Trump didn’t learn the biggest lesson from his first term

Earlier this week, JD Vance revealed that Donald Trump told the envoys tasked with negotiating a peace deal with Iran to “use the [memorandum of understanding] to refill the world’s oil economy, refill some stocks and then to see where the hand is,” by which he meant that the administration is buying time to get gas prices down before possibly starting the war again. 

I don’t think the vice president was supposed to say that out loud. As the leader of the American delegation, such a public admission probably wasn’t the best strategy. Then again, that’s how the Trump administration rolls, starting at the top. Vance was just emulating his boss. 

If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Eighteen months into his second term, the president has reverted to the unpredictable ways and methods of his first, revealing that reports during the 2024 campaign and after his return to presidency of a new, more disciplined Trump were false. As the wheels seem to be coming off the Trump train, the potential consequences couldn’t be more dire.

Verbal incontinence and erratic behavior defined Trump’s first term as president. Even as administration officials like John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, and Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, his first two defense secretaries, tried to contain the president’s worst impulses, they were often unsuccessful. Trump seemed congenitally undisciplined, unable to stop himself from articulating every thought that passed through his head, usually to brag, blame or threaten. The result was a presidency that was, in a word, unstable. 

It was obvious that Trump had no clue what he was doing, simply by observing what he said. He never stopped talking, and from the beginning gave away the fact that he had virtually no knowledge of history, government or anything, really, that one might expect a president to know something about. He would blurt out things like “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,” or casually observe how Andrew Jackson “was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’” Douglass, of course, lived in the 19th century and has long been revered as an American icon, and Jackson had been dead 16 years before the Civil War even started. Trump never seemed to know what he didn’t know — and worse, he didn’t care. 

The president’s ignorance of history led him to believe that the NATO alliance was “obsolete” and akin to a club membership in which the Europeans were failing to pay their dues on time. He behaved aggressively toward America’s traditional allies, insulting them to their faces over trivial matters simply because he didn’t understand the basic fundamentals of global relationships. Diplomacy, credibility and reliability were foreign concepts, and his rash actions — such as issuing a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries that was blocked by federal courts, firing FBI Director James Comey and later admitting in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that it was over the Russia investigation, and threatening to deploy the military during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests — sparked widespread outrage.  

By the time the 2020 presidential election came around, a majority of Americans were exhausted, and that feeling, coupled with the administration’s bungled handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, led to Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden.

When Trump ran again in 2024, he managed to keep much of that behavior in check. His campaign manager, Susie Wiles, ran a tight ship, and the press was filled with reports about the improved Trump, more disciplined than before, his worst impulses, if not tamed, then at least contained by the professionals surrounding him. 

This perception followed him into office. Trump seemed to return with a clearer agenda and a better grasp of the job. We were told that he and his staff now knew how to use all the levers of power to enact his radical conservative agenda, and his actions, at least at first, appeared to reflect this. The administration and congressional Republicans ran circles around the Democrats, who were still licking their wounds from Kamala Harris’ loss during a truncated campaign following Biden’s historic withdrawal from the race. Trump seemed to be listening to the people around him, many of whom, while intensely loyal, also wanted him to avoid the pitfalls of his first term.

The president signed an avalanche of executive orders, instituted a sweeping overhaul of the federal government and racked up legislative wins, including the One Big Beautiful Bill, which enacted significant tax cuts for the wealthy and draconian reductions in programs benefiting low-income Americans, including slashing $1 trillion from Medicaid and other federally funded healthcare programs.

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But whatever hopes people may have had that Trump had learned to be more circumspect, or that his White House was more disciplined, have been thoroughly dashed. As his approval ratings have hit historic lows due to multiple crises and his handling of the economy, he has returned to his old ways, and nowhere can this be seen more than in his behavior in waging war on Iran and his refusal to sign a bipartisan housing bill. 

With Iran, he has shown himself to be, at every turn, as headstrong and uncontrolled as ever, beginning with his initial decision to wage war in partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and his astonishment that the Islamic Republic had a few cards up his sleeve, particularly its ability to shut down the all-important Strait of Hormuz. Trump has gone back and forth throughout the conflict, threatening to annihilate the entire country and civilization in one breath, and then extolling the good character of its leaders in the next.

But in many ways, his recent decision to scrap the signing of a housing affordability bill, which was a rare bipartisan win in today’s Washington, was even more revealing. The president cancelled the planned signing ceremony at the last minute, explaining in a petulant Truth Social post that he wouldn’t sign the legislation until Congress passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would enact stringent voting restrictions — and potentially disenfranchise millions. (After House Speaker Mike Johnson sent the bill to the White House on Monday, Trump refused to say whether he would sign it, characterizing the legislation as “so unimportant” and a “yawn.”) 

The signing ceremony for the bipartisan legislation marked a missed opportunity for the president, who could have generated much-needed positive headlines. Instead it showed that his irrational methods and ego are causing him to step on his own feet — just like he did repeatedly during his first term.

But Trump’s old compulsion to behave erratically and shoot his mouth off is now combined with a megalomania that has him building monuments to himself and musing openly about being included in the pantheon of dictators like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Today he’s driven by a belief that he is omnipotent, and nothing he does will have any negative consequences. He has come to believe that whatever he says is the right thing, no matter what. If he gets blowback, he doubles down, more convinced than ever that his instincts are correct. He is impervious to criticism now because he literally believes he can do no wrong, and there are tens of millions of people who believe that too. 

Among those are members of the Supreme Court, who earlier this week ruled that Trump can deport hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians — despite dozens of examples of his own offensive, bigoted comments, which were cited by Justice Elena Kagan, that showed a racial animus that violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection — and every tenet of basic human decency. The Court’s conservative majority might as well have been wearing one of the red hats that say “Trump was right about everything.”

The legal win — as well as his loss in the birthright citizenship case — no doubt put more fuel in the president’s tank. As the midterms approach, and as he becomes increasingly cornered, we can expect his unpredictable behavior to only escalate.