Great piece. Exposes many of you are so easily compromised.

Excerpts:

The Iran War has revealed President Trump’s true weakness. There is a kind of person who truly flummoxes Trump, the person he just can’t understand — the true believer.

Trump’s central political insight (and perhaps his key political advantage) is that he understood that Americans weren’t quite cynical enough about many of our politicians. As much as we already thought they placed power over principle, we didn’t know the half of it. He could see our politicians more clearly than we could — perhaps because he’d spent a lifetime in their presence, writing them large checks while hearing their empty promises.

And he showed it by placing a big carrot and a giant stick in front of the Republican political class, and then we watched as virtually everyone fell in line.

It’s worth emphasizing the size of the carrot and the stick. First, the carrot: Joining with Trump doesn’t just mean that you gain access to the room where it happens, to use Lin-Manuel Miranda’s memorable phrase. For a substantial number of supporters, it means access to a degree of autonomy and impunity that’s virtually unknown in modern American politics.

Conversely, break with Trump, and you’d face a personal and professional apocalypse. Republican state senators in Indiana learned that lesson once again on Tuesday night — most of the Republicans who refused to redistrict the state to make it more favorable to their party lost their primaries, and it wasn’t close.

Trump is not a man who values dissent, to put it mildly. The idea of a “team of rivals” is completely alien to him. Talk to virtually any prominent person who breaks with Trump, and they can tell you stories of terrifying days and sleepless nights as MAGA’s minions made their lives a living hell.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

And, in a strange way, they appreciated him for his brazenness. In this cynical view, all politicians are, deep down, just like Trump. They were faking their dedication to principle. As for Trump, he was the honest crook. He was like the mob boss who didn’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be in the sanitation business.

Nor should we be surprised that such a substantial proportion of the nation’s tech moguls found their way to MAGA. Forget culture, their politics are downstream of commerce, and Trump has promised crypto and A.I. riches to all those who fall in line behind him.

From pardons to prediction markets, the transactional nature of the Trump administration is perhaps its most obvious characteristic. And transactional people often soothe their own consciences with the belief that everyone else is ultimately transactional as well — the only question is their price.

But that’s wrong. Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war, shifting strategies, objectives and timelines sometimes by the day. It’s obvious that he thought Iran would be another Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was able to capture the leader and then more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now.

But in Iran, he helped Israel decapitate virtually all of the nation’s senior leadership, and the rest of the regime seems to have become more intransigent and less willing to negotiate. Even worse, he also seems to have enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics.

In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals. Remember when he considered a “joint venture” to control the Strait of Hormuz with Iran?

Why hasn’t Trump been able to force an end to the Ukraine war? There are true believers on both sides. The Ukrainians won’t willingly yield an inch to the man who wants to destroy them, and Putin is infused with his own sense of religious purpose and historic destiny.

The pope’s steadfast adherence to Catholic doctrine is yet another example. One gets the sense that he’s almost amused at the idea that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric should have any influence at all on his public professions of Christian faith.

At home, Trump has obviously been flummoxed by judges who stubbornly stick to principle and seem immune to his bluster. Constitutional fidelity is alien to him. He cannot understand why the justices he appointed will not do exactly what he wants.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

The first Trump administration was a complex hybrid of all these characteristics. The president’s indecency and dishonesty were paramount, of course, but for years they existed side-by-side with the integrity of Jim Mattis, for example, and in the run-up to Jan. 6 and on the day itself, Trump encountered the lines that Mike Pence would not cross.

There is no Mattis or Pence in the present administration, and that doesn’t just mean that Trump’s id and impulses are unrestrained; it also means that he’s staffed his administration with people who can’t even comprehend integrity, much less genuine belief.

It’s not that you can’t negotiate with people who possess real convictions. Of course you can. But the nature of the negotiation is entirely different. You have to take into account the other side’s values. You have to know their red lines. And you have to know that they can’t be personally bought. If a person genuinely believes their soul is at stake, then no amount of money or power can compensate them for an eternity in hell.

As Trump has concentrated the most transactional figures in American politics into his coalition, it’s clear that they’ve created their own alternate reality — where everyone is like them, willing to surrender even their deepest values (if they even have deep values) when the price is right.

Yet that alternate reality was never going to hold. Trump was always going to confront true believers, and it is quite plain that MAGA is now fighting forces of both good and evil that it can’t even begin to understand.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/trump-iran-ukraine-true-believers.html