The Spokesman

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

There’s an infamous tweet from October 2016 that still recirculates from time to time. It was posted by sports business analyst Darren Rovell in a moment of reflection about the antics of that year’s presidential campaign. “I feel bad for our country,” he wrote. “But this is tremendous content.”

 

It’s memorable because it’s efficient. In 11 words, Rovell glibly channeled the fatuity of the American people on the eve of the Donald Trump era. Voters found the clown on the ballot entertaining, so they chose to turn the United States into a circus.

 

I thought of Rovell’s tweet yesterday as I watched that clown perform at the G7 summit in France. It really was tremendous content. And I did—almost—feel bad for our country.

 

“The president’s vanity will … align him psychologically with the Iranians,” I predicted on Monday. “He’ll end up behaving like an Iranian ally, making excuses for their transgressions.” Disposed as he is to view the world in primitive terms of “friends” and “enemies,” he would inevitably begin to think of his new partners in peace as friends and would end up rationalizing concessions made to them as a matter of treating them fairly.

 

Trump would, I thought, turn himself into a kind of spokesman for Iran.

 

What happened yesterday exceeded my expectations.

 

Iranian missiles have been a key security concern for hawks for decades. The president himself cited the missiles as a problem in 2017, months before he withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, and he justified his decision to go to war earlier this year partly in terms of neutralizing the supposedly urgent threat from Iran’s arsenal.

 

Fast-forward to Wednesday, when he found himself arguing that it would be unfair to deprive the Iranians of a missile deterrent.

 

“What am I gonna do? We’re going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” Trump wondered. “It doesn’t work that way. Missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.” No wonder some Israelis are calling the U.S. bargain with Iran a “diplomatic October 7.”

 

The president was just getting started, though. Asked about the possibility of Iran maintaining a nuclear energy program, something that the hated Obama deal had permitted, he again suggested that it wouldn’t be fair to deprive Iranians of something their neighbors are allowed to have. (Does that logic also apply to nuclear weapons?) Ditto for returning billions in “frozen” funds: It’s their money, Trump reminded his audience, before alleging that no one would invest in the U.S. dollar if those assets weren’t eventually returned.

 

Is that so? Those assets have been frozen for a long time, and the dollar’s holding up okay.

 

Later, he all but admitted defeat in the war by acknowledging that Iran’s strategy of holding oil markets hostage had worked. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” the president said. Unable or unwilling to reopen the Strait of Hormuz using military force, he concluded that the risk of being remembered as a new Herbert Hoover was too high to justify prolonging the conflict.

 

Oh, and then, for good measure, he told the global press that America’s elections are rigged.

 

It was tremendous content, a Helsinki-tier tour de force of national humiliation that I’m sure his new “friends” appreciated. I almost felt bad for the country, and specifically the right-wing hawks, that elected him. Almost. But not quite.

 

“The Iran Peace Deal Is What Trumpism Looks Like,” Jonah Goldberg observed in yesterday’s G-File. That’s correct. The hawkish suckers who agreed to turn America into a circus in the belief that the clown would deliver for them bought this ticket. Now let them take the ride.

 

Three-legged stool.

 

The story of the conservative movement since 2016 is its various factions learning the hard way that the president doesn’t give a rip about their priorities. He’s delivered meaningful “wins” for each, but only immigration matters enough to him that he’s willing to plow endless political capital into it in the name of achieving some lasting, paradigm-changing victory.

 

He’ll continue his long-term project of purifying America’s “blood” by removing undesirables from the population for as long as he’s in charge. All other right-wing agendas are subject to being abandoned as his political needs require.

 

Fiscal conservatives, the first leg of the so-called “three-legged stool” in Ronald Reagan’s coalition, found that out early on. Trump handed them a quick win in his first term when he signed new tax cuts into law, then came close to handing them another when his push to repeal Obamacare fell just short in the Senate.

 

But it’s been all downhill since. Deficit hawks spent the last 16 months suffering through the stupidest trade war in history, the mainstreaming of right-wing state capitalism, and profligacy that’s brought the national debt to the brink of $40 trillion with no sign of slowing down. The president likes tax cuts because he can never have enough stimulus, but everything else that conservatives value as prudent economic policy matters as much to him as a fart in the wind.

 

The second leg of the stool is social conservatives. No faction of the right scored a bigger win than they did when Trump kept his promise to stock the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. With states suddenly free to ban abortion, a tectonic cultural shift seemed in the offing.

 

It wasn’t. Spooked by the electoral backlash to the Dobbs ruling in the 2022 midterms, the president has done next to nothing in his second term to advance the pro-life cause. He’s urged Republican lawmakers to be “flexible” on abortion and has proved so reluctant to use federal power to restrict abortifacient drugs that activists have taken to attacking him in the press over it. “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem,” one starkly told the Wall Street Journal last month.

 

Because those drugs remain widely available in blue states and accessible by mail in red ones, abortions in America have actually risen since the Dobbs ruling. Trump delivered a “win” to pro-lifers but seems completely uninterested in delivering victory.

 

Which brings us to foreign policy hawks, the third leg in the proverbial stool.

 

Their relationship with the president has always been more fraught than the other two factions’. He criticized the Iraq war in 2016, made a Tucker Carlson acolyte his running mate in 2024, and got reelected by accusing Democrats of warmongering in Ukraine and beyond. He’s always seemed more excited to shake hands with Vladimir Putin than to attend the annual NATO summit. He’s not a natural ally.

 

But he’s given them some wins, too. Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and assassinated Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, in 2020. He knocked a communist dictator out of power in Venezuela without a U.S. casualty when he captured Nicolás Maduro. He plainly intends to depose Cuba’s Castro-ist regime, a thorn in Reaganites’ side for decades, sooner rather than later. And of course he’s been an outspoken champion of Israel, a rare thing for a world leader to be in 2026.

 

Add to that the fact that the president is obsessed with “strength” and plainly relishes the U.S. military’s ability to impose its will by violent force, and you can see why so many right-wing hawks convinced themselves he was worth supporting.

 

Now they’ve discovered that Trump cared about Iran’s threat to the U.S. and Israel only insofar as he believed ending it could gain him glory on the cheap, as the man who achieved in a few short days of war what no president since Jimmy Carter had dared to try. Once the regime showed that it wouldn’t surrender quickly and prostrate itself before him and instead undertook to inflict political pain on him, he was done. There was nothing left in it for him.

 

Like fiscal and social conservatives, foreign policy hawks who chose to support the president backed a loathsome coup-plotting caudillo because they valued their pet policy issues more highly than they did the constitutional order. He’s now delivered a strategic catastrophe for their cause, a world in which America’s “allies will have less confidence in its capabilities; its public will be less willing to bear the costs of even productive engagement; and its rivals will be likelier to challenge Washington’s will.”

 

Their reward as enablers for having sold out their country and the men who founded it is getting to watch Caesar celebrate a peace deal that would embarrass the weakest peacenik Democrat. Don’t tell me they don’t deserve it.

 

Humiliation.

 

Don’t tell me Marco Rubio doesn’t deserve it. The secretary of state suffered the well-earned indignity yesterday of standing a few feet behind Trump, in frame for the cameras, as the president performed his new duties as an unofficial spokesman for Iran’s regime. I encourage you to watch the clips I linked above and pay attention to Rubio’s face. He knew better than to betray the horror he was plainly feeling in the moment, but it’s clear enough when a man’s soul leaves his body.

 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

 

Don’t tell me Senate Republicans don’t deserve it. One of the grim delights of the endless next phase of “negotiations” with Iran will be watching members of Trump’s party in Congress forced to choke down the sh-t sandwich he’s fed them. Lindsey Graham has already taken a bite. Ted Cruz, who abetted Trump’s coup plot in January 2021, has also had a nibble. Last night Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall was reduced to telling CNN that, while he’d prefer that Iran not have missiles, the country needs to be able to defend itself.

 

Soon enough the entire Republican establishment will be unofficial spokesmen for the Iranians, especially after most of the right-wing base decides that criticizing the deal is treason against the president. When Trump eventually tells Congress that he intends to fund Iranian terrorism by waiving sanctions on their oil exports, regardless of whether that happens to violate federal law, the only noisy objections will come from lawmakers whose careers are already over.

 

And in a few months, when he decides that keeping Cuba under miserable Castro-ist rule is fine by him so long as the regime there takes orders from the White House, Republican lawmakers will be fine with that, too. (They’re fine with persistent oppression in Venezuela, aren’t they?) The term “Cuba libre” as a GOP rallying cry will have a short shelf life, I promise.

 

Don’t tell me that hawkish Trump-supporting right-wing commentators don’t deserve it either. For a decade, they’ve endorsed, excused, or tolerated every form of demagogic scumbaggery imaginable in the belief that a demented authoritarian who wants to run America like a third-world country is the least bad option available because he’s more likely to bomb demented third-world authoritarian regimes like Iran’s than Democrats are.

 

In the end, those commentators were gifted a new regional status quo in which the U.S. has abandoned virtually all of its “red lines” and endorsed a sort of Marshall Plan for Iran’s reconstruction without demanding anything like surrender first. The terms of this week’s deal have so horrified Israel that the president has become instantly politically radioactive there. It’s astounding that, to this day, every faction of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party remains convinced that its own faces won’t be eaten right up until the moment they are.

 

Trump’s response to the disappointment among his hawkish fans was perfect, however. “There are some people, some writers, that I thought were friends of mine, but I don’t want them as friends anymore,” he said yesterday at the G7. He sounded like an 8-year-old, reducing principled strategic differences in matters of war to petulant personal grievances about being a bad friend—but as I said earlier, “friends” and “enemies” are the childish terms by which he understands the world. That stupidity is what his Reaganite supporters have cynically enabled for 10 years, believing they could leverage it for their own policy ends.

 

Now they’re finding that they’ve gone from “friends” to “enemies” themselves in a blink, a bad thing to be in a movement as dumb and tribal as the modern right.

 

Our former colleague Andrew Egger drew a clever analogy at The Bulwark yesterday between the president’s war in Iran and his quixotic attempt to rid the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool of algae. The two cases reflect the same fallacy, he wrote—the belief that all national problems have been caused by the stupidity and lethargy of the expert class and can be solved with aggressive direct action, without considering the logistical challenges that made them problems in the first place. I’ve made the same point myself about Trumpism’s faith in ruthlessness as a cure for all policy ailments: Supposedly, with sufficient will, any impediment to beneficial change can be overcome.

 

It’s the dimwit populist antithesis of Chesterton’s fence, the conservative maxim that before you knock down a fence you should make sure you understand why it was put up. Maybe the fence is still standing only because no one until now had the brains and the balls to try to knock it down.

 

It’s embarrassing that conservative foreign policy hawks ever aligned themselves with a political movement as foolhardy as that, especially after Iraq. And it’s more embarrassing that Donald Trump seems to have—very belatedly—learned to appreciate the wisdom of Chesterton’s fence with respect to Iran before those hawks did. It wasn’t cowardice or idiocy that caused his predecessors to avoid attacking the Iranians, it turns out. It was the low likelihood of success and high cost of failure.

 

The fence was there for a reason. Meanwhile, hawks continue to holler at the president to “finish the job,” whatever that means, of knocking it over.

 

Decline.

 

In a just world, Republicans’ deathless image as the party of strength abroad would never recover from this debacle.

 

Trump started a dumb conflict that “warmongering” Democrats wouldn’t have pursued and finished it with a feeble one-sided peace that even Democrats wouldn’t have endorsed. But that’s not how American politics works: In the same way that the GOP is forever the party of smaller government in the public imagination, no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary, it will remain the choice on balance for those who prize “toughness” on foreign policy.

 

Certainly, it will remain that way for most of the right.

 

Republican voters spent four years aghast at the “weaponization of government” by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and the personal corruption of the “Biden crime family,” then turned around and reelected a convicted criminal whom any imbecile could see would put Democrats to shame on both counts if he regained power. The modern partisan brain is incapable of perceiving the sins of its own side—particularly the right-wing brain. It will never face the reality that the electoral success of Trump and his brand of politics are flames-in-the-sky omens of American decline.

 

Independents might, though. I don’t feel bad for a country that chose—twice—to turn itself into a circus, but it’s possible that this week’s deal will humiliate swing voters into delivering the beating this fall that Republicans deserve. Ten years of “tremendous content” is enough.