NYT column diagnoses Trump flaw that may bring him down: ‘Cursed with a kind of blindness’
President Donald Trump's cascading failures in the Iran war — from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to the collapse of his regime-change fantasy — stem from a single fatal flaw: the president doesn't actually believe other people have agency, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argued Wednesday.
And that leaves him vulnerable.
"Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds," Bouie wrote, calling Trump "without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office."
The result, Bouie argued, is an administration that keeps getting blindsided by entirely predictable consequences of its own actions, from public outrage over DOGE, to backlash over the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to Iran's decision to close the Strait of Hormuz and retaliate against Gulf state allies.
None of it, according to Bouie, was planned for.
Trump appears to have expected Iran to fold the same way Venezuela did earlier this year, a "replay fantasy" that has since crashed into a more complex reality, Bouie wrote. That has left him trapped in an "escalation spiral," in which the president has no choice but to keep doubling down when one approach fails.
Bouie pressed the question of why the White House fails to see what others could easily predict.
"This gets to the real problem. Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him," he wrote, slapping the president with the label of a "consummate narcissist."
Trump's flaw is an opportunity for opposition, Bouie added. He is "a weak and deeply unpopular president," who also happens to be "cursed with a kind of blindness," wrote Bouie. That means he cannot see that his "opposition is real," and won't see it when it acts, Bouie concluded.
Stephen Miller hit with ‘uncomfortable silence’ as he jabs Republicans with loyalty test
Stephen Miller encouraged Texas Republican state legislators to challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent
The White House deputy chief of staff views GOP-led state legislatures as a workaround to get anti-immigration laws on the books that wouldn't need to pass through the gridlock in Congress, especially as Republicans at this point appear likely to lose their House majority and possibly the Senate, reported the New York Times.
“He sees conservative states like Texas and Florida can be partners with the federal government,” said state Rep. Tom Oliverson, chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus. “We can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.”
Miller met with Texas Republicans for more than four hours and demanded to know why the GOP-dominated legislature had not passed a bill to restrict public school funding to children who are citizens or are “lawfully present in the United States," which would break a precedent set in 1982 by a ruling in Plyler v. Doe that found states must pay for elementary school education for children regardless of their immigration status.
“There’s a lot of people that believe that that ruling has some pretty faulty logic associated with it,” Oliverson said. “He challenged us, and he encouraged us, and he asked us to partner with him."
Miller's proposal, if passed into state law, would cut education funding for an estimated 100,000 students out of more than 5.5 million schoolchildren in the state, the Times reported. It appears to be intended as a model for other red states to follow, according to the report.
"[It seems to be an effort from the White House to pressure lawmakers into passing extreme immigration policies that don’t reflect the needs of our state," said state Rep. Ramon Romero, a Democrat and the chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.
Miller led off the meeting, which included Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, with a loyalty test that landed awkwardly, according to Oliverson.
"Do we have a RINO problem in Texas?” he said, using an acronym for “Republican in name only” that is used by conservatives to disparage party moderates.
“There was no answer — it was just uncomfortable silence,” Oliverson said.
