For a man with the emotional maturity of a three-year-old and the foresight of a newt, Donald Trump is nonetheless a pretty terrible president.
He demonstrated all of these traits again when, issuing yet another edict/entry for his burn book via Truth Social, our commander-in-chief unveiled the Trump Corollary to Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule. Powell’s maxim was, “If you break you, you own it.” It underscored the former Secretary of State’s belief that states and leaders were responsible for the actions they took.
The Trump corollary, unsurprisingly, outlined precisely the opposite approach, just what you would expect from a man who has never accepted responsibility for a single mistake in a life defined by its nearly ceaseless stream of mistakes, disasters, crimes, gaffes, failures, doozies, and boneheaded blunders.
Trump’s message to the world in the midst of the deepening megacatastrophe he unleashed with his illegal war with Iran was as bold as it was embarrassing to the country he leads.
To all the countries of the world now suffering the consequences of the Trump energy crisis associated with Iran’s decision to shut the Strait of Hormuz to all ships associated with the U.S. and our allies, Trump’s message was a big F.U.
“I broke it. Now you fix it,” said the Man Who Would Be King.
The exact text of Trump’s social media post was: “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT.”
Grammatical convolutions and misunderstood vocabulary aside (decimated means destroyed by one tenth; he probably meant “devastated”), Trump’s meaning was, “sure I screwed world energy and food markets and probably have sent the world hurtling toward recession, but I’m bored with the fighting, I can’t think of a way to fix things and so, maybe I’ll just leave it to everyone else to figure a way out of the mess I’ve created.”
It was consistent with recent reporting, first from Alexander Ward and Meredith McGraw at the Wall Street Journal, which indicated that, per the story’s headline, “Trump Tells Aides He is Willing to End the War Without Reopening Hormuz.” He is apparently considering the position because forcing Iran to open the global commercial chokepoint would require a level of boots -on-the-ground troop commitment and high risk that made Trump queasy. As it should. As anyone who has ever considered fighting such a war knew.
In other words, Trump was seeking to exit his reckless war with an equally reckless, and also deeply unrealistic, strategy of just doing an old-fashioned Trumpian TACO pirouette and heading home.
Other elements of the strategy include those old Trumpian favorites: lying and changing the subject. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did his part in the misrepresenting-the-truth department when he seemed to suggest the “military operation” in Iran was a success because “regime change has occurred.”
Of course, the idea behind regime change is to actually seek to replace a bad regime with a better one and not to a) replace it with one, as we have apparently done, that may be even worse; and b) kill so many members of the old regime that their resolve to fight back is strengthened, even as their ability to effectively negotiate or implement the terms of any negotiated settlement is weakened or negated.
As for changing the subject, while Trump did hope to shift the story to the target of his next nutso war of conquest (Cuba), recent days have produced so many bad headlines for him that even his usual wild threats are getting drowned out.
For example, on Tuesday, one court told the White House to shut down Trump’s unneeded, ugly and ostentatious rebuild of the East Wing of the White House, while another ruled Trump did not have the authority to shut down key pillars of U.S. public broadcasting.
Earlier in the week Trump had been hit with brutal poll results that very nearly twice as many Americans disapproved of Trump’s performance as supported it and, with regard to the East Wing, the New York Times did a nasty take down of the project enumerating its many flaws. (Which in keeping with the theme of this column might actually suggest it is a suitable monument to Trump. Even if it is never finished. Maybe especially if it is never finished. Perhaps what we need to remind us of Trump is not a ballroom but a giant wound threatening the very foundations of the presidency.)
And later this week, the Supreme Court is going to take up and, many expect, prepare to slap down, Trump’s illegal, racist effort to bypass the birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution with an executive order he promulgated last year. (And let’s not fail to note the fallout sure to come from the sordid tales now breaking of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s kinkadelic husband.)
As for the Iran War, whatever his stance may end up being, boots on the ground or none, turning and running, or sinking further into a quagmire of his own making, one thing is already clear: Grave damage has been done. The region will not return to its pre-war stability for years to come, if ever. Tensions between Iran and the neighbors it has attacked in the wake of the Trump-Israeli onslaught are greater than ever.
Vital elements of infrastructure have already been damaged and may take years to rebuild. Thousands are dead.
If Trump puts boots on the ground, $200 a barrel oil and market meltdowns are guaranteed. If he does not, that doesn’t resolve anything. Iran may decide to operate the strait as a toll booth going forward. Or it may just periodically disrupt shipping or attack ships in ways that will keep the financial world skittish and the rest of us paying the price.
And all that is to say nothing of the possibility that Iran may feel it is now in their interest to restart its nuclear program, that the world may respond to that with an accelerating global arms race, that instability in Iran could cause a regional refugee crisis, that Israel might keep fighting even if the U.S. tries to stop and that, in short, the entire mess may get much much messier before this is all over.
If it is ever all over.
Oh, and let’s not ignore the potential fallout that would result if Trump follows through on his recent threats, including the one in this morning’s Truth Social post cited above, that he will somehow undo America’s commitment to our NATO allies. He has been wanting to blow up the last remnants of the post-World War II international order for years now (his prime directive from the Kremlin) and should he do it, the geopolitical aftershocks will be massive.
Throughout his life, Trump has been able to get out of facing the consequences for his past errors and scandals with the help of divorce attorneys, bankruptcy attorneys, spin doctors, secret cash pay offs from sleazeball tabloid publishers, gullible voters, the gnat-like attention span of the media and by hiring his own personal lawyers to debase the U.S. Department of Justice and turn it into the world’s biggest ever industrial strength obstruction of justice factory.
But Iran may be different. This one may already be out of his control. It may be TACO-proof. And while that means he may finally get his comeuppance and be held accountable by America’s friends worldwide, the downside of all that is that this twisted, desiccated old felon will also get his way in that we will spend much of the next several decades cleaning up the global calamities he has unleashed.
