Trump’s Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights

Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics.

President Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran exemplifies his smash-and-grab approach to governing: acting without apparently considering the lives to be lost, the law or the institutional damage he will leave behind.

Trump seems to have attacked Iran unprepared for the intensity of Iran’s counterattack, the full range of threats posed to Americans in the region, the inflationary effects of sharply rising gas prices and the angry reaction within the MAGA electorate. Somehow the administration’s battle plan resulted in the direct hit of a girls’ elementary school, killing at least 175 people, many if not most of them children.

So far, the war on Iran falls into a larger pattern of Trump policies leaving wanton destruction in their wake.

Perhaps the most devastating of these was the administration’s decision to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development, which, according to estimates produced by Brooke Nichols, an epidemiologist and health economist at Boston University, may have resulted in the deaths of as many as 262,915 adults and 518,428 children over one year.

But it isn’t just in foreign countries. The willingness to adopt policies that will result in increased deaths among Americans, particularly within Trump’s loyal MAGA electorate, pervades administration decision making, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as I wrote in two previous essays, “What Can’t Trump Wreck?” and “The MAHA Pipe Dream Is Going to Hurt MAGA the Most.”

Even so, Trump’s war against Iran stands apart from past policies adopted on impulse. In this case, preliminary developments suggest Trump will pay a political price for his lack of careful planning and impetuous behavior. In fact, he may be forced to take responsibility for lost lives, damage to U.S. facilities and allies’ cities, economic setbacks and the failure to anticipate predictable adverse events.

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His essays on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appear every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.

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