Nobody puts “Daddy” in a corner
According to Donald Trump, it was a “great victory.”
He took to the stage Wednesday, before leaving the NATO summit in the Hague, and compared the U.S. military’s recent attack on three nuclear facilities in Iran to dropping the atom bomb on Japan, which ended World War II.
“It was so devastating. Actually, if you look at Hiroshima, if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war too. This ended a war in a different way. But it was so devastating,” he exclaimed. But did he declare the war between Iran and Israel — and our participation in it — finished? Nope. He later contradicted himself and said further action might need to be taken. But that was to be expected.
If Trump had said on stage, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” I would not have been surprised. Of course that would then lead Presidential Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt to joyfully and forcefully exclaim, “Nobody knows what ‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’ means better than President Trump. He is the one who came up with that motto and that foreign policy doctrine.” After all, she already did that with “Peace through strength.”
Meanwhile, to placate Trump’s fragile ego at the summit, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte surprised everyone by calling him “Daddy.” Trump loved it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio laughed at it and some of us just wondered how things have gone so wrong.
Trump now says he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for bombing Iran, and he blames the media for not acknowledging how thoroughly he bombed them. He first claimed the airstrikes completely “obliterated” the three facilities. During the summit, he said he had set back Iran’s uranium enrichment project “for decades,” though according to several published reports and an early battle damage assessment from the U.S. Central Command, the bombs may have only set the program back by a few months.
Trump has accused CNN and everyone else who reported those findings to be purveyors of “fake news,” saying they had impugned the reputation of the “great pilots” who bombed Iran. This latest combination of vanity whining and braggadocio bombast was greeted from Congress, members of his staff, reporters and members of the general public with mostly wide, tired stares.
I’ve seen those before. They’re called the “Thousand Yard Stare” — that blank, unfocused gaze of soldiers who’ve become emotionally detached from the horrors around them.
It took about a year during the first Trump administration before I noticed this look on colleagues, members of Congress and the voting public. It’s only taken me four months to recognize it during this term.
You can point to a variety of causes — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s denial of science, Pam Bondi’s denial of justice, Stephen Miller’s denial of due process, Congress’s denial of its role in government, social media and genital warts — but the source is always Donald Trump.
Two weeks ago, Israel began bombing Iran after claiming the Islamic Republic was getting too close to developing a nuclear bomb. As recently as last week, Trump didn’t seem too engaged in the war. He was busy complaining on social media that he didn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace to other areas of the world. Meanwhile, news audiences — addicted to Fox, among other outlets — started talking about “bunker-busters,” the most powerful bomb in the U.S. arsenal short of a nuclear weapon. Media speculation about using them, combined with pressure from Israel to get involved, seemed to put Trump in a corner.
He threatened Iran, warning they had two weeks to come to the negotiating table. “Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump proclaimed, ignoring the fact that he had walked away from a 2015 deal, negotiated under former President Barack Obama and approved by five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, that was designed to prevent just that. The Iranian government found they were dealing with a leader apparently more disingenuous than themselves. Only two days after Trump gave Iran two weeks to come to the bargaining table, he bombed them.
Or, Trump did what Trump does best. He became the arsonist who laid claim to being the heroic firefighter.
Since last Friday, he has governed, and tried to conduct diplomacy, via social media with dozens of posts, most of them incoherent. He bombed Iran on Saturday and declared peace on Sunday. Then Iran and Israel were back at war on Monday. Trump dropped the “f-bomb” on the South Lawn of the White House while talking to reporters on Tuesday. And while he was angry with both countries, arguably more so with Israel, his greatest vitriol was aimed at the press because we asked questions he didn’t want to answer — first about joining Israel’s war, and then, afterward, about the effectiveness of his efforts.
Compounding the frustration were satellite pictures that showed Iran apparently removing equipment from their facilities days before the bombing. Some in the Defense Department, and a few among Trump’s staff, indicated that we gave Iran advance warning, telling them where we were going to bomb them and when. Add to that Trump’s claim that Iran’s “weak” retaliation was phoned in ahead of time to the U.S. so we could prepare caused some to wonder if we were merely watching a reality show. His frequent admonitions on social media saying “Stay Tuned” or “Thank you for your attention to this matter” did nothing to negate that perception. Trump lives in a solipsistic universe. He believes reality to be whatever he wants it to be.
His delusions are to be met by hard questions from the press whenever possible. But these days, that does not seem likely or possible. Instead, we are treated to briefing room questions wherein sycophantic reporters ask if Trump has developed any pithy monikers for his actions or funny insults for his perceived enemies.
Analysis of Trump’s actions include the questions “was it legal?” and “what should we think?” And they are often followed by a phrase: and “. . .sown the seeds of his undoing.” If that sounds sophomoric, it’s only because it is. If I had a dollar for every time someone — including myself — has said Trump has sown the seeds of his undoing for an illegal action most sane people think is wrong, I could pay off the national debt and retire richer than Elon Musk.
There is a real concern about what comes next. On Sunday, a former senior White House national security expert from the Biden administration told me, “We have to be willing to wait to see the results before jumping to conclusions. Iran without enrichment facilities is not a bad thing for the region and for us. I’m shedding no tears for the damage done to Iran’s program. No one should,” the source explained.
“That said, it is clear that Trump got ‘double-dog-dared’ into this by Bibi and Fox News. And now we’re in it. So they need to define success in this conflict. Good news is that well before these strikes, Iran is much weaker than they had been. My concern is that Trump rushed into this and hasn’t thought that through.”
Those were issues Trump needed to address on Monday. But for the last month, he has not shown up at the White House on Mondays. And — thankfully — his Pep Secretary is briefing only once a week with her gaslighting disinformation that neither informs nor entertains, but instead proves that while she hasn’t the knowledge and experience to do her job, she has firmly established herself as the tail end of the Donald Trump human centipede.
The war in the Middle East may be Trump’s current focus — if he can focus — but the mindless actions of Miller, Kennedy, Bondi, Mike Johnson and the chorus of delusional dunces in Trump’s cabinet are equally consequential. And we should not forget to mention Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which threatens to sell off public lands, enhance the bottom line of the richest among us, gut Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), NOAA, education and other vital programs.
Then there’s the 22-year-old gardener who Trump has put in charge of our anti-terrorism efforts — at the exact time we face the greatest threat from Iranian terrorism after having bombed three of their nuclear facilities. The level of incompetence of this administration is truly staggering.
But it all pales in comparison to watching Trump melt down outside the White House on Tuesday after his announced cease-fire fell apart, if it ever existed in the first place. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing,” Trump yelled. “You understand that? Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. The biggest load that we’ve seen. I’m not happy with Israel.”
He also encouraged Israeli bombers to turn around, go home and give a “plane wave” to Iran. What the hell does that mean? What sane president conducts international diplomacy sounding like an angry pre-pubescent pustule on social media? None is the correct answer.
He also trained his bitter bile on MAGA Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who dared to question Trump’s bombing. Trump ranted at Massie more than Iran, Israel and the press, vowing this weekend to raise money to unseat him.
Then Wednesday he was back to ranting about Democrats, the mayoral race in New York and being called “Daddy.”
I confronted a good source inside the administration about that. “My dad was never like this,” I laughed. “Mine either. Mine was sane,” my source explained.
As we discussed Trump’s recent activities, I shook my head. “None of this makes sense,” I said. “None of it is true. None of it is based on facts.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.“It’s only true and it’s only factual if the president says it,” I was told.
We were talking with the speaker phone on so I could shave as we spoke. At that point, I looked up to wipe away some shaving cream.
I didn’t recognize the face in the mirror. It had that “Thousand Yard Stare.” And I wondered if my source had the same look.
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