Missiles

The kind aimed by Trump at Trump.

Donald Trump, yesterday, when asked about Iran’s missile program: “I mean, they have to have some, because other people have some. You got to have some...Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them? Doesn’t work that way, you know, it doesn’t work that way, and missiles aren’t the problem.”

Oy.

Back up a bit. Trump is hardly the first president to have a disaster on his hands, whether (as it is in this case) entirely self-inflicted or not. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with choosing brazen declarations of victory after losing a war; judging “winners” and “losers” is subjective enough in many cases, sort of including this one. Even when it’s pretty clear that Trump’s side lost. It’s still not like losing a ballgame. Or an election.

What’s more, one can argue that Trump’s decision to pull the plug at this point beats what Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and first-presidency Donald Trump all did in prolonging losing wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan so they could duck the blame. But that’s not something any president is going to want to brag about.

(Especially when Trump was the one who made the idiotic decision to begin the war in the first place; utterly failed to gather any allies inside or outside of the US; didn’t bother to come up with a coherent or consistent explanation for why anyone should support the war; and most likely wound up with a very sub-optimal interim agreement with Iran thanks to his incompetent negotiating. Among other things. So many other things. I mean this was a seriously botched operation, soup to nuts. But most of that isn’t my topic today. Although, damn, that’s some impressively inept presidenting.)

Anyway…yes, it’s neither surprising nor particularly bad for Trump to claim that a loss is a win.

But presidents do have a responsibility to the rest of the party to tell a plausible story – and beyond that, it’s in the president’s interest to use talking points that those who want to stick with the party line can adopt.

Trump has repeatedly failed at that. In fact, at least three times in the last five weeks or so, he’s directly undermined what other Republicans have been trying to say. In May, he said “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when dealing with Iraq. Last week, he said “I love the inflation.” And now he’s arguing for Iran’s missiles, when eliminating them was previously one of the main reasons he claimed to have gone to war in the first place.

Matt Glassman has an excellent item up about the ways that legislators hate it when they are “blindsided.” Exactly correct, and it will surprise no one that Trump has been doing plenty of that, too. Missiles/inflation/financial situation are closely related (or perhaps overlapping) in that the problem here isn’t really about politicians as legislators, but about them as representatives. And politicians as representatives are constantly trying to explain what’s happening to their constituents in terms of their own, and their party’s, promises.

Trump is making that impossible.

Just to be clear: The obvious (and brutal) part of this is that he keeps saying things that are so wrong, and so outrageous that it’s hard for even the most kowtowing Republican politicians to buy in. But the absence of any usable talking points – any coherent and consistent story from the White House that Republicans can use – might be even worse. After all, they could always say that, oh, that’s just Trump, but. Except that there’s nothing here to complete that sentence.

Meanwhile, instead of mutual support and advantage, what Trump uses to keep Republican politicians in line is bluster and threats. And that works fairly well! Except it also makes for a lot of repressed enemies, and when they feel free to do so, such as cases in which they are retiring or lost a primary, it can get ugly. As when Republican Senator Bill Cassidy on Wednesday called Trump’s Iran adventure “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

Again: When you start a war for no good reason, can’t even bother to explain why you started it, and then sign a humiliating agreement to end it? There are no magic words to make that go away. But there’s bad, and then there’s worse, and that’s what Trump is doing here.

And I should be clear: I’m not particularly claiming that this will hurt Trump’s popularity, although it surely can’t help. What it does do is further weaken him in his presidency. It further diminishes his influence – not just over congressional Republicans, but over anyone paying attention to how poorly Trump has handled this. Which includes everyone from foreign leaders to bureaucrats in executive branch agencies to interest group leaders deciding whether to submit to the president or take him on. The more everyone sees him defeated without having any clue how to defend himself? The more he seems incapable of handling the basics of his job? The more they are going to feel it’s worth it to take him on.

Trump is just really, really bad at presidenting. And it’s costing him, his party, and the nation, over and over again.