Social Media Diplomacy?
Is that really a good idea?
Recognizing that surely he is doing this for his base (although it seems like he has always taken first Twitter and now Truth Social as official channels of communication), this is no way to conduct foreign policy.
First we got this yesterday before either Iran or Israel made official statements.
Then, after midnight this moring we got:
Then, this morning the following:
And then:
This is all just an absurd way to conduct the serious business at hand. It is more child-throws-tantrum thatn POTUS-does-diplomacy.
Then we get this.
Maybe he doesn’t know what he is doing. (Without any doubt, this is all more complicated than he thinks it is.)
Side note: NPR was unwilling to play Trump saying “they don’t know what the fuck they are doing” (although they noted he used an explicative). Quite frankly, it seems newsworthy that that was the language he used, and maybe we don’t need to be shielded from it? (Not that I couldn’t figure it out from context clues.)
Look, as James Joyner noted this morning, we may have gotten away with the bombing of Iran without significant blowback, although, granted, it is still early. I remain skeptical that this was worth it insofar as I do not believe that the nuclear program in Iran is “obliterated,” and, moreover, we have provided Iran with additional incentives to acquire a bomb. It will take time to know for sure, of course.
The one thing that I will say in favor of the bombings is that they gave Israel what it wanted, and so, maybe, Israel will now stand down.
As I noted at some point in various writings on the topic, there is a finite number of weapons to be used in a war like this.
At any rate, and even setting aside the social media posts, random quotation marks, and weird capitalizations, it is striking the degree to which Trump thinks he can just make people do what he wants and that his anger will be enough to move global actors the way he wants them to go. It is especially ironic because I think that Netanyahu played Trump to get him to drop those bombs, meaning that Trump is not the main driver of any of this, despite thinking he is the capo.
BTW, this is delusional (source):
In an exclusive phone interview with NBC News tonight, Trump called the ceasefire between Iran and Israel that he announced marked “a wonderful day for the world, in my opinion.”
“It’s a great day for America. It’s a great day for the Middle East. I’m very happy to have been able to get the job done,” he said. “A lot of people were dying, and it was only going to get worse. It would have brought the whole Middle East down.”
Asked how long the ceasefire would be, Trump said: “I think the ceasefire is unlimited. It’s going to go forever.”
He added that the war is completely over, saying he does not believe Israel and Iran “will ever be shooting at each other again.”
Dystopian and weird. Abnormal. Trump is a very strange old man.
“Thank you for your attention to this matter” is the most mundane sign off to a business letter and he uses it all the time in the weirdest of ways. But then to append “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES” is just whiplash inducing weirdness.
From Eschaton, a comment by someone calling himself Whitesnake Jackson,
“NPR broadcasts profanity! Another reason to eliminate their funding!”
President Chump
The entire conflict was a fabrication. The case for attacking Iran was never even made. It was the equivalent of ICE claiming they were assaulted by a guy they were holding down and cuffing. In two months, if Israel starts saying that the program is not dead, what does that even mean?
It’s good for the people who were having missiles launched at their cities and bombs dropped on their buildings that this is over, but if you think that something was solved or concluded, you are simply a fool. At a certain level, you have to some awareness of the truth. Most American politicians folded in two seconds and happily denounced a country that was at the negotiating table while being attacked. That’s a sign that America will be eager to do this again.
This man makes my head hurt!
“it is striking the degree to which Trump thinks he can just make people do what he wants and that his anger will be enough to move global actors the way he wants them to go.”
Isn’t this exactly how he has operated within his own staff and for most of his life? He doesn’t understand any other way. Either he’s bullying someone, or being bullied. But as president, he can’t possibly be bullied, therefore…
Like James, I don’t have a strong opinion about whether the bombing was a good idea or not. For much the same reasons.
What I see, though, is an administration that is impulsive and negligent, perhaps reckless. It is very hard to trust that they are holding first and foremost the good of the nation, and not, “will this look good in media”.
And this particular episode really reinforces that impression.
I’m just grateful we no longer have Obama the narcissist, Biden the elderly, or, god forbid, an emotional woman as president.
I’ll never understand how people can be so dissonant in their thought processes that they think this is okay.
It is truly a thing to behold.
@Modulo Myself:
ALL of Trump 2.o is for show – Iran, mass deportation, tariffs, anti-woke – all of it. It is designed to play for the moment in the cyberculture we live in now and it works for the short attention span intended audiences in MAGA world and the media. No long term considerations at all. Simply promise a beautiful future in the knowledge that there won’t be any comeuppance when that future doesn’t materialize, because the audience will have moved on to some other promise flooding the zone.
Sadly, the Trump has astutely read the room as far as the US political culture goes. That suggests to me that the “all ephemeral show, no sustainable substance” will be with us long after Trump is gone. It’s bread & circuses repeating itself.
It’s really weird for him to say that — for one sentence he sounded normal. Not smart or anything, but normal.
Right after “the biggest load we’ve ever seen” and “I’m not happy with” there was a brief moment with no Trumpisms. He usually sounds like a 10 year old afraid of getting his mouth washed out with soap, depending on phrases like “nasty”, “nasty, nasty woman”, “like a dog”, or “disgusting”
I don’t want to be an armchair psychologist relying on a layman’s knowledge of the field, but the most likely reason is that he was tried in front of a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay for Epstein things, executed, and replaced with a clone, and that the clone is slipping and needs to be replaced.
Alternately, if his doctors have cut or increased one of his medications, they should cut or increase it more. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
@Joe: I really kind of love the “Thank you for your attention to this matter” that he’s picked up. Best part of Trump’s second administration by far.
Better than Whiskey Pete, or tariffs, or masked thugs in unmarked cars abducting brown people, or DOGE, or RFKJr, or the corruption…
It seems like an intent to make his completely weird proclamations on Dollar Tree Twitter seem normal, but in the weirdest way possible.
Every President since Reagan simply didn’t think to use all-caps!!!
Vance is right. All those other guys were dummies.
The only question is how long before Xi realizes now is the time to take advantage of the weakest, most incompetent, President ever.
Oops…
https://apnews.com/article/iran-nuclear-program-military-strikes-trump-f0fc085a2605e7da3e2f47ff9ac0e01d
I’m inclined to believe the US and Israel agreed months ago that the former would finally take out Iran’s buried nuclear facilities, as presidents have been threatening to do all century, but only if the IDF went in first to wreck Iran’s air defences so there’d be no possibility of American casualties. Who knows how much Trump was personally involved; it may have been sold to him in general terms with an assurance that naturally he would have the final say on whether the operation went ahead. It’s also likely that Witkoff was the patsy who was not told his “negotiations” were nothing but cover for military preparations. He probably began to suspect the truth when Trump publicly repudiated his enrichment offer a few weeks ago.
I found Iran’s carefully stage-managed “retaliation” intriguing. It made Tehran look pathetically weak; if that was the best they could do to save face, it would have been better not to do anything at all. But it was also consistent with them getting a message to Trump that he had one last chance to call off the Israeli dogs, otherwise they’d take some action/s which scared the hell out of him. His frenzied demands that Israel not break the cease-fire support this hypothesis, although they could also have been the typical reaction of a tyrant who is not getting the obedience he demands.
I expect more information will leak out over the coming months. One piece of information the Iranians and other nations will have tucked away: the much-hyped superbombs were not as effective as was predicted. They dropped 12 of the things on Fordow and reportedly the chamber still didn’t collapse.