The Daily Fuckup

The blowback to Trump’s Sunday threats was immediate and predictable: foreign officials treated the post as proof that Washington was willing to escalate first and ask questions later. Iran’s parliament speaker accused Trump of dragging the United States into a nightmare and said he was following outside commands, language designed to frame the U.S. president as impulsive and unfree. The point of that counterattack was not subtle. It was to portray Trump as the instigator, not the stabilizer, in a conflict that already has enormous regional stakes. That matters because diplomacy depends on credibility, and credibility gets shredded when threats sound more like a tantrum than a strategy.