The Saudi nuclear farce and governance by whim and meme
Trump has made the word of the US government worthless.
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Last Wednesday, the United States announced it had reached an agreement to allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear use.
Less than 24 hours later, however, Trump repudiated the deal, insisting that Saudi Arabia would first have to normalize relations with Israel. By the end of the week, the administration was in chaos and the agreement was in limbo.
This is hardly the first time that the left hand in the Trump administration hasn’t known what the right hand — or even the left hand — was doing. Trump also last week unilaterally claimed he was reneging on a revenue deal with Canada involving the Gordie Howe bridge between Michigan and Ontario. And earlier this month, after ICE murdered multiple people, the administration said it was halting ICE traffic stops, only to almost immediately reverse the decision at Trump’s behest.
This erratic approach to decision-making is what you’d expect in a personalist dictatorship. Republicans love to tout the unitary executive theory, holding that the president has expansive and unchecked power. But they have implemented that theory under the reign of a man who is bored by policy, violently opposed to listening to anyone who isn’t fluffing him, and lives in a self-contained narcissistic fugue of grievance and ego-wounds.
The result is a regime that is constantly tripping over its own bloated mushroom-like appendages — and a global order in which absolutely no one can trust that the United States will do tomorrow what it promises today.
Betraying the Saudis
The United States and Saudi Arabia have been working on some sort of nuclear deal since 2008. A sticking point has been US objections to allowing Saudi Arabia to enrich its own uranium. President Biden also demanded that Saudi Arabia agree to join the (Trump-launched) Abraham Accords, which would normalize relationships with Israel.
But Saudi Arabia has refused to join the Abraham Accords without a path to Palestinian statehood. And when Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the final deal last week, recognition of Israel was not in the agreement.
The agreement was a major coup for Saudi Arabia, who received everything they wanted and had to give up little in return. The only thing the US gained, arguably, was boxing Russia and China out of a role in a potential Saudi nuclear program.
Unsurprisingly, many people objected to the agreement. Experts worried the deal would lead eventually to the Saudis developing nuclear weapons, and to a potential arms race in the Middle East.
Trump despises expertise, but he does listen to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent his entire career fighting to prevent Arab nations from counterbalancing Israel by developing their own nuclear weapons. And even more than Netanyahu, Trump listens to Fox News, where hosts Brian Kilmeade and Kayleigh McEnany questioned the deal, suggesting Trump had been weaker than (gasp!) Joe Biden.
Stung, Trump rushed to social media to say that the Saudis had to join the Abraham Accords. He additionally insisted that the enrichment deal would somehow involve “no enrichment of material.”
The administration has said on the record that this confused bumbling was not in fact confused or bumbling, and that Trump was always demanding the Saudis join the Abraham Accords. Off the record, White House officials have blamed Energy Secretary Wright for moving ahead without Trump’s authorization.
But the real fault has to lie with the person in charge. Trump does not seem to know or fully understand what his diplomats and cabinet secretaries are doing. More, he doesn’t seem to know or understand what the political ramifications of those actions might be.
Normally, a president would try to gather information from key allies — and ideally from key opponents! — about their views and concerns before taking a huge step like okaying a major treaty or, say, going to war. But Trump is too lazy to bother with any of that. He just blunders ahead, and then, when he gets pushback, he blunders back, or sideways.
That’s how we ended up losing the war with Iran. And it’s how Trump ended up only learning about downsides of his Saudi Arabia deal from Fox News.
Betraying Susan Collins
There’s a similarly predictable sad shuffle of failure happening with domestic policy.
Earlier this month, ICE thugs hit the streets bloated with new congressional funds and desperate to meet their 2,000 arrest-a-day quota. So incentivized, they killed two men during traffic stops within days of each other: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Maine.
Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was sacked earlier this year after a series of horrific high-profile ICE murders. Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, told Congress he would approach things differently, with less murder.
“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he initially insisted.
Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, facing a tough reelection bid, wanted to be seen as fighting for less ICE murder in Maine too. After the ICE killing in her state, she called for a pause to “non-urgent vehicle stops” — stops which repeatedly across the country have led to ICE agents escalating and shooting people.
Mullin consulted with Collins, and then did as she suggested, pausing vehicle stops until ICE agents received more training. This was not an especially impressive step, and did not address the main problem, which is that ICE agents are an out of control and unaccountable militia whose purpose is to terrorize and dehumanize immigrants and people of color. But Mullin and Collins obviously felt they could claim to have done something.
MAGA, though, wasn’t having it.
Rabid anti-immigrant goons like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and demoted-for-murderous-incompetence former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino whined that Mullin was weak. An immigration enforcement official told the Daily Wire that because of the order ending traffic stops “numbers are down [and] we can’t do shit.”
Mullin reportedly did not tell Trump about the traffic stop pause beforehand — though it certainly doesn’t seem like Trump encourages much policy discussion with his cabinet officers at the best of times. In any case, Trump was enraged that MAGA media was calling him a weak immigrant-coddler, and he rushed to make his tiny fingers tap out his policy pronouncements on social media as usual.
“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he blared. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”
Did Trump know how ICE used traffic stops before Steve Bannon told him they were essential? Does Trump actually care about ICE being judicious or fair? Why does he put periods after each letter of ICE? Some of those questions are easier to answer than others.
One thing is clear, though — ICE policy is chaotic and confused. Some reporting suggests that the agency did not in fact resume traffic stops. One ICE official The Intercept spoke to said, “I follow policy that comes down the appropriate channels … the president says one thing but in reality we all follow established policy.”
On the one hand, if there are fewer vehicle stops and fewer people murdered by ICE agents in vehicle stops, that would be good. But it is not great to know that the armed masked gunmen flooding the streets are being given conflicting commands and then picking the ones they want to follow.
Governing by meme
Whether looking at Saudi Arabia nuclear policy or ICE traffic stops, it’s clear that Trump is not, to put it mildly, making informed decisions. Instead, political scientist Henry Farrell has argued that Trump’s chaotic governing style is analogous to Hitler’s in the sense that his minions attempt to anticipate his (often contradictory and poorly articulated) whims.
But one major difference, Farrell suggests, is that Trump’s whims are expressed through, and shaped by, garbage social media agitprop.
“Propaganda and policy making [in the Trump administration] are blurred so that one can’t tell where the one ends and the other begins,” Farrell explains. “One of the aspects of Trumpism that is most difficult for people to wrap their heads around is the degree of overlap between the channels that the regime uses to communicate with the public, and the channels that the regime uses to communicate with itself.”
What this means in practice is that policy decisions are planned out and delivered in terms of social media dunks. Thus, Trump’s current trade war with Canada reads like someone trying to win an argument on social media. After Trump imposed preposterous 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, officials in Canada revoked an invitation to the opening of the Gordon-Howe bridge between Ontario and Michigan.
Trump responded with a belligerent Truth Social post. “Canada disinvited the United States of America to the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge, which is fine, considering they are paying substantial TARIFFS to the United States,” he snarked, before stating that he was unilaterally changing the revenue allocation from the bridge.
Originally, the agreement was that Canada would pay for the bridge and then receive all tolls until it had paid back its original investment. But now, Trump declares, “we changed the terms of the Deal so that the United States of America now gets 50 percent of the Profit.”
This is childish and ugly and a disgusting way to treat our neighbors. Farrell’s point, though, is that Trump’s hyperfocus on winning the cheers of right-wing trolls doesn’t just affect his approach to those he sees as enemies or rivals. It also sets the terms for his interactions with his own allies, his own bureaucracy, and his own officials. Cabinet secretaries don’t know what Trump wants because Trump doesn’t know what Trump wants until the administration has done something and right-wing trolls have responded.
The policy-making structure is effectively posting to Truth Social and seeing if the gathered Nazis reply with likes or jeers. If the first, leave the post up. If the second, reverse the policy and chastise your cabinet officials. If you can do neither of those things because losing a war with Iran is not something you can put back in the bottle, bluster and whine about how everyone is unfair to you and how it’s all really Joe Biden’s fault.
This approach means that every commitment, every treaty, every promise, has to be ratified, not by Congress, but by Brian Kilmeade and/or Steve Bannon and/or X’s vile underbelly. No one can trust us — and indeed, as Susan Collins discovered, Republicans cannot even trust each other .
Trump lurches this way and that, committing gross evils through malevolence or negligence or the combination of the two, always insisting he has never changed his mind as he turns on Fox News to find out from some vapid reactionary talking head what he should do in the Middle East today.
The result has been plague, war, murders in the streets, the alienation of core allies, and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary global deaths. It’s clear that Trump will never learn, or attempt to learn, from these past errors. The ludicrous, grotesque, violent failures and evils will continue until he and his band of corrupt meme-ing fascists are at last forced from power.
That’s it for today
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Mushroom-like appendages… 😂 whether you intended it or not, they are a bunch of dicks.