Hey Donald Trump, what was all that back there?
I’ll start off this morning’s column by pointing out that in a fluid situation like the one involving Donald Trump and Iran, there’s a decent chance that new developments will change the story during the short time between when I’m writing this and when you’re reading it. And that’s actually part of the problem: this shouldn’t be an unpredictable situation.
When you’re the big dog on the porch – and the United States always is – you don’t ever have to simply hope that things might go your way on the international stage. Fair or not, we have the strength, the clout, and the leverage to tilt almost any international situation in the direction we want it to go. Oftentimes it doesn’t tilt it all the way to where we want it. But it’s very often a foregone conclusion that the United States is going to mostly get its way in most international situations that involve the United States. Leave it to Trump, the biggest idiot on the planet, to find a way to screw this up.
Israel and Iran have been attacking each other for weeks in controlled fashion. Whatever you might think of the merits of the situation, the reality is that neither nation appears to want an all out war – otherwise one of them would have tried to invade the other’s territory by now.
So what is the United States to do? Israel is a close U.S. ally, and suffice it to say that the current Iranian regime is not. But Israel isn’t losing this conflict, and again, it’s not an actual war, so the savvy move for the United States would be to publicly support Israel while staying out of it. Let Benjamin Netanyahu and Masoud Pezeshkian trade fire off all the missiles they want. If anyone involved with the conflict wants the United States involved at any point, then we get involved accordingly. Except, again, Trump is an idiot.
Trump announced that he was considering bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, which was a valid threat to make. The President of the United States makes that threat, and just maybe the President of Iran decides to play it a little closer to the vest against Israel, on the off chance that the President of the United States might actually be insane enough to go through with it.
The trouble is, the President of the United States is indeed insane enough to have gone through with it. Yesterday I wrote that there was no way to predict with any confidence what would happen next. I also said the most likely next move would be that Iran fires some missiles at a military base associated with the United States, knowing that the missiles wouldn’t hit anything, so that the Iranian regime could save face with its own people. The United States attacked Iran, Iran fired back, ta da, it’s over. Except it’s not.
Yesterday Trump announced out of nowhere that Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire. Except they hadn’t. Iran’s response was pretty much “huh?” – and Netanyahu probably wasn’t happy either. Solely because it was the President of the United States making the announcement, and not because of any clout or savvy belonging to Donald Trump, the two nations sorta kinda agreed to a very brief ceasefire, perhaps if only to chuckle at how badly Trump has backed himself into a corner.
Within hours of both nations agreeing to sort of temporarily go along with Trump’s imaginary ceasefire, Israel claimed that Iran had resumed firing missiles at Israel. Well of course Iran did. Iran saw an opportunity to immediately make Trump look weak. Again, I don’t know what else might transpire between the time I’m writing this and the time you’re reading this. But if Iran and Israel quickly go back to trading missile strikes, it’ll completely neuter Donald Trump. He’ll have been made a complete fool. Rendered powerless. Taken off the chess board. Weaker than an unpopular Prime Minister of Israel and an unsteady President of Iran.
Since when does the President of the United States have the least leverage in the room? That’s never been the case. The United States has been dominant, or co-dominant, on the world stage for almost as long as it’s existed. You’d probably have to go back to before the War of 1812. Back when there were only eighteen states. That’s how badly Trump has blown this situation. He’s the President of the United States, and yet he’s become a broken third wheel in a regional conflict between two nations that are both supposed to be scared of pissing us off.
Many people are asking what Trump is thinking with all of this nonsense. No one seems to be able to come up with an answer. I would suggest that he isn’t thinking at all. Trump’s cognitive condition during his latest public appearances has been so poor that you seriously wonder if he could still pass the “identify this picture of a giraffe” test that he loves bragging about.
So here we are, with a convicted felon of a President of the United States who is a psychopath to begin with and is now almost fully brain dead, who is more unpopular at home than New Coke, who is a total joke on the world stage, and who is even losing large chunks of his own base just five months into his term, doesn’t accidentally get us all killed.
But you know what? We can’t do anything about that. Those of us sitting at home can’t stop Trump from doing these brain dead things. Nor can we stop Iran and Israel from going at each other. What we can do is make sure that Trump pays a price for all of this, in terms of an even lower approval rating. So let’s help make sure everyone knows that 1) Trump is doing this solely because of his historically low approval rating, 2) he has no idea what he’s doing, and 3) he’s fully succumbed to dementia. Let’s do our part to make Trump as unpopular as possible. It’s the one thing that’ll weaken him the most, and thus give him less power to even try to get involved in complex international conflicts.
