NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
A warning from the Commander-in-Chief to the crazy bastards.
Checking in on our fearless leader, I see he’s put out this cheery message this morning:
I continue to wonder how the press would have reacted to this had Sleepy Joe Biden posted it. But, of course, he’s almost four years older, which changes everything.
The fact that we have to treat governing by tweet as legitimate is just insane.
Also: the attempt to turn the closure of the Strait into some kind of genius move we wanted is just something to behold.
Just to note that Trump’s Brown Shirts have killed more innocent Americans than Iran.
But boasting about war crimes you’re going to commit is kind of whacky.
Trump’s entire political career has been based on his defenders saying x not y, with x and y being words like seriously and literally. (The same formulation is now AI canon, not surprisingly.) With Iran, he’s dug himself a hole: x = y even for his base, and now he’s repeating himself. We’re in a reboot of last week’s BIG VICTORY, and there’s no equivocation remaining.
And the Straight being opened for business only by Trump is a lie which doesn’t work. I can’t explain why. I think it has to do with intuition about what can be lied about and what can’t. Like you can lie about being a Christian and voting for a guy with 400 sexual assault allegations, but you can’t like to yourself about only Trump being able to open the Straight of Hormuz. I think there’s something about that type of empirical fact, and Trump doesn’t understand that, because it’s outside his experience of lying.
What’s frightening is that Iran is watching an adversary with a very weak hand unravel all on its own. In a normal country, there would have been a military coup. Trump would be shot in the head and his body burned simply out of obedience to ritual. But America doesn’t have rituals other than worshipping power, so there’s no real guidance there.
I guess if anyone else launched a misguided war against a fourth rate regional power, and wound up hurt almost as bad as the enemy, they’d also go insane with rage and regret, and the realization they were that stupid.
El Taco just had a head start.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You didn’t close the strait, I closed the strait. The President of the United States “negotiating” like he’s in a third grade schoolyard argument.
All he had to do to TACO out of this was lift our blockade and declare he’d opened the strait. And, once again, he didn’t take the opportunity.
It’s interesting to watch Trump flail, issuing deadlines no one pays attention to, threats no one really believes. Does he think name-calling works? Crazy bastard.
Everyone who has bent the knee to Trump should be ashamed. Trump can’t cope with defiance. He doesn’t understand it because he is not capable of imagining anyone cares about anything but money and praise and the dread of losing either. He is baffled by courage and integrity. Stand up to him and he sinks into confusion, with impotent threats and silly boasting.
Yesterday I said he reminded me of Hitler in his bunker commanding non-existent armies while his generals loosened their collars and rolled their eyes. He’s trapped with no way out. There’s a story that Trump had to be kept out of the war room because he was literally hysterical about the downed pilot. Not that he gives a shit about the pilot, but he is terrified of being compared to Jimmy Carter. The ‘L’ word scares him to death. He’s spiraling. He’s not capable of pulling out of his dive, he’s too tired, too weak, too out of his shallow intellectual depth. He’s going to auger in.
I think Joe Biden could do this country one last service by getting a Truth Social account. Maybe just a regular reply of “release the rest of the Epstein files”
There are a lot of fictional characters whom Trump has been compared with over the years. One that doesn’t get as much attention as it should, but which first occurred to me in 2016, is Gilderoy Lockhart from Harry Potter. He’s this ridiculous self-promoting narcissist who has sold a ton of books claiming to be some master wizard, but he’s clearly a fraud, and whenever things start getting tough, it becomes patently obvious that he’s in way over his head, and he tries to get others to help while desperately searching for the nearest exit.
@Gustopher:
I’d enjoy it if the Harris/Walz folks would regularly post on TS as well. Simply toggle between “We told you so” and “Those people are weird” depending on the occasion.
Why are we negotiating when we already won???
I note he is still trying to work the “allies must secure the Straits” angle.
(btw, what is it with his random capitalisation? Dear me.)
Still not gonna work.
No allies are going to intervene to rescue Trump from his mistakes at the Straits.
It’s possible the threats to Iran’s infrastructure might lead the Pasadran to back down.
More likely, they’ll plan to counter-attack against the GCC, and try to endure longer in war of mutual economic destruction.
Watch the commodity markets on Monday.
Imagine VP Eyeliner being convinced he was 48 only to be tossed under the bus by 47? Poor Usha, finding out that shes married to a subservient loser.
@Kylopod: Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones comes to mind.