More than two weeks into the war between the United States and Israel against Iran, the conflict appears to be at risk of spiraling out of control.
At home, Donald Trump’s behavior also seems chaotic. A foreign conflict often provokes somber reflection from leaders: in Trump’s case, it has sparked a stream of behavior that has challenged norms and drawn attention to his mental state.
Take last Sunday, for example: The Pentagon solemnly announced that a seventh American service member had been killed in the conflict with Iran. Trump spent the day golfing in Florida, where he appeared to be wearing the same baseball cap he wore during a ritual carrying dead servicemen on Saturday.
That same day, Trump spoke at a “Shield of the Americas” summit, along with a group of Latin American leaders. He told the heads of countries, including El Salvador and Honduras, that Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, has “a linguistic advantage over me,” because Rubio speaks Spanish.
Trump, the oldest person ever elected president, said he could nevertheless function without speaking Spanish.
“Just give me a good interpreter. Interpreter, very important,” the president said.
“And I know if someone is good. I may not speak the language, but I know. I recently had an interpreter who was not good, talking to a very strong person from a different part of the world, and I realized, even though I don’t speak the language, I realized that the interpreter was not good.”
He added: “The interpreter is – I talk about this all the time – interpreters are really important. When you don’t speak the language and they don’t speak the language, people have no idea. People have no idea how valuable – and I’m on them all the time – people have no idea how valuable a good interpreter is. But over the last year, the world has witnessed the supreme power of the United States. We are the most powerful military country in the world.”
Trump’s strange weekend came after he posted eight separate times on Friday about how he had fallen out with Bill Maher, the American television host and comedian. Maher has no connection to the war in Iran.
In truth, Trump’s behavior had been strange before that. On March 3, the Pentagon named four of the American service members killed in the war. Trump didn’t mention the troops on his Truth Social account, but the president did post: a photo of himself, wearing wayfarer sunglasses, that had the caption “toughest president ever”; an image that boasts about how many people watched his State of the Union address; and a decades-old video of him and Melania announcing their engagement on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“I think it reflects a confusion of the president’s priorities,” Emmitt Riley III, an associate professor of politics at Southern University and president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, said of Trump’s recent behavior.
“The president has always exemplified these reckless behaviors, but I think sometimes he uses them strategically. But the other element of this is that the president is older, and all the criticisms that he made against Joe Biden’s age seem to be impacting him now: we see him falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, we see him being temperamental.”
Along with the distraction, there has been an element of Trump burying his head in the sand. He has repeatedly touted the importance of low gas prices, which could be politically problematic given that average prices have risen about 20% since the war began.
However, Trump’s response has been: it doesn’t matter.
He wrote on Thursday: “The United States is by far the largest oil producer in the world, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money. BUT, for me, as President, it is much more interesting and important to prevent (sic) an evil empire, Iran, from having nuclear weapons and destroying the Middle East and indeed the world. I will never allow that to happen!”
It was a stance that seemed to ignore concerns Americans have about rising oil and gas prices and possible inflation.
Riley said: “This is a representational dilemma of: How do we expect a person who is a billionaire to actually care about the well-being of people who are not rich, who are not of that particular economic class? And I think Trump’s behavior shows that he is either a narcissist or he just doesn’t care.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Olivia Wales told The Guardian: “President Trump and all Americans mourn our fallen heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. They represent the best of our country, and we will never forget their service and sacrifice. They gave their lives for a courageous mission that President Trump will continue to eliminate the threats posed by the sinister Iranian regime and make our nation and the world stronger, safer, and freer than ever.”
As the war has dragged on, with Iran not surrendering in sight, Trump’s comments have become increasingly aggressive, with the president using language more familiar to a bar fight than diplomatic relations.
At 12:33 a.m. on Friday, Trump wrote a lengthy article in Truth Social, complaining about the New York Times’ reporting on the war. In it he referred to the Iranian leadership as “deranged bastards,” adding: “They have been killing innocent people around the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
It’s hard to imagine that families of dead or wounded soldiers will find much comfort in Trump’s posts. At 5:44 p.m. Thursday, US Central Command said it had lost a refueling plane over western Iraq; It was later learned that all six crew members had died.
Trump, who avoided the draft for the Vietnam War because of bone spurs in an unidentified foot, did not comment on the downing of the US plane. However, at 8:57 p.m. he giddily posted a black-and-white photo of a younger version of himself dressed in military gear. “At the Military Academy with my parents, Fred and Mary!”
According to biographers, Fred Trump sent the future president to the New York Military Academy, an expensive private school about 60 miles from New York, after discovering that Donald had amassed a stash of knives.
