U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026. REUTERS Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump has earned a vicious new moniker: “commander in thief,” writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who chastised the president for his efforts to engage in a “brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies.” Those allies, he said, could include Trump’s supporters who were present at the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — whom Friedman labels “phony defenders of freedom’s frontier.”
Friedman also accused Trump of having “conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund.”
Having a president who “behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad,” he writes. “This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.”
Friedman argued those are just a few of several reasons why Trump has failed as commander in chief.
Trump has not even tried to get Democrats to support his war against Iran.
"Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united,” says Friedman. “Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home.” And he warns that “seeing America at war with itself” just encourages the enemy.
Friedman also expressed alarm at how Trump’s actions toward America’s allies have forced them to engage in deterrence — not just against Russia, but against America.
“Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark,” writes Friedman. “They have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.”
Friedman also pointed to the early days of Trump’s second term, when the president “forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real ‘Trump Doctrine’: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.”
