Few think Trump will actually go to war with Iran

Donald Trump is saber-rattling about Iran again. A handful of Democrats in Congress have spoken out, but you’re not crazy if you feel the response to this has been muted, especially compared to June, when Trump bombed Iran and we all worried it actually meant war. 

Some folks are angry about the relative silence. But I get it. Trump keeps threatening to start wars, but then … he doesn’t. He does a half-baked strike, like bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities or kidnapping the Venezuelan president, but there’s no follow-up, no next wave, no invasion and definitely no boots on the ground. That’s likely to happen again.

With all the bad stuff going on at home, hollering about hypotheticals can seem very Chicken Little-ish. So I see why Democrats are mostly taking a pass on this and focusing on stuff that’s more concrete for voters, like ICE raids or tariffs. 

The State of the Union is boring

Tuesday night, unfortunately, will bring us Trump’s State of the Union address. I’ve promised to watch and write about it, though part of me wishes I’d made like some congressional Democrats and boycotted the whole ritual instead. Because there are two very easy predictions: His speech will be very long and very dumb. We will all feel a little stupider for listening to it. 

That said, I’ll go even further out on a limb and also predict it will be extremely boring. I don’t think we’ll see Trump reject his staff’s advice and go way off script, like he does at rallies. I don’t think we’re going to hear one of his extended rants about how bored he is by all this talk about "affordability" or how everyone needs to shut up about Jeffrey Epstein. 

I predict that he’ll read off he the teleprompter in that bored, sing-songy voice he uses when he’s trying to sound “presidential.” It will be annoying and put people to sleep, but that’s pretty much the idea. Trump succeeds at this stuff, at least sometimes, because swing voters who tend not to follow the news closely really don’t understand that he’s a raving, narcissistic lunatic. They don’t listen to him speak to reporters or at rallies, which allows them to think that maybe he’s a bit unvarnished, but otherwise not so bad. 

Even Trump knows, I suspect, that voter ignorance is his biggest advantage, and that people who otherwise don’t take in much news may watch the State of the Union, or at least see clips from it. So he’s not going to show his true self, especially when he’s already crashing in the polls so badly that Democrats now believe they’re likely to win some tough midterm races. 

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Trump refuses to let the Supreme Court save him

That said, if there’s one sign that Trump might let his freak flag fly, it’s in the way he’s been acting since the Supreme Court threw out his tariffs. Make no mistake: the three Republican justices who signed off on this decision — Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts — are trying to save Trump from himself.

Voters hate the tariffs, because they correctly perceive them as a tax that American consumers pay — rather than foreign governments, as Trump falsely claims. People are already mad that prices are high, and they can see that Trump is just adding to their woes. Even Fox News polling shows that this is one of Trump’s weakest issues. A smart politician would be grateful that the court gave him a way to drop a terrible policy, without having to admit he screwed up.

But Trump is nothing if not a painfully stupid narcissist. So he spent the weekend whining about the decision, ultimately imposing a 15% global tariff. Admitting that he’s wrong, even to himself, is intolerable — even if that makes his own voters start to look for ways to pretend they were never all-in on the whole Trump/MAGA thing. 

It’s weird how much of Trump’s fragile ego has gotten caught up in this arbitrary fantasy that tariffs are an effective economic strategy. Maybe a psychologist could explain how that happened. Either way, I could see Trump shooting himself in the foot tonight by going on and on about how great tariffs are and how nobody sees that except him. Here’s hoping!  

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What we're reading this week

• “What Exactly Are Women Supposed to Do?” Jill Filipovic, Throughline

• “X Really Is Pulling Users to the Right,” John Herrman, New York

• “MAGA’s Animal Nationalism,” Daniel Engber, Atlantic

• “Trump trade war has cost bourbon millions, could cause KY job cuts, distillers say,” Janet Patton, Lexington Herald-Leader

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