U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday. Trump's volatility provides a sturdy reminder of the chaotic environment in the White House, writes David Shribman.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
For an American president armed with many of the advantages of his office − the strongest military in history, a robust stock market, the White House forum that Theodore Roosevelt called “the bully pulpit,” and a cadre of supporters whose loyalty has spanned nearly a dozen years − Donald Trump is increasingly finding himself boxed in and frustrated.
That frustration burst into the open Wednesday in a Truth Social post after a U.S. attack on Iranian air defence and radar sites, the coda to a fresh burst of limited hostilities that included the downing of an U.S. Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. Mr. Trump ordered another set of air strikes early Thursday morning Iran time.
Angered, impatient, resentful of the limits he is experiencing in a rare instance when he’s been unable to impose his will, the President said Iran had “taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”
Even if mounting signs of progress toward a preliminary accord on Iran’s nuclear project are accurate, Mr. Trump will face a daunting challenge in convincing critics − and even some allies who are more determined than he is to resume hostilities with Iran − that the celebrated dealmaker has made a prudent and long-lasting deal.
Though the negotiations may be entering a fresh phase − this caveat has been employed a half-dozen times in the two months since the Iran talks began in Pakistan, each time for naught − Mr. Trump told Fox News Wednesday that he was contemplating new attacks on bridges and power stations inside Iran. At the same time, there remain obstacles to an overall agreement, with all indications suggesting that any imminent accord would be only the first step to a more comprehensive pact.
U.S. launches more strikes on Iran after Trump says Tehran will ‘pay the price’ for stalled talks
The stalled negotiations and intermittent flare-ups of hostilities are vexing both Mr. Trump and Americans who remain concerned about the economy and are reminded of the costs of the Iran war every time they pull into a gas station or go through a grocery store checkout. Roughly an hour after Mr. Trump’s social-media post venting his frustration, new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showed that consumer prices rose at an annualized rate of 4.2 per cent in May, the highest since the Joe Biden years that Mr. Trump has assailed so repeatedly.
Mr. Trump’s volatility, taking form in rhetorical explosions such as Wednesday’s and in insults in a recent Meet the Press interview, provides a sturdy reminder of the chaotic environment in the White House − a marked contrast with his presidential predecessors, who sought above all to project a preternatural calm, especially during wartime.
Some of the obstacles Mr. Trump is experiencing now represent the conundrums presidents often face during a military engagement, even the “little excursion” that he calls his war on Iran. Both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon were in essence prisoners of war during the Vietnam period, constrained by conflicts that were intractable, the opposition to their policies keeping them from attaining the domestic goals they sought.
But Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon − who inherited their wars rather than starting their own, as Mr. Trump has done − were conventional political figures, shaped by established norms that they mastered, rode to the commanding heights of U.S. politics, were loath to challenge and ultimately were determined to preserve.
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They led parties that, though fractured by wartime controversies, were the products of decades-old traditions. And when they left the scene − one forced out of office by Vietnam protests, the other resigning because of a gathering scandal − the political system and the parties they left behind were only marginally transformed and survived largely intact for more than four decades.
None of that will be said about Mr. Trump, who will depart the American political scene with the Republican Party overhauled and recast, the nature of the presidency altered and the character of the country’s politics unrecognizable: coarser, more contentious, less open to comity, let alone compromise. The political world, and the other 21st-century presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, bear almost no resemblance to the politics and presidency of Mr. Trump, especially the second-term version.
The negotiations with Iran reportedly have produced some advances in nuclear-weapons discussions, but the final result will almost certainly allow both sides at least to posture that they have prevailed − or, more to the point, that they have not been defeated. Even that will be disappointing to Mr. Trump, who once vowed to secure the “unconditional surrender” of Iran, a goal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the Second World War that generals George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower and top diplomats Cordell Hull of the United States and Ernest Bevin of Great Britain later criticized.
“Trump had a great opportunity to reshape American foreign policy and may have dropped the ball,” said C. William Walldorf, a Wake Forest University political scientist. “He had a fair amount of political capital, a strong economic recovery, and has wasted a lot of it.”
The danger for Mr. Trump is that any agreement he assents to may resemble the Iran agreement made in the Obama administration that he twice spurned − or may give critics the opening for saying so, despite inevitable White House assertions to the contrary.
That 2015 agreement opened with words that provide a cautionary tale for the 2026 negotiations: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”
A separate cautionary tale − an apt reminder of the danger the Iran war casts on Mr. Trump’s other priorities − comes from the way the Vietnam War came to overshadow Mr. Johnson’s legacy of domestic programs to address poverty and racial discrimination, what he called the “Great Society” agenda.
“That bitch of a war,” the 36th president reflected later, “killed the lady I really loved − the Great Society.”