If there is any room left on President Trump’s bedside table for another book perhaps it should be Gulliver’s Travels, the 18th century satire on politics in which – at one stage – Gulliver becomes a giant in the land of the tiny Lilliputians, who manage to tie him down to the ground with ropes, holding him captive.
Trump has always felt himself to be like a man more sinned against than sinning.
But I wonder if the job isn’t beginning to exhaust him – because a man who feels like a giant with a licence to do as he pleases is now finding the breadth of his executive power somewhat restricted.
The President, who has ruled for much of his second term with the power of his marker pen, signing a blizzard of executive orders, is bumping up against the limitations of that power.
Here are a few examples.
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Yesterday four Republicans voted with the Democrats to prevent Trump from using Congress to prolong his war against Iran.
Doubtless, the four renegade Republicans were acting with an eye on the midterm elections and feared their own extinction at the polls.
Predictably, Trump blasted them today for their treachery.
And Trump always loves to have an enemy to bash. Democrats and rebellious Republicans are the comfort blanket of his rage.
In any case, America has spent far too much ammunition and money ($1bn-a-day during the fighting) on a war that was only supposed to last a few days and yield quick results.
Trump now appears to be as desperate for an off-ramp as a car running out of petrol on the motorway. And the Iranians know it.
A deal may be in the offing. The wheels of diplomacy have been churning behind the wall of social media noise, much of it generated by the poster-in-chief.
But no one can be sure and many say they have now stopped believing anything Trump says about war and peace.
There are divisions inside Tehran and Washington that complicate a deal. One of the ropes tying down Trump are the hardliners in his own loyalist camp.
Senator Lindsey Graham is holding Trump’s feet to the fire on not giving too much ground to the mullahs.
The likes of Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly, his erstwhile internet tribunes, have long abandoned their former champion and are now harvesting clickbait by railing against him and his broken promises about never starting a war of choice.
The other rope tying him down is the price of petrol, the Strait of Hormuz whose opening has proved anything but straightforward, and his plummeting approval ratings which are now lower than Biden’s at his lowest.
On the domestic front, federal judges have tied Trump down with injunctions against his big, beautiful ballroom – now lifted – his renaming of the Kennedy Center, and his reimagining of the Imperial Capital in the Reflector Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial that seems to reflect his gargantuan ego, in American-flag blue.
Then there’s the triumphal arch that will be so huge it will make the Arc de Triomphe in Paris look like a croquet hoop.
Trump has gone full marble, fool’s gold and fantasy. A judge has ordered the design to be modified. Fewer angles and lions please.
Will there be an injunction against hubris? The judiciary keeps nibbling away at Trump’s excesses. It is laborious work on the coalface of an endangered democracy. But it still seems to be working.
Trump has also been ordered to ditch the controversial $1.8bn ‘anti-weaponisation’ slush fund of taxpayer money, which critics say intended to fund political allies, following a backlash in Congress.
The fact that the President and the Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer, even had the chutzpah to suggest setting up the slush fund was remarkable.
It was too much even for the slavishly loyal Senate Majority leader John Thune, a man with the chiselled jaw of a tough marine and the political spine of a jellyfish, who also called on the White House to ditch the fund.
On another key issue Trump has had to rein in his bombast.
When he was inaugurated last January, he made a solemn declaration that he wouldn’t use regulation to tie down “the beautiful baby” that is AI as it tries to grow and make its first steps in the world.
Turns out that the baby has become a scary hoodlum in no time and the few designated adults left in the White House – Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and chief of staff Susie Wiles – are beginning to panic about the unfettered power of AI.
The trigger for this panic, I’m told by reliable sources, was the arrival of Anthropic’s Mythos, an AI programme that is fiendishly good at finding holes in even the most robust cyber defences.
Banks, government agencies, the Pentagon… everyone is thought to be in danger, according to the people who built this thing, and who alerted the White House and the wider world.
Anthropic is now running a ‘controlled rollout’ of Mythos, under a scheme called Project Glasswing, where it is being used to find vulnerabilities in software. Project Glasswing this week expanded that rollout from 50 organisations to around 200, it said.
In a statement last month, an Anthropic spokesperson said it would allow users of its Mythos cybersecurity model to share information about cyber threats with others who may be exposed to similar vulnerabilities.
Trump planned an emergency order to tie AI down with regulation. The AI community in Silicon Valley, the billionaire bros who held their nose for Trump because he didn’t hold them back on AI, yelled in despair and picked up the phone.
Trump delayed the announcement only to be chastised by Wiles and Bessent, according to the New York Times, to put a watered down form of regulation on the table.
The point is that Trump is having to learn being less Trump. He hates being constrained and he hates his best laid plans being frustrated, especially if they are born out of desperation.
Hence his salty outburst on the phone to Prime Minister Netanyahu, pictured below: “Everyone hates you now!”
Best buddy Bibi was frustrating any peace deal with Tehran – which the Israeli government sees as unfinished business – by continuing Israel’s war in Lebanon.
The master of the deal is tied down by the “losers” in Tehran, the “friends” in Israel, the vexed American public, the restive MAGA loyalists, the bond markets, the petrol traders and the undeniable power of geography in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Augustus Gloop of geopolitics has got indigestion.
I wonder if Trump is dreaming of spending more time on the golf course and less in the bunker at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The President looks and sounds tired.