Shorter America This Week: Things are not normal; Muskism; Good men
In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
Fri 29 May 2026 10.00 AEST
Photo: The White House/Flickr
Trump is stuck in a loop on Iran. This week is much the same as the one before, and the one before that. It’s clear that there hasn’t been any progress. Trump does this all the time: he suggests a deal is close, headlines dutifully reflect that, the market responds, and then – big surprise – it all turns out to mean nothing at all.
This week:
Except it’s not funny. In a Cabinet meeting this week, Trump mused again about the possibility of a peace deal with Iran. There isn’t one. As Jeet Heer writes in The Nation, “Trump is caught in a trap of his own making”.
As the President flails about, he keeps moving the goal posts. This week, it’s been about the Abraham Accords – an agreement struck during the first Trump administration that was supposed to “normalise” relations with Israel. Trump is now “mandatorily requesting” that all Arab nations sign up as part of a peace deal with Iran. According to this helpful summary on PBS, when Trump brought that up on a call with Arab leaders, it was met with “stunned silence”. Never deterred, in that same Cabinet meeting, Trump said “they owe that to us”. Sorry, what? He’s now not sure that the United States should make a deal at all if they don’t sign.
That might all just be a lame attempt to cover for the lack of progress on critical issues like Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuz – both of which remain in the same place they have for months now. Which is to say, stuck. Asked about control of the Strait and whether he would accept joint Omani-Iranian control, Trump said no: “we’ll watch over it but nobody’s gonna control it” (which just seems like code for US control). And then he chucked this in about longtime US ally Oman: they “will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow em up”. Cool.
As if we needed a reminder, this is how the Trump administration treats America’s allies. He literally threatens to blow them up if they don’t do exactly what he wants. And what he wants changes all the time. And is, you know, insane and cruel and whatever other adjectives you want to chuck in.
Not that that matters to the security establishment, which is frantically trying to make sense of Trump’s China policy (there’s the first mistake – Trump doesn’t do “policy”). After the President’s meeting with Xi last week, the United States has paused a huge weapons sale to Taiwan. On the PEP podcast, Chas Licciardello had some sober analysis of what that might mean, musing that Trump is going to “Ukraine” Taiwan. I think he’s probably right.
But I’m sure Australia is different! We’re special.
In that same Cabinet meeting, Trump said, “I don’t care about the midterms” and that the looming elections wouldn’t affect his strategy (lol) on Iran. Some of his Republican friends might care, though. This nice piece in Yahoo! sums up how Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party – symbolised this week by his successful ousting of Thomas Massie in Kentucky – could mean that the party only becomes less appealing to an American electorate that has well soured on Trump.
As we keep saying over and over again, though, this isn’t a normal election cycle.
Does Trump even need to care? I’ll leave you this week with another belter from Tressie McMillam Cotton, on how Trump’s refusal to care about the “MAHA Moms” in his loose political coalition might play out.
Advertisement
In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
If you only followed mainstream coverage of the Pre-COP Leaders' visit to Tuvalu, you could be forgiven for thinking the big issue was headwear.
