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Steve Brodner after last night’s prime time Trump disaster.
Earlier in the day, Trump promised: “Tonight I'm making a little speech at 9 o'clock and basically I'm gonna tell everybody how great I am.”
John Harwood, the former CNN and Wall St. Journal analyst, would later tweet/comment: “The 25th Amendment was written for precisely this situation. Trump cannot think clearly. He cannot function effectively as president. Unfortunately Republican Party leaders are weak, low-character people unwilling to even try acting honorably.”
We usually post rather brief commentary from other Substacks but today we’re going to just let Paul Krugman go on for quite awhile from a video he posted this morning and then let the cartoonists have at it:
Donald Trump doesn’t even have the courage to run away.
It turns out that the speech was sort of an anticlimax, although not in a good way. Many people expected Trump to pull the mother of all TACOs, to declare victory and surrender. He did not do that. He declared victory, of course, but he did not actually announce an end to hostilities. On the contrary, he said we’re going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age. So add massive war crimes to your schedule.
There is clearly no strategy here. There’s no endgame. There’s nothing. It’s hard to tell, as always, whether Trump is delusional or just completely unable to admit something that he actually knows.
One of the moments that really struck me in the speech was him declaring that the whole world was extremely impressed by what happened. He said, “the whole world is watching and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing. The world can’t believe what it’s seeing.”
What it’s seeing is that the world’s greatest military power took on a fourth-rate power. Again, as I said the other day, Iran’s military budget is a rounding error in our military budget. And we lost. For all practical purposes, we’ve left ourselves in a much weaker position and Iran in a stronger position than it was before.
But Trump has to believe or has to claim that he believes that the whole world is extremely impressed. You might say, why do we care? Well, he cares, obviously. His whole thing is about dominance and believing that we’ve got the world awed by our strength.
Basically, everybody said, oh my God, we thought that this was going to be at least the beginning of the end, and instead it looks like an endless quagmire. I still think that people are not fully taking into account the implications for global oil prices and everything else of the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed for the indefinite future.
So this is going to be really bad…
The thing about what this means for America’s role in the world is not only that Trump and company are doing great damage, but the whole world is watching. They saw that this guy, and it wasn’t hard to see what kind of a person Trump was, that America elected this guy twice. It appears that the American public has completely lost sight of what it means to be a responsible, serious person.
I might say, since this masculinity posturing is such a part of it, they’ve forgotten what it is to be a man. Obviously, that applies to all genders. A country that will elect somebody like that twice is not a country anyone can rely on. And that is the ultimate lesson here.
We have Trump lecturing the world and saying, why are you cowards? Why don’t you come in and help us in this ill-conceived, disastrous war that we started without checking with you? But the reality is that the world is looking and saying, my God, what is wrong with America? They may still have a lot of bombs — although not as many as we started with — but it’s not a country anybody can trust for anything. And that, even more than the price of oil, is going to be the legacy of this war.
Nicola Jennings, The Guardian:
Boris:
de Adder:
Music Pick
On Colbert last night, Maggie Rogers updated her “Alaska” with string and horns.
Caleb Ford provides vital 1930s-style slide guitar for my upcoming PBS doc on Woody Guthrie but I also like this cover he did of “Tomorrow Night,” which I probably first heard decades ago in an earlier cover by….Bob Dylan.
From Tunes to Toons
Wuerker:
Ann Telnaes on yesterday’s birthright citizenship arguments at SCOTUS:
Bramhall:
Tjerd Royaards
Anderson:
Danziger:
Photo Finish
From my camera to you: Giacometti at the Guggenheim, NYC.
Sorry, earlier version of post had the Giacometti at MOMA, not the utterly distinctive Guggenheim.
Your title encapsulates my biggest fear. If Trump is cornered, nobody will stop him from nuking Iran and then civilization slips down the slope.