U.S. President Donald Trump in Dearborn, Michigan, January 13, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump is "painfully, obviously baffled," according to a scathing new takedown from the New York Times, as he runs headlong into his "true weakness": people who cannot be bought or threatened into compliance.
On Thursday, prominent conservative Trump critic David French published the piece, writing that the Iran war has revealed "a kind of person who truly flummoxes Trump, the person he just can’t understand — the true believer." His inability to handle collisions with these sorts of people, he explained, is one of the major reasons why he is flailing so badly as he attempts to bring the disastrous conflict to a swift conclusion.
"From pardons to prediction markets, the transactional nature of the Trump administration is perhaps its most obvious characteristic," French wrote. "And transactional people often soothe their own consciences with the belief that everyone else is ultimately transactional as well — the only question is their price. But that’s wrong. Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that."
In approaching Iran, Trump seemed to think he would get another Venezuela: a brief excursion where he easily topples an existing leader and is able to "more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now." In reality, however, the destruction of almost all of the country's existing leadership has left the remaining officials "more intransigent and less willing to negotiate," and "enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics."
In the face of such an element, fanatically devoted to a cause and unswayed by threats of violence or transactional offers, which, French argued, are the only dynamics that Trump truly understands.
"In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals," French continued. "Remember when he considered a 'joint venture' to control the Strait of Hormuz with Iran?"
He added: "One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past. Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled."
French also noted that this view of the world has been emboldened in Trump by the Republican Party getting in line with his agenda once it became clear that he could offer them power, money or both.
"At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price," French explained. "The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional... The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury."