First Draft: Has Iran Broken Trump?
The president’s primetime address was so bad it reminded one of his own officials of Joe Biden. Plus, even this Trump-packed Supreme Court seems to hate his bid to end birthright citizenship.
On this day in 1992, a New York jury found mob boss John Gotti guilty on 13 counts, including murder. A key witness was Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a former Gotti lieutenant who confessed to 19 killings and who would one day make headlines by endorsing Donald Trump. “We need a gangster,” Gravano said in 2024.
Good morning! Swin and Andrew here. Moments before President Donald Trump went live last night, Swin predicted that his Wednesday night address on the Iran war would sound eerily similar to that scene from ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ in which the Kevin Kline character, gun drawn, angrily insists that America did not lose the Vietnam War. Well, Swin was wrong… Trump’s so-called speech was much, much worse than that.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we review that sleepy, bumbling, bloodthirsty primetime address, the wider Iran war news produces more nasty polling for the president, and even Trump’s pet Supreme Court justices seem skeptical about his bid to end birthright citizenship.
Like ‘Listening to Joe Biden’
As we reported in yesterday morning’s ‘First Draft,’ very few people – including in Trump’s own administration – are actually buying his effort to declare victory in Iran and move on. “However poorly you think the war is going, it is worse,” one senior administration official said in recent days. A different senior US official bluntly stated: “Iran can declare victory, too,” adding that “nobody will buy our attempt to sell this as a big win.”
Still, if you are the US commander in chief, and you’re one month into a major war that you launched, the one communications job you have is to be able to go on live TV and project calm, confidence, and reasonably high energy to the American people, when you’re telling them how well the war is going.
On Wednesday night – April Fools’ Day, funnily enough – President Trump couldn’t even be bothered to do that. (He’s a former reality TV star; he is supposed to be good at doing TV.) Setting aside for a moment the typically incoherent jumble that pervaded his televised address, the American president delivered a jarringly listless, elderly-seeming speech that did little to inspire confidence – including in his own ranks.
During and after his address, an array of Trump advisers, administration officials, allies on Capitol Hill, and rich Mar-a-Lago buddies gave Zeteo their snap reviews of Trump’s message and delivery. (Yes, they asked for the cloak of anonymity, so as to not piss off God King Donald.) Virtually across the board, the president was panned by his own people, with some denigrating the speech as pointless, and others reiterating how much senior members of the administration never wanted this to happen in the first place.
One Trump administration official said the following on Wednesday night: “It reminded me of listening to Joe Biden speak.”
In Trumplandia, that is perhaps the worst possible thing you could say about anyone, much less the sitting president and leader of the GOP.
But Wednesday night’s speech revealed the extent to which Trump’s reckless and illegal war is breaking him down – in ways that numerous other massive crises, criminal investigations, and scandals simply could not. For once, his bullshitting, bullying, and bravado aren’t working – and he cannot take it. Plus, he’s sounding notably old and drained as he tries to pretend, to a late-night audience of millions, that he can.