6 thoughts about the Iran Cease-fire

You're motoring, what’s your price for flight

1.

[Brady Press Briefing Room, White House. TRUMP lumbers to the podium. He holds a long pause, then, with some difficulty, pulls a couple of Sig Sauer 9mms out of his jacket pockets. A heightened murmur among the press becomes hysteria as he aims the guns into the crowd; some reporters try to flee.]

TRUMP: No, no good. Doors are locked, can’t get out. Hey, look!

[He fires into the ceiling, at enough of an angle that the falling tile and wood doesn’t strike him. Screams, banging on doors. At one point he points a gun at his own head and makes faces like Jack Nicholson in The Departed. Finally he puts the guns back — or rather tries to, but he can’t get them in, and calls for KAROLINE LEAVITT, who comes out and takes them away. Reporters continue to scream.]

Hey! Hey! Simmer down, OK? Sit down! G’wan, take a seat. Shhhhh.

[The chaos eventually subsides, but most of the reporters stay standing. TRUMP makes a “sit down” gesture with both hands a couple of times. Eventually most sit.]

Two weeks, you got two weeks. OK? OK.

[He walks off. One or two reporters, absurdly, call out “Mr. President, Mr. President.”]

2.

None of us, anywhere on the globe, really knows the state of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran — including whether either party planned for a cease-fire or not, and how far back the decision by either party to seek one went. Press reports, especially with unnamed sources, are a negotiated settlement with propagandists.

We do know that 1.) a cease-fire has been announced, and 2.) the day before that announcement Trump was yelling about destroying a civilization. But the relationship between the two events is not obvious.

3.

However, it’s a safe bet that a cease-fire was already in the works when Trump made his genocidal threats, and that said threats had nothing to do with the decision and everything to do with how Trump wished to be perceived in the United States.

(The cease-fire certainly does not have anything to do with how Trump wishes to be seen internationally; internationally he is loathed, as he has been for some time.)

4.

Trump’s most likely intention in raving about civilizational death was to be perceived at home as having forced Iran to open the Strait (or to say that they would, on whatever limited basis).

There are some Americans who will take it that way. Ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson said before the cease-fire that “What’s actually happening here is the President has embraced the ‘mad man’ theory and is trying to convince the Iranians that he’s willing to do whatever to wipe them out in hopes of getting a deal... this is not an unhinged President. It’s a man playing a role as a negotiation tactic.”

So while many people were appalled and frightened by the President’s ravings, Erickson saw in them a purpose, though he mistook that purpose as diplomacy of behalf of the United States rather than public relations by Trump for Trump.

Erickson also said that “the President is going to be backed into a corner of extreme options by doing this, or be mocked for TACO [Trump Always Chickens Out] again.”

This morning Erickson offered a statement that was temporizing but generous to Trump: “He can’t win with his critics, and his foolishness on social media alienates him from voters. But the spice flows today, and the markets will go up.” I’m sure most MAGA people (apart from the ones who’ve joined the Tucker Carlson Tendency denouncing Trump’s allegedly unexpected imperialism) will be more generous still.

As I said yesterday, to the extent that Trump remembers anything about history at all, he imagines himself as John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis — and probably believes that JFK was exaggerating his achievement just as much as he is, which of course is why he would find it admirable.

5.

Even on these terms, you may ask: If not for leverage, why did Trump use the language of genocide in the first place?

For one thing, you have to admit it got people’s attention, and he loves that.

For another: It fits Trump’s world view, which has always been that he must dominate all parties and events to the fullest extent that he is able — and having the world’s largest military at his disposal means his ability is virtually unlimited. If he can credibly threaten to destroy a civilization, why wouldn’t he do so? I’m only surprised that he hasn’t threatened to destroy the planet; sure his remaining hardcore supporters would assume they’d go with him to heaven if he did.

Also, someone in one of Trump’s meetings may have mentioned that the ancient Persians had a civilization, and he instinctively felt the desire to destroy it.

Plus the word “civilization” is probably itself triggering for Trump, because everything about him is the opposite of civilized, or civil, on every level.

6.

I mentioned that MAGA people — who are rather thin on the ground these days — would celebrate the cease-fire as a great victory. So I expect will the Prestige Press, which has been bending over backwards for him for over a decade.

But I doubt the rest of the country, with whom Trump has fallen out of favor, will be so moved. All us wise guys like to joke about the enervating effect of Trump’s constant outrages on people who are like us (educated, cynical, probe to obscure references like Jack Nicholson in The Departed); but Trump’s plummeting approval numbers suggest that other kinds of people — even those who have forgotten, if they ever knew, how little reason Trump had for starting this war — feel similarly about it.

It’s hardly a political thing anymore. Trump is simply, as I once heard Jimmy Breslin describe Rudy Giuliani, in your freakin’ ear all the time, and people are sick of it. The Iran War, and Trump’s new frontiers in bombast, have made it even worse. In fact I think that’s why rightwingers like Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped ship — they heard the patter of rats’ feet heading across the deck of the ship and over the gunwales.

So while the fluffing by New York Times and the Daily Caller may make this cease-fire look like a victory for Trump in the short term, give it a week or two and his ratings will get even worse. Just hope that, when he next promises to destroy a civilization, he doesn’t decide ours would be as good as any. (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that ours hasn’t been destroyed already.)