Laughingstock: Bluster and Gibberish Turn Us Into a Joke

Jeff Robbins on May 12, 2026

When the sorry history of the President Donald Trump Era is written, historians will note the irony that the television reality star elected twice to the presidency, assuring us that he would "make America great again," has turned the country into an international laughingstock. It was not readily imagined that on the eve of the 250th anniversary of American independence, a bamboozling strongman would make us the butt of jokes, but that's where we are.

It isn't that finally confronting the malignancy that is the Iranian regime isn't long overdue, or that Donald Trump is wrong that past presidents, Democratic and Republican alike, have shucked, jived and blathered about Iran for decades. Asked in June 2006 what the Democrats' plan for dealing with the Iranian threat was, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin replied, "I don't know. With any luck, Israel will do something about it and then we can all blame Israel."

But years of relentless falsehoods and obvious carnival barking have eviscerated not only Trump's credibility but that of the United States and "credulous" doesn't adequately describe anyone who accepts as true a word Trump utters. At the end of his first term, The Washington Post counted over 35,000 partial or outright falsehoods uttered by the president as of that point, but it apparently has stopped counting, in the same way that it is pointless to attempt to compute the number of individual sands on a seashore.

Since February, we've been treated to grandiose pronouncements that we'd "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, pronouncements that have been repeatedly disproven but are repeatedly repeated. The same claims have been made about Iran's ballistic missile capacity -- which American and Israeli intelligence both agree aren't true.

Trump keeps claiming that we have "won" the war, despite all evidence to the contrary. He also claims that the war wasn't ever actually a war. The Straits of Hormuz are supposed to be "open" when they are closed. There is supposedly a "ceasefire," except that the firing hasn't ceased. The Iranians are supposedly begging for a deal, except that they evince no interest in one. We're really going to "obliterate" Iran this time, indeed, within 48 hours if it doesn't agree to a deal. Okay, it's going to be 96 hours. Okay, it's going to be in two weeks. Okay, never mind, the war, which wasn't a war, is over and we've won it.

The effect of this transparent fraud, this incessant gibberish, is to make America look not great, but pathetic, unable to meet even minimal levels of credibility. It doesn't help that when it isn't the President of the United States looking ridiculous, it is a Secretary of Defense who presents as a nursery schooler about whose suitability for advancement to kindergarten there is room for doubt.

The president's gibberish problem is hardly confined to Iran. His ludicrous claim during the 2024 campaign that he knew how to end the war Russia had inflicted upon Ukraine was vintage Trump hogwash. Among other things, to the extent he had any idea about ending the war it was by selling Ukraine down the river. His attempt to bully Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into surrendering to Russia failed spectacularly -- and thank goodness for that. A Europe that understands that Trump would sell it down the same river has stepped forward to fund Ukraine's defense, a signal that the era of American credibility abroad is finished.

In fairness, it's not as though the Democratic Party provides confidence that it can restore America's stature. Let's put it this way: the prospect of President Ro Khanna, or Chris Murphy or Gavin Newsom, doesn't exactly trigger alarm bells in Tehran. Whether the mullahs are given to high-fiving is unknown, but if they are, the election of most of the likely Democratic candidates for president will make Tehran look like the Winner's Circle at the Kentucky Derby.

"Trust," wrote the late Secretary of State George Schultz about diplomacy, "is the coin of the realm." Our present government isn't merely untrustworthy. It is incapable of being believed. By returning Donald Trump to office, Americans have reaped what they sowed. It doesn't look like the sowing is close to over.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.