Sunday, May 24, 2026
Putin Has Lost Control of the Narrative
Regimes that go to war usually work hard to convince their population that the decision to fight was justified and that any sacrifices will be manageable. In this spirit, Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried for more than four years to protect the population of Moscow from the consequences of his invasion of Ukraine. Festivals and other events have gone on much as they did before, and the effects of supply shortages in the capital have been limited. Even though more than 1 million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, the government has apparently avoided enlisting too many from Moscow or St. Petersburg, preferring to take its cannon fodder from faraway Russian imperial possessions.
But Putin can no longer lull Muscovites into thinking that his war does not involve them. Earlier this month, the annual parade commemorating the defeat of Germany in World War II was startlingly short and devoid of most of the usual military hardware, because the Russian dictator was terrified of Ukrainian drone attacks. A week later, Ukraine launched hundreds of drones and cruise missiles on the Russian capital. The action, an audacious counterstrike to a mass Russian attack on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities two days earlier, showed that multiple rings of air defense around Moscow have been thoroughly compromised. The narrative that Putin has constructed—about a mere “special military operation” that need not trouble Russia’s elites or middle class—is now unraveling completely. Any pretense that Moscow itself can stay out of the war has vanished.
In armed conflicts between nations, major momentum shifts occur when one of the combatants loses control of events—when its rulers can no longer convincingly tell themselves or their public that their side is on the cusp of victory. Although the 1968 Tet Offensive by North Vietnam and the Vietcong was a military failure, the attacks along the length and breadth of South Vietnam made many Americans conclude that the U.S. effort to prop up the Saigon government was doomed.
A more relevant historical parallel involves Japan during World War II. From the Pearl Harbor attack onward, Japan’s domestic propaganda described the country’s early victories as far more decisive than they were and constantly assured the public that the country was winning its war with the United States. . . . They spun outrageous lies, claiming that Japan had sunk two American aircraft carriers at Midway and lost only one of its own. Military leaders went to extreme lengths to conceal the truth, even keeping wounded sailors in isolation for long periods afterward.
In June 1944, however, this charade became impossible to keep up as the United States moved to seize the Mariana Islands—a campaign whose success would put the Japanese homeland within range of the B-29 Superfortress bomber, then the newest American technological bomber. Japan focused its remaining strength on the fight to hold the islands. . . . . Those victories meant that Tokyo would soon come under direct air assault. The Japanese government had no choice but to speak the truth: The war was not going as well as portrayed and would soon get a lot worse.
All nations face economic and logistical constraints, and even authoritarian systems have their own internal politics. The loss of the Marianas brought down Japan’s militarist prime minister Hideki Tojo and emboldened relative moderates within the country’s elite.
How the news of Ukraine’s growing strength—and Moscow’s exposure to future attacks—will alter public opinion in Russia is difficult to judge, not least because of censorship. To keep the population ignorant, Putin’s government has tightened restrictions on the use of the internet. But in recent days, videos have circulated of Russians expressing shock at their capital’s vulnerability. Russian newspapers have been forced to write stories about Ukrainian capabilities.
Ukraine previously struggled to deploy accurate long-range-weapons systems but now appears to have improved its targeting capabilities and production capacity. In the counterstrike on Moscow, Ukrainian systems undeniably hit a range of strategic targets: an electronics-component factory, oil infrastructure, and other facilities. Even Moscow’s main airport shut down for a while because of the attack. Having penetrated Moscow’s defenses once, Ukraine will almost certainly do so again. President Volodymyr Zelensky is signaling as much.
If Zelensky is correct, Putin will have to be more honest with the Russian people about the catastrophe he has unleashed on them. More than four years into what was supposed to be a three-day campaign, Russia is not on a trajectory to victory.
None of this means that Russia will instantly fold. Its forces continue to launch deadly attacks on Ukrainian cities. Putin has periodically hinted at using Russia’s nuclear weapons, only to be slapped down by his more powerful ally, Chinese President Xi Jinping, but he is again making noise about such an escalation.
But the basic dynamics of the war seem to have shifted. Russia has weakened. Even without American help, Ukraine appears to be getting stronger and, more and more, is shaping the war in its own favor. The better the Russian people understand this, the worse Putin’s predicament gets.
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Trump’s Iran Endgame Is Surrender
The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”
Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.
Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.
For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.
In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.
Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.
Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The [Felon] president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.
According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.
Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?
Most likely, the new normal in the Persian Gulf will be chronic instability and frequent disruptions in shipping. That’s what happens when the hegemon cedes hegemony.
Friday, May 22, 2026
Donald Trump Is Mentally Cracking Up
Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar share a distinction that we imagine many Americans would happily cede to them: They have likely watched more Donald Trump rallies, speeches, and press briefings than any other living Americans. . . . And both closely monitor the president’s social media posts. . . . So they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated over the years?
“The past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said. “It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different: “There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”
Rupar sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the past.”
Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever posted,’” Rupar said.
The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards, will live in presidential infamy. . . . It was followed two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These posts were a turning point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”; that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now?
[T]hat moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s social media activity . . . .
Yes, he’s always been like this. But many people think it’s worse now. Is it age? He turns 80 in June; there are millions of compos mentis octogenarians out there, but it’s fair to ask whether age is slowing Trump down, especially given the way that he and his backers carried on relentlessly about Biden. Does he have dementia? Or are we seeing more glaring manifestations of his legendary arrogance, which is rooted in his profound insecurity? Or is it merely the stupidity of a man who not only never reads a book but reportedly can’t even read one-page briefing papers?
Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is sobering: The person with the power to sic the Justice Department on perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear attack is slipping. Maybe fast. And the chance that his Cabinet or his party will do anything about it is zero, which means we’re going to have to survive two and a half more years of this.
In 2025, as he began his second term, Trump was the oldest person ever to be sworn into the presidency. . . . . Trump is less than four years younger than Biden. During Biden’s presidency, Trump and MAGA writ large were laser-focused on Biden’s age. Even the mainstream media reported endlessly about Biden’s use of the back stairs in Air Force One, his bicycle tumble, his fall onstage at the Air Force Academy graduation in 2023, his name mix-ups . . . . The mainstream media was so obsessed with Biden’s age that, according to Media Matters for America, The Wall Street Journal published 41 articles in the first six months of 2024 on the topic.
Donald Trump is not a normal president; he is the most powerful president in modern American history, or maybe all of our history, because of how he has used unitary executive theory and surrounded himself with a Cabinet filled with billionaire sycophants who largely got their jobs because of their willingness to sign off on anything he wanted. Imagine a Cabinet of Mike Johnsons but somehow richer and dumber. While Trump 1.0 featured the president being held back by guardrails, Trump 2.0 feels like it’s lacking a working frontal lobe: Ideas pop into Trump’s head, and he just executes them.
We would be remiss not to mention Trump’s mystery hand bruise, which seems to appear monthly and is coated in orange makeup that, like all the makeup Trump wears, does not even come close to matching his skin tone. The White House’s explanation is that he bruises easily because he pops aspirin like they’re Tic Tacs, and because he shakes so many hands. And then there are the pictures of Trump’s drooping lip, which sparked a flurry of speculation after a speech he gave in Miami last November.
Maybe it’s all nothing. But this is a guy who ran on being healthier and spryer than the guy before him.
Trump shows his age the most in the apparently diminished functioning of his frontal cortex—the thin layer of gray matter that helps the brain make decisions and regulate itself, the part of the brain that prevents you from saying the unkind or insane thing. Trump appears unable to hold himself back. He called a reporter “piggy.” He called another a “fresh person.” He confuses Greenland (which he wanted to invade) with Iceland.
Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the digital magazine Air Mail, has been tracking Trump closely (and mocking him mercilessly) since his halcyon days at Spy magazine in the 1980s. Carter said the Donald Trump of now is not the same man who went down that escalator 11 years ago. “He has gone from being the chatty, handsy salesman at the office happy hour to the crazed, opinionated antiquity shuffling the mail cart from cubicle to cubicle,” Carter said.
Trump will literally have to be drooling and forgetting his own name before Fox and others will acknowledge his age as an issue. And the same goes, of course, for Republicans in Congress. That wall of denial will prevent Trump’s age from being an issue until some point when it’s utterly impossible to deny.
No one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: paying bills, preparing meals, remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: problems communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving; confusion and disorientation.
So: Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. . . . . In an interview, Segal was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That, he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who demonstrated” them.
What has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place, slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time
Second, Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But the claim was nonsense.
The third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead, or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum, Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”
After Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”
Trump very much suits the age of toxic argument, arrogance, and certainty. If you’re certain you’re right, Lynch said, you have nothing to learn from anyone else, and you don’t need to pay attention to evidence. “If you ignore evidence, if you ignore other people’s experience, if you don’t think you have anything to learn, then you are going to end up ignoring reality,” Lynch said. “And we know that’s a central feature of Trump’s universe.”
“What I really believe is that Trump is struggling with a mix of grandiosity, desperation, and old age,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and has been doing penance ever since. “Nothing he’s ever accomplished has been sufficient to overcome his lifelong experience of emptiness and fraudulence. Now, in his final turn, he’s trying to take over the world. It’s only about making himself feel more worthy. He couldn’t care less about the suffering and destruction it causes.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)