To have spent any amount of time observing President Donald Trump over the last month is to conclude that he is in far over his head.
The president is struggling with the consequences of his actions, raging in protest of the fact that for all its firepower, the United States cannot bomb Tehran into submission. When Trump launched his “short-term excursion” into Iran, he assumed it would be — in the words of a Pentagon official in the last Republican administration to launch a Middle East war — a “cakewalk.”
That, as Trump’s own intelligence agencies told him, was a mistake. Now, he is stuck. And he lacks the skill and patience to find a way out of his self-inflicted catastrophe. Unable to will a better outcome into existence and frustrated by his own impotence, his response, familiar to anyone who must manage the emotions of a young child, is to throw a tantrum.
Trump has denounced “the Fake News Media” as “CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT!” for its reporting on the war. He attacked Pope Leo XIV in a bizarre rant calling him “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” And he posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, surrounded by devotees, healing an unnamed man.
This is not a man in control of himself or a president in control of the situation around him.