Trump has a playbook when he's losing — and it isn't TACO

What does Trump do when facing a humiliating defeat? He closes everything down. If that doesn’t work, he dumps it entirely and criticizes the hell out of whoever’s then in charge. Call it the Trump dump.

He did this in the 2020 election — refusing to accept defeat and then trying to close it all down by instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol. When that didn’t work, he spent the next four years blaming Biden for everything.

When performers scheduled to appear at the Kennedy Center canceled in protest of Trump’s taking over the center and putting his name on it, Trump closed the center, with the lame excuse that he was “renovating” it.

Then, Friday, after a federal court ordered him to reopen the center and remove his name, he announced, “I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND,” followed by: “The Kennedy Center will soon be closed, probably never to open again” and “the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially.”

A similar Trump dump occurred over the weekend after artists pulled out of his 250th anniversary concert series on the mall when they discovered that the series was a promotional vehicle for Trump. In response, he said he was canceling the series and replacing it with a Trump rally.

Trump is pulling a nearly identical — and far more serious — Tump dump in Iran. In mid-April, rather than accept Iran’s humiliating blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, he pretended he was in charge and that he’d close the strait. So he ordered a naval blockade, which did nothing but maintain the status quo.

Last Friday, when Iran signaled it might be willing to reopen the strait on its own terms (by charging tolls), Trump once again acted as if he were in charge, announcing that he’d be making a “final determination” on a potential deal that “must see the strait reopened, and then Iran must work with the U.S. to have its highly enriched uranium DESTROYED.”

Now that Iran is reportedly breaking off talks with the Trump administration and seeking “complete closure” of the Strait of Hormuz because of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, we can expect an even larger Trump dump.

What might this one look like? One likelihood: Trump takes credit for brokering a shaky peace deal between Iran and Israel over Lebanon’s Hezbollah, while blaming critics inside the U.S. for imperiling his peace talks with Iran. He announces he’s ending the ceasefire — which ended over the weekend anyway, with the U.S. military striking Iranian radar and drone sites near the Strait of Hormuz — and that “he’s finished with negotiations!” He then claims he’s done. He’s destroyed Iran’s military and killed off its old regime and warns that if Iran doesn’t open the strait and give up its nuclear program, he’ll resume bombing. It’s up to them.

In effect, he leaves the problem of reopening the strait to other countries more dependent on oil shipped through it, such as China, and the problem of taming Iran’s nuclear ambitions to Israel. It’s the final Trump dump.

We’ll see.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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