Weakened But Dangerous
Trump has lost the Iran War, tugged his forelock for Xi, and dissed the Republican Seantee by endorsing Paxton. Republicans could impeach him tomorrow if they wanted to.
I followed the news this week as I always do, and quite a week it was. It’s hard to remember that Trump was in China just a week ago, humiliated by being photographed in a chair built too short for him, gushing into Xi’s stone-faced calm, and sealing the deal on the story of America’s decline in the world.
We barely noticed how effortlessly Xi slipped the phrase “Thucydides’ Trap” into the lexicon of the mainstream press, and Trump’s own acceptance of the concept of decline—but only under Biden, ha ha—made the whole rearrangement of the world order in China’s favor a fait accompli.
It’s not really true, at least not quite yet. But Trump is moving us there as fast as he can.
Meanwhile, I was wrong last week to guess that Trump would have launched a new attack on Iran by now. Maybe Trump has bought into the idea that an escalation of the war would be disastrous and unlikely to succeed, but I still think that his impulse is to strike. It seems quite possible that his wavering is a sign that Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, now have a veto power over renewed U.S. aggression.
Iran apparently has managed to preserve much of its counter-strike force, and it has already shown what escalation might look like with its strike on Qatar’s LNG field. A drone attack on a nuclear power plant in the U.A.E. last week, probably from a proxy in Iraq, was like a shot across the bow. Iran’s threats are of all-out destruction in the Gulf.
Saudi Arabia forced the cancellation of “Operation Freedom” and the military push to reopen the Strait by denying the use of its airspace, essentially making the mission impossible. It seems unlikely that MSB would open the skies for any form of renewed hostilities, given the inevitable damage that renewed Iranian attacks could cause.
Nothing much else has changed, except for reports that Iran is talking with Oman about creating a stable fee structure for ships navigating the Gulf, and the new Ayatollah has drawn a bright line around ending the nation’s nuclear program.
Trump is reportedly trying to buy more time with a “letter of intent” for further negotiations and a month-long extension of the ceasefire, but it’s not clear that the hardline IRGC leaders of Iran have any interest in negotiating, except on terms of a U.S. surrender.
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I suppose the real story of last week was how visibly weakened Trump has become in such a short time. His approval ratings are like a stock that’s broken through its support levels and is searching for a new floor. Redistricting may reduce the margin, but Democrats will take the House in November, and it’s even odds right now on re-taking the Senate, odds that will only improve if the current trajectory holds.
All of the damage is self-inflicted. It is quite astonishing, compared to any presidency I can think of in my lifetime. The saving graces of the Trump administration have been idiocy and incompetence, from the first AI-produced chart of new tariffs on “Liberation Day” to the failure to notice the Chinese humiliation of a shorter chair, something the Office of Protocol would have picked up had they not all been fired.
This week’s best own goal was Trump’s decision to endorse the odious Kenneth Paxton over the well-liked Senate traditionalist John Cornyn in the race for Cornyn’s seat. Along with the $1.776 billion felon to felon slush fund and the $1 billion ballroom, it all proved too much for the toadies in the Republican Senate, which cancelled a key vote and went on recess instead.
From a structural standpoint, the only true brake on Trump is Congress. The Supreme Court can prevent unconstitutional executive orders from becoming law, which is has been doing at least some of the time. But just a handful of Republicans would be required to vote articles of impeachment in the House, and then twenty Republicans to vote to convict. It could happen tomorrow.
Last week Trump made it clear that he doesn’t care about the Republican Party, except to the degree it is his own party, synonymous with MAGA. MAGA is large enough and enthusiastic enough for Trump to primary someone like Massie or Cornyn, but MAGA itself is only about 54 percent of the Republican Party, according to recent surveys, and about 25 percent of the total electorate.
It’s not the winning coalition that brought Trump to power in 2024, but Trump is clearly intent on burning down the Republican Party to his own core support, preferring to lose an election with a slavish loyalist like Paxton rather than a merely servile one like Cornyn.
That’s bad news for the party, which will be stuck with those MAGA voters for as long as Trump lives. Bad news for the U.S., too, since it is hard to see how functional governance is possible in such a polarized nation. My optimism about the short-term prospects for the Dems in 2026 and 2028 is matched by pessimism about the wreckage whoever wins in 2028 will face, a topic for a different essay.
In the immediate term, it remains to be seen how badly Trump has weakened himself with his own party, and whether Congress will continue the trend of constraining his ambitions. The ballroom, the slush fund, and the war itself all make for hard votes, and the Epstein story has no conclusion yet.
The Paxton endorsement cuts very deep for the senators who have dutifully carried Trump’s water from beginning. The blow to Cornyn shows that servility is not enough for Trump—one must play the sedulous ape or be consigned to the darkness. Given the alternatives, perhaps a few more Republicans in Congress will make the principled choice.
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The clearest sign of Trump’s new weakness lies in his choices about how to exercise power. Gloating about winning primary elections within his own party is sort of sad, if you think about it, like being proud of winning an intra-squad scrimmage. Trump knows he’s going to lose the big game in November, and he’s already talking down the importance of it.
At this time last year, Trump was a big player on the world stage, declaring peace in Gaza, all kinds of deals in the Gulf, saying Zelensky holds no cards and playing footsie with his buddy Vladimir while treating Europe like the enemy, and rolling out a full-scale trade war against China. All that’s gone now.
China flourished its power last weekend, subtly humiliating Trump on the global stage, and almost everywhere you look nations are recalibrating their relations with the two great powers, hedging their bets by opening lines to Beijing.
As Putin weakens and the narrative shifts on Ukraine, Trump has been forced to the margins, with Europe deepening its structural ties and Gulf states signing mutual aid agreements on defense. Ukraine has the premier fighting force in the world right now, in terms of the current battlefield, where drones and robots play the leading role.
Most of all, Trump has no meaningful agency in the Middle East—there’s nothing he can do to resolve the conflict since escalation won’t work and the Iranians believe that they have won the war.
I find it hard to believe that Trump won’t strike again, since the alternative is to wait until the Iranians fold, or accept their terms. But it is possible that he is preparing to walk away from the war, leaving other nations to sort out the Gulf. No matter what he does, he’ll never be able to claim victory,
What’s left for Trump now is self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment, and revenge, along with a turn toward his own region, the new world, as the locus for his impulses toward bullying and violence. He’s already brought Greenland back into play.
As I write this, word is that Trump is skipping Don Jr.’s wedding—the joke goes that he’ll try to make the next one, since his son is a person he has known “a very long time”—and a golf weekend in New Jersey, too, instead returning to the White House. Maybe they’ll pull poor old Raul Castro out and put him in prison next to Maduro. We like to go to war on the weekend.
If Trump does decide to attack Cuba as a salve to his broken ego, it may turn out to be messier than he thinks. Cuba has a great deal more in common with Iran than it does with Venezuela, from a centralized hardline regime that collectively controls both security and most of the island nation’s business enterprises, to a geography that would make continued resistance likely.
Cuba’s fighting forces have always been a priority, and they are good. Security forces and surveillance are extensive and comprehensive, and while there is significant opposition to the regime, most of the people who would welcome American soldiers as saviors already live in Miami or Madrid.
The poor are left, for the most part, and whatever opposition exists is disorganized and leaderless. I doubt very much that Rubio, the architect of U.S. strategy, wants to try to bring down the government by force—if nothing else because of the likely humanitarian cost in an already devastated nation. He may have a hard time taming Trump’s impatience.
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Starting fairly early last year, I had written several times about the trajectory of Trump’s power, using the Nazi takeover of Europe and invasion of the Soviet Union as benchmarks, and projecting forward to the point at which Trump would face something like the siege of Stalingrad and be turned back.
The mid-terms seemed then to be the point at which the siege would be broken, and it took two years after that before Hitler was finally defeated. The timing still lines up pretty well, by coincidence I suppose: there were sixteen months between Hitler’s invasion and the start of his retreat, just as many as Trump has had in office.
It’s downhill for Trump from here. The obvious danger is that he will lash out more impulsively in displays of force as his actual hold on power and support continues to weaken. The Chinese reportedly see the U.S. as “weakened but still dangerous,” and that’s an apt phrase for Trump himself. The fact that there’s no rationale besides his fragile ego to strike Cuba won’t prevent Trump from doing it, or from trying to steal the mid-terms in some fashion.
It’s probably a mistake to underestimate the threat of stochastic violence this summer, primarily on the right, which is armed and trained for it, but on the left, too, now, with the examples of Luigi Mangione and Carl Allen Cole. I’m old enough to remember when every summer brought riots, and the level of free-floating rage in the U.S. seems very high to me.
Trump has always had a deep interest in violence and revenge. He thrived in the sadistic milieu of the all-male military boarding school during the dark ages of the 1960s, and his anger and aggression have been on public display for most of the past decade.
Trump called for an insurrection and people came, and now, after pardoning then, he has offered to pay them off. He is obsessed with building a massive structure that would enable him to live underground indefinitely, like Hitler’s bunker but with a hospital. He seems almost entirely indifferent to the consequences of anything he might do, including the loss of political power for his own party.
Congress is on recess next week, and officeholders are home to mix with their constituents and hear what’s on people’s minds. Memorial Day is a big day, and it’s campaign season, so there will be plenty of that sort of news.
Congress left in a hurry, with Republican leaders in each House facing rebellion in their ranks, and I imagine that folks will be talking to each other during the week, trying to figure out what comes next. The ballroom, the slush fund, and the war are all still on the table, as is the budget bill itself.
I keep coming back to the fact that twenty Republican senators and a handful of representatives could end all of this tomorrow. We don’t need to hope and wait for the 25th amendment to be invoked through some unimaginable conspiracy of Trump’s closest courtiers.
The corruption would be the thing. It’s all there, billions and billions of dollars worth. The crypto deals, the payoffs, the sixty trades a day in the stock market, blatant conflicts of interest, all of it enough evidence to impeach the fraudster in chief. It wouldn’t even have to be political. Leave those issues off the table. Just get the votes and get rid of the guy, start fresh with Vance the way the party did in 1974.
It would take the Democrats winning the Senate to get even partway there. But it is easy to imagine a Democratic House impeaching Trump by a majority vote. It would depend a lot on how bad things have gotten by then, and if this war doesn’t end soon—like by August or September—it will be pretty bad.
Trump will be a lame duck, with Rubio and Vance jockeying for position and other horses lining up. Will Republicans make the same mistake McConnell did in 2021? Probably, but it’s worth keeping in mind that they may have the choice, and that Trump won’t be around forever.