For some among the community of the elderly and infirm, signs of decline might include physical traits like swollen ankles or bruising associated with intravenous medical treatments.
For others, they might include the slurring of words or the inability to maintain a train of thought or control one’s emotions. Emitting odd smells or unsteadiness walking might be still other clues of the toll aging is taking.
But when you are president of the United States, there are more ominous clues that you are losing it, no longer being up to the job. The most troubling and damaging among these might be destroying the world order, attacking vital alliances, aiding enemies, and seeking to serially conquer other lands as if one were a king or a Caesar from another era.
For Donald Trump, of course, we have all of these signs of his unmistakable, irreversible, straight-off-a-cliff losing of the mental capacity we all need to operate constructively outside of a nursing home or a mental institution.
But, when historians examine this moment for the most telling signs of what Space X engineers would call the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of our president’s psyche, it is certain that they will cite the Iran War as one of the clearest signs of Trump’s troubling, costly, unmistakable deterioration.
The acronym the engineers use for their euphemism for a rocket blowing up in much the same way Trump’s mind has is RUD. We are in the RUD phase of the Trump presidency.
There are multiple reasons that a faraway war will be cited as a signature Trump meltdown. First, the war was entirely unnecessary. Indeed, for half a century, American presidents have evaluated whether to enter into such a conflict with Iran and have concluded—because they were capable of rational thought and actually listened to experts—that they should not because it would be costly and produce an outcome like, well, just like the one Trump’s fiasco has produced. It also must be noted that the war was illegal and undertaken without the planning or forethought any rational commander-in-chief might employ before making such a consequential decision.
When advised that the war could lead to an interruption in global energy supplies or potential destabilization of the Middle East, Trump ignored the warnings. When the goal of producing regime change was cited, Trump completely sidestepped the historically established reality that an air war, such as the one he wanted to launch, could not achieve that goal and also approved plans that would end up killing all those he might have wanted to assume control of any new government.
He did not consult with most of our key allies in the region, and indeed, he ignored their interests and the degree to which those interests were related to our own. When things started to go badly, he simply repeated what had led to initial failures.
Subsequently, in his delusional state, he felt he could persuade the world that what was happening was not what they could plainly see. Still later, he sought to try to persuade the entire planet to live within his delusion rather than accepting reality as it was.
When it became clear that the war was hugely unpopular at home because it was causing average Americans real economic pain, he vacillated between lying to us about it and dismissing our real economic concerns as irrelevant. When it became essential to end the war, rather than having experienced negotiators handle the matter, he sent off a team that had proven in Ukraine and Gaza their inability to actually achieve anything like real peace and indeed, who had actually exacerbated important problems in both places.
Crazy behavior along each and every step of the way.
Now, as in the case of the Gaza negotiations, our crack diplomatic team seems to have presented Trump with a “solution” that is not a solution at all, but that rather hits pause on a crisis while punting all of the tough issues associated with it into the future.
Not that we should be against stopping the conflict, even for a brief period. But bad deals like reckless wars have long-term negative consequences and this one seems with rife with them.
Based on the leaked details of the pending Iran agreement, Trump has translated his bad military decisions into what one distinguished nuclear expert, Jon Wolfsthal, who was the senior NSC director for arms control and non-proliferation, called “a disaster.” He summarized the reasons he reached that conclusion in a social media post observing, “Iran is going to open the Straits, but under their “control.” They might agree to ship HEU (highly enriched uranium) out of the country for a lot of money. They are not going to end enrichment and they are not going to give up their missiles or drones.”
Further, the “agreement” to get Iran to commit to not developing a nuclear weapon achieves nothing as that has been their official position for many, many years. “Re-opening” the Strait of Hormuz gets us right back to where we were on February 27th, before the war started. It is asserted Iran will do this for free but in fact, they will get, it seems sanctions relief and perhaps a release of billions in frozen assets which might well be seen as one lump-sum toll payment to restore traffic to as it was…for now. The sanctions relief and cash will also help Iran rebuild its defenses which, as it turns out, were not damaged to anything near the degree claimed by Trump at the outset of the war.
The agreement to get Israel to stop waging its war in Lebanon has three fundamental flaws. One is that the Israelis don’t seem to want to agree to it. Another is that they never honor such agreements. And a third is that their target in the war, Hezbollah, has not been party to the negotiations.
It is asserted that the framework calls for a resolution of the nuclear issue in 60 days. Pretty much no independent expert with whom I have spoken believes that will happen.
Nuclear talks with Iran have gone on for well over a decade now. They are highly complicated. Many in the US government who have been responsible for these issues have been let go. Those in charge don’t really understand the issues. Otherwise, they would know that the worst mistake the U.S. made with regard to Iran’s nuclear capability was Trump pulling out of the deal Obama struck in 2015 and that the second worst error made has been the campaign of attacks that have taken place under Trump 2.0 that have put a more hardline regime in charge in Iran, led them to harden their weapons resources and have given Iran, if anything, greater incentive to develop a deterrent, nuclear or otherwise, to random attacks by the U.S. or Israel.
So that issue will be kicked into the indefinite future, which suits Trump just fine because that’s where he locates all the hard problems he can’t solve. He’s old. He’ll be gone soon. In rare moments of lucidity, he knows that.
Will markets breathe a sigh of relief as a result of such a feeble, incomplete and ill-conceived agreement? Probably. Until they don’t and tensions start to flare once more because nothing really has been resolved. Will the price of gas or fertilizer or food return to pre-war levels any time soon? No, because disruptions to regional infrastructure and global reserves have been such that will take months if not years to restore the status quo before the war.
Like attendants in the nursing home to which any other individual displaying Trump’s brainsickness would be consigned, those around Trump now spend most of their time cleaning up after the patient-in-chief. Indeed, we have entered the phase of Trump’s tenure in office in which almost every major action he takes is driven by impulse unregulated by rational thought and is, consequently, so unpopular and/or damaging that it must be undone, hidden, reframed, apologized for, and, typically, lied about.
In just the past couple of weeks we have seen examples of this with Trump’s transcendently corrupt effort to loot the U.S. Treasury, his bizarre obsession with his golden ballroom and the hospital bunker he seeks to build beneath it, his lunatic need to turn a cherished national monument into a kiddie pool, and his explicit and implied threats to redirect his imperial appetites to Cuba, Panama or, once again, Greenland.
While the age-related descent toward oblivion of any among us is lamentable, the toll when a president arrives at the howling at the moon phase of his existence can extend much further, harming the lives of millions or, even billions of people. Which should unsettle us all since so many in positions of power in the US are deeply in denial about what is happening daily before our very eyes…and because we have two and a half more years of this to look forward to and the president’s prognosis is looking grimmer by the day.
