CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Call the Shrink

Trump doing his whining and moaning routine in Pennsylvania this week. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

I remember when Woodward and Bernstein’s description in Final Days of Nixon wandering the halls of the West Wing late at night having drunken conversations with the portraits of FDR, Jefferson and Lincoln, seemed such an inconceivable account of a president who’d lost his marbles that many people assumed they’d made it up, though their source was Tricia’s husband Edward Cox.  [Nixon got looped on expensive French wines, Chateau Margaux and Lafitte Rothschild, which, in true Dick Nixon style, he often mixed with a splash of…7 Up!]  But Donald Trump posts his insane rants online for all to see, nearly every night, and without the aid of alcohol to set him off, just his own disintegrating mind and no one bats an eye anymore. Last week, he compared himself to Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Alexander the Great (does he know the Macedonian psychopath was bisexual?), claiming he was more powerful than all of them, and was “by far the most powerful person that has ever walked this planet,” because of his “global reach.” (Does he know Global Reach was the title of a book on transnational corporations written by the left-wing political economist Richard Barnett?)

During daylight hours, Trump sensibly defending cutting a deal with Iran that ended the war, allowing Iran to keep its enriched uraniumn stockpiles, maintain and restock its ballistic missile arsenal, have control over the Strait of Hormuz, remove sanctions on Iranian oil, unfreeze $28 billion in Iranian financial assets and commit to help raise at $300 billion reconstruction fund to reconstruct the damage to Iran’s infrastructure from the US/Israeli airstrikes. Trump even defended Iran’s right to defend itself and admitted that the US couldn’t dislodge Iran from controlling the Strait of Hormuz without sending in US ground troops and sustaining heavy losses. Of course, he’s said 100 different things about the Strait of Hormuz, including that it didn’t matter because the US has so much oil it doesn’t know where to park all of the barrels. [Fact check: 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows through the Strait; the price of gas here in Oregon City is still $4.97 a gallon cash; and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drained down to a puddle. Tell us another one, Don!] And, most consequentially perhaps, he publicly criticized Netanyahu for continuing to bomb Lebanon and attempting to undermine his deal. 

But that was by day. By night, another Trump emerges. A belligerent, bombastic, even sociopathic Trump, who threatened to “bomb the shit” out of Iran if he didn’t get his way and to kill the Iranian diplomats “before they even made it back to Tehran.” He vowed to seize the Strait of Hormuz and take all of the oil. He boasted about provisions that weren’t in the MOU he signed and decided the existence of provisions that were.

Trump’s public support is now down to 30%, the lowest of any recent president, even Biden in his dotage and George W. at his nadir. But he’s still more popular than his war on Iran, which is supported by only one in four Americans. Few believe the war was worth the costs. Even fewer know what the war was all about in the first place. Trump has never been a great communicator; aside from his code-words and dogwhistles to bigots, it’s increasingly difficult to deconstruct what he’s actually saying and what he’s saying actually means. But he promoted himself as a great salesman, mainly of Trump. But he couldn’t sell the Iran war and now he can’t sell a plan to end it, especially to his principal political sponsor, the person most responsible for resurrecting his political career when it was on life support after J6, Miriam Adelson. 

Adelson infused Trump’s Preserve America PAC with $100 million and raised, pledged and contributed another $150 million to other Trump-affiliated coffers, dwarfing the $75 million contributed by Elon Musk. What did Adelson expect for her money? Palestinians wiped out of Gaza, stripped of their land in the West Bank, Southern Lebanon seized into Israeli control and Iran blown off the map. So give Trump credit for double-crossing his investors, if he understood the consequences of his actions. 

Trump is impulsive. He Tweets on impulse. He acts on impulse. Consequentialism is not in his vocabulary, even in a mispronounced or badly misspelled way. There are deals to be made and deals to be blown up. Often the same deal.  Often on the same day. This may work in real estate. It doesn’t work in war or diplomacy.

The internal conflicts are beginning to leak out of Trump’s consciousness, the weight of Adelson’s millions battling with the weight of Trump’s ego. Trump’s been burning a lot of bridges lately, including every bridge into New York City. But can he afford to burn this one? Not just the link to Miriam Adelson, but the entire symbiotic relationship of the Trump presidency, indeed the entire US government, with the state of Israel and its stateside lobby. What if, for example, the Ellisons, who, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, have injected $45 million into Trump-related accounts and gotten rewarded with a lightning-fast approval of the takeover of Warner Brothers by Paramount, turn on him and use their control of CBS and CNN with the ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss at the helm to rake him over the coals, as Adelson owned media outlets are already doing in Israel?

The knives are also coming out from inside the house, as they invariably do when the aging ruler, physically infirm and mentally unstable, shows signs of vulnerability. This explains the curious case of the normally status-seeking Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, in name at least, who seems to play no role in the Trump administration’s diplomatic initiatives, to the extent there have been any stabs at diplomacy, instead of lectures, threats and posturing. With his eyes on the White House, Rubio certainly has no desire to alienate AIPAC, Adelson or the Ellisons. He’s hanging back, lurking in the shadows, waiting on the deal either to fall apart under its own weight or be sabotaged by the Israelis, as US intelligence agencies warned Trump was Netanyahu’s intent last week. 

At some point, Trump handed the mess he’d made in Iran over to JD Vance to clean up. Vance had quietly opposed the war from the beginning, for his own political reasons. He wants to inherit what’s left of the MAGA contingent in 2028 and has begun talking more and more like Tucker Carlson on quaaludes. His presence within the Administration has waxed and waned with Trump’s mood. Rubio was clearly in favor after the kidnapping of Maduro, but after the Iran war began to crash on the Strait of Hormuz, Trump turned to JD Vance to mop up the mess.  Vance has less diplomatic experience than Rubio. He was clearly just glad to hear his name called from his seat on the far end of the bench. It was clearly a setup. If Vance emerges with a deal, Trump will seize the credit. If the deal falls apart, he’ll get the blame. Rubio will stick the blade into the VP and let Trump call in someone else, Stephen Miller, probably, to wipe away the blood.

So put yourselves in the Iranians’ shoes. What are they to make of all of this?  If Trump’s behavior seems schizophrenic to you, imagine how the Iranians, sophisticated diplomats, viewed his baffling and wildly contradictory statements from day to day and hour to hour. They were so confounded by Trump’s bipolar mood swings that they told mediators in Pakistan that they had consulted psychologists, not of course to fix Trump’s mind. It’s beyond repair. But to decode his mindset. His mental pathology. How to read whether he means what he says, and which statements he really means when he quickly contradicts himself and how long he’ll hold those views before he changes his mind. 

Does he actually trust the people he sent to negotiate for him? 

Does he have the fortitude to stand up to the Israelis? 

Would he really follow through on his threat to kill them in a drone strike? He didn’t hesitate to wipe out the previous Ayatollah and most of the leadership of his regime and their families on the first day of the war. He even laughed about killing the people he wanted to replace them with. What kind of a man does that? What kind of a man admits to doing that?  to analyze Trump’s statements and try to predict his response to Iran’s proposals in the peace talks. Is any deal they sign with Trump worth the pixels it’s written with, especially when Israel isn’t on board, as it clearly isn’t. 

By the way, there’s no word on whether the Iranians consulted with Freudians or Jungians. There’s a case to be made for each or both, given his unresolved mother issues and his obsession with power for the sake of power.

But psychology can only take you so far. Sooner or later, as Kierkegaard said, you must confront “the darkness of the current moment,” and whatever malign forces lurk within. And this goes far beyond Trump’s serial prevarications into the nature of the American empire in extremis. How do you trust a regime that says the rules of war don’t apply to us and drives the point home by bombing a girls’ school? If the Geneva Conventions aren’t binding, how long will an MOU serve to restrain them? 

As Andrew Cockburn astutely observed in a recent piece, the new Iranian regime isn’t bound by the old rules, even the old fatwas issued by the late Ayatollah, such as the one commanding that Iran not develop weapons of mass destruction. The new regime came to power, seeing their fathers, uncles and brothers slaughtered by the US and Israel in a surprise attack. And they’ve quickly gained a stature and authority that the old, more cautious and conciliatory regime didn’t enjoy. They proved themselves. They survived the worst two nuclear regimes could fling at them. They not only survived, but they struck back, militarily and economically and brought Trump to the table, desperate to end the war before it ends his presidency. The Iranians may not have won the war. But endured it and survived it and are now winning the terms for how it will end.

For the first time since the War Powers Act was passed in 1973, both houses of Congress have approved a measure directing the president of the United States to end a war. On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted 50-48 to approve a War Powers Resolution directing Donald Trump to end U.S. hostilities against Iran. The measure was originally introduced (and approved) in the House by Rep. Gregory Meek. Four Republican senators—Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy —joined every Democrat except one in support of the resolution–the lone Democratic dissenter: John Fetterman. The measure does not require Trump’s signature and, if the Constitution means what it says, is binding on the president. 

The Pentagon responded to the vote by asking for an additional $88 billion for the war, much of it to replenish depleted stockpiles of high-tech weapons.

Meanwhile, Trump threw a tantrum at a luncheon meeting of Republican senators, which one aide described as a “total clusterfuck” with Trump weirdly berating Sen. Dave McCormick for missing the War Powers Act vote, even though McCormick was in Pennsylvania with Trump at Trump’s request. Outgoing Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy went after the President in the closed-door session for keeping the Senate (and the US population) in the dark about the Iran deal:

I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on…[Trump] did not particularly care for my comments, raised his voice, I lost my temper…it’s the Irish in me.

I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on…[Trump] did not particularly care for my comments, raised his voice, I lost my temper…it’s the Irish in me.

Reporter: The Department of War is asking for $80 billion more for the Iran war. Do you think Americans support this at a time when so many are financially struggling? Trump: Who are you with? Reporter: NewsNation, sir. Trump: Not a very good group. [NewsNation is well to the right of Fox News.] Not doing very well. [If so, it’s because they defend every irrational thing Trump says or does.] Not only do they support it, they demand it.

Reporter: The Department of War is asking for $80 billion more for the Iran war. Do you think Americans support this at a time when so many are financially struggling?

Trump: Who are you with?

Reporter: NewsNation, sir.

Trump: Not a very good group. [NewsNation is well to the right of Fox News.] Not doing very well. [If so, it’s because they defend every irrational thing Trump says or does.] Not only do they support it, they demand it.

As Stephen Semler reported earlier in the week, the Iran War is the most unpopular war in American history…

Reporter: Are you willing to risk economic catastrophe and strike Iran again?

Trump: A nuclear weapon supersedes depression. Depression’s real bad. A nuclear weapon will cause depression much more quickly.

Moody’s reports that, between increased military funding and higher oil prices, Trump’s Iran war has cost U.S. families more than $100 billion.

Did the US, USSR, UK, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, China, or North Korea getting the bomb cause a “depression”?

Iran shouldn’t agree to nuclear weapons inspections unless Israel also agrees…

Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Lebanon: “Lebanon, all of Lebanon, should become our playground. ALL OF LEBANON should be our TARGET.  And they tell me, ‘Wait a second, there is Lebanon and there is Hezbollah.’  I do not accept this artificial approach…Let a thousand Lebanese mothers weep, and not one Israeli mother weep.”

John Fetterman: “If you have contempt for Israel, you are anti-American.”

Trump: “I think [Israel] could do better … I’m not saying they shouldn’t protect themselves. I’m saying when two drones are shot into the desert and drop harmlessly, you don’t have to knock down buildings in Beirut. They could behave better…”

Since October 11, the first full day of the so-called ceasefire brokered by Trump and overseen by the Board of Peace (with zero budget), Israel has killed at least 1,005 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 3,157.

According to an UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry report this week on the targeting of children by Israeli forces in Gaza, “Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip.” The UN inquiry found that during the first two years of the Israeli assault, over 20,000 children were killed and more than 44,000 injured.

The Times of Israel reported that Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz told a conference in Tel Aviv that the Israeli army will not withdraw from its “security zone” in southern Lebanon, “even if there is an American demand.” Katz vowed that Israel would continue to control the land it has seized and that the “200,000 [Lebanese] residents will not return” to the homes they fled under Israeli bombardment.

Naim Qassem, head of Hezbollah: “A ceasefire means Hezbollah does not fire and Israel is free to occupy anywhere! We do not want such a ceasefire.”

4,000 : Number of Lebanese, mostly civilians, killed by Israel since the start of the Iran War.

Evil in Action: Israel targeted the beachside home of one of Lebanon’s leading environmentalists, 75-year-old Mona Khalil, who spent much of her life trying to save sea turtles…

The Economist on how the US burned through its arsenal of Patriot missiles: “Since the Iran war started, America and its Gulf allies have burned through stocks of Patriots at a dizzying rate, exacerbating an already acute global shortage. New manufacturing lines are not expected to yield significant results for years.”

Matthew Petti in Reason on how Iran’s cheap drones effectively countered the US’s high-tech weapons: “Chinese hobby drones hit the civilian market in the early 2010s, making this type of warfare even cheaper. The Islamic State group obtained a small ‘air force’ by strapping grenades to photography drones…”

CBS: “The Iranians are saying they’re gonna have access to a $300 billion........

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