner in a sleepy Alabama town.

They underestimate badly. When they go to abduct the red-haired, freckle-faced boy, he is throwing rocks at a kitten and hurls a brick at one of his kidnappers.

“Red Chief, the terror of the plains,” as the boy calls himself, runs his captors ragged. He relishes tormenting the men and doesn’t want to go home. In the end, they have to drop their demand for a $2,000 ransom, pay the boy’s father $250 to take the demonic child off their hands and run for the hills.

President Trump went along with Bibi Netanyahu’s Panglossian case for slamming Iran. It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.

After nearly two months of tangling with the demonic Iranian leadership and its allies, Trump looks desperate to run for the hills. He constantly says he has defeated the mullahs and “obliterated” their military power, and yet Iran refuses to be subdued.

Trump says there’s a new regime that’s easier to deal with, but actually it’s the same regime but worse — run by hardened, fanatical generals. Iran has not turned over its enriched uranium, and negotiations are touch-and-go. The Strait of Hormuz, which Trump keeps insisting is open, is closed. Trump is blockading the Iranian blockade.

“Iran has proven to be far more resilient and resourceful than he was prepared for,” Richard Haass, a foreign policy adviser for President George W. Bush, wrote in his newsletter, “Home & Away.” “Almost all the administration’s assumptions have been proven wrong.”

Aside from the weakening of Iran’s conventional military capability, Haass said, “virtually every other metric shows the United States, the region and the world to be worse off.”

The Iranians are tormenting Trump — even as they out-troll the master troller, viciously mocking the president as a “L.O.S.E.R.” and Bibi puppet who wants to distract from the Epstein files.

One viral Iranian rap addressing Trump calls the conflict “a trap you couldn’t see. Welcome to the graveyard of your vanity.”

Conceding that Iran is winning the meme war, the “Daily Show” correspondent Ronny Chieng keened about Trump, “What’s the point of electing a cyberbully if he sucks at cyberbullying?”

Now that Iran has flexed power in the strait, Trump has to bargain with it to get back to where things were before.

He is pinioned in a weird nook and cranny of the planet that seems almost medieval, sitting next to a backward, villainous theocracy. And yet ships carrying over 20 percent of the world’s oil must traverse the narrow passage to get to the Arabian Sea.

Trump, who grew overconfident after his adventurism in Venezuela, is being driven to distraction.

He got so rattled when the two American airmen were shot down, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey reported in The Wall Street Journal, that he “screamed at aides for hours.” Last month, Trump talked about the danger of becoming another Jimmy Carter, spiraling amid the hostages and a failed rescue with eight helicopters lost.

One of my first big stories as a reporter was covering those hostage families for a year and then going to West Point to see the hostages come home in 1981. So I had a front-row seat to the Iranians’ jujitsu tactics, using 52 Americans in our embassy to gain leverage over Carter’s presidency, reputation and re-election.

Trump tried to scare the Iranians with a profane post on Easter and a wild threat to destroy their civilization. But Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. The Iranian mullahs and generals are the terrors of the strait.

Trump has forsaken the one good Middle East policy he had: avoiding the mirage of quick wins while getting sucked once more into “blood and sand,” as he dismissively called it during his first term.

When he was running in 2016, Trump deemed the invasion of Iraq “a big, fat mistake” that destabilized the Middle East and cost too much, in money and lives.

But, seduced by the detestable Bibi, he got suckered into the blood and sand. Unlike W., who had the good grace to trump up a case for war, Trump let Bibi lead him by the nose into this one, blowing off Congress, our allies and many furious MAGA acolytes.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reveal in their forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” that the president brushed aside Gen. Dan Caine’s warnings that a war with Iran would drastically deplete our weapons stockpiles and jeopardize the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

As The Times reported Thursday, the United States has burned through half — around 1,100 — of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China.

The president with the attention span of a gnat posted on Truth Social that “I have all the Time in the World, but Iran doesn’t — The clock is ticking!” But he is the one who has lost control of the timeline, and himself.

As a developer, Trump said, he employed “truthful hyperbole.” But now, in frantic Truth Social posts, in calls with reporters and in interviews, he employs hyperbolic wishful thinking. His staff is resigned to a midterm electoral disaster brought on by higher gas prices and a lack of focus on the economy.

And he keeps returning to his gargantuan ballroom. According to a Washington Post analysis, “Trump has invoked the ballroom on about a third of the days this year.” It’s a pleasant mental escape, now that he has tied himself into a Gordian knot with Iran.

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“Well, Karoline, I Think Americans Do Care That Your Boss is a Racist and is Off His Rocker”

Maureen Dowd (N.Y. Times), Trump’s Obama Derangement Syndrome (really good stuff in bold face):

It seems etymologically, metaphysically, geologically and ethically impossible that President Trump could reach a new low. But he has.

Every Friday, when I’m planning my column, I find fresh evidence that the president is unfit for his office. He taunts his foes in crude, creepy ways and tries to tattoo his name on everything.

Late Thursday night, a vile clip appeared on Truth Social, depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle cartoon, to the Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” It was at the end of a video filled with baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The man who pushed the despicable “birther” conspiracy is still at it, using a racist meme from a far-right Pepe-the-frog-loving acolyte.

Like many of Trump’s actions, it was both shocking and predictable.

As The Times reported, Trump has a “history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants,” and the Obamas in particular, with “the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging” in his current term.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, offered a pathetic defense for our pathological president: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King.’ Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Well, Karoline, I think Americans do care that your boss is a racist and off his rocker.

“His presidency is enclosed in a bubble wrap of darkness and hatred and resentment,” Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama’s chief of staff, told me.

Once the White House realized the outrage was real, the post was deleted. Officials blamed a staffer, though you know Trump was in on it. On Wednesday, he said he does “retruth”conspiracy theories himself.

He went so far that even a few Republicans in Congress, looking down the barrel of the midterms, objected.

On X, Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

Senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican who has been increasingly put off by some of Trump’s offensive actions, said on X, “This content was rightfully removed, should have never been posted to begin with, and is not who we are as a nation.”

Trump had a Dostoyevsky-esque moment on Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, when he confessed that his ego would not let him lose the 2020 race.

“You know, they rigged the second election,” he said. “I had to win it, had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would have had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though.”

He was admitting that our ginned-up election integrity crisis was simply an exercise in bending the truth to his bottomless vanity. “His ego could not handle the fact that he lost, so he had to pretend there was a voting crisis,” David Axelrod told me. “The world is still paying for that.”

(Trump also confessed to the religious gathering that he gets annoyed when Speaker Mike Johnson asks to pray before meals. Trump dryly noted: “I say, ‘Excuse me? We’re having lunch in the Oval.’”)

After obscenely slapping his name on everything from the Kennedy Center to a gold card for rich aspiring immigrants to warships, and planning a gargantuan triumphal arch and an outsize White House ballroom as reflections of his bloated ego, Trump is now trying to strong-arm Congress into naming more things after him by holding congressionally approved funds hostage.

The administration tried extortion tactics on Chuck Schumer, threatening not to unfreeze billions for a new railroad tunnel under the Hudson River unless he helped rename Penn Station in New York and Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump.

Trump’s dragging his own name and America’s name in the muck. The word “Trump” is an epithet in many circles. But in a bizarre manifestation of insecurity, the president still wants to stamp his moniker everywhere, just as he did when he was a New York businessman prone to bankruptcy.

Trump had another quintessential Trump moment on Tuesday when he lambasted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling as she asked him, in light of the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein filth, what he would say to the pedophile’s survivors “who feel like they haven’t gotten justice.”

He told her that it was time to move on — the latest deflection from the fact that he has never come clean about his association with the odious Epstein.

Like a shuddersome image of worms slithering from underneath a rock, a bunch of powerful and formerly respected people in America and beyond have been exposed by the Epstein files.

Many of the ultra-elite who insisted they did not know the truth about Epstein’s depravity have been unmasked as liars. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal wrote, prominent people from Noam Chomsky to Stanley Pottinger to Peter Mandelson to Michael Wolff “actively consoled him, cast him as a victim and in some cases offered advice on how to rehabilitate his image.”

And the shoes keep dropping. CNN reported on Friday that Navy Secretary John Phelan was listed as a passenger on Epstein’s private plane in 2006.

As The Times’s David Fahrenthold told CNN, the louche role of some tech billionaires in the Epstein scandal is particularly chilling because our lives in the coming years will be defined by these billionaires.

Once we saw the lords of the cloud as heroic — young geniuses who would improve our lives. Now, as Fahrenthold said, the personal failings, insecurities and midlife crises of these men are dictating the way they run their companies. We were, he said, “a little bit misplaced in sort of putting our hopes in these folks.”

They are not keeping hope alive.