Trump's Wild War Game
If you want to understand where we are at this moment in Trump’s second administration, all you have to do is look at that picture of Marco Rubio wearing a pair of oversized Florsheim shoes. This footwear, the WSJ revealed, is Trump’s go-to gift for members of his inner circle, to whom he wishes to show approbation.
He determines the shoe size by rough instinct and, 24 hours later, a pair of $145 leather oxfords, the proud badge of political servility, arrives.
We are in Uganda’s Idi Amin territory now. I dream of the cabinet meeting when Trump is finally pelted with Florsheims, like that glorious moment in 2008 when the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference with Iraqi puppet PM al-Maliki in Baghdad. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, dog!” shouted Muntadhar, before he was wrestled to the ground and thrown into jail. (“I don’t know what his beef is,” commented Bush, who lacked imagination at the best of times.)
The unsettling thing is, we are all wearing Florsheims now. Not because we lack raucous expressions of dissent at the manner in which America lurched into a war of choice with Iran, but because we all keep pretending there is a functioning alternative reality in which norms, policy, think tanks, and geopolitical game plans still play their traditional roles.
Pundits speak sonorously about “regime modification” (shorthand for a next-gen, turban-charged Islamic republic) and the “extension of presidential power,” as if this were the long-ago world of institutional gravitas and coequal branches of government, instead of an inescapable escape room, in which we are trapped with a berserk brontosaurus peddling vehement ignorance.
- The sudden notion of resurgent Kurds has already come and gone from the news cycle.
- Trump, who hasn’t even flown commercial since circa 1988, is contemptuous of mariners and shipping companies who are hesitant to set sail on the perilous Strait of Hormuz, now seething with mines and drones.
- “These ships should go through…and show some guts. There’s nothing to be afraid of,”
- The truth is Trump’s Iran high is already wearing off.
- He all but yawned to reporters on Monday,
- “We want a system that can lead to many years of peace, and if we can’t have that, we might as well get it over with right now.”
- On to Cuba.
Jus’ the Facts
- The Dems are betting that MAGA will soon demand a reckoning for his broken promises, but all the evidence is that Trump doesn’t care.
- “MAGA loves everything I do,” he told House Republicans at a retreat this week at his Doral golf resort.
- “MAGA is me.”
- It’s lonely being king.
- There was an unexpectedly lyrical moment in Tuesday’s update when the Joint Chiefs’ chair departed from his dry military-speak to conjure up the reality of this war in the person of young, yellow-shirted sailors on the flight decks of aircraft carriers in the Gulf region.
- Beside him, the pumped-up War Sec didn’t realize Caine’s words were a subtle demolition of Hegseth’s manufactured machismo and the dangerous chimera of a push-button war.
“Just for a minute, imagine you’re standing on that aircraft carrier flight deck,” said Caine. “There’s 30 knots of wind in your face. The deck is slippery, covered in grease. It’s noisy. There are propellers spinning. There’s jet blast everywhere. The helicopters are running. Your head is on a swivel and you’re trying to direct a multi-million dollar fighter into a one-foot square box so that those naval aviators can be shot off into the black of night to go do America’s work.”
America’s work. Remember that?
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