Donald Trump's daily Oval Office rants have been getting much worse of late. By "worse," I mean he's quite obviously making up gibberish on the spot, hallucinating things big and small.
I don't have a lot to say about it. It pretty much speaks for itself.
Aaron Rupar
Huh?
Aaron Rupar
Huh?
Aaron Rupar
Huh?
Honestly it might not be entirely his fault. There seems to be a gas leak in the White House, and it's been getting worse.
Aaron Rupar
Wow, that sounds really scary. What if the wind towers were in cahoots with the Japanese Maine lobsters and the elderly scallopsâwould there even be a northeast left to save at that point?
Anyway, though, the U.S. Commander in Chief is clearly deep in the throes of dementia-addled hallucination. And that is sort of a problem, given the whole "Commander" part of the job. Trump spent the morning threatening an upcoming bomb campaign and ground invasion of Iran, specifically threatening the Kharg Island oil hub, before suddenly reversing himself with an announcement that Iran had now agreed to some seemingly imaginary deal so he was calling off the night's bombings.
By Oval Office time, this had morphed into Trump claiming the war was over? Maybe?
Shipwreck
Trump also claimed this would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
What Trump appears to be talking about is the ongoing U.S.-Iranian negotiations as to what future U.S.-Iranian negotiations might look like. There's no actual deal on Iran's nuclear materials, and Iran has not budged on its vow to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed to all ships for as long as the U.S. blockade of Iran-linked ships continued.
So this appears once again to be an outright hallucination on Trump's part; back in April, Trump similarly hallucinated a fictional peace agreement, one which nobody in the White House was willing to talk about and which the national media never followed up on even after it had clearly been proven a fiction.
It keeps happening, over and over, and we're not supposed to notice and the stock markets fall for it every single time. The Dow rose by 700 points after a social media post making these claims.
Aaron Rupar
This weekly cycle in which Trump first makes doomsday threats against Iran before retreating again with confusing news of supposed deals has been sending the markets into regular fits, but they're best understood as Trump's efforts to avoid the hard decision making he's faced with. Trump doesn't want to admit that his war failed in all its supposed objectives, and he can't run away while declaring a false victory because Iran has now shown its willingness and effectiveness at closing the Strait of Hormuz to world tradeâa status quo that will inevitably lead to global recession if it continues.
But Trump also has no plausible options for "winning" the war. Even the most aggressive action, a ground invasion of Southern Iran and an occupation of its coastline, would not eliminate Iran's ability to strike ships in the strait. It would only reduce that ability, which would likely not be enough for global shippers and insurers to risk the trip.
Trump has no plan for leaving the war that isn't significantly worse than the pre-war status quo, so for weeks now he's been feigning new supposed developments in an attempt to pretend he's doing something. But he's not. He's spent weeks paralyzed with indecision, with U.S. troops parked in a war zone and under fire while he waits for a miracle to save him from having to act.
With every week he spends in this paralysis, the world's emergency oil reserves draw down even more. Time is running out: It will likely be a matter of weeks before those supplies run out and oil prices start skyrocketing.
Donald probably finds all of this quite stressful, and that may or may not be why he looks like death warmed over, why he can't stay awake during any meeting or event, and why his Oval Office appearances have become Mad Libs sessions in which he declares "I love inflation" and mutters about how you have to go to Japan to get Maine lobsters these days.
With an onion on his belt, of course. Which was the style at the time.
There will come a day when everyone in the media will finally agree that Donald Trump was a hallucinating dementia sufferer for the entirety of this second term, and that day will probably come within 72 hours of Trump either dying or otherwise being removed from power. It was an open secret, they'll all say. But only after Trump can't hurt them for saying it: Until then, everyone in government and media will continue to insist that man's delusions are, in fact, merely an ingenious public relations strategy.
Hopefully he won't kill us all in the meantime, but that's a risk our betters are willing to take.
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