THE BLACK-AND-WHITE SITCOM THAT EXPLAINS TRUMP

I know I'm supposed to believe that Donald Trump has dementia, but this is Trump being clear-headed and sane -- or as clear-headed and sane as he's capable of being:

After four weeks of useless threats, bombings, and death, President Trump is placing a five-day pause on his war on Iran after failing to attain the “unconditional surrender” that he claimed he would earlier this month.

“I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST,” Trump wrote Monday morning on Truth Social.

Trump sees himself as a world-bestriding dictator, but he fears the financial markets, and this was a precision-timed effort to appease them.

The announcement came just two hours before U.S. stock markets opened, and Trump noted the pause in strikes will last the duration of the trading week. The decision caused previously skyrocketing oil prices to dip significantly.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more than 650 points as I type this, so it's working.

Trump threatened Iran and Iran made Trump blink, as The Bulwark's Andrew Egger notes:

... Iran appears not to have taken Trump’s threats to target their domestic power generation very seriously. Taken on their merits, these threats were astonishing: a 48-hour deadline for Iran to surrender its primary point of geopolitical leverage, or suffer widespread strikes against civilian infrastructure. But while such strikes would have been catastrophic for Iran, they would have been terrible for America, too, sending the price of oil spiraling into the stratosphere for God knows how long....

How thin did Trump’s bluff turn out to be? The president didn’t even wait until his 48-hour deadline was expiring to call it off. He blinked with twelve hours to spare—ensuring that the entire threat period took place while markets were closed over the weekend....

All the madman posturing in the world can’t change this simple fact: Iran knows how badly Trump needs to get the oil-price situation under control. Again and again, Trump has signaled he will let other foreign-policy objectives fall by the wayside to address this major domestic concern.

To me, Trump's capitulation is a sign of sanity, or at least sanity Trump-style. I realize that his decision to create the crisis that this capitulation is intended to solve seems like evidence of delusional madness. It is -- but I don't think it's dementia madness.

Here's my view: Trump has a more or less healthy brain, but he can't stop trying to do things he can't pull off. He's essentially Ralph Kramden from the old sitcom The Honeymooners, except he's Ralph Kramden with obscene wealth, fame, and, now, the nuclear launch codes.

We always saw Ralph Kramden with his mind on fire, absolutely certain that his latest get-rich-quick scheme was foolproof. As president in his second term, Trump actually is getting rich corruptly -- but what makes the synapses in his brain fire excessively is the idea that he can transform America, the America, and the world, through cockamamie schemes that are either doomed to failure or likely to improve nothing. Tariffs! Regime change in Venezuela! Expelling every undocumented immigrant in America, starting with the most sympathetic ones! Fighting the war with Iran that every previous president understandably decided was too much trouble! All of these are guaranteed to make Trump not just the greatest president ever but the most consequential person in world history!

Ralph Kramden fell for American Dream sales pitches promising easy money. Trump falls for simple political ideas, often peddled on Fox News.

I hate it here.

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— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) March 23, 2026 at 8:43 AM

(Source: Ben Smith at Semafor.)

Even the Iran war, as I noted yesterday, was a crazy idea sold to Trump by Rupert Murdoch and Benjamin Netantyahu, who are both much less likely to suffer blowback from it than the United States.

Trump is a crazed believer in his own brilliance. If he hadn't been born wealthy, he would have been a serial failure who couldn't quit his day job. Instead, Ralph Kramden got to be the most powerful person in the world.