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
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