JEFFREY ST. CLAIR >
I remember when Woodward and Bernstein’s description in Final Days
of Nixon wandering the halls of the West Wing late at night having
drunken conversations with the portraits of FDR, Jefferson and Lincoln,
seemed such an inconceivable account of a president who’d lost his
marbles that many people assumed they’d made it up, though their source
was Tricia’s husband Edward Cox. [Nixon
got looped on expensive French wines, Chateau Margaux and Lafitte
Rothschild, which, in true Dick Nixon style, he often mixed with a
splash of…7 Up!] But Donald
Trump posts his insane rants online for all to see, nearly every night,
and without the aid of alcohol to set him off, just his own
disintegrating mind and no one bats an eye anymore. Last week, he
compared himself to Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Alexander the Great (does
he know the Macedonian psychopath was bisexual?), claiming he was more
powerful than all of them, and was “by far the most powerful person that
has ever walked this planet,” because of his “global reach.” (Does he
know Global Reach was the title of a book on transnational corporations written by the left-wing political economist Richard Barnett?)
During daylight hours, Trump sensibly defending cutting a deal with
Iran that ended the war, allowing Iran to keep its enriched uraniumn
stockpiles, maintain and restock its ballistic missile arsenal, have
control over the Strait of Hormuz, remove sanctions on Iranian oil,
unfreeze $28 billion in Iranian financial assets and commit to help
raise at $300 billion reconstruction fund to reconstruct the damage to
Iran’s infrastructure from the US/Israeli airstrikes. Trump even
defended Iran’s right to defend itself and admitted that the US couldn’t
dislodge Iran from controlling the Strait of Hormuz without sending in
US ground troops and sustaining heavy losses. Of course, he’s said 100
different things about the Strait of Hormuz, including that it didn’t
matter because the US has so much oil it doesn’t know where to park all
of the barrels. [Fact check: 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows
through the Strait; the price of gas here in Oregon City is still $4.97 a
gallon cash; and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drained down
to a puddle. Tell us another one, Don!] And, most consequentially
perhaps, he publicly criticized Netanyahu for continuing to bomb Lebanon
and attempting to undermine his deal.
But that was by day. By night, another Trump emerges. A belligerent,
bombastic, even sociopathic Trump, who threatened to “bomb the shit” out
of Iran if he didn’t get his way and to kill the Iranian diplomats
“before they even made it back to Tehran.” He vowed to seize the Strait
of Hormuz and take all of the oil. He boasted about provisions that
weren’t in the MOU he signed and decided the existence of provisions
that were.
Trump’s public support is now down to 30%, the lowest of any recent
president, even Biden in his dotage and George W. at his nadir. But he’s
still more popular than his war on Iran, which is supported by only one
in four Americans. Few believe the war was worth the costs. Even fewer
know what the war was all about in the first place. Trump has never been
a great communicator; aside from his code-words and dogwhistles to
bigots, it’s increasingly difficult to deconstruct what he’s actually
saying and what he’s saying actually means. But he promoted himself as a
great salesman, mainly of Trump. But he couldn’t sell the Iran war and
now he can’t sell a plan to end it, especially to his principal
political sponsor, the person most responsible for resurrecting his
political career when it was on life support after J6, Miriam Adelson.
Adelson infused Trump’s Preserve America PAC with $100 million and
raised, pledged and contributed another $150 million to other
Trump-affiliated coffers, dwarfing the $75 million contributed by Elon
Musk. What did Adelson expect for her money? Palestinians wiped out of
Gaza, stripped of their land in the West Bank, Southern Lebanon seized
into Israeli control and Iran blown off the map. So give Trump credit
for double-crossing his investors, if he understood the consequences of
his actions.
Trump is impulsive. He Tweets on impulse. He acts on impulse.
Consequentialism is not in his vocabulary, even in a mispronounced or
badly misspelled way. There are deals to be made and deals to be blown
up. Often the same deal. Often on the same day. This may work in real estate. It doesn’t work in war or diplomacy.
The internal conflicts are beginning to leak out of Trump’s
consciousness, the weight of Adelson’s millions battling with the weight
of Trump’s ego. Trump’s been burning a lot of bridges lately, including
every bridge into New York City. But can he afford to burn this one?
Not just the link to Miriam Adelson, but the entire symbiotic
relationship of the Trump presidency, indeed the entire US government,
with the state of Israel and its stateside lobby. What if, for example,
the Ellisons, who, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal,
have injected $45 million into Trump-related accounts and gotten
rewarded with a lightning-fast approval of the takeover of Warner
Brothers by Paramount, turn on him and use their control of CBS and CNN
with the ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss at the helm to rake him over the
coals, as Adelson owned media outlets are already doing in Israel?
The knives are also coming out from inside the house, as they
invariably do when the aging ruler, physically infirm and mentally
unstable, shows signs of vulnerability. This explains the curious case
of the normally status-seeking Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, in
name at least, who seems to play no role in the Trump administration’s
diplomatic initiatives, to the extent there have been any stabs at
diplomacy, instead of lectures, threats and posturing. With his eyes on
the White House, Rubio certainly has no desire to alienate AIPAC,
Adelson or the Ellisons. He’s hanging back, lurking in the shadows,
waiting on the deal either to fall apart under its own weight or be
sabotaged by the Israelis, as US intelligence agencies warned Trump was
Netanyahu’s intent last week.
At some point, Trump handed the mess he’d made in Iran over to JD
Vance to clean up. Vance had quietly opposed the war from the beginning,
for his own political reasons. He wants to inherit what’s left of the
MAGA contingent in 2028 and has begun talking more and more like Tucker
Carlson on quaaludes. His presence within the Administration has waxed
and waned with Trump’s mood. Rubio was clearly in favor after the
kidnapping of Maduro, but after the Iran war began to crash on the
Strait of Hormuz, Trump turned to JD Vance to mop up the mess. Vance
has less diplomatic experience than Rubio. He was clearly just glad to
hear his name called from his seat on the far end of the bench. It was
clearly a setup. If Vance emerges with a deal, Trump will seize the
credit. If the deal falls apart, he’ll get the blame. Rubio will stick
the blade into the VP and let Trump call in someone else, Stephen
Miller, probably, to wipe away the blood.
So put yourselves in the Iranians’ shoes. What are they to make of all of this? If
Trump’s behavior seems schizophrenic to you, imagine how the Iranians,
sophisticated diplomats, viewed his baffling and wildly contradictory
statements from day to day and hour to hour. They were so confounded by
Trump’s bipolar mood swings that they told mediators in Pakistan that
they had consulted psychologists,
not of course to fix Trump’s mind. It’s beyond repair. But to decode
his mindset. His mental pathology. How to read whether he means what he
says, and which statements he really means when he quickly contradicts
himself and how long he’ll hold those views before he changes his mind.
Does he actually trust the people he sent to negotiate for him?
Does he have the fortitude to stand up to the Israelis?
Would he really follow through on his threat to kill them in a drone
strike? He didn’t hesitate to wipe out the previous Ayatollah and most
of the leadership of his regime and their families on the first day of
the war. He even laughed about killing the people he wanted to replace
them with. What kind of a man does that? What kind of a man admits to
doing that? to analyze
Trump’s statements and try to predict his response to Iran’s proposals
in the peace talks. Is any deal they sign with Trump worth the pixels
it’s written with, especially when Israel isn’t on board, as it clearly
isn’t.
By the way, there’s no word on whether the Iranians consulted with
Freudians or Jungians. There’s a case to be made for each or both, given
his unresolved mother issues and his obsession with power for the sake
of power.
But psychology can only take you so far. Sooner or later, as
Kierkegaard said, you must confront “the darkness of the current
moment,” and whatever malign forces lurk within. And this goes far
beyond Trump’s serial prevarications into the nature of the American
empire in extremis. How do you trust a regime that says the rules of war
don’t apply to us and drives the point home by bombing a girls’ school?
If the Geneva Conventions aren’t binding, how long will an MOU serve to
restrain them?
As Andrew Cockburn astutely observed in a recent piece,
the new Iranian regime isn’t bound by the old rules, even the old
fatwas issued by the late Ayatollah, such as the one commanding that
Iran not develop weapons of mass destruction. The new regime came to
power, seeing their fathers, uncles and brothers slaughtered by the US
and Israel in a surprise attack. And they’ve quickly gained a stature
and authority that the old, more cautious and conciliatory regime didn’t
enjoy. They proved themselves. They survived the worst two nuclear
regimes could fling at them. They not only survived, but they struck
back, militarily and economically and brought Trump to the table,
desperate to end the war before it ends his presidency. The Iranians may
not have won the war. But endured it and survived it and are now
winning the terms for how it will end.
COUNTERPUNCH
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR>
I remember when Woodward and Bernstein’s description in Final Days
of Nixon wandering the halls of the West Wing late at night having
drunken conversations with the portraits of FDR, Jefferson and Lincoln,
seemed such an inconceivable account of a president who’d lost his
marbles that many people assumed they’d made it up, though their source
was Tricia’s husband Edward Cox. [Nixon
got looped on expensive French wines, Chateau Margaux and Lafitte
Rothschild, which, in true Dick Nixon style, he often mixed with a
splash of…7 Up!] But Donald
Trump posts his insane rants online for all to see, nearly every night,
and without the aid of alcohol to set him off, just his own
disintegrating mind and no one bats an eye anymore. Last week, he
compared himself to Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Alexander the Great (does
he know the Macedonian psychopath was bisexual?), claiming he was more
powerful than all of them, and was “by far the most powerful person that
has ever walked this planet,” because of his “global reach.” (Does he
know Global Reach was the title of a book on transnational corporations written by the left-wing political economist Richard Barnett?)
During daylight hours, Trump sensibly defending cutting a deal with
Iran that ended the war, allowing Iran to keep its enriched uraniumn
stockpiles, maintain and restock its ballistic missile arsenal, have
control over the Strait of Hormuz, remove sanctions on Iranian oil,
unfreeze $28 billion in Iranian financial assets and commit to help
raise at $300 billion reconstruction fund to reconstruct the damage to
Iran’s infrastructure from the US/Israeli airstrikes. Trump even
defended Iran’s right to defend itself and admitted that the US couldn’t
dislodge Iran from controlling the Strait of Hormuz without sending in
US ground troops and sustaining heavy losses. Of course, he’s said 100
different things about the Strait of Hormuz, including that it didn’t
matter because the US has so much oil it doesn’t know where to park all
of the barrels. [Fact check: 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows
through the Strait; the price of gas here in Oregon City is still $4.97 a
gallon cash; and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drained down
to a puddle. Tell us another one, Don!] And, most consequentially
perhaps, he publicly criticized Netanyahu for continuing to bomb Lebanon
and attempting to undermine his deal.
But that was by day. By night, another Trump emerges. A belligerent,
bombastic, even sociopathic Trump, who threatened to “bomb the shit” out
of Iran if he didn’t get his way and to kill the Iranian diplomats
“before they even made it back to Tehran.” He vowed to seize the Strait
of Hormuz and take all of the oil. He boasted about provisions that
weren’t in the MOU he signed and decided the existence of provisions
that were.
Trump’s public support is now down to 30%, the lowest of any recent
president, even Biden in his dotage and George W. at his nadir. But he’s
still more popular than his war on Iran, which is supported by only one
in four Americans. Few believe the war was worth the costs. Even fewer
know what the war was all about in the first place. Trump has never been
a great communicator; aside from his code-words and dogwhistles to
bigots, it’s increasingly difficult to deconstruct what he’s actually
saying and what he’s saying actually means. But he promoted himself as a
great salesman, mainly of Trump. But he couldn’t sell the Iran war and
now he can’t sell a plan to end it, especially to his principal
political sponsor, the person most responsible for resurrecting his
political career when it was on life support after J6, Miriam Adelson.
Adelson infused Trump’s Preserve America PAC with $100 million and
raised, pledged and contributed another $150 million to other
Trump-affiliated coffers, dwarfing the $75 million contributed by Elon
Musk. What did Adelson expect for her money? Palestinians wiped out of
Gaza, stripped of their land in the West Bank, Southern Lebanon seized
into Israeli control and Iran blown off the map. So give Trump credit
for double-crossing his investors, if he understood the consequences of
his actions.
Trump is impulsive. He Tweets on impulse. He acts on impulse.
Consequentialism is not in his vocabulary, even in a mispronounced or
badly misspelled way. There are deals to be made and deals to be blown
up. Often the same deal. Often on the same day. This may work in real estate. It doesn’t work in war or diplomacy.
The internal conflicts are beginning to leak out of Trump’s
consciousness, the weight of Adelson’s millions battling with the weight
of Trump’s ego. Trump’s been burning a lot of bridges lately, including
every bridge into New York City. But can he afford to burn this one?
Not just the link to Miriam Adelson, but the entire symbiotic
relationship of the Trump presidency, indeed the entire US government,
with the state of Israel and its stateside lobby. What if, for example,
the Ellisons, who, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal,
have injected $45 million into Trump-related accounts and gotten
rewarded with a lightning-fast approval of the takeover of Warner
Brothers by Paramount, turn on him and use their control of CBS and CNN
with the ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss at the helm to rake him over the
coals, as Adelson owned media outlets are already doing in Israel?
The knives are also coming out from inside the house, as they
invariably do when the aging ruler, physically infirm and mentally
unstable, shows signs of vulnerability. This explains the curious case
of the normally status-seeking Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, in
name at least, who seems to play no role in the Trump administration’s
diplomatic initiatives, to the extent there have been any stabs at
diplomacy, instead of lectures, threats and posturing. With his eyes on
the White House, Rubio certainly has no desire to alienate AIPAC,
Adelson or the Ellisons. He’s hanging back, lurking in the shadows,
waiting on the deal either to fall apart under its own weight or be
sabotaged by the Israelis, as US intelligence agencies warned Trump was
Netanyahu’s intent last week.
At some point, Trump handed the mess he’d made in Iran over to JD
Vance to clean up. Vance had quietly opposed the war from the beginning,
for his own political reasons. He wants to inherit what’s left of the
MAGA contingent in 2028 and has begun talking more and more like Tucker
Carlson on quaaludes. His presence within the Administration has waxed
and waned with Trump’s mood. Rubio was clearly in favor after the
kidnapping of Maduro, but after the Iran war began to crash on the
Strait of Hormuz, Trump turned to JD Vance to mop up the mess. Vance
has less diplomatic experience than Rubio. He was clearly just glad to
hear his name called from his seat on the far end of the bench. It was
clearly a setup. If Vance emerges with a deal, Trump will seize the
credit. If the deal falls apart, he’ll get the blame. Rubio will stick
the blade into the VP and let Trump call in someone else, Stephen
Miller, probably, to wipe away the blood.
So put yourselves in the Iranians’ shoes. What are they to make of all of this? If
Trump’s behavior seems schizophrenic to you, imagine how the Iranians,
sophisticated diplomats, viewed his baffling and wildly contradictory
statements from day to day and hour to hour. They were so confounded by
Trump’s bipolar mood swings that they told mediators in Pakistan that
they had consulted psychologists,
not of course to fix Trump’s mind. It’s beyond repair. But to decode
his mindset. His mental pathology. How to read whether he means what he
says, and which statements he really means when he quickly contradicts
himself and how long he’ll hold those views before he changes his mind.
Does he actually trust the people he sent to negotiate for him?
Does he have the fortitude to stand up to the Israelis?
Would he really follow through on his threat to kill them in a drone
strike? He didn’t hesitate to wipe out the previous Ayatollah and most
of the leadership of his regime and their families on the first day of
the war. He even laughed about killing the people he wanted to replace
them with. What kind of a man does that? What kind of a man admits to
doing that? to analyze
Trump’s statements and try to predict his response to Iran’s proposals
in the peace talks. Is any deal they sign with Trump worth the pixels
it’s written with, especially when Israel isn’t on board, as it clearly
isn’t.
By the way, there’s no word on whether the Iranians consulted with
Freudians or Jungians. There’s a case to be made for each or both, given
his unresolved mother issues and his obsession with power for the sake
of power.
But psychology can only take you so far. Sooner or later, as
Kierkegaard said, you must confront “the darkness of the current
moment,” and whatever malign forces lurk within. And this goes far
beyond Trump’s serial prevarications into the nature of the American
empire in extremis. How do you trust a regime that says the rules of war
don’t apply to us and drives the point home by bombing a girls’ school?
If the Geneva Conventions aren’t binding, how long will an MOU serve to
restrain them?
As Andrew Cockburn astutely observed in a recent piece,
the new Iranian regime isn’t bound by the old rules, even the old
fatwas issued by the late Ayatollah, such as the one commanding that
Iran not develop weapons of mass destruction. The new regime came to
power, seeing their fathers, uncles and brothers slaughtered by the US
and Israel in a surprise attack. And they’ve quickly gained a stature
and authority that the old, more cautious and conciliatory regime didn’t
enjoy. They proved themselves. They survived the worst two nuclear
regimes could fling at them. They not only survived, but they struck
back, militarily and economically and brought Trump to the table,
desperate to end the war before it ends his presidency. The Iranians may
not have won the war. But endured it and survived it and are now
winning the terms for how it will end.
COUNTERPUNCH
