Unhinged Trump's wild Memorial Day lurching proves he's in freefall

The unofficial start to summer in the Northeast was a washout, cold, damp, murky, and gray. It was, in retrospect, the perfect meteorological metaphor for what Donald Trump is doing to nuclear negotiations with Iran: a drenching, dispiriting mess with no sun in sight.

While millions of Americans were dodging raindrops this Memorial Day weekend, Trump was being dodgy on Truth Social, contradicting himself over and over again, lurching between triumphant exaltations and terrorizing threats, showing his desperation and stupidity to a world that is watching, and not laughing.

Saturday: a peace deal was largely negotiated. Sunday: slow down, don’t rush. Monday: Iran will be in “great danger” if talks collapse. Three days, three completely incompatible postures.

What blew my mind apart on Saturday were the “breaking news” alerts exploding across my phone as the gullible media tripped over itself to declare that a peace deal was “imminent.” “Are you kidding me with this?” I said to no one in particular.

They based their reporting on one of Trump’s flimsy, historically lie-ridden Truth Social posts. I honestly didn’t know who was stupider, Trump or the media outlets breathlessly announcing that a deal was coming.

The media seemed as desperate for holiday weekend clicks as Trump is for a peace deal. This is a man drowning and flailing for anything within reach, and the media treated every erratic outburst as cause to interrupt a holiday weekend.

Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Iran has Trump in a vise, and it knows it. Since the astonishingly reckless decision to launch military operations against Iran on February 27, Trump has handed Tehran virtually everything it wanted without extracting anything of lasting value in return.

If Hollywood made a movie about what has happened since then, no one would believe it. It reminded me of a very serious and realistic friend who reluctantly agreed years ago to see the film Dumb and Dumber with me. He hated it. “People just aren’t that stupid,” he remarked.

I’ve been thinking about what he said all those years ago, so I texted him on Monday, reminding him, and asking what he thought about the Iran war.

“I was wrong,” he replied succinctly.

Trump’s utter stupidity never considered the following: the Iranian regime has survived. It has depleted American weapons stockpiles worth billions. It has forced the U.S. government to spend tens of billions of dollars. It has retained its uranium. It has preserved the bulk of its military arsenal. And it has discovered, with almost gleeful efficiency, that launching cheap drones while threatening to choke off the Strait of Hormuz is enough to send the world economy into a tailspin and Donald Trump into a tailspin of a panic attack.

Iran has not been defeated. Iran has been empowered. It has emerged from this conflict with arguably greater regional leverage than it had before. That is horrifying on every level. And Trump’s stupidity owns every line of it.

When I asked him for advice on a career dilemma I was having, my grandfather once told me that the most pathetic people in the world are those who are both stupid and desperate. It was as sage a piece of advice as I’ve ever received.

I’ve thought about that a lot this weekend too. Because right now, Donald Trump is the living embodiment of that description, and the stakes are infinitely higher than my little work snafu ever was. This isn’t a job situation gone sideways. This is war. And war is a lethal, dead-serious business.

What makes the current conflict even more alarming is the combination of the players at the negotiating table. You have undoubtedly the most untrustworthy man in American political history negotiating with one of the most untrustworthy regimes on earth. Put in terms Trump might understand: a scumbag dealing with sleazeballs.

The Iranian government has violated nearly every agreement it has entered into since seizing power in 1979. And Trump’s “deal-making” has proved that his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, is the biggest piece of fictionalized mythology ever written.

How will these two devious players ever reach a genuine agreement? The U.S. wants Iran to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iran wants frozen assets released, sanctions lifted, and 30 to 60 days to “finalize details.” Right, and Rome was built in a day. More applicable, it took 20 months of intensive negotiations to finalize the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Obama/Iran nuclear agreement reached in July 2015.

Iran is simply running out the clock on a desperate president. And even Trump’s most hawkish Republican allies know it.

Senator Roger Wicker called the rumored 60-day ceasefire framework a “disaster” that would render everything achieved by Operation Epic Fury meaningless. Ted Cruz warned that allowing Iran to retain enrichment capabilities while halting military pressure would be a “catastrophic mistake.”

Lindsey Graham — stupid and desperate when it comes to anything related to Trump — said any deal that doesn’t permanently secure the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian aggression isn’t worth making. Senator Thom Tillis went on CNN and asked the obvious question no one in the administration wants to answer: if Iran’s defenses were truly “obliterated,” why are we letting them keep nuclear material?

Trump’s response to these critics? He called them “losers” on Truth Social.

There will never be a real deal between Trump and Iran. Mark these words. Iran will never surrender its nuclear program. It will never relinquish its newfound stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, not after realizing the leverage it now holds over the world economy.

Iran would rather burn the world down than watch itself slide back into irrelevance.

And Trump, desperate and stupid, lacks the patience and intellect to force meaningful concessions from a regime thrilled to have an ignorant American president exactly where it wants him.

What that means for the next two years is a world on tenterhooks: ships uncertain of safe passage, oil markets subject to Iranian whim, a nuclear program advancing behind a worthless ceasefire, and a president calling his critics un-American while overseeing one of the most genuinely un-American foreign policy catastrophes ever.

That is why treating Donald Trump as a credible source for breaking news about peace negotiations is stupid and desperate, and how a man so desperate and this stupid is not someone the world should trust to deliver peace.