Donald Trump has become something of a sole man. His cabinet members and White House visitors report that the president has developed a penchant for handing out $145 Florsheim shoes in an effort to up their sartorial game. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell reported that Dr. Johnson recoiled at an “eleemosynary supply” of shoes as an impecunious student at Christ Church, Oxford and threw them away with indignation. Trump’s followers have no such freedom of action. “All the boys have them,” one official told the Wall Street Journal, which ran a picture of his administration leaders obediently lined up and wearing the same shiny black leather numbers.
The war increasingly resembles a prolonged exercise in folie de grandeur
Despite Trump’s best efforts, however, the administration has been caught flat footed, at least when it comes to the conflict in Iran. Trump envisions himself as an economic grandmaster but gyrations in energy markets seem to have come as something of a rude shock to him and his confederates. They had presumed that Tehran, much as it had in the past, would refrain from disrupting shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, Tehran has moved to mine it, a measure that has introduced further volatility into oil prices. The Trump administration says that it has destroyed 16 Iranian minelayers in response.
So far, the fiscal price of the measures that the Pentagon has undertaken amounts to $5.6 billion. The Center for Strategic and Independent Studies estimates the daily costs at $891 billion per day. For a weary titan that is staggering under a federal debt of $38 trillion and counting, the war increasingly resembles a prolonged exercise in folie de grandeur.
Will the precipitous rise in gas prices doom Trump politically? The American economy is already showing flashing warning signals. The latest report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that a mere 181,000 jobs were created in 2025. February saw a loss of 92,000. Nor has the manufacturing sector shown any signs of recovery despite Trump’s tariffs.
The latest sign of Trump’s predicament arrived today when the Pentagon divulged that at least 140 soldiers have been injured in the war. None of this augurs well for the Republican party’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections. The true legacy of “Operation Epic Fury” may simply be to infuriate the American electorate, which, according to a new Quinnapiac poll, takes a dim view of the war and an even dimmer one of sending in ground troops – 74 percent oppose boots on the ground.
This opposition, as it happens, is not confined to Democrats and independents. Some of the most vociferous denunciations of the Iran excursion, as Trump has dubbed it, are emanating from the ranks of his own champions. Curt Mills, the executive editor of the American Conservative, told me that the administration has offered up a farrago of specious justifications for the war. He suggested that of the Iran hawks, Pete Hegseth is the most honest. Mills observes that Hegseth has simply “dispensed with rationales for the war. He exalts Ares. Good for him for jettisoning the niceties.”
Others point to the irony of an administration that wanted to confront China now cannibalizing American military supplies in Asia on behalf of the Middle East. The foreign policy maven Sumantra Maitra, whose concept of a “dormant Nato,” served as the administration’s unofficial credo, points out that “we are having to strip mine our forces in Asia. It’s the reverse of burden shifting and it’s ironic that this is happening under an administration which is now being dragged and chain-ganged into a conflict by a reckless protectorate in one of the most toxic regions of the world.”
Perhaps Trump’s volte-face should not altogether come as a surprise. It was another Republican president, George W. Bush, who campaigned in 2000 on the claim that he would introduce a “new realism” that would shun globalism and emphasize sovereignty and national interests. Trump, who professed much the same, has become entranced, like Bush, by the prospect of reshaping the globe in America’s image. Instead of polishing the American brand, however, he may have irrevocably tarnished it.
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