Daily Despot Update

" “And everybody praised the Duke/ Who this great fight did win.”/ “But what good came of it at last?”/ Quoth little Peterkin./ “Why that I cannot tell,” said he,/ “But ’twas a famous victory.” — Robert Southey, “The Battle of Blenheim” (1798)

Deferring gratification can be virtuous, but now is the time for an autopsy of Donald Trump’s presidency. The nation has experienced more than a few failing presidencies, but this flailing presidency is as uniquely unsightly as it is terminal.

Trump’s plummet will intensify what is causing it, his self-absorption and self-indulgence. Recently, he has waged war carelessly, pursued a fixation incontinently, and named a building contemptibly.

He unleashed America’s military competence, in conjunction with Israel’s, for a defensible purpose: preventing a genocidal and theologically demented regime from completing the Holocaust (it has called Israel “a one-bomb country”) and punishing God’s foremost enemy, America. But this worthy U.S. goal became a casualty of presidential frivolousness.

Trump launched this war eight months after declaring that last summer’s U.S. and Israeli bombing “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapon program. The general who led the Defense Department’s intelligence agency was fired after its report concluded otherwise.

In February, Trump implicitly affirmed the report’s conclusion by ordering another obliteration. But when, in May, the price of gasoline reached a national average of $4.47 a gallon (the price 70 years ago, adjusted for inflation, was about $3.70), he wobbled. Trumpeting Iran’s assurance, which it has reiterated for decades, that it would not acquire nuclear weapons, Trump accepted a “memorandum of understanding” under which Iran will be bribed (with reconstruction money from undetermined sources) to accept U.S. capitulation. Here are reasons why Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Massachusetts) calls this “the most humiliating national security episode since the British burned the White House”:

Restrictions on Iranian exports will be loosened and at least $100 billion in frozen assets will be “fully available” to Iran. The MOU would codify that, contrary to international law, the Strait of Hormuz is “an Iranian river” (Auchincloss). Excluded from negotiations are Iran’s ballistic missile developments, its funding of Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies, and the regime’s slaughter of protesters by the thousands. (“Help is on its way,” Trump told them in January.)

If Trump believes that Israel, which was excluded from negotiation of the MOU, and which exists to “never again” depend on others for its security, will allow limits on its measures against Hezbollah, his credulousness is unlimited. Trump, who said he would make Americans “tired of winning,” must, by law, submit a final Iran agreement for congressional review. To him, however, the law is a cobweb; to his many congressional poodles, it is an invitation to evasion. Perhaps, though, they have reached the limits of their canine loyalty.

A figment of Trump’s imagination, the theft of the 2020 election, has produced a congressional train wreck. He is willing to sacrifice national security in order to get a voting-security law that is intended to prevent a repeat of what did not happen in 2020. A vital anti-terrorism law expired while he was toying with nominating (he retreated) another know-nothing — Bill Pulte, a real-estate mogul — as director of national intelligence.

The neutering of Trump might continue with the Senate not confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general. National Review, conservatism’s flagship publication, says, “Blanche has been everything President Trump wants in an attorney general, and that’s the problem.” As acting attorney general, he has been “an instrument of Trump’s unworthy and abusive campaign to investigate and prosecute his political opponents.”

Trump’s hunger for flattery, even self-flattery, recently caused him to further miniaturize himself: He tried to appropriate an honor bestowed on an assassinated president. Although Trump’s life has been a long plea of “Look at me!,” he is oblivious to how he looked when he slapped his name on (for 176 days; a court intervened) the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare’s Juliet. “That which we call a rose/ By any other word would smell as sweet.” Well.

The Kennedy Center’s name reminds Americans that honors are bestowed on those whom the nation believes especially worth remembering. By elevating an honored few, this egalitarian nation reminds itself that excellence is both real and rare. By slathering the building with the stench of self-praise, Trump proclaimed that honor is a mere bauble, a prerogative of power.

So, “What’s in a name?” Sometimes a lot, sometimes — for 176 recent days — nothing."
By George F. Will