What if an American president gave a speech and nobody cared? That's what happened last night. I almost never listen to Trump; his bleetings are not worth attempting to decode. But he's gone and launched a murderous war so I figured, I should. Thousands are dying under air assault by my country. Why?
What a waste of time it was to watch this. The man is a floundering moron. And he looks like he could use a nap.
Typically, presidents follow a decision to go to war with a nationally televised address to explain the decision, call for shared sacrifice, and define what victory looks like. ... One month into the war, Trump finally gave a nationally televised address — but instead of offering clarity or rallying the country to the cause, he delivered an overlong, low-energy, rambling speech that served no strategic purpose.
... Because the speech was so poorly written, it’s hard to identify any strategic rationale for giving it. To the extent there was a purpose, it was to declare victory. Instead, it read as an admission of defeat. ...
Having started a war, Trump seems to intend to bomb some more and just walk away from a broken international oil delivery system, leaving passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz under hostile Iranian control. I guess we knew he didn't know how to read a map.
During the speech, Trump argued this didn’t matter to the United States:
The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it.
With Trump, the line between dumb and dishonest is always blurry — but this is a genuinely nonsensical statement. ...
Trump started this war and raised your gas prices. Ending it on these terms won’t lower them.
What Trump says doesn't matter here, because Americans can't be tricked into thinking gas prices aren't high. The fact that he thinks they can says a lot.
Pfeiffer knows well that slipping presidential approval rarely recovers during a second term.
Trump’s numbers have been sliding for a year, but the decline has accelerated since the war with Iran began. A bounce-back is conceivable if the war ended and gas prices came down — but that would be a historical anomaly. Most second-term presidents never recover. They just amble off into the dustbin of history.
Trump’s path back to relevance looks especially precarious. The decision to go to war violated the two fundamental pillars of his political appeal — lower costs and no new wars. And as last night’s speech made clear, he can barely muster the energy to sell the war or save his presidency.
Trump has three more years to do possibly irretrievable damage to people and planet. The project remains: stop him as much as possible and envision a better future.
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