The Founding Fathers may have modelled America on Ancient Rome, but they would have found the ersatz gladiatorial spectacle Donald Trump mounted at the White House to mark his birthday a grotesque perversion of their dreams. An ‘ultimate fighting contest’, staged to pay homage to Trump’s rule (though dressed up as part of the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations) was exactly the cult of one man the Founding Fathers most dreaded.
The President is not an emperor unconstrained, however. A shellacking in November’s midterm elections will show how hemmed in he is. And nowhere is his weakness more apparent than in his so-called ‘peace agreement’ with Iran. It is the latest in a series of humiliations visited on the Great Republic by this tawdry tinsel Caesar.
The President’s spin obscures his disastrous unwillingness to plan properly for conflict and see it through
The ‘memorandum of understanding’ between Washington and Tehran is not a permanent peace deal, rather the latest in a series of ceasefires. The US and Iran will have 60 days to discuss the latter’s nuclear programme. Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz; billions are to be released in sanctions relief. Trump claims that at the ‘appropriate time, when all is calm’, the US ‘will go in and get the nuclear dust’, but what leverage does he now have when he has crumpled before Tehran’s intransigence?
