Subject: Krugman on Last Night’s Speech
It turns out that the speech was sort of an anticlimax, although not in a good way. Many people expected Trump to pull the mother of all TACOs, to declare victory and surrender. He did not do that. He declared victory, of course, but he did not actually announce an end to hostilities. On the contrary, he said we’re going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age. So add massive war crimes to your schedule.

There is clearly no strategy here. There’s no endgame. There’s nothing. It’s hard to tell, as always, whether Trump is delusional or just completely unable to admit something that he actually knows.

One of the moments that really struck me in the speech was him declaring that the whole world was extremely impressed by what happened. He said,

the whole world is watching and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing. The world can’t believe what it’s seeing.

What it’s seeing is that the world’s greatest military power took on a fourth-rate power. Again, as I said the other day, Iran’s military budget is a rounding error in our military budget. And we lost. For all practical purposes, we’ve left ourselves in a much weaker position and Iran in a stronger position than it was before.

But Trump has to believe or has to claim that he believes that the whole world is extremely impressed. You might say, why do we care? Well, he cares, obviously. His whole thing is about dominance and believing that we’ve got the world awed by our strength.

If you want the real verdict on the speech, well, Brent oil futures were under $100 when Trump started speaking. They are over $108 as I record this. The oil market, I think is a more clear gauge, although the stock market has also reacted.

Basically, everybody said, oh my God, we thought that this was going to be at least the beginning of the end, and instead it looks like an endless quagmire. I still think that people are not fully taking into account the implications for global oil prices and everything else of the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed for the indefinite future.

So this is going to be really bad. But anyway, it was radically disappointing even to people who are, you know, the markets and a lot of people in the world were actually hoping that the United States would give up. I mean, it’ll be terrible. We really don’t want a medievalist theocracy empowered. But since this is heading nowhere except for, again, massive war crimes, better to end it. But we’re not getting that.

What really strikes me, and there’s obviously deeper stuff in here, but it is a question of character. It’s funny, I don’t think there’s a sort of, if you like, native English term for the Yiddish — but it’s effectively English now — word mensch. A mensch is literally a person, but it means somebody who takes responsibility for their actions, who accepts defeats as being defeats and tries to move on, who tries to improve, basically just being a mensch.

It’s hard to imagine somebody who’s less of a mensch than Donald Trump, except maybe for some of the members of his cabinet. It’s incredible that they’re so lacking in the basics of character.

The thing about what this means for America’s role in the world is not only that Trump and company are doing great damage, but the whole world is watching. They saw that this guy, and it wasn’t hard to see what kind of a person Trump was, that America elected this guy twice. It appears that the American public has completely lost sight of what it means to be a responsible, serious person.

I might say, since this masculinity posturing is such a part of it, they’ve forgotten what it is to be a man. Obviously, that applies to all genders. A country that will elect somebody like that twice is not a country anyone can rely on. And that is the ultimate lesson here.