Peggy Noonan, In Gut We Trust? I think Trump shocked his followers with his vulgar, threatening social-media posts about the Iran war:
Cease-fires give hope even if temporary, tenuous and fragile. But does anyone imagine negotiations with Iran in the next two weeks will bear real fruit, resolve central questions? If they don’t, what then?
The first story here is the U.S. joining the war, the second is the ultimate outcome, but third in importance is those posts, because they seemed so desperate, so cruel, and so Suez-like in their historical size and import.
You know them well. On Tuesday, Donald Trump on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen but it probably will.” On Good Friday, “Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” On Easter Sunday, “Open the f— Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH.” He ended that post “Praise be to Allah.”
The posts left his friends and foes slackjawed. I want to talk about why they were so horrifying.
They constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it.
It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime.
It’s even ineffective as a threat. The reason the “madman theory” worked for Richard Nixon, if it did, was that world leaders knew he wasn’t crazy but might be tripped into extreme behavior by an adversary’s intransigence. Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks.
Previous presidents haven’t always been lit by inner dignity, but all at least attempted to fake it in public, as a bow to the people and their presumably moral ways. They didn’t feel free to get revved up in the middle of the night and take their rage out for a walk to relieve itself on the sidewalk.
Here I ask you to google “U.S. presidents at war, how they spoke and wrote.” Lincoln and FDR of course, but also Eisenhower and Korea, Reagan in the Cold War, both Bushes in their wars. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. If we don’t actively remember and summon past standards, we have no chance of getting them back, because we’ll have forgotten what they were, and the current fecal matter will be all we know and can continue.
You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral. The art, the sweep, the ceilings are so high that you aspire even in your posture. You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.
Why do we recoil when a leader is vulgar and violent in his language and thinking? Coarse language obviously implies coarse thinking, and no one wants that in a leader entrusted to bring peace and prosperity. Beyond that, throughout history political authority has come wrapped in a certain formality and ceremony. Dignity enhanced power. A British king even 500 years ago didn’t think himself free to speak in public like a fishmonger or a street whore. He had to present himself at a certain height so people would look up to him.
As for threats, when you resort to them, you’re revealing you are uncertain of the sufficiency of your power. Real menace shuts its mouth. Napoleon acted as if a threat was information given to the enemy. He didn’t want to signal intent or commit to an action, he wanted the foe wondering what he’d do next.
In the past, Trump supporters often received criticism of his language as if it were criticism of them. That didn’t happen this time. They know he was doing something they themselves wouldn’t do and don’t want. Tucker Carlson caught this when he challenged Mr. Trump the day after Easter: “Who do you think you are?”
I think Mr. Trump shocked his followers. What he used this week was not the diction of the common man but the language of sociopathy. That isn’t how his supporters want the world to see him. It’s not what they want him to be.
Beyond that, we haven’t learned much new about Mr. Trump during his Iran endeavor, it’s more a matter of “more so.”
He has enormous personal tolerance for dramatic, high-stakes situations in which outcomes are unknown and won’t immediately be known. The waiting doesn’t wear him down.
He operates as if he honestly believes we don’t need allies, as if the concept is antique. He’s threatening again to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But having and holding allies is simple prudence. They steady your position in moments of danger—they help you make the case, and share the intelligence burden—and broaden your influence in peace. More than that, allies add legitimacy and moral authority. You’re acting with others, not only for yourself, and you’re going forward with shared values that imply historical meaning, which has its own force. Having allies means that when something bad happens you don’t stand alone.
It is not sentimental to care about this, it is babyish to think it means nothing.
Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut. George W. Bush was famously a gut player too, and having a good gut, a good brain and good judgment are a great boost in life and leadership. But it can’t be all gut. A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience. It can have limited utility in wholly new territory. Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning. You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe.
Also gut never does a full audit—you need your brain for that, for reflection and self-examination on how or where you went wrong, to help you next time.
And gut doesn’t necessarily travel. A good gut in one domain can be a bad one in another. You can confuse domains.
Facing MAGA 