While Rome Burns
Donald Trump is bored with the war in Iran.
Jonathan Lemire wrote in The Atlantic last week that Trump wants out of the crisis. He is ready to move on from the war he started—if only the Iranians would let him.
Which they will not.
Lemire reports that:
Trump is tired of the war, which has proved far more difficult and lasted far longer than he had expected. His party is warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers. He doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit next week in China. He is ready to move on.
But Iran, it seems, does not want the war to come to a close. Or at least not with any sort of outcome that could be acceptable to American negotiators. Trump is now in a bind. The president, five aides and outside advisers told me, is convinced that he can sell any sort of agreement as a win. But at least for now, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal can’t even get Iran to the negotiating table.
This in a nutshell is what you get with Donald Trump. In addition to pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, and greed, there is sloth. Donald Trump has always been lazy. He is quick to herald grandiose initiatives with ridiculous superlatives—the best people, too much winning—only to lose interest and walk away when he bankrupts the casino or—if we’re not careful—the country.
And then he just claims that it was all a success and relies on his salesmanship to convince enough people to forget about his failures while he moves on to the next one.
The Iranian leadership appears to understand this quite well and believes Trump will not be able to outrun the economic pain that the ongoing Strait of Hormuz crisis is causing. On this matter, they are likely correct.
But that just propels Trump’s disinterest in the war. What gratification could Trump possibly derive from being in a bind?
The exciting part for Trump was when he got to blow things up. That’s when he could project his power and quench his seemingly bottomless thirst for dominance. It played to his delusions. For a minute, he must have felt like superman.
But when that feeling wanes—regardless of the reality it leaves behind—Trump will predictably look for gratification elsewhere.
And he has clearly found it in his ballroom project.
The Washington Post reported in mid-April that Trump mentioned his ballroom on about one-third of the days this year, in his public appearances and on social media—rivaling how much he has talked about actual policy issues. And since the security breach at the White House correspondents dinner late last month, the ballroom has become something of an obsessive priority. Trump’s new rationale for the ballroom is that having it is a matter of presidential security, and he talks about it incessantly.
The grandiosity of the ballroom promises gratification of the sort that starting a war once did but being stuck in a quagmire cannot.
All of this is creating a huge political problem for Trump’s enablers, with significant ramifications for the midterm elections.
