MSNBC analyst Steve Benen pulled no punches Monday in a stinging op-ed that dissected Donald Trump’s latest presidential frustrations, calling the MAGA leader “gobsmacked” by the realities of foreign policy.
“I’m surprised by the degree to which the president is surprised,” Benen, a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," wrote Monday. The MSNBC political contributor used his piece to criticize Trump after reports surfaced over the weekend that the president is struggling to make good on his campaign vows to bring a swift end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
“Trump apparently thought he’d assume power, use common sense, bark a few orders and, in a snap, problems would disappear,” Benen told readers. “He instead faced a brutal learning curve, as he racked up one humiliating failure after another.”
Trump’s second term promises surrounding the far-off wars prompted Benen to look at a now-infamous moment from Trump’s first term, when the president in 2017 said, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
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Eight years later, Trump appears to have made the same assumptions about global conflicts, leading him to make “wildly unrealistic promises, which he’s reportedly now frustrated by,” the analyst said.
“It was amusing, of course, because literally everyone who’s familiarized themselves with the governing details of health care policymaking is well aware of how incredibly complex and challenging the issue is,” he wrote Monday. “But Trump, upon arriving in the White House, was gobsmacked.”
Trump’s inability to end the wars as he repeatedly told voters he would led Benen to conclude that Trump, in his fifth year as president, “is still behind the presidential learning curve.”
He added: “Trump is almost certainly the slowest learner in the history of American presidential politics.”
