Trump gives away the game as he becomes 'increasingly erratic': historian

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during the White House Faith Office Luncheon at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 14, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Since entering politics, President Donald Trump has become known for his unfiltered way of speaking, which has provided no shortage of memorably unusual statements. In the past year alone, he’s claimed that “affordability is a Democrat scam,” railed incoherently against Tylenol, and asserted that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was a student of his uncle at MIT — even though Kaczynski didn’t attend the school.

But according to renowned historian Heather Cox Richardson, “Trump’s behavior is increasingly erratic as he lashes out at those he perceives to be enemies.”

As evidence of this, Richardson lists a string of alarming statements and actions by Trump over just the past few days. She says that “the president is under enormous pressure,” and it is becoming evident that, in the absence of any genuine plan for addressing the numerous crises assailing his administration, his panic is showing.

Of the many problems Richardson lays out, perhaps none loom as large as Trump’s war on Iran, about which he has become increasingly frantic as its purported successes have been diminished and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has wrought chaos on the global economy. Now Trump is saying and doing whatever he can to wriggle out of the situation.

For example, a decade ago, Trump lambasted Barack Obama for giving Iran a sizable amount of money in exchange for nuclear and prisoner concessions, but now, in an attempt to slow rising gas prices, he’s lifted sanctions on Iranian oil that have been in place for 50 years, which will allow the country to raise some $14 billion. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said, “We’re literally putting money into the pockets of the very nations that we are fighting right now. We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”

At the same time, Trump has worked his way into a corner where extracting the U.S. from the war under favorable terms appears increasingly impossible. Monday he touted supposed negotiations with Iran, but Iran says such talks are entirely fictitious.

As former Defense Secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta said, “He tends to be naive about how things can happen. If he says it and keeps saying it, there’s always a hope that what he says will come true. But that’s what kids do. It’s not what presidents do.”

This is all happening as Trump becomes increasingly embroiled in a corruption scandal at the Department of Homeland Security, in which it is becoming apparent that not only did the president’s cronies improperly leverage their positions for financial gain, but that Trump himself seemed to have some awareness of it. In an attempt to distract from that, Richardson points out, he posted a rant about Democrats, saying that their refusal to move forward with disputed DHS funding has forced him to send ICE agents to airports “where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before ... with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”

The list goes on from there. Posting that he’s “glad” Robert Mueller died. Cracking a Pearl Harbor joke in front of the Japanese Prime Minister. Posting that “the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party,” shortly after a story came out about a Bureau of Prisons staff shredding “suspicious” amounts of documents in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

With the war in Iran, the implications of Trump’s floundering have become global. As he thrashes for a way out, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, as Phil Gordon, former White House coordinator for the Middle East, put it, the president’s increasingly “desperate” behavior comes from a “recognition of the situation Trump’s own actions have created and the lack of available alternatives for dealing with it.”

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