Facing a decision on Iran, Trump is as befuddled as ever

If there’s one thing we have learned about Donald J. Trump over the last decade, it’s that he loves to talk big and carry a small stick. He’s a man full of bluster and dominance displays, which he employs both impulsively and tactically against friend and foe alike. But he almost always fails to follow through if he suspects that it carries the slightest risk. 

Over the years, he’s learned he can convince many people that he’s the ultimate strongman. But in reality, he is weak and indecisive.

Trump sees himself as a hero, which I suppose is true for most people who run for high office. But since he was a young man, he has been obsessed with creating a macho image, inventing the persona of a high-flying playboy and king of the New York real estate world. The roots of his aggressive, tough guy demeanor are well documented, stretching back to at least the 1970s and 1980s when Roy Cohn, the nefarious former counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt committee, took Trump under his wing.

Cohn counseled Trump to never admit guilt or wrongdoing of any kind, to pretend to always be in the right, no matter what. This advice cost Trump a lot of money over the years, as his businesses repeatedly went bankrupt and as he failed at one venture after another. By the end of the 1990s, he was nearly broke. But Trump’s obsessive pursuit of fame, and his insistence that he had never erred, convinced the public — and television executives at NBC — that he knew what he was doing anyway. It provided him a second act on television and, ultimately, the White House.

But all this doesn’t mean that being a belligerent blowhard isn’t the authentic Trump. In his first book “The Art of the Deal,” he tells a (probably false) story about how, when he was in second grade, he hit one of his teachers. His classmates and the teacher had no recollection of this incident. But Trump was almost certainly a kid with a discipline problem. After all, his father sent him to military school. But he never lost his obstreperous disposition. 

Still, when you think about it, the only people Trump has ever actually dominated on a personal level are all the women he’s been credibly accused of assaulting. While he’s certainly verbally insulted many men, he’s always done so from the safety of his powerful position. There’s actually very little evidence of him facing down a bully like himself. In fact, he reveres other strongmen on the world stage. In their presence, he shrinks into himself.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump pretended he had been a big Iraq War critic as a way of presenting himself as smarter than the rest of the GOP field, particularly former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who was the frontrunner at the time. (There’s no evidence that Trump was against the invasion.) By that time, Republican voters were embarrassed by the Iraq debacle and were happy to see someone promise that, rather than get into foreign quagmires, he would instead dominate the world by sheer force of his allegedly masterful negotiating prowess. 

Trump took office completely unprepared to make the kind of decisions a president is required to make. In that first term, his team included people who tried to tutor him. But they soon realized he was unteachable. He believed he knew everything he needed to know. It became clear that he was not only incapable of admitting otherwise, but also that he could not make a reasoned decision at all. 

This was a particularly acute problem when it came to foreign policy. He didn’t understand any of the thorny complicated issues, so he mostly just did the opposite of his predecessor. Trump had long nursed a grudge against President Barack Obama, and he was intent on reversing anything associated with Obama, such as the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal. Trump dealt with U.S. allies as if they were our adversaries and our adversaries as if they were our allies. He trash-talked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and many of its member states, while cozying up to the likes of Russia and North Korea. He found it was easy to bully our friends. After all, they weren’t going to require him to take some kind of action with unpredictable results like the adversaries would. 

Now, in his second term, nothing has changed and the stakes are considerably higher. Two major wars are raging — one of which he promised to end on his first day in office, apparently convinced that his good friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, would be happy to do him a solid. That didn’t work out. And after crowing that nobody has ever done as much for Israel as he has, Trump is now standing by helplessly as Benjamin Netanyahu thumbs his nose at the U.S. and carries out his long-standing dream of regime change in Iran. 

Once again, Trump doesn’t know how to make hard decisions. He is dithering on whether to get in on the action and take credit for it, or avoid the risk of it all going sideways and being stuck with the consequences. When he saw how Fox News was celebrating the strategic genius of the Israeli strikes, his initial instinct was to join in. But then he got some blowback from his MAGA base and heard that the big bombs the Israelis want him to use to blow up Iran’s underground nuclear facilities might not get the job done. At the same time, others have been pointing out that Iran is actually a formidable foe with 90 million people and a professional military that could close the Straits of Hormuz and disrupt the world’s oil supply, hit some of the 40,000 troops stationed in the region or perhaps even attempt to stage a terrorist attack on U.S. soil — which the FBI might not be able to foil since its focus has been redeployed to focus on ousting undocumented workers instead of anti-terrorism.

This, of course, is the complicated calculus one faces as president. And Trump is undoubtedly more befuddled than ever.

Trump’s former national security adviser — and hardcore Iran hawk — John Bolton told the New York Times that, in his experience, Trump is “frantic and agitated” in national security crises, which is very believable:

“He talks to a lot of people and he’s looking for somebody who will say the magic words,” Mr. Bolton said. “He’ll hear something and he’ll decide, ‘That’s right, that’s what I believe.’ Which lasts until he has the next conversation.”

So far, Trump’s weakness and confusion in the face of authorizing military action has prevented him from acting on his strongman impulses. On Thursday, he punted a decision on Iran for the proverbial two weeks in the hopes that something will materialize and save him from having to do anything at all. Let’s hope that’s one thing he is right about.