Tom Nichols

After half-heartedly including some actual professionals in his first administration, Donald Trump is now served almost exclusively by sycophants and family members. The president has made clear that he cares about loyalty more than qualifications, but the astonishing incompetence and corruption of many of his appointees raises an obvious question: What does it take to get fired by Trump’s White House?
Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation yesterday as ambassador to Greece provides some clues.

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Pete Hegseth seems to imagine himself as a man of big ideas. Perhaps you’ve worked with someone like that: Every organization has “idea hamsters,” who spin in their wheels and toss out suggestions of wildly varying quality.

State visits are a normal and necessary part of diplomacy. National leaders should, from time to time, sit with one another in person and have candid conversations. Summit meetings between the American president and his counterparts from Moscow and Beijing are particularly tricky because of the innately tense relationship between two adversaries.

Donald Trump is facing multiple challenges. The United States is losing to one of its worst enemies in a war that has left the American economy mired in the sludge of growing inflation and rising energy prices. His popularity is now hovering around second-term George W. Bush levels, and may even be headed for end-stage Richard Nixon numbers. His party faces the prospect of a crushing defeat in midterm elections that are only six weeks away. (In some places, early voting has already begun.

Donald Trump loves rallies. Everyone can see how they energize him, how the crowd’s applause encourages him to ditch the hackneyed prose of his speechwriters and go on wild riffs, how the music and cheering are like water to a parched man. Tonight, at the end of a two-day rally billed as a Republican “midterm convention,” Trump was visibly exhilarated.
But he also protested too much, in the process revealing some political as well as personal fears and insecurities.

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When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations. He sees property. All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly.

Making Pete Hegseth the secretary of defense was always a huge gamble. A television host with little background in national-security or defense affairs, who topped out as a major in the National Guard, he was nominated based on the same qualification shared by most of Donald Trump’s other appointees: loyalty. And now the price of that gamble is evident.

Last winter, Donald Trump plunged recklessly into war with Iran. The United States is now losing that conflict. Iran remains defiant, much of the world economy is more threatened now than it was six months ago, U.S. military resources are overextended, and munition stores are dangerously depleted. Trump and the United States have suffered one embarrassment after another; last week, he had to sneak away from the region on a backup plane because of a possible assassination threat from Tehran.

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One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi.

Many Americans—and much of the rest of the world—have become inured to Donald Trump’s strange rants. When he shouts about sharks, when he drones on about his brilliant uncle, when he casually ponders violating the Constitution, his supporters try to dress his statements up as some kind of strategy: He’s not lost touch with reality, you see. He’s doing the weave, or he’s owning the libs. He’s fighting the fake news and flooding the zone. He knows what he’s doing.

For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance.

Two more Americans have given their lives in the service of their country. They died in an Iranian attack on a Jordanian air base; several more U.S. military personnel were injured and one is missing. The American people have a right to know why they died, and how many more of their sons and daughters President Trump is willing to risk in this war of choice.
The president, so far, has issued his usual stock answers.

President Trump addressed the American people tonight and told them that their elections are at the mercy of foreign actors—especially China. He called the current situation a “crisis” and vowed to prevent any future elections from being “stolen.” He directed the public to a website where people can peruse documents that he says prove not only that bad actors have influenced U.S. elections, but that all of this was kept from him by “deep state” malefactors during his first term.

If Donald Trump ever had any control over the war he started with Iran, he’s lost it. The Iranians are now setting the terms of this conflict and are routinely humiliating the American president. The “cease-fire” Trump declared last month—a move probably meant to both soothe international markets and avert legislative action from the United States Congress—never really existed, because neither side ever ceased firing.

Most Americans seem to understand that the Fourth of July is about something bigger than ourselves. It is about celebrating our democracy and our role as citizens—as equals—in it. George Washington understood what that meant. In his last will and testament, he described himself as “a citizen of the United States, and lately president of the same.

Almost everything in the Trump administration seems like an implausible pitch for a television show, containing so many oddball plot devices and weird twists that even the most creative showrunner would veto most of them.

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Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran.

President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site this evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he’d arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary.

No one yet knows the details of the Iran deal that President Trump has been teasing on social media for the past day or so. The president himself has admonished his followers not to “listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.” But as this war stumbles to a close, it is clear that the president, too, is lost: He didn’t know what he was doing when he began it, and now he doesn’t know how to get out of it.
Only a day ago, Trump was trying to project confidence.

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Some of Donald Trump’s favorite world leaders have been scoundrels, bullies, and dictators. He keeps a picture of himself with the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin on the wall of the White House. He claims to have fallen “in love” with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Except for what appears—thank God—to be only a minor injury to a Secret Service officer who was shot near a security checkpoint, no one was hurt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last night. News reports are reassembling the mosaic of the attacker’s movements; he apparently took a train and transported some weapons with him, checked into the hotel, and then made his run at the event.

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On many recent nights, Donald Trump has been posting obsessively on his Truth Social site into the wee hours. The president, of course, has never been one for a solid night’s sleep—or restrained and temperate commentary on social media—but his emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.

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The president of the United States is losing his head, and that means the rest of us must keep ours. At 8:06 a.m. eastern daylight time, Donald Trump posted this on his Truth Social site:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s Chief of Staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green, Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of Army, Dan Driscoll.

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his primetime address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.
Maybe he’d have been better off not trying.

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The term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course.

The war in Iran has reaffirmed two truths. One is that the United States is blessed with the most professional and effective military in the world. The men and women of the American armed forces can conduct missions of almost any size with formidable competence, from special operations to seize a rogue-state president to a large-scale war. The other truth is that the Trump administration, when it comes to strategy, is incompetent.

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The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time, might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S. goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials.

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Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives.