Trump has been stumbling from one war in Iran to a war of words with the Pope – and last night he gave an indication of which fight he’s going to pick next
If there’s one person in Donald Trump administration who probably deserves a bit of sympathy, it’s Susie Wiles.
As the first female White House chief of staff, she’s theoretically at least in charge of keeping the President relatively on task, on message and on the straight and narrow. In November, she led a push for Trump to stick to talking up his economic achievements in every available public moment from then to this November’s midterm elections.
Since then her project has been foiled first by Jeffrey Epstein, then by Venezuela, then Epstein again. And just when he’d been booked to do a few speeches – or ’roundtables’ in smaller hotel conference rooms, presumably because filling arenas is not something he can do these days – he decided it was time to wage a holy war in Iran. After all of this, you’d think she’d have seen it all. But even Wiles didn’t expect him to pick a fight with the Pope in the middle of the night.
We learned this week that Wiles, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, has a giant screen in her office devoted to monitoring Trump’s Truth Social feed. Trump’s tendency to sit up in bed late into the night, hammering out posts and reposts on his own social network has become more frequent and more erratic. Even so, it’s rare for Trump to back off – and reportedly just one person who can convince him to do so. So on Tuesday, reportedly following an intervention by the Chief herself, Trump deleted a Truth Social post for only the second time since returning to office. The first was an AI slop video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. This week, it was an AI slop picture depicting Trump as Jesus Christ.
Or maybe a doctor, as Trump claimed the following day during a photo op with a food delivery driver that even the President admitted was “tacky” and “embarrassing”. He claimed he’d thought the image showed him as a doctor, healing people with his [checks notes] glowing magical hand orbs, under the watching eye of a weird army demon with four arms and spikes coming out of his head. A theory emerged during the week that he’d been told to say the image had been doctored, and misunderstood. It’s unclear if that’s true, but it’s quite funny either way.
The genesis of Trump’s beef with the pontiff can actually be traced back to his seething frat boy of a Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, who insisted in going in front of cameras and using biblical metaphors to suggest the bombing of Iran was being done for some kind of divine purpose. To which the Pope chimed in, suggesting that perhaps choosing to drop bombs on a country half way around the world who posed no immediate threat to you was not a terribly Christian thing to do. It snowballed from there, and within a couple of days the President was branding Pope Leo “weak on crime”. In fairness, the crime rate in Vatican City is astronomical, but that’s mostly because almost nobody actually lives there.
Anyway, Trump’s row with God’s representative on Earth was interrupted on Friday, when the seemingly hopeless peace talks in Pakistan produced some positive movement. Iran announced that for the duration of the ceasefire in Lebanon, they wouldn’t be blowing up ships trying to get through the State of Hormuz. But obviously it wasn’t that simple. At the time of writing the Strait remains blockaded by the US, until Trump gets Iran’s promise to capitulate to his maximalist demands.
Trump, of course, is very upset that people have been slow to give him credit for the apparent progress towards something resembling peace. Like a burglar leaving a card for a locksmith on the doormat as he’s carrying your telly to his van, and demanding you thank him for the nice new locks you had fitted. You may think that if it turns out this is his off-ramp from his folly in Iran, that he’ll head home and keep his head down. Maybe do a few more of those roundtables to talk about tax and the economy.
But no, in a speech he gave in Arizona last night, he gave his firmest indication yet that his next little adventure is going to be invading Cuba. So we’ve all got that to look forward to.