Trump has one chance to save face: Resign now

I watched Donald Trump speaking on stage at the end of the G7 summit in France and seriously wondered whether he had suffered a stroke.

He spoke about long-lasting black granite floors at the White House, people born with machine guns in their hands, pallets of cash and the Space Force. He made a bad joke about the popularity of first names in Iran. He began a sentence on one subject and ended on another. He compared himself to both Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.

Hell, I wondered if I was having a stroke. None of it made sense.

But very little does these days. Maybe the president should just call it a day and resign. You win, pal. Go out on the faux high notes of this summit, the memo of understanding with Iran (whatever it may turn out to be) and the One Big Beautiful 80th Birthday Party at the White House. You’ve had a hell of a run.

But your reality show isn’t playing as well as it used to do. The more you keep on claiming that you’ve won, the more it looks like you lost.  The Iranians defied you and ended up getting more out of a deal to end a war — the one you started — than you did. Suddenly Fox News is challenging you. The Kennedy Center has literally erased you. In France, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood behind Trump looking like a kid going to the dentist, or a babysitter who doesn’t want the gig. Of course, there was also Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, standing nearby bouncing up and down like a puppy happy to be on stage with his master.

Yes, Trump still has power. He can persuade a Fox News reporter to tell us that an obviously green reflecting pool contaminated with algae is “American Blue.” Many people still adore him, for whatever reason. His endorsement still carries weight; when it comes to getting extremists nominated in the Republican Party, he holds the keys. There’s something else you can put on your resume, Mr. President. Give yourself another award if you want,  but after watching you over these past few days, there’s no getting over the fact that you need to sit down.

Maybe Trump, as some close to him secretly hope, really is considering hanging up his spurs. I doubt it. But who could blame him? There’s nothing left that he has touched which hasn’t metaphorically or physically been destroyed. The East Wing is a festering crater. So is the Constitution. Congress is under his full control. So is the Supreme Court. What’s left to conquer?

Thing is, Trump can’t help himself. Even if he were cogent enough to consider such a thought, he will never go gentle into that good night. He never goes anywhere gently. He is the single most politically, socially, morally, spiritually and physically constipated man of power in the history of our country.

He started the war with Iran for the simple reason that he wanted to. Everything else is a ruse. He’s trying to end it now because he’s tired of hearing about rising gas prices and inflation. That’s as deep as it gets. Everyone needs to stop overanalyzing his actions. Look at him.

To watch Trump now is to see a repeat of Joe Biden’s last days, but with none of Biden’s enduring professionalism. Compound the decrepitude and mental decay with impulse control issues and you can see why this country needs younger, more vibrant and more intelligent leadership. I know we can fill the bill on the first two. But that third category is cause for concern.

That’s not to say that Trump can’t still put on a show. I watched his UFC birthday gift to himself with awe and wonder. I was in awe of the fact that in 40 years of reporting on the White House I never once, in my wildest and most macabre hallucinations, dreamed up anything like that event. And it was during that event that I first wondered whether he or both of us or everyone present had suffered a stroke.

It was a spectacle, and a slightly bloody one at that. Apparently there were no life-threatening injuries. It fell somewhere between a fan taking a fastball to the cheek and your average hockey brawl. I know some people were upset with the “unbridled violence” at the president’s White House birthday party, but it’s not unprecedented. The 26th president, Teddy Roosevelt, regularly invited professional boxers, military aides and guests to the executive mansion to spar, at least until he suffered a detached retina.

I have nothing against the UFC. I played tackle football. I boxed in the Louisville Police Athletic league when I was nine. I was a goalie in an adult soccer league until my mid 40s, when a small, and fast forward buried his right foot in my ribs, breaking three of them and displacing two. Hey, he didn’t score.

The UFC is as much a part of America as Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Buddy Holly, hip-hop, the Texas two-step, the films of John Waters, rock n’ roll, baseball, apple pie, Sid Caesar’s comedy and the works of Eugene O’Neill.

I am sure that many years from now, some grandparents will proudly tell their grandchildren about “that time” they visited the White House and why.

But it wasn’t about that to Trump. “For myself and money” is his motto. He should have that emblazoned on the T-shirts he sells to his fans. So what if he fell asleep during the White House cage match? He reveled in debasing the environment and watching blood flow. For his 80th birthday he lived out his fantasy of being a Caesar. Bread and circuses, man. I’m surprised Rubio didn’t trot out after the cameras caught Trump napping and testify that he’s never once seen him asleep. They could bring out Dana White or Joe Rogan to declare that Trump is an alpha male who works harder than anyone else has  been capable of working in the history of mankind.

In the afterglow of the UFC cage fights and his latest proclamation that the war in Iran is over, Trump took his birthday act to France. But the other G7 leaders now look at him like the bastard stepchild who lives in a crumbling double-wide somewhere outside  Salt Lake City.

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He’s the Rodney Dangerfield of world leaders. He can’t get no respect — although he loves to claim that world leaders fawn over him because he has the biggest and best everything. I’m not claiming that he’s overcompensating, but, yeah, he is. “Nobody can make a deal like I can,” is his standard public greeting. I wonder if he understands how much the world smirks at him.

“Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last Sunday.  In another post, he said the Iran deal “will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region.”

According to the BBC, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, confirmed the end of military operations in a phone call on Iranian state TV, which portrayed the framework deal as a “victory for Iran.” The U.S. and Israel, Iranian leaders said,  had “no option but to accept defeat and surrender.”

Trump would never openly do that. He’ll just declare victory and steer his plague of locusts to consume something else. Lately he’s targeted Barack Obama for making an earlier deal with Iran, the one where they agreed to stop enriching uranium and accept international inspections. That took 20 months of diplomacy but didn’t cost American lives, a depletion of munitions or countless billions of dollars.

Trump says he either personally witnessed or saw pictures of a Boeing 757 loaded with $1.7 billion in cash which Obama “gave” Iran as a bribe. In fact, Obama’s deal unfroze $50 billion in Iranian assets and nothing was ever loaded onto an airplane. Trump’s deal gives Iran access to six times the amount of money that Obama made available — and he’s selling that deal by claiming that Americans won’t pay a dime. So what?  This is the same nation that Trump and others claimed just weeks ago was sponsoring the world’s worst terrorists. How will Hezbollah benefit from this deal? I’m sure the people of Lebanon are concerned, no matter what assurances Trump gave this week. He called for letting Iran back into the pantheon of “good guys,” provided “they behave themselves.” He hasn’t offered that to Democrats in his own country.

A rolling stone gathers no moss, and for many years that described Trump. But everything is sticking to him now. How long will it take before either he or Iran back out of their sketchy deal? Trump has a strong incentive to make it work because he needs the Strait of Hormuz to stay open. But there are no guarantees that he’ll act rationally. The way the current agreement is worded, either side can walk away easily. Mostly it amounts to a ceasefire, with all the details punted to a 60-day period that will supposedly produce “the final deal.”

Trump finds the Iran problem boring, as he has said several times. His limited attention span now pulls him elsewhere. He wants to turn the Fourth of July into a Trump rally, which is one of the funniest ideas I’ve heard lately. That won’t be half as entertaining as a few more cage matches at the White House.

Maybe once a week the White House press should be able to declare a “Cage Challenge.” Reporters get to take on whoever speaks to us on behalf of the administration in public. So the next time Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio or anyone else starts lying, we shout “Cage Match” and call out the actual facts. The White House official dons a singlet and head into the cage. Reporters get to vote on which pool member will join the fray and we stage the match. Rogan or White can referee. Whoever wins gets to determine the facts.

If we  advertise that right and stream it in primetime, we might be able to settle the national debt.

Then again, maybe I really did have a stroke and I’ve imagined all this. Maybe the White House is full of people who actually do know the difference between green and blue, know what a “ceasefire” actually means and treat other humans with diplomatic courtesy.

However you slice it, Trump II is not a sequel equal to the rampant horrors of Trump I.

This week, the guy came off as  a befuddled great-grandpa, an international embarrassment who got lost in France, cut a horrible deal to end the war with Iran and spent his 80th birthday sleeping through cage fights at the White House.

Sit down, Donald. There are 947 days left in your administration, but your 15 minutes are up.