Was Donald Trump’s profane and threatening tweet, which included an F-bomb and an allusion to Iran’s leaders as “crazy bastards,” on Easter Sunday itself a bunch of BS? Trump is riding high after the daring rescue of an American airman from Iran, but its leadership doesn’t appear to be overly impressed by his tweet threatening a major attack on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. On Saturday, Iran’s military leadership indicated that it had no intention of complying with Trump’s demands, dismissing his vow to destroy its infrastructure as a “helpless, nervous, unbalanced and stupid action.” One of Iran’s media outlets suggested that if anyone is a crazy bastard, it’s America’s president: “Iran’s steadfastness and resistance have driven Trump to the brink of madness.”
Trump is betwixt and between. If he follows through on his coarse threat to bomb Iran to smithereens, Trump risks a widening of the war and a global financial crash. If he doesn’t, Trump will have effectively become a full-time content provider for the Iranian team that has been producing LEGO-style videos that mock him as macho man.
Small wonder that by the early afternoon, Trump had issued a fresh tweet slightly modifying his earlier one. He stated the deadline was 8pm Eastern Time on Tuesday. Trump explained to Axios that a deal with Iran was more than likely but that if it didn’t occur, then, and only then, would he resort to the bomb them back to the Stone Age approach: “I am blowing up everything.” This is the now-familiar Trumpian tactic that if you bluster enough, then your adversary will crumple into a helpless heap. Perhaps Trump will issue a further tweet that declares, as he has in the past, that negotiations are going so swimmingly that he’s not ready to plunge into the Strait of Hormuz and, in any case, it remains the obligation of America’s NATO allies to ensure that it’s opened for shipping.
As always, the issue with trying to decipher Trump’s tweets is that it amounts to a version of the old Roman practice of haruspicy. Reading the entrails entails powers of prophecy that are denied to mere mortals, particularly as Trump’s disciples, including his White House spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, liken the president to Jesus. Put bluntly, Trump has repeatedly asseverated that he is engaged in extensive negotiations with Iran but produced no evidence that they are taking place. Meanwhile, the Iranians themselves just as insistently state that they aren’t.
Whom to believe? A would-be savior who appears to need saving from himself? Or a gang of desperadoes hunkered down in Tehran who have turned the tables on a superpower that was convinced it could oust its adversaries overnight?
Increasingly, Trump appears to be raising doubts not only about his truthfulness but his mental stability. Peter Hitchens, for example, recently expressed the vexation that is mounting among conservatives about Trump’s antics, stating that King Charles should not visit America in late April to mark its 250th anniversary of independence: “I find it quite absurd and rather pathetic that we, supposedly a major country with a long and proud history, should be dispatching His Majesty to endure, as I say, the company of this oaf.” In America itself, a variety of figures, ranging from Ann Coulter to Marjorie Taylor-Green, are expressing their exasperation with Trump’s lurch into Iran. Indeed, Coulter recently hosted me on her podcast “UNSAFE” and I found her views – among them that Trump’s “excursion,” as he is wont to call it, into Iran jeopardizes rather than enhances American national security – eminently sensible.
Indeed, as Trump demands a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, American power, it must be said, is boomeranging upon itself. Absent a countervailing force such as the Soviet Union during the cold war, America is running amok. As Robert Kagan recently noted, it has become a rogue superpower.
Edmund Burke had it right: “I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded… We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.” As Trump ponders whether to make the rubble bounce in Iran, he faces a war that is proving not only dreadful but also ruinous.
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