Do Trump’s “humiliating loss to Iran” and his White House cage fight signal a nation in free fall? Or the moment America wakes up and fights back? Those are the questions The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol is asking.

“The coincidence yesterday of the announcement of an agreement on a deal and the cage match at the White House has led to much discussion of imperial decadence, and of our entering an age of bread and circuses,” writes Kristol in “Bread and Capitulation.” He says that the Roman Empire lasted 80 years after the advent of “bread and circuses,” but warns that “things seem to move faster these days. Our decline shows every likelihood of being far quicker and more thorough than Rome’s.”

Kristol points to The Atlantic‘s Tom Nichols, who analyzed the deal that is expected to end the Iran war.

“The United States has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary,” Nichols wrote. “It is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.”

Iran, says Kristol, “comes out a winner.” But that is less important than the “defeat” of America. He says that “Trump’s failure in Iran has confirmed and accelerated the broader retreat during his second term from our standing as the linchpin and guardian of an American-friendly international order.”

America was “the greatest world power” from 1941 to 2025. But now the nation is just one power “among many, even one bully among many, perhaps the preeminent one, but one without much credibility among either allies or enemies.”

Trump’s failed war, says Kristol, leaves the nation and the world “less feared and less respected,” and the world more dangerous.

But he asks, could “the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing?”

Could it provide the catalyst to stop and “reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence?”

He notes that the American people largely opposed Trump’s UFC cage fight at the White House. “Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?”

Pointing to the Knicks’ “remarkable comeback,” Kristol asks: Who’s to say America can’t have one too?

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Republican lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill are expressing frustration and anger over President Donald Trump’s timing of announcements that go on to undermine their legislative agenda. Some expressed that the president doesn’t consider Congress when he acts, while others suggested that his announcements were intentionally disruptive, MS NOW reports.

From his announcement of the highly controversial naming of Bill Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence, to what critics called his proposed $1.8 billion “slush fund” for January 6 rioters, to his 11th-hour endorsement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for the seat held by U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), Trump’s announcements have had a strong impact on Republicans’ efforts to pass legislation.

“The most common thought of most Republicans I’ve talked to is he doesn’t give a s—— about the legislative branch and he pays no attention to anything going on that we’re doing because all of the actions he has taken has done nothing but been unhelpful to us putting stuff on his desk or keeping a lot of our government agencies open,” one House Republican told MS NOW. “Everything is timed so perfectly that it’s like they sit around in the White House and think to themselves when is the worst possible time to do this — and then they do it.”

“I don’t think he’s dumb,” another GOP lawmaker told MS NOW. “I think he does a lot of this stuff on purpose, and I think he’s trying to undermine our institutions, and it’s setting some really bad precedents.”

“We all know the president talks to one group of people, and it’s his base,” the lawmaker also said. “He doesn’t care about anyone else. And when he talks to them, I think a lot of the actions he’s taken is to try to undermine both the legislative branch and the judicial branch and strengthen his position of executive branch and the importance of him sticking around.”

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) suggested that there was little thought behind Trump’s announcements and their effect on Congress.

“I don’t think he thinks about the impact on us, and the timing,” Murkowski told MS NOW. “I just don’t think he thinks about it.”

She also said she does not think the president is “connecting” what lawmakers do daily with his actions.

U.S. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) told MS NOW that “the president’s the president.”

“He can announce his initiatives whenever he wants,” he added, while acknowledging that the “terrible timing” of Trump’s announcements “obviously complicates” Republicans’ efforts.

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The Dispatch‘s national correspondent, Kevin D. Williamson, wants to ask Republicans a question.

He points to the $270 it takes to fill up the tank of a Ford Super Duty truck in his neighborhood — 48 gallons at $5.60 a gallon for diesel — and asks, “Do you feel smart?”

Citing a column by The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Williamson weighs the pros and cons of voters electing candidates to achieve results over voters choosing “paragons of moral rectitude.”

“There is something to be said for that approach,” writes Williamson. “One of the problems with our politics is that politicians—especially presidents—are treated as embodiments of the nation, the people, and our values, to such an extent that members of a party feel alienated and humiliated when the other party’s leader occupies the White House.”

He concludes that for partisans, “inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step.”

“There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism,” Williamson writes.

They will say they like Trump’s “policies,” which, Williamson charges, “mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy.”

But press the embarrassed Trump cultist further — like on the $270 tank fill-up — and they will “retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist.”

When Republicans insist Americans “think of the policies,” Williamson says he wonders “what those beneficial policies are.”

“The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation?”

Williamson says that they like the policies, “Except for the inflation, and the trade chaos, and the war, and the corruption, and the enshrinement of utter incompetence.”

He says that you “can two-step around reality any way you like, but the fact is that right now Republicans are offering both Ken Paxton and $5.60 diesel. And so I repeat the question to my Republican friends: ‘Do you feel smart?'”

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