TACO Tuesday
Trump and America’s Collective Dementia
On Tuesday, the United States accepted Iran’s 10-point proposal to end the current fighting as a basis for negotiation.
Donald Trump on his own social media said that it was a “workable basis on which to negotiate,” that the United States had achieved all its military objectives, and that the two countries agreed “all the various points of past contention.”
On Wednesday, things went another way. Trump and his clown-retinue said other things. As Israel defied the agreement and kept bombing everyone, the Yanks said there must have been a mistranslation as Lebanon wasn’t in the ceasefire agreement. Bibi Netanyahu, Donny’s co-conspirator in this Iranian clusterf*ck, very much on brand, as the kids would say, appeared on screens telling the world no one will tell him who not to kill. Then someone pointed to the Pakistani announcement - certainly approved by if not written by the Americans - and there was Lebanon, definitely included. “With the greatest humility, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wrote, “I am pleased to announced that [Iran and the United States], along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate cease fire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere...” Bibi the ally and co-conspirator in launching the predatory attack, kept on keeping on all over Lebanon with Trump’s approval, in violation of the ceasefire terms.
As newsrooms across the world published again the 10-point plan, Trump yelled fake news. His FCC stooge attacked CNN which reported the Iranian version of things before Trump did, even though CNN had sources. One of them was - a bit later than the Iranians - Donald J. Trump himself. The J stands for “Jesus, not again!” by some accounts. I accept the Iranian 10-point plan as the basis for talks, said Trump plain as day. No interns thrown under a bus this time.
Asked about the Iranian commitment demand to collect tolls on the Hormuz strait, Trump said no sweat, even though that would be as illegal as Trump’s attack under international law, and and we’ll take a cut, which is all Trump knows. Not real estate but a piece of the action. Bela Oxmyx or JoJo Krako. IYKYK. And the we could be the United States or, more likely the Trump Organization.
Krako was pissed because the Iranians told the truth, that Krako had capitulated, which is exactly what his statement that he’d accepted the Iranian 10-points was. Capitulation. Surrender. TACO. Everything else from Krako or Oxmyx or whatever small-time olearian Trump longs to be is bullshit. You know the Iranians told the truth and hurt Trump’s pride because in her Wednesday briefing, Trump’s stressed-out and gravid Bullshit Barbie scolded the media. Claimed Trump had literally thrown the 10-point plan in the garbage and accepted a new one, a “condensed” version of the 10-point plan, one not released before and of which no gave any details at all, especially not the lightweight mouthpiece. This new plan was the basis for talks, the one Trump accepted. Supposedly. Supposably.
Condensed plan. Maybe five points, then, or three? Just how condensed was the 10- point plan that was still 10-points. If we get it wet, does the condensed plan grow again to full size? More like 20 points? Trump and his legions spent the day talking about anything else but capitulation. No lie was too brazen. No comment too racist and insulting to the Iranians, let alone the Pakistanis. And that piece-of-the-action thing vanished. Never said it. Wednesday was Trump and Vance and Lil Mario playing fizzbin. American civilization died under a barrage of alternative truth.
Things went so well that Ann Coulter summed it up beautifully on X even before the rain of self-destruction hit peak:
That was the NYT story about how the war started. How Trump got into it, in a version told obviously by JD Vance people, angling for Don the Don’s seat while Don is still alive. According to NYT, the most senior American military advisor, General Dan Caine described for Trump the Israeli con job, one they’d tried on other administrations before 47: “‘Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.’ Only Hegseth was a major supporter of the war.”
Only Hegseth.
Pete. Back at the podium again wednesday thanking God for giving the awesome strength to Pete’s boys - they must all be boys in Pete’s in-no-way-self-loathing-repressed-urges fashion - to slaughter all the people who on the other side of this Jingos-for-Jesus jihad who themselves thanked the same God for helping them destroy the satanic infidels of Mar-a-Lago. Meanwhile, in another room, Pete’s crew dragged the local Roman cardinal to work him over about the Pope’s judgment that the killing Pete and Don ordered as unjust and immoral.
A phonebook being unavailable these days, the goons hit the cleric with a mention of the Avignon papacy, an obscure bit of history to be sure and one completely irrelevant, even if only the cardinal understood the threat to use military force to take out the church and set up one more friendly to the Trump mob in its place. No word on who they suggested might be the Trump choice for mock-pope but it would be a cruel world were his name not Lindsay. Pope Lindsay the First. A good job for a Baptist warmonger, running a knock-off Roman church.
Right on cue, Mark Rutte the NATO secretary general popped by to listen to Trump and Lil Marco talk about a plan to shift some of the American NATO bases from one country to another in Europe as punishment, supposedly, for not helping out with Trump’s stupid mistake. Not quitting NATO altogether mind you, no matter the froth on social media, since Trump and Lil Marco know that without European bases for American defence, which is all they are about and always have been, the Yanks are screwed. They project their power overseas from those bases. Get out of NATO and suddenly the world gets a lot uglier for any president looking to murder school girls for better poll numbers.
Trump is angry. The ever-angry child. Frustrated and looking for a distraction and revenge and for something, anything, to go right. As much as Trump is just venting by attacking NATO, the base-shifting scam is just Trump working his real goal which is to fracture NATO and the European Union. Play one off against the other. Keep the Russian stooge Orban in power in Hungary. Send JD Vance to interfere in the election with anti-NATO, anti-EU slogans. Splitting up NATO and the EU is not about Russia but is part of some idiotic idea to restore American power by undermining the rivals to the US economically and politically, which are the other members of NATO and the EU. The tariffs, the political attacks on Canada, Denmark, and Greenland, supporting Orban the Russian asset, the free-rein to Russia in Ukraine all stress the countries Trump and his associates fear most, the successful liberal democracies. America is in decline and Trump is targeting allies. Cut them down to make himself look bigger.
Rutte flattered the orange oligarch in public. Praised him in a way that sickened many but Rutte’s obsequiousness, his butt-licking, is a masterstroke of diplomacy. Play to Trump’s ego. Lay it on thickly, even if the real goal is simply to manage the buffoon until he no longer matters. Europeans play the long-game. All of them. 3D chess while Trump struggles with crayons that even Marines could master.
Even Trump’s own followers shagged him on Wednesday. Set Hegseth up beautifully for the fall, but with no one asking the question openly of why with everyone else in agreement this was stupid - as the stories now go - that Trump ignored them all. Even if someone duped him, as many of the excuses go these days, Trump still got played for a sucker, which is the opposite of the claim made by the same Fan Klubbers that Trump is always the one running the con, never the mark.
All those stories about how Trump got America into the disastrous war came Tuesday night just before the news broke of the ceasefire and the start of a deal that may end the fighting. It included quotes attributed to the head of the CIA that the Israeli claims about the easy decapitation of the Iranian regime and its imminent collapse were “farcical.” Bullshit Barbie cannot spew enough bullshit to bury this mess and so, like her boss, she will only grow more and more obviously angry. The stress shows.
You don’t have to be very smart to read the Iranian 10-points and realise that none of them - literally none of them - align with the 15-point proposal Trump made to end the war or American strategic interests.
None.
The American strategic objectives in this attack were changing the regime, which is still in place, and ending Iran’s possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons, which is also unhindered. There were no military objectives sod estroying all those ships and airplanes and other stuff that can be easily replaced will not matter. At the same time, Iran gets to control the Strait of Hormuz now and after - in all likelihood - once the final agreement is signed. They didn’t before. That’s a massive strategic loss even if by some miracle, the United States partnered with Iran – as Trump was spit balling on Wednesday – and ran the whole shake down together, splitting the take. That’s not a serious option. It’s just Trump making shit up because he cannot be seen for the failure he is. Only Donald Trump could bankrupt a casino four times. Only Donald Trump could start a war with Iran and make the butchers of tens of thousands look good.
What got Trump into the attack, what Trump seems to have focused on, from the NYT story, were the first points of the Israeli proposal, which involved killing the Supreme Leader and “dismantling the Iranian military.” The stuff he understood. Like Maduro but bigger. Grander. Cooler. What the Israelis and Americans considered the “Iranian military” to mean apparently included all the stuff that looked important to the Americans and Israelis but meant nothing to the Iranians who continued to fire ballistic missiles and drone swarms onto targets across the Middle East even after the ceasefire announcement. The biggest of American bombs dropped many times, even Trump’s f-bomb, did nothing.
The largely untold story of this edition of the war between Iran and America is the devastating Iranian attacks across the Gulf region. They hit the Americans hard, and the Americans could only fumble, bumble, and lash up an evacuation of all sorts of people, civilian and military, in a phenomenally half- assed way. American bases hammered. Hundreds killed or wounded. Allies – a lot less allied now than before – living in constant threat, now fearing what a resurgent Iran will do to them or mean to them once the Americans haul ass back to Fort Butthead or Camp Cluster or wherever they came from.
Make no mistake: having blundered into this ridiculous war based on the childishly naive idea that it would be like a bigger version of the Venezuela joke, Trump and his advisors had to get out of this fighting. There were no upsides. No better alternatives. That’s why they capitulated Tuesday night. Each other path was equally painful.
Brent crude hit almost CDN$160 this past week and was in the 150s on Tuesday before trading at CDN$126 on Wednesday morning. Crude prices drove American gas prices to more than US$4 a gallon in some parts of the country, adding to the cost-of-living problems plaguing the Republicans heading into the mid-terms. Meanwhile, as noted here before, shortages of crude in other parts of the world were ramping up steadily the longer the Strait of Hormuz was functionally closed to most shipping. The Americans needed to get the Strait open and the fighting over far more desperately than anything else and clearly more than the Iranians did. None of that – literally none of that – is changed by this cease-fire. There’s just a temporary reprieve, and whatever version comes after, the world will not switch back to some time before Bibi and The Donald went nuts.
The strategic success is Iranian: greatly changed the governance of the country to counteract the Israeli decapitation strategy beta tested on Hezbollah in 2025, and correctly assessed grave American weaknesses of materiel and will for what they were. Both paid off. Not incidental was the calculation in both Beijing and Russia that helping the Iranians would be easy and that for the Russians, the Grand Old Party’s ties to Russian oligarchs were too strong for Trump to blink at the widely reported Russian help to the Iranians in killing Americans more easily. Both Iran and Russia profited from the bonus, the gift from a blundering incompetent Donald as the United States desperately removed sanctions on both countries in a panic to keep oil prices down in the United States.
You know the Americans capitulated, caved, lost because they say they won.
Just apply the Rule of Opposites.
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians learned it from proto-Trump. The beta test version. Autocratic/authoritarian leader-figure surrounded by a personality cult of sycophants and enablers, supported by a week stenographer-reporter pool, easily cowed by the bully, who was prone to entertaining, distracting outbursts that captured media attention and won their tacet support for reciting popular nationalist mythology if not for giving them lots of attractive copy.
The Rules of Opposites. X= Not (X).
The more frustrated Trump is, the more hysterical his rhetoric and claims. He claims to win when he is, in fact, losing. The corollary, the adjacent bit, the thing that goes along with the intensity of Trump’s bullshit stream is that he knows stuff before others. Trump talked of destroying Iranian civilization when he knew he was about to capitulate. The value of the lie - he had no intention since ordering war crimes might be all it takes for someone to 25 his ass - was that it made him seem more powerful to the MAGA dupes and the media.
The lie, the bluff, the exaggeration distracted and, when the story broke, might have let the idea take hold that the Iranians had capitulated in the face of Trumpian awesomeness when nothing could be further from the truth. It certainly let the Trump Fan Klub claim victory for their hero. Some might be fooled. Others will willfully suspend disbelief while still more invent all sorts of stories to explain away their support for stupidity or to ignore the disaster that unfolded and unfolds in front of them with their support, active or passive. As with Muskrat Falls, so with Iran. In truth, Trump’s swagger was and always is a salve to his own fragile ego, seldom anything more.
The fighting may be over.
It may simply be a ceasefire.
Trump’s braggadocio and all the shifts and reversals and assertions since Tuesday may simply mean that there will not be an agreement that lasts. Like the Korean, it may hold. Unlike the Korean, more like the Suez in 1956, this may mark for some what has been coming for a while, namely the end of American dominance. Not a sudden collapse of the United States but shrinkage. Decline. Erosion. Steadily, a withdrawal from empire.
Either way, the United States is weaker now that at any time in decades. Trump’s dream of the Gilded Age is dreaming away reality. Nostalgia as drug. Like putting American soldiers in ice cream uniforms as if the Greatest Generation that never truly was had been reborn. As if looking like a hero was good enough to make one a hero. Image above substance. The American version of British nostalgia for nostalgia. Societies in decline - like Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003 - love the imaginary past. They cling to its tattered remains, imagine it more lustrous and beautiful than it ever was, to block out what they see as a darker and grimmer reality.
This is cowardice, of course. The poverty of leading classes. Elites in despair. Not up to the challenge but ready, always ready, to fatten themselves and at the same time dig away at the values and principles on which all the former glory was built in order to block others, those who can see a way out of the mire, from replacing them. The alternatives - sensible, pragmatic like Emma Ashford’s perspective - elude them simply because they find the fantasy more emotionally safe, more fleetingly secure.
The difference between the 1970s and now is that even in the wake of the Saigon defeat in 1975, the fundamental economic and political structure of the world did not change. The Americans recovered. This time is different. Then, the troubles in the United States centred on and were driven by the war in Vietnam. It was the cause of what turned out to be a short-lived bout of shakiness.
This time, oh this time, the debacle in the Gulf is the result of American decline, of the rot in its military, political, economic, and social elites. This time, the trembles are in the foundation of American civilization itself.
“It took centuries of toil and sacrifice to reach the apex of human civilization that is America,” Trump’s Stephen Miller wrote on X Wednesday night. “The crux of the Democrat agenda is to resettle the masses of the world on our shores and redistribute the wealth and resources our civilization has produced until nothing is left.”
The Rule of Opposites.
You know because they tell you.
Ed
Your Trump talks aren’t very interesting.
Who cares, when there are burning local questions about?