Why did Donald Trump suddenly become shy?

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For once in his life, Donald Trump would have liked less attention to be paid to him.

“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good deal for the United States and those who are with us,” the president said this morning at 1:02 a.m. “But don’t the Democrats and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans understand that it is MUCH harder for me to do my job properly and negotiate, when political hackers continue to ‘chirp’ negatively, at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”

The first part of the message is false. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach a deal – and this morning, Tehran said it was withdrawing from negotiations and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran and Israel all launched strikes today.

Trump’s dithering and dithering about war is nothing new, but the second part of his article is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings to his job a strange combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity. On the one hand, he wants to start, wage and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.

The president’s agitation in the face of the Republicans’ refusal is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party appears to be strengthening, even as American public opinion continues to sour against him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of incumbent congressional Republicans create a clique of lawmakers who are not beholden to him and perhaps eager for revenge.) Still, he seems very responsive to comments from the Republican Party. Last weekend, he appeared to walk back a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from his hawkish allies, including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s worried about public criticism again.

Members of Congress will always criticize a war that ultimately goes badly, but Trump could have built support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) if he had sought authorization from Congress or made the case for war to the American people. He refused because it was easier not to care, but the vocal opposition to war reminds us how checks and balances can be a political advantage to a president, not just a constraint. That reaction hasn’t translated into any action — Republican leaders in Congress have so far waived their right to get involved — but Trump is nonetheless upset about lawmakers exercising their right to free speech.

Trump wants them to shut up and go away. “Just sit back and relax, everything will work out in the end – it always does!” he wrote in the same message. The last few days alone offer many reasons to doubt it. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th anniversary, installed poorly qualified commissioners, and the result — as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday — is a fiasco. The spectacular concert lineup turned out to be a mix of hasbeens and retreads, and even then, many of them opted out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he might pull the plug and just hold a political rally instead.

Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his plan to buy the Kennedy Center. He promised that his overhaul (and adding his own name) to the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, his project having failed, he announced his intention to close the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump must remove his name and cannot close the center — although, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it’s unclear how much is left to stay open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.

Trump’s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the Treasury to make payments to his political friends, to address the so-called “militarization” of the federal government, could be even worse. To make that happen (and to avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides quickly worked out a deal that sidelined government lawyers and took some advisers by surprise. It now faces backlash from Congress and doubts inside the White House, and two judges issued rulings Friday calling the fund into question. Axios reported this afternoon that, according to two senior administration officials, the White House intended to abandon plans for the fund altogether.

This brings us back to Iran, where there is little evidence of success. The White House has teased and then withdrawn from deals several times in recent weeks. Trump held a Situation Room meeting on Friday that he promised would produce a “final determination” on Iran, but the meeting ended without a resolution and appeared to have been completely overtaken by events. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News this weekend, Trump said that “we actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.” They surely would, as Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most of Iran’s military capabilities. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he would “finish the job” with military power.

Trump can’t put his arguments together at the moment. This afternoon, the president told CNBC’s Eamon Javers that he doesn’t care whether the negotiations are over, saying, “I really don’t care. I don’t care. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they’ve taken too long.” Shortly after, he declared that “talks continue, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Today’s hostilities could be a sign of a broader conflict threatened by Trump, or simply further evidence of the precariousness of the so-called ceasefire in force. Regardless, the fact that so many big initiatives are going in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn’t want people to pay too much attention to them — and doesn’t give much reason for anyone to relax and take comfort that everything will turn out well.

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Today’s news

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers, including women and minority officers, a move that current and former Defense officials say is highly unusual. His decision appears inconsistent with the merit-based military promotion system. Anthropic has filed for an IPO, making it the first of the major AI startups to begin the IPO process. The company, which makes the Claude chatbot, could be valued at around $1 trillion when its shares begin trading. Oil prices jumped more than 4% today as the United States and Israel resumed fighting with Iran, raising fears that the Strait of Hormuz could remain closed, further disrupting global energy supplies.

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Evening reading

Martin Parr / Magnum

Fold the laundry with me!

By Julie Beck

The country’s welcome mats are a lot less welcoming these days. Even though Americans are spending significantly more time at home in recent years — an hour and 39 minutes more per day in 2022 than in 2003 — they’re not inviting other people inside. The percentage of people who organized or attended a social event on an average day has fallen by 50% over the past two decades. Socialization of any kind has decreased over the same period and isolation has increased. These days, it seems, home is where people go to be alone.

Read the full article.

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Cultural break

Illustration from The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

Read. A new novel by Harriet Clark, the daughter of an imprisoned revolutionary, shows the fate of the radical’s children, writes Julius Taranto.

Watch (or ignore). Pressure (in theaters now) offers a suspenseful new take on D-Day, writes David Sims.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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