Another day of losing for Donald Trump

Jun 02, 2026

After days of hiding from the press, tucked away from the American people deep inside the White House, while a giant UFC cage is being set up on the South Lawn, the President of the United States finally found a moment to emerge from seclusion when he took a phone call from a reporter earlier today. And when the reporter, CNBC’s Eamon Javers, spoke to him, Trump did not hold back. His lack of impulse control got the better of him. Asked about negotiations collapsing over the Iran war, Trump shrugged off the question entirely, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” because the discussions had “started to get very boring.” This was the President of the United States discussing a deadly war that he started. A conflict that has destabilized an entire region, rattled global economic markets, endangered American troops, and left allies and adversaries alike scrambling to understand what comes next. And his response was that he didn’t care anymore because it was boring.

He did not misspeak, and he was not caught off guard. He said it, knowing he was speaking to a journalist who would be reporting on it later. And he still said he did not care because he was now bored with negotiating a peaceful end to the war. The war he ordered, the one being fought right now with real weapons and real bodies, no longer holds his interest. And the only flash of energy he summoned on the subject was a threat. When the conversation turned to whether Iran might still try to build a nuclear weapon, he said he would “blow them up to kingdom come.” That is the entire range of his thinking now: indifference on one end and annihilation on the other, with nothing in between. No strategy, diplomacy, or visible grasp of the thing he set in motion. Just a shrug and a threat from a man who would clearly rather be doing something else. Unfortunately, he is the President of the United States, and this is the job he volunteered for, campaigned for, and was ultimately elected to do.

And here’s what makes that answer so disturbing. Just before eleven o’clock this morning, hours before he told Eamon Javers he could not care less, the President posted this on Truth Social: “Talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Rapid pace. Everything moving along. Nothing to worry about. And then, within the span of a single morning, those same rapid-paced talks became too boring to follow.

Both of those statements came from the same man, about the same war, on the same day. They cannot both be true. And the reason they cannot both be true is that he was not following the negotiations closely enough to know which version of reality he was supposed to be selling. While he was posting reassurance at 10:43 that morning, Iran was already moving to suspend its participation in the negotiations over Israel’s escalation in Lebanon and threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. The collapse was already underway as he typed the word “rapid.”

He was not informing us. He was performing for us. And by the end of the day, the performance had changed completely.

Because what he told that reporter at midday cannot be squared with what he posted later that same afternoon. During the call, Trump said he was “going to ask” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu what was happening in Lebanon. Going to ask. The President of the United States, in the middle of a regional war his own military helped start, telling a reporter that he still needed to find out what was going on. And then, a little over an hour later, he suddenly sounded as though he already knew everything.

In his first post, he wrote that he had a “very productive call” with Netanyahu, and that “there will be no Troops going to Beirut, and any Troops that are on their way, have already been turned back.” He added that, “through highly placed Representatives,” he had spoken with Hezbollah, and “they agreed that all shooting will stop.” Then, hours later, he posted the entire thing all over again, the same claims, now wrapped in gratitude and wishful thinking. “I had a conversation with Bibi Netanyahu today, asking him not to go into a major raid of Beirut, Lebanon. He turned his Troops around. Thank you Bibi! I also had a conversation with Representatives of the Leaders of Hezbollah, and they agreed to stop shooting at Israel, and its soldiers. Likewise, Israel agreed to stop shooting at them. Let’s see how long that lasts — Hopefully it will be for ETERNITY!”

It was a remarkable announcement. A ceasefire on every front, brokered personally by the President of the United States and, if his post was to be believed, possibly lasting forever. There was only one problem. The people actually fighting the war had not agreed to any of it. According to reporting across CNN, The Jerusalem Post, and The Times of Israel, Netanyahu publicly contradicted him, saying the Israel Defense Forces would “continue to operate in southern Lebanon as planned.” His own defense minister, Israel Katz, went even further, denying that there was any ceasefire in Lebanon at all.

So the President announced a potential end to a war that the people fighting it were still actively fighting. He declared victory before there was a victory to declare. He took a victory lap around a finish line that did not exist.

And the call itself with Netanyahu was not the warm exchange that his “Thank you Bibi!” suggested. According to CNN, it was a heated phone call in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to scale back the operation and at points used expletives. The Times of Israel reported the words more bluntly, that Trump told Netanyahu, “you’re f**king crazy,” and “I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel.” So in private, he was reportedly shouting, and in public, he was posting gratitude and dreams of eternity. The distance between those two things is the distance between what is actually happening and what he wants us to believe is happening. And he does not appear to know, or to care, which side of that distance he is standing on from one hour to the next.

And nowhere was that clearer than when the subject turned to oil in his phone interview. Because while families across this country are watching the numbers climb at the pump, the President described a world that does not exist. He told Javers he was not worried about prices at all, that oil would soon be “dropping like a rock,” that there were “1,700 boats right now that are loaded up with oil,” and that it was “going to be like an oil gusher.” An oil gusher. That is the picture he painted. Here is the picture the rest of us are living in. Gas prices are devastating families. That cost lands squarely on the people who can least afford it, while the man responsible waves it away with a story about boats and gushers. And maybe he believes it. Maybe no one around him is willing to tell him otherwise, or maybe he simply cannot be bothered to know or care. We have to imagine it is some combination of all three. But the result is the same no matter which it is. The President of the United States is creating and telling fairy tales at our expense and at the expense of the world around us.

And maybe the most dangerous part is that nothing he does is new. We have seen this before, in other places and other times. Not the specifics, but the pattern. Strongmen who lose touch with the reality of their own wars while insisting, right up until the end, that everything is going perfectly. Leaders surrounded by aides who learn that the safest thing to do is agree, who manage the man instead of informing him, who feed him the version of events that keeps him calm and keeps themselves close to power. The danger in that arrangement is not only the leader’s detachment. It is that no one is left to say the true thing out loud. The reports grow rosier as the situation grows worse. The declarations of victory grow louder as the ground gives way. And the people who could correct the course decide, one by one, that it is easier to nod along. That is how a country drifts into catastrophe. Not only because the man at the top cannot be trusted, though he cannot, but because the man at the top does not know what is happening, and everyone around him has decided not to tell him.

And moments like this remind me why I write these posts in the first place. I do not write them for the people who cheer him on, no matter what he does. I am not writing to change their minds, and I let go a long time ago of the idea that the right words ever would. I write these for us. For history. For our children and our grandchildren. For our legacy. So that everyone who comes after us will know exactly what happened here, what they tried to do, and where we stood while they did it. I write so that we remember what we are up against and what we are fighting for. I am not trying to win an argument. I am trying to remind us who we are. What our country is supposed to stand for. I am trying to create a record. And I am trying to make sure that, through all of it, we never lose our own humanity to his cruelty.

We cannot let a single one of his failures go unnamed. When the man in charge treats war negotiations as boring, the temptation is to let our own attention drift too, to decide that if he does not care, then there is no point in us caring either. But that exhaustion is exactly what they are counting on. And we can’t give it to them. We hold on to the facts even when he tries to replace them with fantasy, because the facts are the record, and the record is what we are going to need. We pay attention to the price of gas, to the state of the talks, and to who is actually fighting and dying, even when the President will not. And we carry all of it toward the midterms, because that is the next real chance we have to take back some measure of control from people who have shown us, again and again, that they will not use it carefully. We do not get to wait for someone else to come and save us. We are the ones who keep the lights on while he sleeps.

Today was another bad day for Trump. His “relationship” with Netanyahu is being stressed. He once again told a reporter something he should never have said out loud. And in the ultimate strike to his ego, came today, when it was announced that Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund, the one critics warned would be used like a pool of money that could end up rewarding the very people who attacked the Capitol on January 6, was going to be shelved. After federal judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia temporarily blocked it, ordering the department to stop transferring money into it, stop considering claims, and stop disbursing funds, the pressure from both sides grew. Republicans in Congress balked, with some signaling they would not move their own immigration and law enforcement funding package until the fund was dealt with. And then earlier today, Trump met with House Speaker Mike Johnson at the White House, where the fund was among the things they discussed. Later that same day, the Justice Department put out a public statement saying it would “abide by” the court’s ruling, even as it insisted it disagreed. It did not say the fund was finished. But administration officials told reporters something blunter. One of them described it to Axios in three words. Dead for now. Whether that holds is another question, because even members of his own party are not satisfied with “for now.” They want it killed outright, and they are holding the President’s own immigration funding agenda hostage until it is.

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