Donald Trump isn’t sounding like himself, and that’s terrifying. Hi, Paul Krugman here with a brief update on Saturday afternoon.
Not my usual thing. No economics, no analytics, just I felt I needed to say something. On Wednesday, Trump gave a speech, which was... pretty depressing. He was low energy, listless, and seemed to be disconnected from reality, insisting that everything is going great in this war and everything is going great across the board. And in terms of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, well, it’s somebody else’s problem. And the Strait may naturally open by itself, which didn’t sound like leadership.
In some ways it sounded like Trump, always living in a fantasy world in which things are going his way. But if you thought about the outcome for the world, it seemed to be pointing towards the U.S. never admitting it openly, but implicitly basically giving up and leaving a stronger Iran, but with the Strait of Hormuz opening up — maybe with tolls collected by the regime in Iran, and just a diminished, weakened U.S., but better than some of the alternatives.
Today Trump put up a Truth Social post, which said that if Iran doesn’t open up the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, “all hell will reign down on them.” That was how he put it. All hell will rain down. Misspelled rain, but OK. And then finished it up with glory be to God. GOD in caps.
Wow. So first of all, this is a completely different picture suddenly. Aside from the Strait of Hormuz not being our problem to we will commit massive war crimes, presumably. That’s the only thing that makes sense here, unless they open it up, which is pretty bad.
And also... I don’t think Trump has ever said “glory be to God.” That doesn’t sound like him. That sounds almost as if Pete Hegseth wrote this post, which maybe in some sense he did. The misspellings and all do look like Trump in his own hand, but it feels like this is the influence of our religious fanatic Secretary of War, or as people in the Pentagon apparently call him the Secretary of War Crimes.
This is really bad. It’s hard to see what happens in 48 hours. It’s clear that Trump, for all his pretense of, “I’m always winning,” is aware of how completely he screwed things up, that he’s aware that he has basically led America into an epic strategic defeat. I don’t think he cares about that from the point of view of America, but he is realizing what this has done to him — that he will probably quite rapidly lose his grip on U.S., politics, and certainly to the extent that he cares about his legacy, it’s not going to be his wonderful ballroom. It’s going to be that he’s the man who single-handedly led America to one of its greatest defeats ever. But now what?
It would be one thing if he just kind of slunk away into the night, which is what we would have hoped would happen, but instead it sounds like he’s unable to accept it and that he is going to try and do something truly awful in an attempt to somehow redeem himself and the situation.
If we had a functioning democracy, this would be 25th Amendment time. This guy should not have any authority at all. Finger on the button, although I don’t think we’re talking about nukes, but he shouldn’t have any authority on matters of state violence when this is the kind of mood he’s in. Just in general, although religiosity is often expected of American leaders, saying glory be to God before you unleash violence, that is not what used to be the American way.
Anyway, I’m scared. I wonder very much what the next few days will bring because this is looking like basically a president who is losing it and unfortunately losing it in a way that can really make the world a much worse place very fast.
I guess enjoy the rest of your weekend.
