Saturday, May 30, 2026
The War Trump Can’t End
For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been preparing for a war that Donald Trump expected would take days.
As virtually every American president since World War II has learned, a monopoly on focus can outlast a monopoly on power. America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department. The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity.
The deadlock is both ideological and structural. To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began. Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.
Trump may pause his war against Iran. But the Islamic Republic’s 47-year ideological war with “the Great Satan, America, and its trained beast, the Zionist regime”—in the recent words of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader—will continue in earnest. U.S.-Iran negotiations yield zero trust and zero closure. A win-win scenario does not exist. Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, regional proxies, and missile programs will menace the Middle East so long as the Islamic Republic is in power.
Tehran is transparent about its negotiating tactics. “The Iranian negotiation style is generally known in the world as the ‘bazaar style,’ which means continuous and tireless bargaining,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in his 2025 diplomatic memoir. “This method is a process of interaction that requires great patience and time,” and thus, “he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.” Trump has twice grown bored with diplomacy and resorted to military action against Iran.
The first phase of any deal would require Tehran to de-mine the Strait of Hormuz and cease harassing vessels traversing it, and the United States to lift its blockade proportionally—restoring, in theory, the prewar reality of an unfettered international waterway. For Tehran, the strait has become its greatest source of leverage. Iran’s implicit control over it—and the global economy—is both a potential fixed-revenue stream and a deterrent against future attacks. “This time, papers and signatures are not guarantees,” Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said. “The objective guarantee for preserving any agreement is the Strait of Hormuz.”
A coordinated reopening of the strait could be a prelude to successful nuclear negotiations, but it could also prove merely an intermission in fighting. The resumption of traffic through the strait would bring down oil prices—a crucial strategic objective in itself for the U.S., because it would make a return to war, if necessary, more sustainable, one senior official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters. Similarly for Tehran, the pause would provide much-needed cash and an opportunity to refortify its military.
Trump-administration officials believe that once the strait is reopened, Tehran will have a hard time closing it again: “It’s a card they can only play once,” the senior official said. Tehran appears confident taking opposite bets: that it has established a de facto Strait of Hormuz protection racket, and that the closer Trump gets to the U.S. midterms, the less appetite he will have to restart the war. For both sides, a tactical pause may relieve economic pressure and make reaching a broader diplomatic compromise feel less urgent, rather than more so.
The most difficult negotiation is the nuclear one. Trump will seek a commitment from Tehran to never pursue nuclear weapons, including a freeze on long-term enrichment, removal of its 400-kilogram stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the establishment of an invasive inspections regime. But Tehran has drawn an obvious lesson from modern history: The regimes that gave up their weapons programs—in Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine—made themselves vulnerable to foreign intervention. North Korea, meanwhile, has survived behind a nuclear shield.
A former Iranian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid government scrutiny, told me that Tehran retains the knowledge and now has the will to build nuclear weapons in short order. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have as many as 30 underground “missile cities,” likely built with North Korean assistance, some reportedly buried deeper than the nuclear facilities already destroyed. Like Gaza, Iran is becoming a place where the authorities and their weaponry thrive underground while citizens languish aboveground.
The U.S. official told me that Washington expects to know “within a few weeks” whether this peace process has legs. The Trump administration plans to present Tehran with two possible paths. The first would require Iran to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, its regional proxies, and its foundational hostility toward America and Israel in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in Persian Gulf investment that could make Iran “one of the richest countries in the world.” The second path would be to preserve the status quo: Iran’s revolutionary ideology would remain intact, but at the cost of a continued naval blockade, crushing sanctions, and the potential renewal of war.
Over the past 47 years, Tehran has made major compromises only twice. The first was its 1988 decision to end the Iran-Iraq War—after eight years and an estimated 200,000 Iranian deaths—a concession that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini likened to drinking poison. The second was the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration. In both cases, when faced with overwhelming economic and diplomatic pressure, a viable diplomatic exit, and no demands to change its revolutionary identity, Tehran showed itself capable of tactical compromise.
“Iran never won a war,” Trump tweeted in January of 2020, “but never lost a negotiation!” This aphorism has become received wisdom, yet it misses a central fact: Any government willing to immiserate its own population rather than compromise can look like a tough negotiator.
“The main principle of bargaining is practice: repetition, repetition, and repetition,” Araghchi wrote, “so much that the other side of the deal, as they say, ‘gets numb’ and gives its consent.” Up until now, Tehran’s negotiating style has not numbed Trump into consent but agitated him into conflict. Yet conflict, like negotiation, has not resolved the fundamental problem that has confounded every American president since 1979: The United States needs a deal, but the Islamic Republic needs the United States as an adversary. America seeks resolution. Iran is committed to revolution.
Thursday, May 28, 2026
Why Trump Keeps Getting Rolled By Iran
Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him.
He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.
The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. . . . . despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday.
Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.
The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach.
First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel.
The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.
Second, as the roller-coaster weekend demonstrates, Trump is mercurial. Keeping one’s bottom line ambiguous in a negotiation is canny, but Trump doesn’t appear to have any bottom line in his own mind. . . . Lacking a goal in the war means he also lacks a goal in the peace talks. Iran may be able to use that to its advantage, but even if its leaders are eager to make a deal, they will be understandably reluctant to agree to anything that requires a leap of faith, because Trump may change his mind at any moment, as appeared to happen amid Republican backlash in recent days.
Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement. . . . Iran, sensing Trump’s need for a deal, has maintained a hard line.
All of these factors combine to mean that Trump is ill-equipped to win any negotiation, much less one that is the result of his own blundering into war. Trump is likely to muddle through, as he has so many times in his career, and reach some sort of agreement with Iran. He will surely say that it’s a great triumph, but reality will be harder to ignore than it was when Trump’s failures merely hurt his own bank accounts.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Monday, May 25, 2026
Trump's Impending Defeat in Iran
The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli air strikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing. If Trump had quit while ahead, he could have banked his gains from last June as a solid if imperfect win.
The second surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that he does not seem to have cared at all about the only evident reason to resume fighting in 2026: the Iranian people’s rebellion against their brutal oppressors. Trump has never given any evidence of caring about Iranian democracy or human rights. He promised the Iranian people “Help is on the way” on January 13, but military operations did not commence until thousands were dead and the rebellion was already effectively crushed. During military operations, Trump made clear that he sought a deal with the existing regime. He made no effort to support or cooperate with Iranian dissidents before, during, or after the uprising.
The third surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that even he himself seems never to have understood why he went back to war against Iran. What exactly did he think he would achieve?
Trump started the February 28 war for reasons of personality, not strategy. He is on his way to losing the war for the same reasons of personality.
Trump is arrogant. Think how often Trump mocks his predecessors as “dumb” and praises himself as “smart.” Those predecessors, from Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, all had to ponder military responses to Iranian terrorism and aggression. They all ultimately decided not to wage a major war against Iranian national territory. Among the prime deterrents to action: the Strait of Hormuz problem. Trump apparently decided that a problem that was too hard for everybody else would magically disappear for him, because he is tough and growls in his official photographs.
Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? . . . In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.
Trump hates procedure. A lot of the apparatus of the modern presidency exists to force confrontations with unwelcome realities. Cabinet officers are confirmed by the Senate to assure the country that major offices are filled by people of character and competence. The National Security Council is supposed to process challenging data to ensure that the president receives necessary information. . . . . Trump has shriveled the NSC’s staff and subjected it to loyalty tests demanded by his most screwball supporters.
Trump is panicky. For all his bluster and boasting, Trump cannot take the heat. Presidents who believe in their decisions ride out bad polls. Trump panics and reverses course. Trump has been signaling since mid-March that he wants an end to the Iran war at almost any price. The Iranians have read those signals. For all the damage the U.S. military inflicted on Iran, the Iranians seem to have gambled that they could outlast Trump. They’ve been proven right.
Trump is gullible. As Trump’s present secretary of state observed back in 2016, Trump is most fundamentally a con artist. But Trump is often a self-defeating con artist who falls victim to his own con. Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. Instead, he’s negotiating an exit that concedes most of Iran’s demands and leaves Iran in a more dominant position over Persian Gulf oil traffic than it occupied before the war. But Trump seems genuinely to have convinced himself that he’s won a mighty victory, and he seems truly baffled that others decline to endorse his flim-flam.
Trump can’t lead. Trump’s method of governance is command. He cannot work across party lines, and he cannot speak to any part of the American nation beyond his MAGA base. A war leader, however, must be a national leader. War imposes costly sacrifices. Leaders who take the nation to war must explain those costs and inspire those sacrifices. Trump simply cannot do any of that work, and he has no idea how it could be done.
In this second presidency, his main work has been spectacular self-enrichment, even as the economy has sagged under the weight of his catastrophic trade wars. He made no case for an Iran war to the public and never sought approval by Congress. There are some Iran hawks on the Democratic side, especially in the Senate. Trump never tried to ally with them.
Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.
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.”
Thursday, May 21, 2026
The Potential Cost of the Felon's Primary Wins
Is Donald Trump strong or weak right now? Usually, telling whether a president is up or down isn’t difficult, but the past few weeks have offered reasons to believe both.
Last night, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who has been publicly critical of Trump’s policies throughout his second term, lost a primary to Ed Gallrein, a candidate recruited and backed by Trump. The president’s attempt to turn that race into a referendum on himself seems to have worked: Massie, who’s just as idiosyncratic now as he was when the voters of his district elected him to the first of seven terms, ended up about 10 points behind Gallrein.
This flex was the latest in a string. On Saturday, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whom neither Trump nor voters ever forgave for his vote to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, came third in a Republican primary. And earlier in May, several Republican state legislators in Indiana who had opposed Trump’s gerrymandering push lost primaries to Trump-backed challengers, fulfilling a vow of revenge from the White House.
A common thread in commentary on these races is that they demonstrate Trump’s enduring grip on power. . . . “This is @realDonaldTrump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it,” the proudly submissive Representative Randy Fine of Florida declared last night.
Yet Trump’s standing seems to also be deteriorating. This week, a New York Times/Siena poll found the president at 37 percent approval, his lowest in the poll ever and a four-percentage-point drop from January. The paper’s polling analyst, Nate Cohn, was led to wonder whether the much-vaunted “floor” in Trump’s polling is starting to crack. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday has him even lower, at 35 percent—12 points below where he began his term in the same survey. Much of his issue polling is even worse. That means some Republicans are rejecting Trump’s decisions, even if they retain a fondness for the man himself.
How do we reconcile these contradictions? If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, the answer will not surprise you: Trump’s hold on the MAGA base is still powerful, but the same actions that help him maintain it also help erode his standing with the broader public—and threaten to lead Republicans to defeat in November’s midterm elections.
Primary voters—and especially primary voters in Indiana, Louisiana, and Kentucky—are not representative of the general electorate. . . . . They aren’t even necessarily representative of the Republicans who vote in the general election, a group that is likely to be less engaged, less ideological, and less politically extreme overall. As a result, votes in November are more likely to hinge on issues such as inflation or the Iran war.
Yesterday, Trump finally issued a long-awaited endorsement in next week’s Texas runoff for U.S. Senate. The race pits Senator John Cornyn against state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn is a longtime mainstream Republican who has mostly been a loyal if unenthusiastic foot soldier for Trump; Paxton is, to use the political-science terminology, a real piece of work.
Trump was initially expected to endorse Cornyn, but polls showed Paxton ahead and one found that even a Trump endorsement wouldn’t change that. Trump dithered, then waited until the last minute to back Paxton. That effectively guarantees that Trump will back the winner, but it could be a Pyrrhic victory: Republican senators are now afraid that a Paxton nomination could cost the GOP the seat in November.
Although the idea of a MAGA crack-up may be nothing more than a pipe dream of Trump critics, Cohn’s data are real. MAGA isn’t collapsing, and the base remains devoted, but it is shrinking. Trump’s sinking numbers may not matter as much to him, because he won’t face voters again, but they matter a great deal to other Republican officeholders. Many of them would like to find ways to distance themselves from Trump’s unpopular policies (and they may try as the general election gets close), but cases such as Massie and Cassidy remind them that the immediate political risk of crossing Trump outweighs the dangers of being yoked to an unpopular agenda. The latter might well end your career, but the former almost certainly will.
The irony is that Trump would probably benefit politically from a GOP Congress that was more willing to challenge him, because it would restrain him from his worst ideas. . . . An uncowed Republican Congress might have pushed Trump harder on affordability measures, and it might not have supported the war in Iran, had he asked for authorization—but he didn’t, calculating that it wouldn’t take action to block him.
Politics is a pendulum, so Trump may get a more antagonistic Congress despite—or because of—his efforts to resist it. . . . Even if Paxton doesn’t blow the Senate race, Democrats remain the favorites to retake at least the House of Representatives. That would be one clear indication of Trumpian weakness.
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