Columnist recounts trying to hang up on Trump during 'very strange' phone call

Trump’s War Questions Were Not Quirky. They Were Executive Drift.A Strange Call, BrieflyEd Luce’s account is simple enough: at his editor’s request, he called Trump around the start of the Iran war, found the conversation strange, watched Trump repeat himself, and heard him float questions about whether to “take the oil” or Kharg Island. Luce’s read was that Trump was already looking for an offramp early in Operation Epic Fury. Mona Charen’s add-on was even more revealing in its own way: Trump allegedly asks random golfers for geopolitical advice like it is a casual handicap adjustment.The Only Power That MattersThe institutional power here was not Luce’s, and not the pundit circle gawking at the call afterward. It was Trump’s. He was the president. He held the authority to decide whether the United States escalated, extracted, threatened, or withdrew. That is the whole point the anecdote almost obscures: when a president is improvising war policy in conversations that sound like drift, the problem is not his odd personality. The problem is the concentration of military and geopolitical power in one unstable office.Confusion Is Doing Too Much WorkThe softest reading of the exchange is that Trump was confused. That may be true, but it is too generous and too tidy. Asking whether to “take the oil” or Kharg Island is not just random thought bubbling up. It suggests a commander-in-chief treating war aims, resource seizure, and territorial leverage as interchangeable options. That is not civic confusion. It is imperial reflex without discipline.The Misdirection: Personality as CoverThe reporting risks turning a serious governance failure into a story about eccentricity. “Strange,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “mindboggling” are atmospheric words. They describe the spectacle while draining the consequence. Trump’s erratic manner is not the main event. The main event is that a man with the power to order force appears to have no stable strategic framework and no institutional culture strong enough to correct him. The anecdote becomes entertainment precisely where it should become indictment.Who Enabled the OutcomeLuce’s story also points to the broader enablers around Trump. If a president can solicit war advice from journalists, golfers, and whoever happens to be nearby, that is not because he is uniquely spontaneous. It is because the political system around him has normalized access, informality, and deference in place of serious accountability. The media then helps launder the whole thing by presenting presidential improvisation as colorful trivia rather than a structural failure.The Pattern Beneath the AnecdoteThis is the recurring logic of modern power: serious harm is narrated as personality theater, and political responsibility is diluted into “strange behavior.” That framing protects the institution, the party, and the surrounding professional class. It leaves the presidency intact while reducing its actions to a story about a difficult man on the phone. The deeper truth is uglier and more useful: when power is this centralized, improvisation is not a quirk. It is a governing method, and everyone forced to explain it afterward is already part of the cover. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe