Fresh Takes

Negotiating to get what you want = Bad

Spending tens of billions to bomb and kill to accomplish none of your original objectives = strength.

For Hegseth, it’s not really about the result. It’s that he gets to blow things up. pic.twitter.com/IheZHkaNZq

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 18, 2026

An offer of $300 billion would bring me to the table, too.

pic.twitter.com/yE1TKDelfO

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 16, 2026

Snyder: One of our national fairy tales is that [Donald Trump] is a negotiator or he has some kind of negotiating skills. He does not. He's a charismatic performer who played a negotiator on TV, but he does not have negotiating skills. He's terrible at it. pic.twitter.com/x6TXW72ftx

— MeidasClips (@MeidasClips) June 17, 2026

Snyder: [Donald Trump] is out of his depth. He does not understand anything about negotiation. He does not understand anything about war. He doesn't understand the politics of war. He doesn't understand how war is politics. He thinks it's like a video game or a movie where you… pic.twitter.com/oAjncLGb1S

— MeidasClips (@MeidasClips) June 17, 2026

Snyder: [Donald Trump] is out of his depth. He does not understand anything about negotiation. He does not understand anything about war. He doesn't understand the politics of war. He doesn't understand how war is politics. He thinks it's like a video game or a movie where you push a button and then the other guy surrenders. But war is fundamentally an intense form of politics. And politics is not what he's good at.

Is Trump in decline? Or was he never really that competent? 

The accepted narrative is that Trump has lost a step approaching 80.  He has lost energy, granted; but has he lost competence? Did he manage affairs any better than this during Covid, when he said it would just “go away,” and then he and Jared clearly didn’t know how to use the government to acquire and provide healthcare equipment in the early stages of overwhelming hospitalizations? He quickly quit attacking it when blaming Covid on China and Fauci didn’t make the pandemic ease. And then he tried to take credit for the vaccines, when the most important individual in that development was Dolly Parton.

Does any of this sound familiar? Like Déjà vu all over again?

Trump has never been good at politics.  The insistence that he’s some kind of feral political genius is just mental laziness. He exposes how lazy and vulnerable our politics is (and I don’t mean to authoritarianism. Trump could barely govern in his first term, and his crude attempts at wielding power have left him where he is now: about to face a Congress so vengeful James Carville expects Trump to quit by Easter). Rather than face the fact that we, the people, are pretty much shit at governing ourselves right now, we tell ourselves fairy tales about how we couldn’t help it, the “feral genius” won, what could we do? 🤷‍♂️

Welp, the Emperor truly has no clothes now….