By David A. Graham
Monday, June 01, 2026
For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting
less attention.
“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good
one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this
morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly
unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly
do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at
levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or
move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”
The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled
negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an
agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling
out of talks and would completely block the Strait of
Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian
ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.
Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not
new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to
governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and
hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and
resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for
it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.
The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans
is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s
iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even
as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s
conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators
not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive
to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran
after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted
Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public
criticism again.
Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s
going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal
Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional
authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined
because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is
a reminder of how checks and balances can be a
political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t
manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated
their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers
are exercising their right to free speech.
Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back
and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” he wrote in
the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt
that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th
birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague
David Frum wrote yesterday—is
a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of
has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to
say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a
political rally instead.
Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned
Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his
own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later,
as his plan
failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On
Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t
close the center—though, as my
colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it’s not clear what is left to stay
open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.
Trump’s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the
Treasury for payouts to his political pals, to redress supposed “weaponization”
of the federal government, may be going even worse. To make that happen (and to
avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides hastily
engineered a deal that sidelined government lawyers
and took some advisers by surprise. Now it’s facing blowback from Congress and
doubts from inside the White House, and two
judges on Friday issued rulings calling the fund into
question. Axios reported this afternoon that according to two senior
administration officials, the White House intends to drop its plans for the
fund entirely.
That brings us back to Iran, where few indications
forecast success. The White House teased and then pulled back deals several
times in the past few weeks. Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room on
Friday that he promised would result in a “final determination” on Iran, but it
ended without a resolution and seems to have been totally overtaken by events.
In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend,
Trump said that “we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be
surprised to hear that.” They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly
claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the
same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he’d “finish the job” with
military might.
Trump can’t get his talking points straight now. This
afternoon, the president told
CNBC’s Eamon Javers that he didn’t care whether talks
were over, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over,
they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time.” Not
long after, he posted that “talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic
Republic of Iran.”
Today’s hostilities could be a sign of the larger
conflict that Trump threatened, or just more evidence of how tenuous the
supposed cease-fire in place is. Either way, the fact that so many big
initiatives are heading in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn’t
want people paying too much attention—and doesn’t offer a lot of reasons for
anyone to relax and take his assurances that everything will work out fine.
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