U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a press conference on the day of a NATO leaders' summit in Ankara, Turkey, July 8, 2026. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov
President Donald Trump is growing increasingly isolated, and it's making him more volatile, former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols wrote for The Atlantic this week. Those who remain in his orbit have been forced to compromise everything they believe.
In his column, Nichols said, "Trump’s detachment from reality is sometimes amusing and often alarming, but the price of his irrationality until now has been mostly economic and reputational (or, in the case of the Reflecting Pool, aesthetic, now that the cases against innocent Americans have been dropped). His belief in tariffs, for example, is a flatly irrational attachment to a tool that has been proven, over and over, to harm Americans. Likewise, his fixation on NATO has undermined decades of careful diplomacy and weakened the strongest alliance in history."
Chatting with a Thursday afternoon MS NOW panel, Nichols described Trump as being caught in some kind of denialism.
"I mean, we've humored him right into a war," Nichols said. "And, you know, this notion of Todd Blanche, somebody who's got to help protect the president from himself. I mean, a lot of this in the past has been explained away as: if only Trump really, you know, knew what everybody was up to."
In a previous commentary, Trump biographer Tim O'Brien called it almost like a "Soviet structure."
"You can even go back to it's the wise czar. You know, if only he knew what his crafty princes were up to. But that's not the case," said Nichols. "He is alone, cocooned in his own beliefs. There is nobody around him to tell him the truth, or even to, you know, suggest to him that maybe some of the things he wants to do are bad ideas, and that makes him incredibly dangerous."
After the commercial break, the panel moved on from speaking about Blanche and other Cabinet officials and the degree to which they've been forced to suck up their principles and even their MAGA ideology to commit to whatever policy Trump demands. Such was the case with Iran. Vice President JD Vance was dedicated to the "America First" belief that there should be no more foreign wars. It's a key reason he didn't support Trump's war with Iran. Now he's being forced to defend it.
"You know, there isn't anybody in Trump's orbit who hasn't had to mortgage their soul for pennies on the dollar at this point, no matter what they may have believed or said or once claimed to believe," Nichols continued. "They've had to put it all on the altar of Donald Trump's ego."
Speaking to Vance specifically, Nichols said that this is uniquely Trump. He rattled off previous Republican presidents like Bush and Reagan, and said that none of them would have made a huge mistake and then blamed it on their vice presidents.
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