Over the weekend I noticed an example of one of the most significant features of the last decade-plus in American politics, though it’s one that still remains too little remarked upon. Lauren Egan writes a newsletter covering the Democratic Party for The Bulwark. Sunday night’s edition was about pundit and political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, “He Was a Legendary Independent Pundit. Then Trump Arrived.” Basically, How did Stuart Rothenberg come down with, as MAGA puts it, Trump Derangement Syndrome? Toward the end of the piece, Egan gets at what I think is the underlying issue here and some of the commonality I’m about to note.

Let’s start this story in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At the time, there were a handful of men — pretty much all men, as I recall — who played a very specific role in the political-journalistic ecosystem. They were rigorously, perhaps obsessively, non-partisan and were go-to people on basic questions of politics. They’d appear on shows, be on call for quotes for journalists at the big papers. Rothenberg and Charlie Cook played that role in the electoral analysis and predictions space. Larry Sabato also occupied that space, though he also played in the political analysis one. In the latter space were Norm Ornstein (AEI) and Thomas Mann (Brookings). I think they were on PBS Newshour for a long time as a pair. Their analysis was on the mechanics of governing, less the explicitly political stuff and generally not electoral stuff.

The U.S. is approaching a newly dangerous phase of its war against Iran. The administration is signaling that it will likely soon commence ground operations in Iran that will yet stop short of a full-scale invasion. Obviously, certainly to many TPM readers, this whole situation and war of choice are very bad things. But I want to point your attention to something specific.

In recent weeks there’s been a recurring story, albeit with different players. This or that DHS or White House official gets asked about sending ICE to the polls in November. Will they disavow it, promise it won’t happen? The general answer has been no comment, no answer. It’s Tom Homan, or Kristi Noem or Stephen Miller. Yesterday, it was Todd Blanche at DOJ. There’s a general mood of a drip, drip, drip story, with all the vibes of looming danger and the hammer-fall of that danger being in the other guy’s hands. This is all a mistake. It’s a Trumpian sort of conditioning that is being perpetuated even though Trump himself, as far as I can tell, hasn’t addressed this particular question in some time. It’s a kind of watchful waiting in which all the power is being ceded to the hands of the White House when that is not necessary at all.

Being in a reactive mode, having the other guy holding the cards and waiting to know what they’re going to do and reacting when they do it is enervating, demoralizing, even paralyzing. And that’s always Trump’s personal angle: ‘I 100% can do it. Everyone agrees I can do it. But we’ll see what I decide,’ is more or less what he’s said about countless future crimes he’s dangled in front of an often-cowering opposition over the last decade.

I had a moment of insight or perhaps revelation early in this war when the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz first became central in the news and President Trump was publicly debating whether he would use the U.S. Navy to escort ships through it. Would he, won’t he? Will it happen tomorrow? What will he decide. Then I was watching a YouTube show about maritime shipping. In passing the host, Sal Mercogliano, noted that, at that time at least, there weren’t any U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf at all. And the kind of ships you need, in the numbers you’d need, were hundreds of even thousands of miles away. That made perfect sense since for the kind of war the U.S. is currently fighting we don’t need naval vessels anywhere near that close to the combat zone, and when they are that close they become much more vulnerable to attack. But the point is that the whole debate about whether Trump was about to do that any time in the near future was entirely contained within Trump’s Truth Social world. It wasn’t connected to any of the hard realities of whether any of that was even possible.

This post follows up on the previous two posts about President Trump’s weak hand in trying to end his Iran War with something short of a humiliating climb-down from his demands for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender.” Trump’s claim yesterday of “very, very strong talks” with Tehran turn out, predictably, to be third-party talks aimed at coaxing Tehran into talking at all. As Reuters reports in this new (paywalled) story, Iran is actually dramatically upping its demands since the start of the war. Those include guarantees of no future attacks, reparations for war damage and formal control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Beyond the bluster and carnage let’s look at the current situation in the war between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. I wrote most of this post before the overnight news that Trump is essentially suing for peace. But all of it still applies. And it comes down to one remarkable dynamic.

Despite the U.S. dominating the skies and almost every other combat domain, Iran has seized and holds the initiative in the war itself, forcing the U.S. to react to it and, in Trump’s hands, do so erratically and helplessly. Iran has the strategic initiative, despite constant and incredibly damaging attacks by the United States and Israel. Indeed, getting Iran to stop its primary retaliatory measure — throttling the Strait of Hormuz — now appears to be the main U.S. war aim. In other words, the main goal of the U.S. now is to get Iran to cease its retaliation for the U.S. starting the war in the first place.

The U.S. was already trying to get Iran to the bargaining table, according to this report last night from Axios. The fact that the U.S. is, reportedly, considering how to “package” cash payments to Iran (i.e. release frozen assets) is a testament to just how far we are from “unconditional surrender.” Meanwhile, this morning’s news confirms that the U.S. is getting talks started, or at least hoping to do so. Of course the simplest way to get Iran to release the strait is to stop the war. But the U.S. can’t do that, at least not openly, since that would amount to a massive and humiliating defeat.

A week ago I asked whether global energy markets have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I was being a bit arch because I didn’t mean in the sense that MAGA world means, which is being somehow obsessively, compulsively anti-Trump. I meant the opposite. Are the markets wedded to a kind of Trump magical thinking? That somehow he’ll always find a way to thread the needle or slip out of his self-made crises? I’ve tried to be very aware of the fact that I’m totally green on the question of global energy markets. And since oil futures are at least flirting with twice the price that they were at when this war started, it’s hardly like markets aren’t reacting to it. A friend who follows energy markets very closely walked me through some of the reasons why the markets response has been more tempered than one might expect: existing slack in the oil markets on the eve of the war, continued impact of the recent release of 400 million barrels of oil, and uncertainty about whether the U.S. can or will reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But I get more and more indications, some in just reading the news closely, some in small bits of information I pick up from sources, that there really is something going on here.

Semafor reported last night that Joe Kent, momentary half-resistance hero and full-time white nationalist weirdo, is being investigated by the FBI for leaking classified information. According to Semafor, at least, the investigation predates his high-profile, news-driving resignation. We don’t know many details of this investigation. It’s at least possible that, rather than being retaliation for the resignation, it was actually the cause of it. In other words, maybe Kent saw the investigation was building, that the moment was right, and made his push to clothe the investigation and any possible future charges as retaliation. But let’s set that possibility aside for the moment. Because there’s another possibility I want to explore, one that goes to the heart of how Trump II works.

Our friend John Judis had an essay over the weekend in NOTUS airing the provocative and audacious claim that Trump is a world-historical figure in the way that the German philosopher Hegel used the term. This is a proposition sure to drive many to distraction. And perhaps for good reason. But as I told John in an email I largely agree with him, but with an important exception or difference in the way he articulated the claim. Before getting to that, let me give a very, very brief outline of the concept.

The idea here is not that the figures in question — an Alexander or Caesar or Bonaparte, the figures Hegel thought of — are good people. It’s not even that they necessarily have any articulate awareness of their role in history. It’s that there are some individuals who have an intuitive sense of the opportunities of the historical moment. They then acquire power and force huge changes that drive the course of history in dramatically new directions, directions that are essentially impossible to undo. The key is there’s really no going back from the changes these people make.

Donald Trump’s Iran war is playing out like a Defense Department war game in which a neophyte is schooled in the stodgy and risk-averse reasons why a couple of generations of presidents and joint chiefs of staff have resisted demands to overthrow Iran’s clerical regime by force. Well, yes, we do have a super, super powerful military, the schoolers might say, and Iran is still using rusted-out jets we sold the Shah half a century ago, but here’s the thing …. and you go from there.