"I Have Everything"

On Memorial Day, Donald Trump restructured the Middle East before breakfast, napped through Arlington, pivoted to the World Cup, and broke a ceasefire. God did that.

Good morning! Donald Trump began Memorial Day the way he begins most days, on Truth Social, before the republic was fully awake.

It should be noted that the day had opened with a “Happy Memorial Day” post, the greeting of someone who knows there’s a holiday but not what the holiday is. You say Happy Fourth of July. You do not say Happy Memorial Day for the same reason you do not say Happy Good Friday. The day is for mourning. Veterans’ groups have been making this point for years. The president has been in public life for decades and has not yet received the memo.

By 8:30am ET, he had already restructured the Middle East. In a single sprawling post, Trump announced that Iran’s enriched uranium (“Nuclear Dust!”) would be immediately surrendered or destroyed, mandated that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan sign the Abraham Accords, and extended Iran an invitation to join as a bonus. The post was signed “President DJT. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

The matter in question being, to be clear, the architecture of Middle Eastern security for the next generation. What Trump did not mention in his 8:30am reorganization of regional geopolitics was that he had floated the Abraham Accords demand to the actual leaders of those countries on a call the previous day, and had been met with a silence so prolonged and so total that he reportedly asked whether everyone was still on the line. They were. A former U.S. ambassador to Israel, asked for his assessment, said the proposal was as realistic as a moon made of green cheese, the diplomatic equivalent of a one-star review.

Iran’s foreign ministry, for its part, said a deal was not imminent and that it was not discussing the details of its nuclear program, a polite way of saying that the “Nuclear Dust!” post did not reflect any agreement Iran had actually made, regardless of what a senior U.S. official had suggested to reporters the previous day.

None of this appeared to trouble the president, who then went to Arlington. At the National Memorial Day Observance at Arlington National Cemetery, Trump placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a somber tradition he performed with appropriate gravity, then sat down and fell asleep while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered remarks honoring the fallen. Hegseth was at that moment declaring that “the duty we owe these men is peace which only can be achieved through strength,” and that “because we strive for peace, we must prepare for war,” which is, as it happens, also the retroactive justification for striking Iranian missile sites and mine-laying boats in the Strait of Hormuz later that same evening. The commander-in-chief was, at that moment, neither eternal nor vigilant nor, strictly speaking, conscious.

He woke up in time for his own speech. The speech included genuinely moving tributes to Senior Master Sergeant Elroy Harworth, killed at 24 on a classified mission over Vietnam, leaving behind a pregnant wife who would raise their son alone; to Corporal Ryan McGee, an Army Ranger killed in Iraq at 21, now resting in Section 60 at Arlington among the honored dead of the war on terror; and to Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, one of the first women to work alongside Delta Force and Navy SEALs, killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in 2019, leaving behind two boys now aged nine and seven who were present at the ceremony. Trump called them “great, great warriors” and said of Shannon Kent that she “did it better than anyone.” These were good tributes, well-written, and the families deserved every word.

What the families perhaps did not anticipate was that the speech would then pivot to the World Cup. With the Gold Star families still in their seats, Trump announced that “in some ways I’m glad I missed that second term,” the second term now being the one in which, among other things, 13 Americans died in the war currently being negotiated in Doha, because it meant he would be present for the 250th anniversary, the World Cup, and the Olympics. “I have everything,” he said. “Amazing the way things work out. God did that.” God, apparently, had personally engineered the January 6th aftermath, two criminal indictments, a conviction, and a Supreme Court immunity ruling specifically so that Donald Trump would be in office for the FIFA World Cup. The fallen were not mentioned in this portion of the remarks.

Back in the actual world: Iranian negotiators had arrived in Doha that same morning to discuss extending the ceasefire by 60 days and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has blockaded since the United States and Israel attacked in late February, a blockade that has driven oil prices roughly 30 percent higher and is eating into Trump’s poll numbers ahead of November midterms. The negotiations, by all accounts, were delicate. Progress had been made on some issues. Much remained unresolved, including the fate of Iran’s missiles, the status of $24 billion in frozen Iranian funds, and whether any deal would cover Lebanon, which Iran insists it must and Israel insists it won’t.

That evening, as the Gold Star families made their way home from Arlington, U.S. Central Command announced it had conducted strikes in southern Iran near Bandar Abbas, hitting missile launch sites and boats it said were attempting to lay mines. CENTCOM described the strikes as defensive. Iran’s foreign ministry described them as a gross violation of the ceasefire. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a U.S. MQ-9 drone and fired at a fighter jet. The supreme leader’s office posted that Gulf powers would no longer serve as a shield for American bases and that the U.S. would have no safe haven in the region. A tanker reported an external explosion 60 nautical miles off Muscat, discharging bunker fuel into the Arabian Sea. Brent crude, which had fallen 6.5 percent on Monday on hopes of a deal, climbed 3 percent overnight on the news that there might not be one.

This is what a peace process looks like when the goal is the appearance of peace rather than peace itself. The 8:30am Truth Social post and the Bandar Abbas strikes happened on the same day, by the same administration, with apparently no awareness that one might complicate the other. The president announced the terms of a deal Iran hadn’t agreed to, honored soldiers killed in the war that deal is meant to end, napped through their eulogy, and then had his military strike Iranian soil while Iranian negotiators were still in Doha.

The analysts quoted on the Abraham Accords demand expressed astonishment. Astonishment is the appropriate response. Saudi Arabia has made clear for years that it will not normalize with Israel without a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories. Qatar is hosting the negotiations. The idea that either country would, on Memorial Day, receive a Truth Social post “mandatorily requesting” their immediate signature and respond with anything other than silence was, to borrow the ambassador’s formulation, lunar cheese at best.

What Trump appears to have calculated, and it is perhaps the only coherent calculation in any of this, is that he needs a deal, or the convincing simulation of one, before November. The war has been expensive at the pump, and midterms are a known quantity. If the deal collapses, the Abraham Accords gambit gives him somewhere to point: the Gulf states showed bad intention. It was their fault. He tried. The silence on that Sunday call was already being quietly reframed as obstruction before the ceasefire finished breaking.

There is a word for conducting strikes on a country while simultaneously negotiating with that country through third-party mediators in a Gulf state while posting on social media about how nicely the talks are proceeding. The word is not diplomacy.

As of this morning, Iran has formally accused the United States of ceasefire violations and promised retaliation. Israel has killed 12 people overnight in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and warned the residents of Nabatieh to evacuate. The longest nation-scale internet shutdown ever recorded, Iran’s, now in its third month, was briefly ordered reopened by the Iranian president yesterday, then immediately suspended again by the judiciary, because even in the middle of a war and a peace negotiation Iran has time for an internal constitutional crisis. Brent crude is pushing toward $100. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

Trump is scheduled to visit Walter Reed National Military Medical Center today for his third checkup in thirteen months, a visit the White House announced two weeks ago as “routine annual dental and medical assessments,” which is an interesting use of the word annual for something happening for the third time in thirteen months. He turns 80 next month. Independent physicians have noted that presidents with daily access to White House doctors do not typically make repeated trips to Walter Reed unless something warrants it. The visit, as of last night, did not appear on his official public schedule.

The fallen got the transcript. The Middle East got a Truth Social thread. The ceasefire got the Bandar Abbas treatment, and the president, who began the day by announcing a deal that doesn’t exist and ended it by striking the country he’s negotiating with, will reportedly spend Tuesday morning at the hospital.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.