{"id":235,"date":"2026-06-01T22:49:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T22:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=235"},"modified":"2026-06-01T22:49:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T22:49:15","slug":"why-did-donald-trump-get-so-suddenly-shy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=235","title":{"rendered":"Why Did Donald Trump Get So Suddenly Shy?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of The<\/i> Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more Photos: Farming in Ukraine\u2019s War Zone<\/a><\/p>\n

For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cIran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,\u201d the president posted this morning at 1:02. \u201cBut don\u2019t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively \u2018chirping,\u2019 at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement\u2014and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump\u2019s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump\u2019s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he\u2019s fretting about public criticism again.<\/p>\n

Members of Congress will always criticize a war that\u2019s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn\u2019t manifested in any kind of action\u2014Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved\u2014but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.<\/p>\n

Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. \u201cJust sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end – It always does!\u201d he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation\u2019s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result\u2014as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday\u2014is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn\u2019t close the center\u2014though, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it\u2019s not clear what is left to stay open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the Treasury for payouts to his political pals, to redress supposed \u201cweaponization\u201d of the federal government, may be going even worse. To make that happen (and to avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides hastily engineered a deal that sidelined government lawyers and took some advisers by surprise. Now it\u2019s facing blowback from Congress and doubts from inside the White House, and two judges on Friday issued rulings calling the fund into question. Axios<\/i> reported this afternoon that according to two senior administration officials, the White House intends to drop its plans for the fund entirely.<\/p>\n

Read more Atlantic Trivia: Peptides and Pediments<\/a><\/p>\n

That brings us back to Iran, where few indications forecast success. The White House teased and then pulled back deals several times in the past few weeks. Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday that he promised would result in a \u201cfinal determination\u201d on Iran, but it ended without a resolution and seems to have been totally overtaken by events. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that \u201cwe\u2019ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.\u201d They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn\u2019t get a good deal, he\u2019d \u201cfinish the job\u201d with military might.<\/p>\n

Trump can\u2019t get his talking points straight now. This afternoon, the president told CNBC\u2019s Eamon Javers that he didn\u2019t care whether talks were over, saying, \u201cI really don\u2019t care. I couldn\u2019t care less. If they\u2019re over, they\u2019re over. If they\u2019re not, you know, I think they took too much time.\u201d Not long after, he posted that \u201ctalks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s hostilities could be a sign of the larger conflict that Trump threatened, or just more evidence of how tenuous the supposed cease-fire in place is. Either way, the fact that so many big initiatives are heading in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn\u2019t want people paying too much attention\u2014and doesn\u2019t offer a lot of reasons for anyone to relax and take his assurances that everything will work out fine.<\/p>\n

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