In April of 2025, President Trump gave an interview to two reporters at The Atlantic, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer.
During the interview, he said something astounding.
Or, simply megalomaniacal. Take your pick.
Ms. Parker and Mr. Scherer wrote:
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys," he said. "And the second time, I run the country and the world."
Who says something--let alone believes something--like this?
Trump is certainly trying to run the world. He wants to have his hand in everything, everywhere.
There have been his designs on Canada, and Greenland. After the capture of Nicolas Maduro, Trump declared that the U.S. would "run" Venezuela, until "a proper transition can take place." There are his threats to take over Cuba; he said on March 9th that "it may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover."
On March 16th, in the Oval Office, he said that he believed he would be "having the honor of taking Cuba...That's a big honor." He said: "I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth. They're a very weakened nation..."
On March 9th, in an interview with CBS News, Trump spoke about the Strait of Hormuz--that he was "thinking about taking it over."
Yet his power, which is considerable, may not be as limitless as he seems to believe.
He demanded that he have a say in the choosing of Iran's new leader. Iran ignored the demand; the son of the recently killed (and the distinctly brutal, ruthless) Ayatollah Khamenei was selected.
Trump has demanded Iran's "unconditional surrender." (Does anyone in the military think this was the right thing to say?) Iran has continued to attack multiple countries in the region, and doesn't seem interested in surrendering.
Trump said, on March 9th: "I think the war is very complete,
pretty much." "Very complete" and "pretty much" are at odds with one another.
On March 11th, speaking to an audience in Kentucky, he said this, as one news outlet reported:
"We've won. Let me tell you, we've won. You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won," Trump said. "In the first hour it was over. But we won."
Yet the news report then pointed to this caveat, in Trump's Kentucky speech:
After the president declared victory, he noted that the U.S. has to finish the job, saying that America cannot "leave early."
"We gotta finish the job, right?" Trump said.
There is also this: a report in The New York Times on March 13th noted that when Trump
announced the opening strikes on Feb. 28, he called on the Iranian people to rise up.
“When we are finished, take over your government,” Mr. Trump said. “It will be yours to take.”
The Times report continued:
But on [March 13th], Mr. Trump appeared to acknowledge [in an interview with Fox's Brian Kilmeade, on Kilmeade's podcast] that his command was easier said than done.
...Mr. Trump said the Basij, a plainclothes militia that is affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, would probably kill protesters if they took to the streets.
“You just mentioned to me a group of people that go around with machine guns and shoot them down, and they say, ‘Anybody protests, we’re going to kill you in the streets.’ So I really think that’s a big hurdle to climb for people that don’t have weapons,” Mr. Trump said.
“I think it’s a very big hurdle,” he continued. “So that’ll happen, but it probably will be, maybe not immediately. Who’s going to do that? They literally have people in the streets with machine guns, machine gunning people down if they want to protest. OK?”
Such are Trump's routine contradictions, his shifts, his reliance upon moment-to-moment improvisations.
He was asked, in the March 13th interview with Brian Kilmeade, about the conclusion of the war.
"When are you going to know when it's over?" asked Kilmeade.
"When I feel it," Trump replied. "When I feel it in my bones."
The primacy of his feelings. Not facts, not the advice of the generals, the military experts ("I know more about ISIS than the generals do," he said in 2015, while running for president).
One thinks, too, of remarks he made in 2016, during his campaign, as reported at the time by Politico.
Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” who he talks with consistently about foreign policy, Trump responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain..."
He said:
"I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are," Trump said. “But my primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff."
Asked whether he thought the Iran war could "wrap up soon," the president told CBS News on March 9th: "Wrapping up is all in my mind, nobody else's."
Arguments can certainly be made that Iran's decades of terror, both abroad and at home, had to be ended. One can argue that--at least at some point--Iran needed to be prevented from reconstituting its nuclear weapons program (a program which Trump, of course, had claimed was "obliterated" last year). One can argue that the threat of Iran's growing arsenal of ballistic missiles had to be confronted--and, crucially, that it was necessary to stop the country from continuing the killings of thousands of its own citizens--in particular after Trump wrote this in January, on social media: "Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING...HELP IS ON ITS WAY."
Yet the key question about the joint U.S. and Israel war, it seems to me, is how much thinking Trump did, prior to attacking Iran.
In April of last year, Trump posted this all-caps declaration on his social media platform: "THE BEST DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE IS THE ABILITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE!!!" That was the entire post.
So much for his predictive powers.
"I have a plan for everything, OK?" he told the New York Post on March 9th, when asked about the rising oil prices. "I have a plan for everything. You'll be very happy."
On March 14th he told NBC News that the United States might attack Iran's Kharg Island "a few more times just for fun."
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During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised--repeatedly--that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine in twenty-four hours. The promise sounded ridiculous--yet Trump clearly believed he had the power to end the Russia/Ukraine war within a day.
He didn't have the power to do so. Vladimir Putin wouldn't give in; Putin continued to attack Ukraine, horrifically, while proclaiming he wanted peace, which of course he does not want. It has not helped matters that Trump has often criticized Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that Trump has, on many occasions, spoken of President Zelenskyy harshly, condescendingly.
On March 14th he said the following about President Zelenskyy, in his interview with NBC:
"I'm surprised that Zelenskyy doesn't want to make a deal. Tell Zelenskyy to make a deal because Putin's willing to make a deal."
He said: "Zelenskyy is far more difficult to make a deal with."
NBC's online report continued:
Zelenskyy earlier this month offered to help U.S. forces and their allies in the Middle East with intercepting drones, using the military's experience with shooting down Russian drones.
But on Saturday, Trump said that "we don't need help," adding that the "last person we need help from is Zelenskyy."
Trump, certainly, has for years been fixated upon Putin. He clearly admires Putin, and wants Putin to admire him.
That Trump has been unable to control what Putin does, or does not do, means this: Trump doesn't run the world as much as he believes he does.
In 2019, Nancy Pelosi famously told Trump at a White House meeting: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”
It seems to me not implausible that Trump's various foreign interventions, or threats of intervention--including the war with Iran--have been, in some deep sense (at least in-part, though maybe more than in-part) driven by frustration: by his inability to control (and to meaningfully stand up to) Putin. With each intervention, one wonders, is Trump in essence saying to Putin: see how much power I have?
Yet with Putin, he reveals, again and again, his basic weakness.
There have been deeply troubling reports that Russia has, during the war, been providing Iran with intelligence--about drones, and about America's military forces, and assets.
Despite such reports, the United States has temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil, to help stabilize worldwide oil prices. It is, at least for the moment, another gift to Putin, courtesy of Trump.
