In His Bones – The Dispatch

The paradox of Trumpism is the same paradox at the heart of all authoritarian cults. The leader is omnipotent, in control of events and capable of imposing his iron will on adversaries great and small—but he’s also blameless when things go wrong.

He’s the motive force in our universe yet bears no responsibility for its misfortunes. (This is the same conviction many religious believers hold about God, not coincidentally.)

The paradox explains why conspiracy theories are popular among the president’s supporters. When a figure like Trump whose persona is based on dominance and indomitability fails in some important way, his followers face a serious crisis of belief. How could a man who’s invincible have lost an election to, of all people, Joe Biden?

The answer is that he couldn’t have. The election must have been rigged. Unlike every other losing presidential candidate in American history, this supremely competent figure who somehow wasn’t competent enough to prevent a conspiracy against him from prevailing is blameless for his own defeat.

The purest expression of the Trumpist paradox is QAnon, which needed a way during his first term to explain why their hero failed to dismantle the evil child-raping cabal of elites that supposedly runs America. Their solution was “the plan,” the idea that the then-president was working against that cabal but was doing so in covert, barely decipherable ways because he’s such a tactical genius. He was blameless for his failure because he wasn’t actually failing: He was, in fact, in total control of events, and that would become clear to all once he was done executing his “plan.”

The Trumpist paradox is how populists cope with the theological question, “Why do bad things happen to good MAGAs?”

The war in Iran is a special test of that paradox and not merely because the human and economic stakes are so high. To begin with, it’s a severe challenge to the grassroots right’s belief that the president is blameless for his failures. Not only is he giving the orders that steer the direction of the war, after all, but he’s often keen to remind people of it. “For reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on [Kharg] Island,” he said last week. 

First-person singular. It’s not the United States or Americans or the White House or even “we” who are deciding whether Iran’s oil economy lives or dies. It’s him alone, and he means for all of us to know it. Under those circumstances, it’s hard to hold him blameless for the war.

The best his apologists can do to try to excuse him is to insist that Israel misled him into attacking, but that’s awfully unflattering to Trump by the standards of populist conspiracy theories. Even if you buy it, you’re left to conclude that he’s a sucker, duped by the wily Benjamin Netanyahu. The best-case scenario for Trumpists if the war deteriorates, in other words, is to accept that their idol is a chump.

The other half of the paradox is also rough sledding, though.

Our omnipotent president seems conspicuously not so omnipotent at the moment.

War is a natural proving ground for postliberalism’s belief that all political problems are ultimately due to failures of will. With a supposedly iron-willed leader like Trump in command and an overwhelming advantage in firepower at his disposal, there should be no excuse for America not to impose its will on Iran’s revolutionary regime. Our chief executive has the means and the desire to dominate the enemy and crush its ability to resist.

He hasn’t done it. On the contrary. “We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” a source close to the White House told Politico this week. “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Another source put it this way: “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

As gas prices rise and the White House grasps for a solution to the Hormuz standoff, even a devout QAnon-er would struggle to deny that the president is no longer in control of events. The ultimate proof would be Trump ordering U.S. troops to occupy parts of Iran, a development so grievously politically undesirable that it could only be understood as a desperate measure. But he’s on the verge of doing just that.

His public comments about Hormuz’s closure over the past week betray his ambivalence between needing to appear in control of events and needing to appear blameless for the crisis. He complained that America’s European allies weren’t doing anything to help reopen the strait—then, apparently realizing how impotent that made him sound, pivoted to insisting that the U.S. doesn’t need their help. But yesterday he pivoted back and blamed those allies for the strait’s closure again by musing that he might walk away and leave Europe to reopen it since its nations stand to suffer from the impasse more than our energy-rich country does.

Convincing Americans in the heartland that Keir Starmer’s faithlessness is why they’re paying $4 per gallon for gas is worth a shot, I suppose. But as long as the strait remains closed, MAGA will be forced to wrestle with the humiliation of Trump having failed to reopen it despite being warned before the war that it might happen.

Some twists in the conflict have been so dire that the president seems to want Americans to believe that he’s lost control of events so that they’ll hopefully hold him blameless for what’s happened. Last night he issued an extraordinary statement disclaiming all responsibility for Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field. “The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen,” he wrote on Truth Social.

That was a lie, according to Axios. Under no circumstances would Israel have blindsided the White House by hitting a target as sensitive as that gas field, knowing how Iran would—and did—retaliate against oil and gas facilities in other Gulf states. Trump approved the strike but hurriedly washed his hands of it afterward because, presumably, he knows his Gulf allies are “furious” at the havoc being wreaked upon their energy industries and likewise knows how furious Americans will be when they discover what that means for global inflation.

Forced to choose between having his supporters believe that some of his tactics are futile or destructive on the one hand or that he’s powerless over what’s happening on the other, he opted in this instance for powerlessness. Best of luck to Trump cultists committed to his image of indomitability in navigating that.

As the war’s consequences become more dire, even formerly faithful Trumpists may find themselves choking on the familiar paradox. Is the president a schmuck who was led around by the nose by Mossad? (Gullible yet blameless!) Or is he a schmuck who hatched the plan to go to war without a way to reopen the strait or protect regional oil infrastructure from Iranian attack? (Reckless but fully in charge!)

His own intelligence deputies can’t agree.

Joe Kent, who led the National Counterterrorism Center until he resigned on Tuesday, is in the “gullible schmuck” camp. “A good deal of key decision makers were not allowed to come and express their opinion to the president,” he told Tucker Carlson in an interview yesterday, describing pre-war deliberations within the West Wing. “There wasn’t a robust debate.” That’s hard to believe, as Trump surely heard J.D. Vance’s concerns about the conflict and reportedly got an earful from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine about the risks of war generally and the risk to Hormuz in particular.

But if you’re eager to exculpate the president for his role in all this, there you go. He’s an insulated old man in the Biden mold whose handlers won’t let dissenting voices get close to him. Quite a legacy.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is in the “reckless schmuck” camp by contrast. Appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, she was asked whether the agencies under her command agreed with Trump that Iran’s nuclear threat to the United States was “imminent.” Gabbard replied that it’s not for U.S. intelligence to say. “The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president,” she said, pointing to the volume of information he receives.

In other words, no, U.S. intelligence didn’t believe there was an imminent threat, but in this administration the leader alone is in control of events. If you’re eager to be reassured that Donald Trump, not the “deep state,” is in charge of this war, there you go. The president is so totally in command that he’s waging wars even when the deep state tells him he doesn’t need to.

The obvious truth about his motives that the “America First” cohort is reluctant to face, and which the paradox of Trumpism helps obscure, comes down to two points. One is that Trump has always been an Iran hawk. The other is that he’s shockingly glib about how he wields power even in matters of life and death.

A few days ago an old quote of his surfaced. “I’d do a number on Kharg Island,” he told an interviewer. “I’d go in and take it.” That was in 1988, when I was still in grade school. There are many other examples of him sounding bellicose toward Iran over the decades, as Yair Rosenberg recently recounted, all the way back to calling for U.S. troops to intervene in the Iran hostage crisis in 1980. Christopher Caldwell is welcome to believe that this conflict is some momentous betrayal of Trumpism, but to all appearances the president has been a hardliner on Iran longer than he’s been a hardliner on immigration.

As for his strategic thinking: What strategic thinking? “He ended up saying, ‘I just want to do it,’” a source told Axios of how the president answered objections from aides opposed to attacking Iran. “He grossly overestimated his ability to topple the regime short of sending in ground troops.” Pointing to the White House’s quick and painless successes in bombing Iran’s nuclear program and capturing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro last year, the same source accused Trump of being “high on his own supply” in thinking this war would be similarly easy.

It’s really that simple, I think.

Believing that it’s more complicated than that, that Israel hypnotized the president into wanting war or whatever, is a bit like believing that the CIA killed JFK or that George W. Bush did 9/11. It’s comforting insofar as it imagines that only a skillful ruse perpetrated by a hyper-competent villain can cause a world-shaking calamity—that someone who knew what he was doing was ultimately in charge of events. But the reality is more disquieting: A single person or small group of people who mean to do harm or are too glibly hubristic to avoid doing it can change everything overnight.

Oswald killed Kennedy. A network of Islamist fanatics flew airliners into the World Trade Center. Trump attacked Iran because he wanted the glory of toppling a regime that bedeviled America for most of his life, and he was high enough on his own supply to think the fighting would be over in like three hours.

Last week he was asked how he’ll know when the war is over. “When I feel it,” he replied. “When I feel it in my bones.” He meant it, I’m sure. The paradox of omnipotence and blamelessness is designed to make an authoritarian leader’s actions seem logical and comprehensible to admirers when really he’s just acting on impulses that are inscrutable to everyone else.

It’s nice to know that what’s “in his bones” is no longer cutting it for all of the Trumpist commentariat, though. Even if it took them 10 years.