Projecting weakness

Any American president should project American strength. It's particularly surprising that this one isn't.

President Donald Trump has never found an adjective he values more highly, whether applied to him or whether he’s applying it to others, than “strong” (or any of its forms).

When praising his own behavior, he’ll brag about dealing with a problem “strongly”. When praising Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or an athlete he likes, it’s clear that he thinks he’s comparing them to the lord almighty or, even more bigly, to himself, when he calls the person “strong.”

At the risk of practicing psychology without a license, Trump has long struck me as a teenage boy desperate for the affection and approval of his father. I suspect that Fred Trump was a tough dad, didn’t shower young Donald with love and affection, and made him feel not-good-enough, causing the scarred young man (and now old man) to spend the rest of his life trying to prove his dad wrong, to earn his dad’s approval. Yes, I know, that’s wacky armchair psychology that’s more likely wrong than right but I’m just sharing with you my mental framework when I think of Trump’s behavior.

In any case, regardless of why it’s true, it undoubtedly is true that few things are more important to Donald Trump than being perceived as strong. Which makes it beyond shocking how much weakness he is portraying, day after day, week after week, most damagingly though not exclusively, in the prosecution of the war with Iran.

Just a couple of quick things before getting to the war, examples of demonstrating weakness, though I understand you may disagree. I note these also as unforced errors that hurt him politically. This is not close to a complete list; just a couple of examples.

First, picking a fight with the pope. Trump said that he didn’t like what the pope said about the Iran war and felt a need to respond. A strong person does not feel a necessity to respond to everything, and Trump is far less popular than the pope so it was also political malpractice.

Second, just yesterday, naming Bill Pulte, currently head of the Federal Housing Finance Authority, as acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte recently won the gold medal in the Donald Trump Boot-Licking Competition. Nobody licks ‘em more enthusiastically. He has zero relevant experience and he is best known for using information he claims to have, that he only could have accessed unethically through his current position, to try to torpedo some of Trump’s political opponents. (For the record, I very much dislike the people he went after, like NY AG Letitia James; I’m not here to defend any of them.) So now he’s put in a position to know and protect secrets when he’s already demonstrated that he can’t be trusted with private information. It was reported that Trump was pushed into naming Pulte by Roger Stone, a liar and grifter and schemer of the first order. It’s a sign of weakness to name to a position of such importance a man who has nothing to offer other than blind loyalty, a man who has no chance of being confirmed by the US Senate to the position because he’s so unfit.

Again, those are two small examples among many but they’re inconsequential as compared to what’s happening now with the Iran War.

Leland Vittert made a remarkable point on my KOA radio show on Tuesday morning: the world, including markets, are now ignoring Trump’s pronouncements about whether the war will be ending tomorrow, or ending in a week, or whether he’s going to destroy Iranian civilization, or whether he doesn’t even care. Think about that for a minute.

Donald Trump campaigned against Barack Obama for Obama’s attaching a deadline for American troop presence in Afghanistan, with Trump saying, “Conditions on the ground — not arbitrary timetables — will guide our strategy from now on. America's enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.”

Then, in the first days of the war with Iran, he announced that the war would take no longer than 4-6 weeks. That immediately projected weakness to…well, to everybody except Trump himself. And it put him in exactly the same terrible position that he complained about Obama putting himself in.

Initial military action killed some people and broke some things but it didn’t break the will of the Iranian regime nor, apparently, their ability to control — or at least deny safe access to — the Strait of Hormuz. It’s rather shocking that we seem to have gone into this war without a plan to prevent Iranian control over what has long been known as their only important leverage point in such a conflict. The vaunted American military looks strategically weak now. China is salivating.

For the last couple of months, though, we’ve seen the same Groundhog Day movie, or Lucy and the football (you choose the metaphor), of Trump giving a deadline by when Iran must agree to American terms of the US will attack, even going so far as to threaten “a whole civilization will die tonight” (which was an insane thing to say) followed by Trump giving a reason/excuse for not attacking. It’s usually along the lines of “the Pakistanis/Saudis said we’re close to a deal and I shouldn’t attack now because it will harm negotiations.”

Now I’m not arguing that Trump was right to threaten the things he threatened but as a friend recently told me, it seems like TACO Tuesday every day lately. Trump is displaying incredible weakness by never backing up his own deadlines, something that is a remarkable change in behavior for Trump. You may remember that one of his first acts in his first term was lobbing some Tomahawk missiles at Syria after Bashar al Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, defying Trump’s red line. That was a strong move. Where’s that guy? Again, I’m not saying that it needs to be all attacks all the time, but it can’t be a repeated cycle of threaten and back down.

And now we get to the worst of it:

Because Trump has demonstrated unwillingness or fear or whatever it is to engage in more military activity and because we either don’t have a plan or a willingness to do what it takes to end Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian regime thinks it’s winning.

And it’s hard to blame them.

Trump keeps talking about how many Iranian ships we’ve sunk. It’s true, but so what? It did not achieve our strategic goals.

Trump is acting like the teenage boy who hopes a cute girl will go on a date with him. It doesn’t matter how much Iran strings him along, doesn’t matter that Iran has made it clear that they won’t agree to the one provision that Trump says is an absolute must: they must give up all aspirations for a nuclear weapon and their current stockpile of enriched uranium. When I think of Trump being told that there may be a deal to be made with Iran, it reminds me of this:

Because Trump projects such weakness, Iran behaves as if they’re in the driver’s seat in the negotiations. And Trump is letting them get away with it. He’s even letting Iran demand that Israel stop defending itself against the terrorist group Hezbollah, somehow getting Trump to yell at the Israeli Prime Minister to get him to back off. Truly shocking weakness.

So where are we now?

Trump has two choices: Take almost any deal he can get so he can wind down the war, or stick to his guns (literally and figuratively) and insist on a deal that achieves the terms mentioned above.

I am convinced that the only way to end up with a deal that looks at least a little like an American win, a little like the war has been worth it, is to engage in more military activity. We must take out personnel and weapons emplacements and storage throughout Iran that are involved with controlling the strait. He won’t be able to defer the decision much longer.

Getting even close to a “win” in this war is far more difficult now than when it started because of the weakness being demonstrated by Donald Trump.