Instructions for interpreting our Orange Toddler monster

Is he serious -- or is he bluffing? Journalist and activist Parker Molloy has some suggestions for navigating that question while Trump continues to bark and weave while threatening genocide.

She's insightful in describing how most of our media play Trump's game, falling for his lying feints over and over again.

By Tuesday, Operation Epic Fury had been running for six weeks. The whole time, Trump had been telling anyone listening exactly what he planned to do. He said Iran could be “taken out in one night,” and named the bridges and power plants that would come down. Each of those threats was parsed by the political press. Each was processed as leverage or theater. Each was written off as Trump being Trump.

Then the bombs started falling. On Kharg Island. On power plants. On bridges.

The ["take him seriously, but not literally] frame has a near-perfect track record of being wrong in one direction. It rarely overestimates how far Trump will go. It only underestimates him. A prediction that’s always wrong in the same direction stops being analysis and starts being an alibi.

[Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh] Hammer reached for the ... line on the day Trump posted that a whole civilization would die that night. That’s the tell. That’s what “seriously, not literally” is actually for. The frame comes out when the sentence is so plainly monstrous that the only defense left is to tell the reader not to read. 

That's the pattern we are caught in by this decompensating madman. If JD cannot pull a rabbit out of an empty hat to cover up the United States' strategic defeat by the mullahs, she predicts we'll see some variant again:

... Since the war began, Trump has repeatedly backed off his own deadlines at the last possible hour. The sequence is always the same: threat, deadline, airstrike, walkback, a news cycle crediting him with dealmaking, the original threat filed away. The walkback itself becomes retroactive evidence that the morning post was never serious. And the next morning, he can say something worse.

By Wednesday morning, the headlines were about the Hormuz ceasefire. The genocide post was yesterday’s news. The laundering was happening in real time. 

Trump is failing at home. Even Melania is undermining his defenses. How about a little genocide in the one arena where his power is still apparently unfettered?