Why Trump Keeps Getting Rolled in Negotiations

By David A. Graham

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.

 

Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.

 

The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. Hawkish Trump allies promptly criticized the deal, and despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday. “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” he posted. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.” Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.

 

The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach.

 

First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel. The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.

 

Second, as the roller-coaster weekend demonstrates, Trump is mercurial. Keeping one’s bottom line ambiguous in a negotiation is canny, but Trump doesn’t appear to have any bottom line in his own mind. He has cycled through different rationales for the war, including regime change and stopping Iran’s nuclear program, but hasn’t landed on one. Lacking a goal in the war means he also lacks a goal in the peace talks. Iran may be able to use that to its advantage, but even if its leaders are eager to make a deal, they will be understandably reluctant to agree to anything that requires a leap of faith, because Trump may change his mind at any moment, as appeared to happen amid Republican backlash in recent days.

 

Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement. (The president also seemed eager to have something to show for his weekend, because he skipped his eldest son’s wedding, ostensibly to work.) Iran, sensing Trump’s need for a deal, has maintained a hard line.

 

All of these factors combine to mean that Trump is ill-equipped to win any negotiation, much less one that is the result of his own blundering into war. Trump is likely to muddle through, as he has so many times in his career, and reach some sort of agreement with Iran. He will surely say that it’s a great triumph, but reality will be harder to ignore than it was when Trump’s failures merely hurt his own bank accounts.

 

One of the ironies of The Art of the Deal, the book that made Trump’s reputation as a clever businessman, is that Trump himself didn’t write it. His ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, has said that he cobbled the volume together after sitting at Trump’s elbow while he conducted his daily business. Unfortunately, it’s probably too late for Trump to hire a real professional to handle negotiations with Iran.

Why Democrats Need an ‘Operation Kibble’

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

There’s an ancient, almost surely apocryphal, story about a dog food company executive convening a big sales meeting. A very short version has the exec running through all of the company’s advantages: the best sales team, the best advertising, the best packaging, etc. He then irately asks, “So why aren’t we selling more dog food?”

 

After a long silence, a small voice from the back ventures a guess. “Maybe the dogs don’t like it.”

 

The story is a cliché, but a useful one, in business and politics. For instance, the prelaunch internal name for “Netflix” was “Kibble,” as a reminder that the customer actually had to like the product itself.

 

The Democratic Party would be well-advised to launch its own Operation Kibble.

 

There were hopes—and fears—that the recently released Democratic “autopsy” of the 2024 election defeat would be the beginning of just such an effort. Every Democratic faction wanted a report that either ratified its ideological commitments or proved that the party brass was hostile toward it.  

 

Everyone was disappointed. The autopsy wasn’t a complete mess. It was an incomplete mess, with countless blank sections, including a missing conclusion. Also, absent: any mention of President Joe Biden’s age, Kamala Harris’ myriad shortcomings, or such relevant issues as inflation, immigration, Israel, or politically toxic culture war issues.

 

There were some defensible points scattered across the report’s nearly 200 pages; the party doesn’t try to win rural voters, it relies too much on identity politics, etc.

 

Still, critics across the ideological spectrum have crossed the partisan divide to tear it apart like so many polar bears agreeably sharing a whale carcass. With so much to feed on, why squabble?

 

But there’s one criticism I haven’t seen that gets to the heart of the Democrats’ kibble problem. Simply put, the ideologically activist base can’t accept that the dogs don’t actually like what they’re being served. This denial has a long history.

 

From the 1930s until the mid-1980s, Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans, sometimes more than 2-to-1. And even long after that, Democrats still usually had the edge. Republican presidents—Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, even the Bushes—earned victories by winning over some Democrats, and starting in the 1990s, Democrat-friendly independents. But Democrats clung to the idea that Democrats alone were the path to victory. 

 

Bill Clinton recognized this era was ending, and instead crafted an appeal to the moderate and conservative voters the Democratic Party had been hemorrhaging. His presidency is not remembered fondly by today’s ardent progressives.

 

Electoral math is only part of the story. Ever since FDR’s administration, both parties have organized around an enduring myth of American politics: If everyone voted, Democrats would win. This idea more than any other explains why Republicans favor tighter controls on voting and Democrats want looser ones.

 

This idea rests on several different assumptions. First, it seemed plausible back in the days when Democrats outnumbered Republicans. There’s also a kind of Marx-ish assumption that non-voters are a reserve army of the dispossessed, the marginal, the oppressed. As President Barack Obama once put it when making the case for mandatory voting, “The people who tend not to vote are young; they're lower income; they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups.”

 

Another related assumption by Democrats: We’re obviously right, so we just have to do better at getting our message out. Inversely, the Republicans are obviously wrong, so they must have exploited an unfair advantage to win, in terms of money, media, and mobilization. 

 

Democrats reflexively assume that when Republicans win, it’s because they have some unfair advantage. When right-wing talk radio seemed to help the GOP, lefties concluded all they needed was their own talk radio, and Air America was born. When Fox News seemed to fuel GOP success, Current TV was launched, and MSNBC was revamped as left-wing Fox News. Several progressive think tanks were born out of envy for conservative think tanks. The recent quest to stand up left-wing “podcast bros”—despite the fact that many such bros had been left-wing until recently (remember, Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020) —– is another of numerous examples.

 

Add in the complementary myth that the candidate with the most money wins, and you can start to appreciate the “cope” of the Democratic worldview.

 

The autopsy offers more of the same, arguing that Democrats need to copy the “always on” media and activist infrastructure of the right—the Koch networks, Turning Point USA, etc. “Democrats and allies must consider how to match and exceed these investments.”

 

Now, as tradecraft, none of this is indefensible. But in context, it’s the same argument that has hobbled Democrats for decades. There’s nothing wrong with our dog food; we just need a better ad campaign. 

The Blanche Impeachment

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

Last November, after Democrats clobbered the GOP in off-year elections, I floated a theory to explain the results.

 

“Simply put, [Donald] Trump has welshed on the devil’s bargain he offered” in 2024, I wrote. “Give me a free hand to govern as I like, without accountability, the president implied, and I’ll bring back the economic glory days of 2019, starting with restoring the pre-pandemic cost of living.”

 

Americans accepted his offer and reelected him, the crowning achievement in the career of one of history’s most successful con artists. Since returning to office, not only has Trump plainly not given a rip about reducing the cost of living, he has chosen to make the problem worse by starting one foolish war and then another. Voters got snookered and they know it. They’re not happy.

 

My theory implies that the average joe’s tolerance for Trump’s corruption is a moving target tied to policy failures. The more disgruntled Americans are about inflation, the more irritated we should expect them to feel at the president’s ethical, er, “lapses.” From their perspective, the devil’s bargain I described might be summarized as Trump is free to self-enrich as long as we get rich too. At the moment, he’s getting very, very rich and they very, very much are not.

 

So go figure that they’re growing more sensitive to his sleaziness. In February, 49 percent of Americans said the word “corrupt” applies to the president; a month later, 54 percent told YouGov that it applies “a lot” while another 15 percent conceded that it applies “a little.” A third poll released last week found 59 percent now believe Trump is using his office for personal gain versus 30 percent who disagree. Among independents, the split was 64-20.

 

The backlash is also showing up anecdotally. Take Megyn Kelly, who knows a thing or two about devil’s bargains.

 

As a Fox News anchor, Kelly famously opened the first Republican presidential primary debate in 2015 by pressing Trump about misogynistic comments he’d made. Nine years later, having reinvented herself as a culture-warrior podcaster, she rallied with him a few days before the 2024 election and pronounced a guy facing more than two dozen allegations of sexual misconduct a “protector of women.” 

 

Kelly has now soured on Trump over the Iran war. It’s anyone’s guess whether she’s an earnest dove or merely playing the part that the Tucker/Candace audience she’s cultivating demands of her, but I took note last week when her foreign policy disagreement with the president spilled over into ethical grievance.

 

“I didn’t expect the corruption to be quite as, you know, widespread as it’s been. And, like, the self-dealing and the lining of his and his family’s pockets,” Kelly complained in an interview. “You look at, like, across the board at the Trump family, I’ve never seen a family get so rich off of the presidency.” She went on to remind the audience that the president is also a notorious philanderer whose first wife accused him of rape (a claim that the first wife, Ivana Trump, later retracted when he ran for president).

 

Which Megyn Kelly already knew, I assume, when she endorsed him as a “protector of women” in 2024.

 

Here again we have someone whose sense of betrayal over policy has made Trump’s rotten character less bearable. He promised Kelly an end to endless Middle Eastern wars; she was snookered, so she’s grown less willing to indulge him and his family in the rampant looting in which they’re engaged. That creates a strategic question for the out-party: If Americans like her are growing more sensitive to Trump’s corruption due to their disappointment with him on policy, shouldn’t Democrats capitalize by making corruption a bigger issue in the midterm campaign?

 

Specifically, should they zero in on Todd Blanche and the Justice Department’s sociopathic new slush fund?

 

The case for impeachment.

 

They should, journalist Josh Barro argued in a piece on Friday. More to the point, they should impeach the acting attorney general for abetting the theft of taxpayer dollars to enrich Trump’s most loathsome cronies.

 

Impeaching Blanche is an elegant, if imperfect, solution to the problem of right-wing cultishness. Trump also deserves impeachment for this attempted grand larceny, needless to say, but targeting him would render Trump-leaning voters instantly deaf to the merits of the case. To have a chance of persuading anyone about how garishly corrupt the fund is, you must lower the political stakes. That means going after Blanche, not his boss.

 

“Democrats don’t have the votes,” you might reply. Don’t they? Barro reminds us that the margins in both chambers are tight and getting tighter by the day as angry GOP lawmakers fed up with an unpopular president’s grotesque crookedness go their own way. One House Republican from a swing district has already sent a letter to Blanche demanding answers about the fund; in the upper chamber, Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn are or soon will be lame ducks with axes to grind against the president.

 

House Democrats can force a vote on impeaching Blanche via a privileged resolution. That resolution could plausibly pass thanks to a few moderate Republicans and vengeful Trump enemies like Rep. Thomas Massie. Once it does, it has a nonzero chance of progressing to a trial in the Senate thanks to the lame-duck faction I mentioned, which might not heed the president’s inevitable demand to bury the matter by tabling the articles of impeachment. Democrats should do it, Barro insists.

 

Is he right?

 

It’s true that they’ll never get the 67 votes they need in the upper chamber to remove Blanche, but so what? Declining to pursue a warranted impeachment—which this is—because the majority party is too corrupt to punish an impeachable offense would amount to rewarding that party for its corruption. Democrats shouldn’t validate Republicans’ moral nihilism by letting it influence their own behavior.

 

And lord knows, they shouldn’t spare Mike Johnson and John Thune the humiliation of having to explain why Blanche should remain in office after making himself an accessory to larceny. “Democrats should … force a trial of Blanche that elevates this issue—the president stealing billions of dollars of your money at a time when you can’t afford gasoline—in the 2026 campaign,” Barro writes, “and ultimately forces every Republican senator to render a verdict on whether the president can simply steal whatever he wants from the Treasury.”

 

Absolutely. McConnell and his conference eviscerated the constitutional logic of impeachment after January 6 when they contrived an excuse not to convict Trump for the worst thing a president has ever done. Filthy hyperpartisanship means impeachment is no longer a realistic tool for removing unfit officials from office. But it can still be used as a form of extreme censure that focuses voters’ attention on egregious corruption by throwing a media spotlight on it. That’s what Barro means by “elevating” the slush fund.

 

Don’t you want to watch ol’ Susan Collins sweat it out on whether to support a trial for Blanche and, if one is held, whether to convict him? No matter which way she votes, many voters in Maine will be furious with her. If impeaching Todd Blanche improves Democrats’ chances of flipping Congress in November, it will achieve its goal of deterring corruption over the last two years of the president’s term—even if Blanche is acquitted.

 

The slush fund is an ideal issue for impeachment, too. Ask a liberal to name a high crime that the president and his Cabinet have committed and they’ll rattle off a dozen offenses: waging unauthorized war on Iran, bombing suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, turning ICE into a secret police force populated by under-trained goons, etc etc. But those matters all involve political disputes between the two parties and would be relatively easy for Republicans to parry on policy terms. Pursuing an exercise as futile as impeachment is worth it only if it forces Trump’s party to defend something that’s truly indefensible.

 

That’s the slush fund. Last week, according to Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican senators resorted to “screaming” at Blanche in protest during a hearing over the brazen self-dealing involved in the fund. But self-dealing is the least of it: The money is obviously designed to induce future mob behavior on Trump’s behalf à la the insurrection by making MAGA supporters believe they’ll get a check if they join in. Meanwhile, it tees up Democrats to remind voters this fall of just how unsavory some of the degenerates are who’ve already benefited from the president’s largesse.

 

Worst of all, as Barro notes, the fund is a poisonous counterpoint to the cost-of-living crisis that’s poised to sink the GOP. If I’m right that policy grievances tend to make Americans less tolerant of Trump’s corruption, an issue like this one that fuses the two may be unusually potent. Bad enough that the president would disappoint voters on affordability while making himself rich; imagine how much more disgusted they’ll be watching the January 6 cretins also get rich off their own tax dollars while they struggle to pay for food.

 

The slush fund is so irredeemable that if Democrats do move forward against Blanche, I suspect the terms of the fund will be hastily reworked and/or the acting attorney general will step down to short-circuit the process before momentum for action builds. Hakeem Jeffries might as well get things moving by filing articles of impeachment, no?

 

The case against impeachment.

 

Maybe not.

 

My worry is that impeaching Blanche might lead swing voters to believe that Democrats have the wrong priorities. Anything that the party does between now and November that isn’t aimed squarely at addressing the cost of living risks causing persuadables to wonder whether the out-party will betray them the way Trump himself did.

 

The president promised them that he would prioritize inflation and the price of groceries. They elected him, and he promptly prioritized everything else. Jeffries and his caucus targeting Blanche in the thick of the midterm campaign could inadvertently signal that, for all their supposed concern about affordability, Democrats will use their new congressional majority next year to pick up where they left off in Trump 1.0. It’ll be nonstop “witch hunts” against a president they despise. Even if one of those witch hunts is justified, how does that help people pay for gas?

 

Our righteous moral outrage over the slush fund should not blind us to the lesson of the devil’s bargain. Americans aren’t mad at the president for behaving corruptly; they don’t care about that, and voted accordingly two years ago. They’re mad that he promised to make it worth their while to ignore his corruption and then did not.

 

Most aren’t burning to see Democrats hold the administration morally accountable. (Well, people like me are, but who cares about us?) They simply want Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to bear down on affordability and make Democratic control of Congress worth their while.

 

To say that they’re skeptical of the party’s ability to do so would be an understatement. A Quinnipiac poll published last week placed congressional Democrats’ job approval at 20-72, if you can believe it, several points worse than congressional Republicans’. And when asked whether the party should be doing more to stand up to Trump or to work with him, the split wasn’t as lopsided as you might assume—just 50-42, suggesting a less-than-ravenous national appetite for a partisan impeachment brawl.

 

What seems more likely to boost Democrats’ approval? An all-out messaging commitment to helping Americans pay their bills, or “Trump Is Bad, Part 8,000”?

 

Impeachment might also help the president politically by providing him with a partisan foil, something he’s lacked in his second term.

 

An “us and them” demagogue like Trump always benefits from having a robust “them” to rally against, and would really benefit right now. His approval among Republicans in two recent polls is down to 80 percent, off his usual cultish heights, and one of those surveys had his support among so-called non-MAGA Republicans down to 54 percent. With Democrats in Washington a nonfactor and Trump’s conflict with Iran of his own making, he and his party have no one to scapegoat for his problems. They’re languishing, and their sense of unity is suffering for it.

 

Maybe the slush fund is so obnoxious that Democrats “elevating” it by impeaching Blanche would weaken Trump’s right-wing support further. But given how much the right enjoys a fight with the left and how slavishly they show up for the president whenever he starts babbling about “witch hunts,” I can imagine an impeachment fight over the acting attorney general shoring up Trump’s right-wing approval, particularly once he leans into it in his daily rhetoric.

 

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,” Napoleon allegedly said. Trump and his party are making lots of mistakes lately. Why would Jeffries and his caucus want to interrupt them?

 

Meanwhile, I’m not so sure that Senate Republicans would be as willing to proceed with an impeachment trial for Blanche as Barro and I imagine.

 

What’s their incentive to do so? Getting back at Trump by embarrassing him and his acting AG would be enjoyable for the GOP’s axe-grinding lame ducks, no doubt—but at the expense of their friend Susan Collins and other Republican congressional candidates. Every right-winger on the ballot this fall will face painful questions about Blanche and the slush fund as long as this scandal persists in the news. Old-school partisans like McConnell and Cornyn might decide that protecting the party down ballot by tabling the impeachment articles matters more than sticking it to the president by taking up the matter.

 

Besides, they have precedent they can use for cover. In 2024 the Democratic-run Senate tabled the Republican House’s articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security at the time, instead of holding a trial. That too was an election year, and the impeachment grounds—dereliction of duty in failing to enforce immigration law—reflected an important popular grievance against the administration. Senate Democrats killed the process anyway and paid no price for it as far as I can tell. The aborted Mayorkas trial mattered not at all to the campaign that fall despite immigration’s salience as an issue.

 

Why would the aborted Blanche trial matter this November despite the salience of affordability and corruption as issues?

 

In fact, I’m not confident that impeaching Blanche would hurt him politically more than it would help him, or compel him to behave more ethically going forward.

 

In a sane world, a failed impeachment of the acting attorney general would shame him or her and convey to the president that the DOJ urgently needs new leadership. But in that world, neither Donald Trump nor Todd Blanche is within a thousand miles of power. As it is, my guess is that Blanche would welcome impeachment: Nothing would endear him to the president more than being “martyred” by Democrats for the sin of defending Trump’s repulsive slush fund, and therefore nothing would better ensure that he stays on the job for as long as possible as weathering this storm would.

 

As for shame: Todd Blanche is not a man who shames easily.

 

If anything, beating the impeachment rap might “liberate” Blanche to be an even bigger thug on the president’s behalf than he’s already been. It would mean that he had passed an acid test of personal loyalty, the sort of no-questions-asked devotion that Trump has craved in a “fixer” since the death of his friend Roy Cohn, and he might feel obliged to live down to that reputation afterward as acting AG. His reputation is already destroyed; he might as well lean all the way into Trumpism’s alternate morality and make himself a hero by being the most enthusiastic goon he can be.

 

***

 

In the end, I land here: I would vote to impeach Blanche, but without the faintest expectation that doing so would achieve anything useful.

 

He should be impeached because he deserves to be impeached. He’s facilitating the embezzlement of taxpayer money to remunerate criminals for breaking the law on behalf of a fascist. No attorney general has betrayed his duty so egregiously. In five years, I hope he’s disbarred and/or in prison.

 

But I’m skeptical that impeaching him would make morally inert Americans any angrier about the affordability crisis than driving past their local gas station every day does. In a culture warped by a decade of Trumpian evangelism about “looking out for number one,” the lesson of the slush fund to most might not be that it’s a civic abomination, but that they should have joined in on the “rigged election” nonsense in 2020 so that they might stake a claim now.

 

Maybe that’s too cynical with respect to swing voters. But among right-wingers, there’s no doubt that the newly surfaced qualms about Trump’s corruption will submerge again by Election Day to serve the eternal imperative of choosing “us” over “them.” Ask Megyn Kelly, who’s made that devil’s bargain too.

A Quagmire of Trump’s Own Making

By Mike Nelson

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

If Ulysses Everett McGill were asked to describe President Donald Trump’s current situation with Iran, he might exclaim, “Damn, he’s in a tight spot!” Almost three months into the conflict that he initiated sua sponte, Trump finds himself in a sticky situation. He doesn’t want conditions to remain as they are, with a mutually imposed blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Whatever advantage has come from stressing the already fragile Iranian economy also comes with the cost of increasing energy prices around the globe. The second-order impacts of these costs will only get worse as the price of moving goods is passed on to consumers.

 

Trump was already facing concerns about affordability before the war, and those concerns are now growing while his approval rating is declining. He doesn’t want to be weighed down by a continued face-off over the strait. And he doesn’t want to restart the combat operations that have been on pause for a month and a half—operations that he naively believed would quickly bring the Iranian regime to its knees with no cost to the United States. Instead, they have depleted large quantities of some of our most critical capabilities, resulted in hundreds of American casualties, destroyed American aircraft and military infrastructure in the region, and caused pushback from Gulf Arab allies who have been targeted for Iranian retaliation—while not bringing about any signs of Iranian surrender.

 

Over the weekend, reports of a negotiated settlement between the United States and Iran met with a chorus of disapproval for being too generous toward the regime. The settlement is not yet finalized, nor have the details been announced, but if even a small portion of what was reported appears in the final version—including Iranian retention of their enriched uranium, a system of tolling an international waterway, or a financial windfall with which the regime can fund their proxies—we can expect an even more acrimonious reception, including from several voices who had previously been reliable Trump supporters.

 

So here we are, with a president who can’t stay where he is, can’t move forward, and can’t step backward, mired in the quicksand of a poorly managed confrontation. A president who ran a campaign in which he said each problem facing the United States had a simple solution that he alone could provide, now finds himself alone with no good options.

 

This dilemma is one of his own making. Not just the decision to go to war without a full understanding of the costs, risks, goals, and complications—Trump undoubtedly did that, and it’s been written about in great detail. But also the fact that he is alone—without political support in government, without allies, and without the will of the people in prosecuting this war, or at least navigating his way out of it.

 

While Trump may be surprised and frustrated by where the path of unilateral decision-making has led him, his sojourn down it is entirely predictable. He is absolutely enamored by the authority of his office, reveling in the decisions he’s empowered to make without outside input. In just the first year of his second term, he has issued more executive orders than any other president in an entire single term since Carter, and he has amassed more than 10 times the pardons and commutations than he did in his full first term (admittedly, the mass pardoning of the January 6 rioters and get-out-jail-free cards to finance and crypto scammers who have dealings with the Trump family runs up the score).

 

But the president hasn’t been satisfied to merely abuse the unilateral power of his position. He has also sought to extend his reach beyond the boundaries of the Oval Office and assume authority that isn’t his. The Supreme Court ruled his attempt to implement widespread tariffs were an unconstitutional attempt to usurp authority assigned to Congress. Hundreds of federal judges have shot down thousands of specious claims about the administration’s authority to deny civil liberties and due process protections as part of its immigration enforcement.

 

Trump’s disregard for collaboration and consensus has extended past domestic policy and legal matters to beyond the water’s edge. Not only has the president suggested he would withdraw or fail to meet the obligations of treaties ratified by Congress, he has thumbed his nose at Congress’ role in matters of war and peace. The administration didn’t even notify the Gang of 8 before removing Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, and the White House’s approach to dealing with the (as of yet untested in court) timelines of the War Powers Act is to either ignore them outright or play clever word games as to whether a “ceasefire” where both combatants still shoot at each other pauses the stopwatch. Both Operation Southern Spear in the Caribbean Sea and the conflict with Iran have extended past these timelines without a vote from Congress authorizing them.

 

Whether Trump is unaware of or unconcerned with the constraints on his power is largely academic—he does not abide by them regardless of the cause. A man with neither the curiosity to learn about the constitutional processes of the government he leads nor the patience to work through them if he had, has been emboldened by a pliant Republican-led Congress, more concerned with being sufficiently obsequious than in fulfilling its duty to provide checks and balances between branches of government.

 

But the comfort level the president has developed, the enabling he has received, and the momentum he has created with this style of decision-making have served him poorly, leading to the situation in which he now finds himself. The administration’s decision not to put the war to a vote means the burden and the blame for stalled progress, regional instability, and American losses rests solely on the president’s shoulders. Not only did he fail to create a political coalition that shared the decision and responsibility to go to war, he is starting to see defections as once supportive Republicans cross the aisle and vote for war powers bills designed to force an end to the conflict.

 

Perhaps most damning, Trump never made the case to the American people. The will and passion of the people are essential to continued effort in any war, especially when wars face inevitable setbacks and require reassessment of the strategy (a truth written about by Von Clausewitz and studied at the war colleges that Secretary Pete Hegseth rails against as too woke). The fact that the president’s model prior to ordering Epic Fury—the Maduro raid—was not a full campaign and was over before it was publicly disclosed seems to have inspired Trump to believe he never needed buy-in from the public.

 

Any president has a limited amount of political capital to expend and a finite amount of focus they can command when using their bully pulpit. It would seem odd, therefore, under normal circumstances, that this president has spoken with more frequency, greater specificity, and deeper passion when trying to make a case to the American people for a ballroom than the war in which we are entangled. The fact that the president is far more animated and informed about his pet beautification projects might just suggest the seriousness, or lack thereof, with which he is taking war—the most serious undertaking into which a president can enter.

 

Insomuch as he does speak to the American people about the war at all, his argument can be summarized as, “Other wars were longer, why are you complaining?” Hardly a rallying cry.

 

But perhaps the greatest burr in the president’s saddle are the allies he spent years saying we don’t need, suggesting their previous wartime contributions were worthy of mockery, or whose territory he threatens to annex (even the weekend’s negotiations with Iran, so taxing that he could not attend his son’s wedding, didn’t stop the president from taking his eye off the ball of aggravating the tensions over Greenland). Building coalitions with annoying Europeans is beneath him, and listening to or addressing the concerns and input of the allies during the planning process would have been a frustrating timesuck for someone whose impulsivity and desire to implement orders make Veruca Salt look like she has the patience of a saint. Now, because of his own disregard for international coalitions in the march to war, he finds himself demanding support from one he does not have, lashing out and venting his rage via social media posts and through wildly fluctuating decisions about military presence in Europe.

 

The Europeans were not the only American partners who were not consulted before the war. The Arab Gulf  states, which have paid the cost of Iranian reaction in lives and destroyed infrastructure, have expressed objection to the handling of the war in their backyard, to the point that they have rallied together to pressure and attempt to limit some of Trump’s options, lessening further the wiggle room available to squeeze out of this mess.

 

That the president thought so little of needing consensus from others on the war is evidenced by the fact that he initiated it with a middle-of-the-night social media post—providing less focus and fanfare than a Friday afternoon news dump. But now, three months on, Trump finds himself paying the delayed costs of his approach, with no shared skin in the game from Congress, cratering public sentiment for a war that began with underwater polling, European allies sitting on the sidelines, and Gulf partners voicing opposition to some of his options. Had he sought a consensus, he would likely have a wider range of options and a longer time horizon to deal with the conflict.

 

The lesson with which Donald Trump is now contending (but not learning) is that the freedom of going it alone when it comes to decision-making brings with it the burdens and consequences of going it alone when things go poorly. The man who loves to take sole credit for any positive outcome and pass blame for any negative one now finds himself flailing as he tries to make the fault for his current dilemma stick elsewhere. But his usual playbook hasn’t shifted the polls, hasn’t brought down inflation, and has not compelled the Iranians to concede.

 

The words he once belted out at his rallies to adoring crowds, his campaign boast—“I alone” —these words now take on new meaning, as he alone is left with the consequences and complications of a situation he never had the focus in understanding, nor the patience to prepare for any contingency other than the most optimistic, and unrealistic, result. And now he must navigate a way out—and deal with the consequences—alone.

The New Iran ‘Deal’ Would Be a Disaster

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

On what proved to be the eve of the full-scale U.S.-Israeli war against the Iranian regime, it was already clear that Donald Trump’s presidential legacy is inextricably bound with his efforts to reshape the Middle East.

 

“Trump spent a decade bending the arc of history toward this point,” I wrote of the Abraham Accords, the president’s support for Israel’s campaigns against Iran’s terrorist proxies, and his 2025 strikes on the Iranian nuclear program. “He stands on the threshold of a new era. If the past is prologue, he will cross it.”

 

Cross it, he did. But the many tactical successes that the U.S. and Israel enjoyed over the kinetic phase of this war are increasingly overshadowed by the cease-fire’s failures. Now, the administration insists that a deal to end the war is at hand — a claim the Iranian side of this equation undermines at every available opportunity.

 

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, there is “a pretty solid thing on the table in terms of their ability to open up the strait [and] enter into a very real, significant, time-limited negotiation on the nuclear matter.” Late on Monday, Trump himself broadened the aperture of the deal he hopes to negotiate when he fantasized about a permanent regional peace accord that not only defangs Iran but welcomes it — along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan — into a normalization agreement with Israel.

 

The Trump administration’s optimism is unwarranted. The draft memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran would create the conditions for future talks and mutual de-escalation, but this is not a peace deal. Reportedly, the regime would agree to an unspecified method by which it would dispose of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. In exchange, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would withdraw its threat to the Strait of Hormuz and ensure maritime traffic returns to pre-war levels within 30 days.

 

If the deal suffers from one blinding conceptual flaw, it is the notion that the pre-war status quo can be restored. The Iranian Foreign Ministry insists that it will continue to extort fees from shipping interests in the Strait of Hormuz regardless of the terms of any deal. And some energy industry experts anticipate that commercial concerns will capitulate to Iranian demands even as the market adjusts around “a permanently more risky operating environment” in the region.

 

More unnervingly, the Trump administration’s negotiators may be beginning to soften their posture in pursuit of a deal. The chatter in recent days has involved the prospect of entertaining restrictions on Israeli operations against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon — an Iranian ask at which the U.S. has previously balked. The president is backing away from his (probably unnecessary) insistence that Iran must surrender its enriched uranium to U.S. custody. Rather, it can be “destroyed in place” or handed over to a third party, like the International Atomic Energy Agency. And, of course, the cash-strapped Iranian regime insists it will not undertake any de-escalation of hostilities until it gets a healthy bribe: $24 billion in unfrozen assets, for starters.

 

For all the president’s happy talk about the emerging prospects for a durable and advantageous peace, neither side seems close to anything more than a written commitment to keep talking. Many, including many within the administration, may be leaning out over their skis by assuming this deal is a fait accompli. Still more are talking themselves into the notion that the 40-day war achieved nothing.

 

It would be hard to argue in good faith that the Iranian regime enjoys more freedom of action today than its American or Israeli adversaries. On February 27, the Islamic Republic still had an air force, a navy, a layered air defense network, a defense-industrial base capable of fully replenishing its ballistic missile arsenal, an intact leadership cadre, and a complex and expensive indigenous uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons program. Today, the regime has been stripped of those instruments of statecraft, and it is more isolated in its region than at any point since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Tehran’s last real point of leverage over the West — its throttling of traffic through the strait — is as painful for it as it is for the rest of the world.

 

And yet, what the administration seems to be talking itself into risks sacrificing those gains. Indeed, the consequences of capitulating now could reverberate throughout the geopolitical landscape.

 

Contrary to popular belief, the Iranians have not been able to close the strait via overwhelming military pressure. On Monday night, the U.S. executed air strikes on Iranian assets attempting to do just that, as well as on an anti-air battery that shot at U.S. warplanes. But even the modest application of force — or even the threat of force against traffic in the strait — ground it to a halt, and the United States appears to lack the will to reopen that contested waterway with force. Resigning ourselves to the status quo that prevails today will all but guarantee that other revisionist powers, most notably China, would attempt the same gambit.

 

In addition, the perception that the United States can be deterred by commercial pressure will ensure that Trump and his successors face much more commercial pressure. If Iran succeeds in strong-arming shipping interests, we can expect America’s role as the sole guarantor of free global maritime trade to rapidly erode. Foreign government and global enterprises will make their own arrangements. Spheres of influence would naturally arise within this new modus vivendi. And even if the Iranian regime has been fatally wounded, as it may very well have been, U.S. interests will be challenged with more frequency and, perhaps, effect.

 

“The temporary agreement that the Trump administration announced with Iran this weekend isn’t a peace deal,” New York Times reporters David Sanger and Tyler Pager wrote over the weekend. “It isn’t a nuclear deal. It isn’t a missile deal.” Rather, it’s an agreement designed to relieve the political pressure on Republicans who fear voters’ wrath over elevated gasoline prices — a burden the president refuses to acknowledge and which he most certainly won’t ask the American people to bear in a national effort to consign this blood-soaked regime to history’s dustbin

 

Nothing is settled yet. But if this agreement proceeds on the terms reported publicly, Trump’s once promising legacy in the Middle East will be indelibly tarnished.

What Platner Has Done to the Democratic Party

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

Yesterday, Democratic Rep. Jake Auchincloss said something that used to be taken for granted in Western political circles regarding Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo: “I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying. I hope Maine voters agree with me.”

 

This isn’t a terribly confrontational way to say it, either. Political parties are big tents, but all have to draw the line somewhere. Auchincloss believes Nazi symbology belongs on the outside of the tent.

 

It’s worth noting that the Nazi tat merely scratches the surface, no pun intended. Platner’s campaign looks like it was built in a lab underground by the fusion of everything Democrats used to claim belongs outside the tent: misogynistic theories about rape, the celebration of the killing of American troops, unabashed Jew-baiting, open admiration for terrorist groups, racist stereotypes about black Americans, toleration of political violence, etc.

 

Auchincloss’s choice of zeroing in on the Nazi tattoo is a fascinating one. Had he denounced Platner for sexism or racism, the pushback from pro-Platner Dems might have been more muted. But calling rank anti-Semitism disqualifying is a threat to an entire group of up-and-coming progressives.

 

One such progressive, representative of the wider cohort, is Saikat Chakrabarti, a wealthy software engineer who jumped to politics in 2016 and made his first big splash a couple years later by helping elect progressive darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who made Chakrabarti her chief of staff.

 

Now Ocasio-Cortez is a contender for the 2028 presidential election and Chakrabarti is running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the House. Under normal circumstances, the combination would represent the rise of a powerful potential alliance. Under current circumstances, AOC won’t even acknowledge Chakrabarti.

 

Yet even two high-powered progressives on the outs can come together for a certain cause: Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo.

 

Chakrabarti declared war on Platner’s congressional critics: “Auchincloss should be primaried.” In other words, there is room either for people sporting Nazi tattoos or people who object to them, but not both, in the preferred Democratic Party of AOC’s former chief of staff. (Ocasio-Cortez’s own embrace of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories only got worse after Chakrabarti left her office, so we know she didn’t object to that part of Chakrabarti’s political persona.)

 

Chakrabarti and others claimed that this was Auchincloss’s way of endorsing the Republican in the race, Susan Collins. Auchincloss clarified that no, he was simply saying Nazis are bad: “Susan Collins is a rubber stamp for the worst admin in history. Claims that I would endorse her, implicitly or otherwise, ignore my track record supporting Democrats to take back both chambers. As I said months ago, I find Platner’s Nazi tattoo and his commentary about it personally disqualifying. If it were me I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary.”

 

But Auchincloss’s nuance fell on deaf ears. Back the Nazi tattoo guy or you might as well be a Republican.

 

Between Chakrabarti and Auchincloss, there is no question who has taken the more heterodox position on Nazis. After all, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is also backing Platner’s campaign, as is the party’s relevant campaign committee.

 

Hasan Piker, the Jew-baiting anti-American influencer popular among progressive Democratic candidates, also chimed in against Auchincloss, calling him part of the “straight up israel first democrats.”

 

But of course, Auchincloss didn’t mention Israel in that statement. He said Nazis are bad. Piker was, by the way, not the only left-winger to bring up Israel in response to Auchincloss. It was a telling moment: Somehow, suddenly influential progressives openly associate anti-Nazism with disloyalty to America.

 

Enjoy your new friends, Chuck Schumer.

Texas Republicans Roll the Dice with Paxton

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

There isn’t much more to add to tonight’s Texas GOP Senate primary, not after the reams of text already written here about the implication of Republican voters’ choice: The race was called the second polls closed in El Paso at 8 p.m. Central (an hour later than the rest of the state) and was a blowout in favor of Ken Paxton, who as of this writing is defeating incumbent Senator John Cornyn by over 24 percentage points.

 

By resoundingly selecting the scandal-tarred state attorney general over Cornyn, Texas Republicans have decided to roll the dice in an incredibly high-stakes game — and all to win a prize of dubious value.

 

There are many reasons why Texas Republican primary voters — a self-selectingly small subset of the voters who typically pull the lever for Republicans in general elections — have decided to jettison Senator Cornyn for a man who has countless scandals and public disgraces to his name. Most of the ones Paxton’s supporters will offer — wild claims that Cornyn is a secret amnesty-pushing gun grabber — are transparently farcical. Really it is about something more elemental and subrational: the fact that he represents the “old” in a primary environment where MAGA demands the new and the different — whether such candidate promises miracles or constitutional revolutions.

 

Meanwhile, Paxton has also proven extremely adept at playing to the frustrations of Texans who have grown to hate the Austin/Houston axis of state power. Paxton hails from the far outer suburbs of northeast Dallas but speaks with the disaffected populist voice of rural Texans, whom he has proven extremely good at persuading over the years by leaning into MAGA (which postdates him) and portraying himself as a persecuted martyr of “mini-Trump” proportions.

 

The fact that the race wasn’t terribly close suggests that it wasn’t Trump’s endorsement that nudged Paxton over the line; as I suggested earlier, Trump picked Paxton because he knew Paxton was going to win, and now he can claim credit for backing the winner. But even if Ken Paxton didn’t win this primary because of Trump’s intervention, Trump has every right and reason to claim him as one of his own: Paxton’s sordid and disgraceful career would have collapsed in any other era — this is a man who was impeached as attorney general by his own party a mere three years ago — and really only exists as a collateral result of the Trump phenomenon.

 

So Donald Trump can go to bed tonight satisfied that he has once again been vindicated in his supremacy among the Republican primary electorate: Truly, he can “pick ’em” in the primary, wielding the powers of the presidency as he does. But can he pick winners in the general election? That record is decidedly more mixed. Until then, expect an enormous amount of media attention to suddenly shift to the Lone Star State, as legacy media and activists alike converge on the new and unexpected center of the American political universe.