Donald Trump

Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 26, 2026

Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.

Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”

Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.

Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.

Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.

The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.

Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.

On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.

On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.

Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.

At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”

And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.

Bill Allison and Dana Hull of Bloomberg reported on October 22 that billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies depend on U.S. government contracts, has poured at least $445 million (not a typo) into the Republican effort to keep control of Congress. That money is swamping Democratic candidates, who nonetheless are holding on to a significant percentage of the vote.

So, last Thursday, the Trump administration sued the state of Alaska and its election officials personally to try to stop the certification of the U.S. Senate election there if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Unless the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, wins, the Department of Justice says, state officials must not accept the results.

The Republicans’ complaint is that a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot, and they are currently claiming that if the Republican incumbent loses it will be as a result of voter confusion. But the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected a Republican attempt to get Daniel J. Sullivan removed, and the Alaska Republican Party chose how to identify the two Sullivans: the incumbent is listed as the Republican incumbent while the other Sullivan is listed without a party affiliation.

On Friday, Trump told reporters that he, personally, demanded the lawsuit.

On Saturday, in an article in Politico titled “Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system,” Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson, and Lauren Fedor reminded readers that under Trump, the Justice Department has tried to get access to state voter files—so far, it has lost every case—and Trump has vowed to refuse to distribute federal funds to state and local governments that won’t make the changes he demands in election procedures.

As Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times noted on Sunday, Trump has also tried to use the United States Postal Service to screen ballots with the potential for rejecting tens of thousands of them. Now the Justice Department is trying to force California election officials to set aside ballots it claims were sent to 20,000 noncitizens, warning the officials they could be prosecuted if they don’t help the federal government identify alien voters.

California officials said the federal government has no authority to oversee their voter lists and note that the federal government has made false accusations against states. In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security publicly told Nevada officials they had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but ultimately, they could not provide evidence of even one.

On October 22, Madeleine May of CBS News reported that ICE agents, armed and in uniform, are knocking on doors in at least six states—California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin—to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they have either registered to vote or voted in past elections.

It is a crime to vote in federal elections if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the number of times such votes are cast is vanishingly low. As May notes, since the second Trump administration began it has charged—not obtained convictions, charged—just 156 people out of 227 million registered voters.

But Trump has made the Big Lie that Democrats win elections only through fraud central to his hopes of keeping MAGA in control of the government, and he is weaponizing the government against his political opponents by using the idea of illegal voting as justification for trying to intimidate lawful voters. It is a tactic straight out of the Reconstruction South, when gangs of white supremacists, often organized as the Ku Klux Klan, visited Republican voters before elections to make it clear their survival depended on staying away from the polls.

Even so, the Alaska suit was a new level of election interference and may reflect the recently exposed story that the administration is backing the sale of a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska to a sanctioned Russian company. Such a plan will be harder to pull off if there is a Democratic senator in the state conducting oversight.

This transparent attempt to steal the election is unlikely to succeed in court, but it is another way for Trump to sow confusion over the elections and lay the groundwork for challenging a Democratic victory. This afternoon, Trump continued that effort by posting on social media a vow that sounded even more desperate than his repeated promises to pay Americans $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election,” he wrote, “will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 18, 2026

Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.

Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.

But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

WSJ: Is Iran is getting help from Russia?

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

July 20, 2026

On Friday an Iranian attack on a U.S. base in Jordan killed two soldiers and left one missing. Another service member died Friday in northern Iraq. This brings the number of military personnel killed in the Iran War to 17 since Trump launched strikes against the country on February 28. The Pentagon’s casualty-reporting site says 427 U.S. service members have been wounded.

On Saturday, Greg Jaffe, Julian E. Barnes, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that multiple officials told them that the attack in Jordan was the fourth in five days and that the strikes had wounded dozens of military personnel and damaged several helicopters. The journalists’ sources told them that the strikes proved Iranian forces still have plenty of missiles and are becoming more skilled at getting around U.S. air defense systems.

The sources told the journalists that the first attack hit a base, injuring as many as five service members; the second hit a different base, damaging U.S. Blackhawk helicopters; and a third hit the same base where the soldiers would later be killed. In that first attack, about 20 military personnel were injured.

Retired Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula, who helped to plan the air war in the 1991 Gulf War, explained that bases in Jordan give the U.S. broader reach across Syria, Iraq, and beyond. Friday’s attack was “an attack on the U.S. regional coalition and an attempt to make the political cost of hosting American forces greater than the security benefit.”

Those sources who spoke to the New York Times reporters spoke on condition of anonymity. The Pentagon declined to comment.

Eric Schmitt of the New York Times noted that lack of information from the Pentagon today when he reported that in the week before the weekend’s deaths, three Iranian strikes injured military personnel and damaged several helicopters yet the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not disclose the strikes, the casualties, or the damage to the American people, citing the need to keep information about operations secure.

Schmitt noted that neither the White House nor the Pentagon has outlined a military strategy since Trump announced that the memorandum of understanding that extended a ceasefire—the one he signed on June 17—was no longer in force. In the nine days since then, both sides have increased strikes.

Schmitt noted the Pentagon has not held a major briefing on the war since early May. Since then, the administration has not disclosed the depletion of crucial and expensive weapons through the Iran strikes, or how Iran has both retained and rebuilt its own missiles. In June, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported that Hegseth’s claim that “almost 90%” of service members injured had sustained only minor injuries gives a misleading picture of the extent of those injuries. A spokesperson for the Army explained that the Army classifies a soldier as “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” only if they are at risk of dying from their wounds within 72 hours.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell responded to Schmitt’s story by posting on social media that “[t]he Department of War rejects these baseless and malicious accusations of hiding injury numbers as outright lies from partisan hacks at the New York Times who are desperate to smear America’s military and its leadership. Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action.” He continued: “This is the most transparent Department of War in history.”

And yet, the administration did not consult Congress about launching the war, as the Constitution requires, and has blown through the 60-day time limit for the use of the U.S. military to counter an “imminent threat” without getting congressional approval.

Damian Paletta of the Wall Street Journal today also asked questions about how the Iranians, who Trump said had very few missiles left back in June, are developing faster and more maneuverable missiles. Paletta noted that whether Iran is getting help from Russia, or any other country, remains an “enormous question” that puts “much more pressure on the White House to potentially confront Russia.”

When asked about the deaths of the three service members, Trump said “We feel very badly, but you know those great people, those great patriots were out there fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They’ve lost everything almost, militarily. They’ve got very little left…. We control the strait. They don’t control anything. So we’ll see what happens when we hit ’em very hard again tonight.”

Over the last several days, the U.S. has struck Iranian bridges and energy infrastructure. According to Iran’s Health Ministry, the recent U.S. attacks have killed at least 38 people and wounded more than 400.

Today the Houthis in Yemen, who are backed by Iran, announced they are imposing a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, threatening the passage of oil through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. If the strait is closed, the global oil supply will take another 7% hit.

The American Automobile Association said today that the average price for a gallon of gasoline is just over $4, up about $0.13 from last week. Before the conflict, the price averaged $2.98 a gallon. Economist Paul Krugman noted today that the “wholesale price of refined products (assuming 2/3 gasoline, 1/3 distillates) is most of the way back to its peak. Since this is what matters for inflation and demand, no relief in sight before the midterms.”

Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported today that crude oil supplies in the U.S. are the lowest they’ve been in 45 years.

The expansion of the Iran War’s scope, duration, and casualties did not keep Trump away from the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina on Sunday. After Spain won over Argentina with a score of 1–0, Trump joined FIFA President Gianni Infantino on the field—apparently unconcerned about the dangers that he says require the construction of a fortified ballroom—to present medals to the Spanish players.

The crowd resoundingly booed Trump, who then stood on stage with the celebrating players until Infantino jogged across the stage to lead him away. The Guardian captioned a picture by Javier Garcia taken of Infantino and Trump standing aside from the players: “Gianni Infantino carefully explains to Donald Trump that he is not part of the Spanish national team.”

Trump appears to be becoming less and less relevant to actual governance. Last Thursday, Alex Gangitano, Megan Messerly, and Myah Ward of Politico reported that Republicans were “scared sh*tless” about what Trump might say in his prime time address, but it is perhaps more of a sign of the current political reality of Trump’s falling popularity that CNN, ABC and NBC, chose not to run the speech live.

Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted that despite Trump’s promise that his speech would deliver “really, really big news,” the Fox News Channel largely ignored the event. Executives might not have wanted to get entangled in the election denialism that cost them close to $800 million after pushing claims of election fraud after the 2020 presidential election.

Fox hosts turned instead to culture war issues, railing against “DEI” and perceived abuse of WNBA Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who is white, by Black players.

In line with that focus, the administration is renewing its visible and aggressive immigration policies. For months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not released data about arrests, but immigration enforcement scholar Austin Kocher noted that new records show arrests in early July hit 1,474 a day, a record high for the Trump administration.

In the past months, ICE has recruited thousands of new agents. As Maanvi Singh and Fabiola Cineas of The Guardian note, many of these new agents did not have the requisite qualifications and were not properly vetted.

Agents from ICE shot and killed two immigrants within a week earlier this month: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, in Houston, Texas, on July 7 and Joan (or Johan) Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13. Neither man was the target of the operation in which he was killed.

In Maine, Ashley Brouillette identified her ex-husband, David Brouillette, as the officer who shot Guerrero four times. She found out he was involved in the shooting when he called her to ask her not to tell reporters about his abuse during their marriage. Both she and another ex-wife had restraining orders against Brouillette.

Ashley Brouillette told reporters that when her ex-husband told her at the end of last year that he had been hired as an ICE agent, “I honestly thought that he was being delusional and I didn’t believe it.”

As an Army combat veteran and former security agent, Brouillette would likely not have undergone in-person training to become an ICE agent, Christian Harsa of News Center Maine reported. A spokesperson for ICE, Lauren Bis, told Vanessa Romo and Alina Hartounian of NPR that Brouillette had “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training.”

Today, Senator Angus King (I-ME) and 38 Democratic senators sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanding “immediate, thorough, independent, and transparent investigations” of the shooting deaths of Araujo and Guerrero.

As Isabelle Oss of the Portland Press Herald reported, the letter noted that both former DHS secretary Kristi Noem and White House immigration advisor Tom Homan committed to making sure that agents are fitted with body cameras. And yet, agents involved in the recent shootings were not equipped with cameras, confirming “that neither of these commitments were honored.”

The senators noted that the acting director of ICE, David Venturella, promised Congress that all field agents would be equipped with cameras by the end of July. “We view this timeline not as a projection, but as a firm, binding commitment to which we will hold the Department accountable,” the senators wrote.

They also demanded that ICE agents wear labels clearly identifying themselves as ICE agents.

The senators asked Mullin to identify specifically how he intended to investigate the shootings, explain the vetting process for new recruits including whether it considers records of domestic abuse before hiring, identify updates or reviews being made to ICE traffic stop policies, and explain what oversight, reporting measures, or public safety measures the agency is implementing.

As if to demonstrate that he is still in charge, Trump this afternoon announced new tariffs on certain products from Canada. The 50% tariffs would further upend the economy if they take effect in 30 days as scheduled.

Trump has been complaining about the smoke from Canadian wildfires hurting U.S. air quality, and has threatened to impose further tariffs on Canadian produce because “the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air.” Canadians including Ontario premier Doug Ford noted that they sent firefighters, rather than threats, when conditions were reversed.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

July 8, 2026 (Sunday)

After the U.S. resumed bombing Iran yesterday evening, Iranian forces retaliated early this morning with strikes on U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.

In Ankara, Türkiye, for a NATO summit, President Donald J. Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said in his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, [negotiations are] over.”

The U.S. then launched another round of strikes on Iran to “further degrade” its “ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Oil prices spiked over the course of the day, and Trump appeared to walk back his earlier words, saying: “I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.”

As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.

Like many other observers, Nichols noted that Trump was “incoherent” in Ankara. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and referred to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” In an off-with-their-heads! moment, he also announced he had ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off all trade with Spain.

According to Humeyra Pamuk and David Latona of Reuters, Trump repeatedly complained about Spain, whose leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused to let the U.S. use its bases or airspace to attack Iran even though Spain has been dramatically increasing its NATO spending. Trump then told Bessent: “I don’t want to do any more trade with them, alright? Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless. They’re bad people…. They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

As economist Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida.

Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”

What we should take from it, he says, is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker agrees. He reposted Trump’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Japan with the comment: “Donald Trump is suffering from dementia. Someone needs to step in before it’s too late.”

Meanwhile, Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that European officials at the NATO summit reacted to Trump’s announcement of new attacks on Iran just a day after he had praised Iranian leaders with the recognition that they can no longer rely on the United States.

A European official told the Politico reporters: “After seeing what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine, we first of all, have to build our own military might, and then everybody will respect us: Americans, Russians, Iranians or Chinese. The more muscles you have, the less political anger you show.”

A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”

Meanwhile, Steven Rattner of MS NOW noted today that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons have raised about $13 billion in investment capital from foreign governments, mostly in the Middle East, even as Kushner is working for Trump as special envoy to the region..

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American