The White House Is Lost in the ‘Weave’

The Trump administration has a coherence problem. This issue starts at the top with a fabulist president who is increasingly unfiltered and unfocused, offering up ping-ponging thoughts with little purpose or explanation. His approach to governing and to waging a war has itself become “the weave,” his term for the random asides that pepper his speeches. For much of his political life, Trump, 79, understood the importance of a simple and repetitive story, the need to keep the main thing the main thing. It is how he got elected and re-elected. There is now a distracted panic about him, his plot lost in the fog of war.

Over the last few days he has suggested, without proof, that a former president told him that they should have struck Iran during their time in office. He publicly revealed the private medical diagnosis of a Republican House member as Speaker Mike Johnson sat by, unable to stop him. He suggested that he could “take” Cuba and that he could do anything he wanted with the sovereign country. And he insisted that NATO help the US alleviate Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz before insisting the US would go it alone.