Donald Trump got two pieces of bad news this weekend, and how he responded to both says everything about his frame of mind, and maybe more.
One bit of information came from inside his own Pentagon, where somebody disclosed the contents of a classified orders book showing four senior military leaders formally objecting to extending his war in Iran. The other came from NBC’s Kristen Welker, who noted on a local D.C. morning hit before Meet the Press that his primary endorsements have produced “mixed results.” The president let the Pentagon spokesman answer the generals’ reported dissension, while he ostensibly directed the FCC to investigate Welker.
The difference between those two responses tells you everything about what this president cares about and, more to the point, what he doesn’t.
The Pentagon document in question is Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's orders book, which decides how, when, and which US military forces are deployed. Citing people familiar with it, The Washington Post reported that three combatant commanders and the chief of naval operations formally non-concurred on extending the Iran war into 2027. A “non-concur” is effectively how military brass disagrees with orders before following them.
According to the bombshell report, Admiral Daryl Caudle wrote that the Navy “cannot sustain its current level of support,” in a book that showed roughly a quarter of the fleet’s destroyers ready to deploy and more than 50,000 troops kept on alert in the region. These objections were meant to stay inside the building, but instead went public and exposed a level of uniformed dissent the administration plainly would have preferred to keep private.
The fact that this concerns a war that a majority of Americans now disapprove of, a majority call a mistake, and more than two-thirds say Trump is handling badly? Well it’s not good news for the administration.
Instead of addressing it, the president spent the weekend raging at reporters. Welker’s accurate assessment of Trump’s Republican primary endorsements led to a presidential demand that the FCC deliver “rebuke or punishment.” Bill Maher made the same endorsement observation on HBO a week ago, and according to a report, the president texted him charts until Maher allowed on air that he’d “overstated” it. And Trump delivered a scathing midnight post with remarkably ugly personal insults toward the highly regarded Maggie Haberman, for reporting his 9/11 no-show.
Meanwhile, the closest Trump came to engaging his own commanders was posting a bizarre AI-generated video of Iran’s Kharg Island getting blown “to smithereens.” Cool.
You may never find a purer expression of the Trump mind, or at least what he values most. Any public measurement of his political power? That earns his personal, sustained, furious attention. His own military telling him it is nearing the breaking point? He leaves that to a spokesman and a meme.
The reasoning revealed here is that Trump’s endorsement record far outranks a readiness crisis because the threat of primaring members of his own party is the crucial enforcement arm of the whole operation. “It would be a terrible thing if something bad were to happen to your primary campaign” is precisely what keeps the GOP rank and file in line.
Trump pushed back on the growing narrative during an interview with Fox News weekend host Trey Gowdy. “I’m at 98%,” he said of his endorsement track record, which aired Sunday night. “Whenever I endorse somebody, they win. Almost all the time.” He claimed 214 of 218 House endorsees and a perfect 24 for 24 in the Senate, which the data backs up even though that relies mostly on victorious incumbents and safe seats. The more recent record offers more, well, “mixed results.”
But! The New York Times has tallied nine Trump-endorsed losers so far this cycle, six of which were in August alone. The biggest loser is clearly Pillow magnate and professional election denier Mike Lindell, who lost the Minnesota governor’s primary by a whopping eleven points despite Trump’s blessing. Trump’s been telling Republican voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” which sounds like an awareness that current messaging isn’t working anymore, from someone unfamiliar with recent polling.
This question of Trump’s intraparty political power comes at the worst possible moment. The Bulwark has audio of Rep. Stephanie Bice, a loyal Oklahoma Republican, privately telling students that voters keep coming to her with some version of “I don’t like this guy, so I’m voting Democratic,” and that her bigger fear is the ones who stay home. There it is. The whole system runs on Republicans believing the endorsement can make them or end them, and here is a sitting member quietly weighing whether the president’s name has become a drag.
That said, reports of the untimely death of Trump’s political power in his base are premature. His endorsement is still the most valuable thing a Republican can bring into a primary, but more to the point, the threat of ending up on the wrong end of one is a major reason why GOP officials continue to stay in line and vote for an unpopular war and tariffs their districts hate. This arrangement only works as long as everyone fears reprisal and his endorsement still wins. “Mixed results” undermines the enforcement part of the threat.
But Welker’s two words invited every Republican in Washington to run the same check Bice is afraid of. That is why she got the FCC threat, and Haberman got the insults.
In flush times, like 2016? This sort of novel approach was weirdly entertaining, and seemed a benign distraction that, in hindsight, was a sort of perverted luxury of good times we all lived with. A kayfabe presidency that constantly throws off clicky headlines and insults is really nothing more than an entertainment product. Plenty of Americans have enjoyed the show, and the vast majority of media outlets have played along because they found it so lucrative.
But that luxurious time of a strong economy and respected diplomatic standing has ended. American soldiers have died in the Iran War, and troops are still very much in harm’s way. We are just ending the most expensive August for gas prices on record. And the price of nearly everything has risen as a direct result of a war and tariff policy that were not just optional, but intentional.
Military commanders are telling Trump his war can’t continue as he wants. Reporters see the data and ask Republicans whether his power can continue as it has. Watch which issue gets Trump on the phone or leads to his next mean tweet.
When the costs of a presidency get this real, people ask the sort of questions that Republicans running for reelection this November are not happy to answer. And a president who spends his energy insulting reporters instead of doing the actual job? Well, it stops being entertaining, and bad governance also starts to resemble catastrophic politics. Or maybe it’s poetic karma.