Trump so 'detached from reality' he may not even know how wrecked he is: report

06 June

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he addresses House Republicans at their annual issues conference retreat, at the Kennedy Center. (REUTERS)

President Donald Trump genuinely appears in no hurry to end his self-created Iran war disaster, which is tearing down Republicans’ chances in the November midterms. And Zeteo reporter Harrison Mann believes that might be because the president is truly clueless about the pain he’s putting on grumbling voters.

It’s hard for many Americans not to feel the increased pain at the pump and the agony of steady inflation in grocery stores, but Mann said an isolated president surrounding himself with yes-men and good news artists might be totally unaware of just how wrong things have gone in Iran.

“I’m always reluctant to attribute crises to the personal shortcomings of Trump because doing so can obscure the structural, often bipartisan failures behind his policies. … But at this point, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that Trump’s lack of urgency to sign a deal with Tehran is in part because he’s been very slow to understand the actual situation on the ground,” reports Mann.

Trump went into this battle expecting an easy victory similar to the regime swap in Venezuela. Mann says you can tell because weeks later, Trump and his minions were still looking for an Iranian second-in-command to hand over the country’s reins to — as if that were a possibility.

“Trump’s trusted advisers – both in the Situation Room and on Fox News – rarely if ever deliver bad news about the war, whether out of ideological desire to see the president ‘finish the job,’ or because they’re afraid he’ll shoot the messenger,” said Mann. “Tucker Carlson’s accusation that Trump’s staff presents him with fake polling on the popularity of the war isn’t hard to believe, given reports that Trump’s Iran intel briefs don’t just minimize bad news; sometimes, they’re just videos of stuff blowing up.”

Of course, the rest of the world outside the president’s ignorant bubble knows Iranian leaders still have the drones, missiles, and underground bunkers necessary to drag the U.S. into a full-on Vietnam-style quagmire. U.S. intelligence agencies keep leaking these more honest assessments directly to the public — probably in hopes that the info will eventually “reach Trump’s ears,” said Mann.

“I’m not sure those facts are getting through; likewise, I’d be surprised if Trump has absorbed that the U.S. economy is inching toward a recession because of Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” said Mann.

And it’s not like the people running U.S markets are helping, being similarly “detached from reality,” said Mann.

“Traders … maintain an almost childlike faith that Trump would end the war quickly, despite mounting evidence to the contrary,” said Mann. “Oil futures have, to the point of parody, plummeted after every Trump Truth social post or Axios article hinting at an impending deal.”

With Trump snuggled in his impenetrable sphere of obliviousness, Mann said Trump apparently views today’s “pseudo-ceasefire double-blockade impasse as a satisfactory solution to a problem he’d rather forget, instead of a ticking time bomb.”

“Unfortunately, it may take a new crisis within this crisis – an unmistakable recession or more U.S. troops killed in the Gulf – to change his mind,” said Mann.

Editor's note: An opinion marker was left off this article when originally published. It has been corrected.

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