Trump is isolated in his dangerous fantasies

A new report in The Atlantic supplies colourful insight into why Donald Trump’s presidency is bounding along so chaotically. It turns out that the man with his finger on the button lacks a lot of basic information. I’m not referring to his ignorance of macroeconomics, military strategy or history; these shortcomings have long been obvious. More problematic, he doesn’t notice vital aspects of what’s going on around him. This obliviousness has rarely been more glaring than when the US Army’s top civilian, Daniel Driscoll, met Trump in the Oval Office last week to explain why he was resigning from the post he’d held for a year and a half. Driscoll had clashed repeatedly with the Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, especially over Hegseth’s moves to fire or block the promotion of more than 80 senior officers, most for their adoption of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies, many for their promotion of new ideas (such as recognising the new dominance of drone warfare over, say, tank manoeuvres), at least half because (and pretty much only because) they were black or female. Shorts No surprises here. Driscoll – who, like Hegseth, is an Ivy League law school graduate and Army veteran with political ambitions beyond this administration – had been expected to resign for some time. The stunner was that, according to The Atlantic, Trump expressed surprise at Driscoll’s comments. It seems the President – who also serves as the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces – had no idea that Hegseth had dismissed or derailed the careers of so many senior officers or that the Army was now soaked in turmoil as a consequence. (In April, Hegseth also fired the Army’s much-beloved top general and hasn’t nominated a replacement since.) These are no small matters, especially in a time of war and crises. Nor are they too esoteric to grab a president’s attention. In fact, they’ve been the topics of many newspaper articles, social-media posts and even cable-news features in the past several months. In Pete Hegseth’s quest to please Donald Trump above all other obligations, he appears to have failed to inform him when things go wrong (Photo: Daniel Heuer/Reuters) Does Trump so much as glance at the front-page headlines of The New York Times? He might not, and may be inclined to dismiss as “fake news” any claims that conflict with his prejudices. In fact, his news diet is extremely tilted toward (to extend the metaphor) pleasure food. As has been widely reported, he is followed around incessantly by an ebullient 35-year-old blonde named Natalie Harp, a Christian evangelical who literally worships Trump and whose sole job as his “executive assistant” is to print out and hand him every tidbit of praise and happy-making news that she can find on the internet. (For this, she is known as “the human printer.”) This may explain why Trump tells interviewers that many people regard him as the greatest president of all time (if some people do regard him as such, Natalie Harp has tracked down their TikTok posts) or that the war in Iran is going smoothly (some commentators have said so) or that his positive ratings in the polls are historically high (it’s unclear where he might have picked up that myth, as in fact they’re as low as any president’s have been). The surprise that Trump is reported to have expressed at his meeting with Driscoll is not unprecedented. The Washington Post reported last month that he screamed at Hegseth in a national-security meeting over findings that the massive attacks on Iran, in the first few weeks of the war, had depleted a large percentage of the US military’s vital munitions, including more than half of its cruise missiles and high-tech air-defence weapons. This too had been reported in the press as far back as April. Trump had apparently skipped over those stories, and Hegseth had apparently failed to inform him. Hegseth surely stands as the least-qualified Defence Secretary since the job was created in 1947. He had never led an organisation that held more than 100 people. He reached only the level of major in the Army National Guard and got booted out for bearing tattoos that were seen as politically extremist. He came to Trump’s attention as the anchor of a Fox News weekend show by railing against DEI and defending three Army officers who’d been tried for committing especially hideous war crimes in Afghanistan. (Trump pardoned them upon winning his election.) His confirmation hearings revealed allegations of excessive drinking and abuse of women, as a result of which he just barely got the job, despite his denials. Even after Trump turned up the pressure against the pliant Republican majority, the Senate vote on his approval was 50-50, a tie broken in his favour, as the procedures allow, by the Vice President, JD Vance. Dan Driscoll has stepped down as US Army secretary, repotedly following clashes with Hegseth (Photo: Karl DeBlaker/AP) Ever since, he has been the most vocal Trump loyalist in the cabinet (a high bar to cross), banning inquisitive journalists from the Pentagon, yelling at anyone who dares to criticise him at congressional hearings, briefing only Republican lawmakers on sensitive matters of policy (an unprecedented act of politicisation) and trumpeting all acts of “lethality” (from the sinking of suspected drug boats in the Caribbean to killing anyone who happens to linger in the damage circle of a bomb dropped in Iran) as proof of our glory. In his quest to please his President above all other obligations, he appears to have failed to inform him when things go wrong – though it’s plausible that he’d inferred this too was part of the job. (He must have noticed that cabinet secretaries who bring him bad news have lost their favor, sometimes their jobs, as a result.) As long as Trump can convince himself that he’s “winning” in Iran, he will champion Hegseth as the agent of those victories. The question is how long even the likes of Trump, so determined to evade bad news, can sustain this delusion – and whether, when the truth starts to burn, he pushes Hegseth under the bus, as he has done to so many other top aides whose loyalty he’d suddenly deemed lacking.