Political commentator Jonah Goldberg issued a rhetorical body-slam about President Donald Trump’s recent claim that there are “no limits” to his power.
Marc Caputo recently asked Trump, ” What have you learned about not just the exercise of power, but the limits on your power as a result of the conflict?”
“There are no limits. No, not — I haven’t learned that lesson yet. I know there are. But you know, there are no limits. We defeated them totally militarily,” Trump said about Iran, his agreement, and what he calls “an unconditional defeat.”
It comes at a time when Trump insulted Premier Giorgia Meloni, claiming Meloni “begged” him for a photo and he “felt sorry for her.” That mistake prompted Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani to abruptly cancel his planned trip to the U.S. Meloni also responded with a video, making it clear that his claim was not true but that “Italy and I do not beg.”
Goldberg returned to the Axios interview and merged the two stories together. While Trump was once able to bully his way into foreign policy and make demands of international leaders, the Iran War made it clear that those days are over. Meloni simply vocalized it publicly.
“Where he says, we totally defeated Iran militarily. There are no limits to my power to my power.’ The fact that he’s coming out of this week with this deal, saying that there are no limits to his power when he was forced to negotiate ending a blockade to open up the Strait of Hormuz, is preposterous,” Goldberg said. “And why was the Strait of Hormuz such a problem? They begged to get allies to come in and help with the mine-sweeping, because our European allies have better equipment for that kind of stuff.”
The reason that the Strait is closed is that Trump couldn’t get Europe to come to his aid.
“Why couldn’t they get them to do it? Because he threatened to take, militarily, take over Greenland, and made himself so unbelievably radioactive,” Goldberg continued. “The most brilliant thing Trump did — he was already unpopular in the middle and with the left in Europe. But the Greenland thing made the nationalists hate him, too.”
After that, it was implausible that any European allies would help at Trump’s demand.
“The idea that all these allies were going to jump and help him out in the Strait of Hormuz. It would be political suicide for any elected leader in Europe to act to save Trump’s bacon about anything,” Goldberg said.
“I think his approval rating in Denmark is like 4 percent, right? So like, those are limits to his power,” Goldberg explained. “We would be a much more powerful country if we had allies that were willing to get our back and help us out. Those are limits. What’s disturbing is he’s so delusional he can’t see the limits to his power, and that’s something that’s going to get him into more mistakes.”
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