While global stocks have largely sustained the relief rally that followed Monday’s wild swings, fear is again resurfacing as Iran vowed to step up its missile strikes.
President Donald Trump’s assurance that the war with Iran was “very complete” and could be “over soon” initially injected optimism into markets, even as Iranian hardliners rallied behind new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and said their blockade of oil would continue.
Within hours of Trump’s statements, Iran’s military dashed markets’ hopes. “We are the ones who will determine the end of the war,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.
Such comments brought the exchange back to a familiar tempo with Trump then threatening to hit Iran “TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.”
Or, if you’ve no strategic goals, you never really fail. It’s a matter of perpspective. And when friendly media take his word as does a cult following, that perspective will be magnified.
I agree, you’re looking at his actions similarly to me, but you’re trying to fit that into an assessment compared to peers or conventional thinking and/or planning. He doesn’t follow norms as he’s not normal.
See, I think this is a mistake people make a lot with Trump. They start at “Trump doesn’t follow norms” which is a completely true and correct statement, and continue to “Trump has proven that a lot of our assumptions about politics are incorrect”, which is also true and correct, but then they seemingly progress from there to a position that tends to land somewhere around “Trump is an eldritch being unbound by all laws of reality.”
Obviously, I’m being hyperbolic there, but it really does seem like a lot of the thinking about Trump skews that way. People over-correct from our assumptions and norms to this world where nothing will ever affect Trump because he’s got some kind of magical power to warp reality.
Trump exists in the same physical universe we all do. When something happens that breaks our understanding of reality, it’s not magic, it just means that our understanding was based on faulty assumptions. Trump is forcing us to update and correct a lot of our assumptions about political realities, but he’s still bound by political realities. We just need to understand those realities better. His support is steadily crumbling, and we can see that in both how his poll numbers are falling, and how he is panicking about the mid-terms. Whether Iran will meaningfully affect that support is an open question, and whether or not Iran can be judged as a strategic success does not necessarily have any bearing on that question. Whether or not the Iran war is a political success, for example, would be an entirely separate question.
But just because the question of strategic success or failure in Iran doesn’t necessarily matter to the question of political success or failure, doesn’t mean that we can’t still ask the question. It’s not about trying to fit Trump into any kind of box, it’s just about judging him, and his administration, by all of the criteria available.
It’s important to ask these questions, and be clear about the answers, because there will be a myriad of defenders of his who will parrot any claim he makes that Iran was a success, however it goes down. There’s no reason for us to allow his lackeys to freely rewrite history.
I agree with what you’re saying. I also think it’s important to seperate trump as a person to trump as a political entity or trumpism (maga) as a cause.
Trump gets away with stuff, bit because we let him, but because he demands it and does everything to get it. Someone else might retire in disgrace. Hell make claims of fraud and try and incite violent upheaval to auit his purposes.
It’s not so much that he is exempt from consequences, political or legal, it’s that those consequences aren’t being upheld. It’s very groupthink and emperora new clothes. If he thought he was immune, he wouldn’t need to get rid of opposition and stack everywhere with allies and yes men.