Jamelle Bouie

I don't think Trump should be shocked at all.

No, you shouldn't be surprised that when you bully people and then you come to them hat in hand for help, they say, no, thanks, not going to do it.

And this is the other part of it, right?

That it's a testament to how little this war was planned out and how little forethought there seems to have been that the same administration that

which has taken a hammer to America's clean energy development, to its renewable energy development, that is actively hostile to it.

In fact, our wonderful newspaper published a story this week about how the administration wants to spend up to a billion dollars to keep a wind energy company from producing, from building new wind energy infrastructure, and instead wants to divert that to fossil fuel production.

So you have this administration that is ideologically anti-renewable energy.

And then it's like, oh, also, I'm going to start a war with the one country that could unilaterally cause a energy crisis through the denial of fossil fuels.

Brilliant work.

Genius stuff.

I'm skeptical.

I mean, it's clear to me that the president has a view of American power that's very childish, that's very sort of, we have lots of weapons, we have lots of things that can blow things up, and that's all we really need.

He seems to have also this view that American influence, both American influence and American military and other forms of power, economic power, are inexhaustible resources that you can just call on again and again and again to do what you want.

And that isn't true.

That is very much not the case.

But there's no indication that anyone in the White House or at least anyone the president will listen to, I'll say that, is capable of explaining to Trump.

getting him to understand that they may have already reached up against the limits of what the country can simply do, given the situation, given our deteriorating relationships with our allies, given everything.

It's always been so striking to me that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has these press conferences where he doesn't at all

talk in strategic terms about the conflict.

It's all kind of, we're going to rain down death upon the enemy, and then why can't you clap harder, clap louder?