Derek Thompson

How long are we going to do this before Trump just says, look, we won.

The war's over.

I'm declaring the war over.

We did what we wanted to do, which is to assassinate the leader of Iran.

Iran, it's up to you to pick up the pieces.

Rise up, Iranian people, if you want to rise up.

I'm going to go back to talking about various domestic issues and sicking ice on various innocent U.S.

populations.

Like, at what point do you think...

It just becomes utterly necessary to turn the page because this is someone who looks at the stock market and looks at oil markets and looks at polling in a lot of cases and seems at least somewhat...

if not controlled by those metrics, then at least sensitive to them.

I don't see those metrics sort of blinking green for several weeks in a way that's going to make him want to keep this up.

Yeah, I'm working on a piece about this.

So this is actually a really great opportunity, Sam, to sort of structure the argument.

I have for a while been really interested in this mode of the administration where they continually seem to be executing the same playbook over and over again in the realm of domestic politics, trade, and international politics.

And that is, they seem to consistently do the following.

They declare an emergency.

They revive some dormant or esoteric code that gives the executive branch extraordinary power to essentially do whatever it wants to do, and then they duke it out in the courts.

I mean, this is what they were doing in terms of finding, I think it was called Statute 10, that allowed the National Guard to be deployed in California to put down protests.

Statute 10, it was an incredibly random code just hiding somewhere in the legal system