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For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.
“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”
The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.
Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.
The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.
Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.
Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end – It always does!” he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday—is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.
Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t close the center—though, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it’s not clear what is left to stay open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.
Trump’s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the Treasury for payouts to his political pals, to redress supposed “weaponization” of the federal government, may be going even worse. To make that happen (and to avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides hastily engineered a deal that sidelined government lawyers and took some advisers by surprise. Now it’s facing blowback from Congress and doubts from inside the White House, and two judges on Friday issued rulings calling the fund into question. Axios reported this afternoon that according to two senior administration officials, the White House intends to drop its plans for the fund entirely.
That brings us back to Iran, where few indications forecast success. The White House teased and then pulled back deals several times in the past few weeks. Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday that he promised would result in a “final determination” on Iran, but it ended without a resolution and seems to have been totally overtaken by events. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that “we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.” They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he’d “finish the job” with military might.
Trump can’t get his talking points straight now. This afternoon, the president told CNBC’s Eamon Javers that he didn’t care whether talks were over, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time.” Not long after, he posted that “talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Today’s hostilities could be a sign of the larger conflict that Trump threatened, or just more evidence of how tenuous the supposed cease-fire in place is. Either way, the fact that so many big initiatives are heading in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn’t want people paying too much attention—and doesn’t offer a lot of reasons for anyone to relax and take his assurances that everything will work out fine.
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Today’s News
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers, including women and minority officers, a move that current and former defense officials say is highly unusual. His decision appears inconsistent with the military’s merit-based-promotion system.
- Anthropic filed to go public, making it the first of the major AI start-ups to begin the IPO process. The company, which makes the Claude chatbot, could be valued at about $1 trillion when its shares begin trading.
- Oil prices jumped more than 4 percent today as the United States and Israel renewed fighting with Iran, raising fears that the Strait of Hormuz could remain closed, further disrupting global energy supplies.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores why even the closest-knit families can leave important subjects unspoken.
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Evening Read
Fold Laundry With Me!
By Julie Beck
The nation’s welcome mats have been doing a lot less welcoming lately. Although Americans have been spending much more time at home in recent years—an hour and 39 minutes more a day in 2022 than in 2003—they aren’t inviting other people in. The percentage of people who hosted or attended a social event on an average day has fallen by 50 percent over the past couple of decades. Socializing of any kind declined over that same period, and isolation rose. These days, it seems, home is where people go to be alone.
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Culture Break
Read. A new novel by Harriet Clark, the daughter of a jailed revolutionary, shows the plight of the radical’s children, Julius Taranto writes.
Watch (or skip). Pressure (out now in theaters) offers a freshly suspenseful take on D-Day, David Sims writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post Why Trump Is Suddenly Asking Americans to Look Away appeared first on The Atlantic.
