Eat & Drink

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.

The liberal voting rights outlet Democracy Docket exposed a pattern of extreme anti-voting and conspiracy theorist beliefs by Chad Bianco, the pro-Trump sheriff of Riverside County, California, who is currently running for governor.

Bianco is currently in a high-profile clash with California state officials after he seized 650,000 ballots from the Proposition 50 referendum, which established a new mid-decade congressional map to draw out five Republicans in retaliation for GOP efforts to do the same to Democrats in Texas. Even some Republican leaders in the state have condemned his actions.

But Bianco's seizure of ballots, evidently to try to investigate baseless allegations of fraud, is part of a broader pattern of his disdain for democracy.

"'That’s why some people should never be allowed to vote,' the sheriff wrote Wednesday in response to a commentary video about the Iran war on the social media site," said the report. This "wasn't an isolated incident," the report said, as "Over the past months, Bianco published numerous comments and posts on social media promoting false claims that elections are rigged and Democrats rely on illegal voters to win races."

Among other things, Bianco also claimed that Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office,” and that “Non citizens can vote, you can vote for someone else even if they are dead, people can vote multiple times with different names.”

There is no evidence to support any of this; all of these things are illegal and have been prosecuted in the rare cases they have occurred.

Bianco, who has been characterized by opponents as having one of the worst crime-solving records and some of the deadliest jails in California, is a former member of the Oath Keepers paramilitary and is affiliated with the "Constitutional Sheriffs" movement, a fringe group that believes God delegates divine legal authority to sheriffs to overrule federal law they disapprove of. In 2024, this group was preparing a scheme to block Democrats from taking power if they won the election.