The Atlantic Monthly: What Happens When Trump Feels Cornered

（Source: Invest Wallstreet）

President Trump’s most inflammatory remarks often come when he feels frustrated—this may explain his recent episodes of emotional out-of-control behavior.

Brendan Smialowski / Reuters

In the early days of Donald Trump’s social media posts, when they were still somewhat naive, people might have dismissed his 2017 declaration of “My approach is not presidential, but modern presidential.” But as the Iran war became stuck in a stalemate, his remarks had long since gone beyond the realm of mere weirdness and had become completely unhinged. I have written that when Trump feels cornered, he launches the most violent counterattack—possibly explaining the crazy rhetoric and actions coming out of the White House over the past few days.

(For now) the worst was a letter Trump posted on Truth Social on Easter morning. In it, he threatened: “Tuesday will be Iran’s ‘Power Plant Day’ and ‘Bridge Day,’ combining the two into one. Absolutely unprecedented! Open the Strait, you crazy people, or you’ll be waiting to go to hell! Just wait and see! Praise be to Allah!”

This afternoon, Trump reiterated the threat at a press conference, saying: “The whole country could be destroyed overnight—and that night could be tomorrow night.” Attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges would likely be illegal. Trump is not the first U.S. president to disregard international law, but he is the first president to publicly promote it in advance on the social media platform he owns. Strategically, the threat is also questionable.

It may be hard to get beyond that post, but this morning the president still tried. In an unclear and threatening new post, he shared a short video showing a group of shoppers—most of them people of color, with some wearing headscarves. They were each busy with their own things, enjoying the typical kind of modern American capitalist pastime: strolling around in a place that looks like an American shopping mall in Minnesota. The background music was “Mad World” by Gary Jules, a song from the soundtrack of the film Donnie Darko.

These outbursts of rhetoric come at a time when this administration has found that fighting a war with military power alone is not enough to win. Trump now threatens to attack civilian infrastructure because, other than that, there is no other means to force Iran to back down. In the early stages of the war, he seemed pleased with himself—confident after a rapid victory in Venezuela—but that sense of joy quickly faded. Last week, the president spoke from the White House, where he could have used it to ease the war situation or to make clear signs of victory. However, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, Trump did neither.

The war in the Middle East had previously gone badly for the United States, but this time the negative effects became visible with unusual speed. U.S. and Israeli airstrikes killed many senior Iranian officials, yet Iran remained solid—and its control of the Strait of Hormuz suggests that Iran’s strategic position may be more favorable than at the beginning of the war. (Iran’s leaders today rejected a ceasefire proposal.) The U.S. military is consuming large quantities of its ammunition reserves. Last week, in an article in The Atlantic, Thomas Wright pointed out that the next step is likely to be a ground war.

Yesterday, an emergency search-and-rescue operation for an F-15E fighter pilot who was shot down inside Iran concluded successfully, and the pilot was rescued. But the operation also resulted in two MC-130J transport aircraft and several MH-6 helicopters being destroyed, and in addition, an A-10 attack plane was shot down by itself—an enormous loss, especially considering that the Trump administration had claimed it destroyed Iran’s air defense system.

These setbacks might make other presidents more humble, but for Trump, they instead make him even more hot-tempered and irritable. His frustration may even lead him to delusions. Last month, he claimed that a former president said privately that he regretted not launching strikes against Iran. That seems unlikely. Trump said the former president was not George W. Bush; the other three living presidents—Democratic Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—had all publicly had disagreements with Trump. The New York Times reported that each of those presidents’ confidants denied having spoken with him recently. This makes Trump’s claim resemble another former president: Richard Nixon, who, as his presidency was nearing its end, had held delusional conversations with the portrait of a figure on a wall in the White House.

This frenzy has spread to other parts of the government as well. While the war was still raging, the struggling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army’s chief of staff and its chief chaplain (and some others). Last week, Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, after she had just appeared at an argument before the Supreme Court, in which the justices he had appointed expressed skepticism toward the far-fetched claims being advanced by lawyers from the Justice Department led by Bondi—claims intended to defend attempts to overturn Trump’s opponents’—I mean to defend attempts to end birthright citizenship.

Under normal circumstances, President Trump’s behavior tends to ease slightly once he no longer feels cornered. But it is not easy to predict when that will happen. Trump has already shown that he does not have a cure for the conflict with Iran—yet even if he finds one, he may discover—borrowing from Trotsky’s words—that even if he may no longer be interested in the war, the war still keeps its eyes on him. The U.S. and the global economy seem to be teetering. New polls come out every week showing that the Republicans could suffer a catastrophic defeat in the midterm elections. Trump may find himself trapped for the long term in a dilemma of coming and going—meaning that others will also face a difficult stretch.

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