David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Trump is the man in the arena, as the fate of our democracy has so often revolved around this one man's performances. He may indeed fit the description of the man in the arena in the famous speech by President Teddy Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris, France on April 23, 1910:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
This is an incomplete comparison to Trump, as pieced from Roosevelt’s message. Roosevelt goes on to say the following:
A democratic republic such as ours—an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all-important.
And so it is the quality of the individual that must reign supreme. This man (meaning Trump) in the arena today is quite skillful at misleading himself as he first deceives himself so he can better deceive others. Today, as we watch Trump abandon both his friends and the Constitution of the United States, there are far too few who believe like Roosevelt that the individual citizen is supreme.
There are exceptions of course and former Vice President Mike Pence is one:
“Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” the former vice president said shortly after the indictment of Donald Trump.
Of course those who believe in Trump will say he is the embodiment of the man Roosevelt described; one who fights against his critics, one who gets up when knocked down, and one with incredible tenacity. Yet, we must also prepare to defend democracy from autocratic tendencies reframed as heroic antics as the politicization of our justice system by Trump and his co-conspirators has just begun.
As we watch the spectacle play out before us, a phrase coined by P.T. Barnum, showman, businessman and politician of the early 1800’s comes to mind; “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Barnum, of course, was referring to the performances of his con-men at carnivals and circuses of the time. Call Trump what you may: con artist, snake oil salesman, huckster, or charlatan, he is a master of the game. The successful con artist plays by certain rules; of course, they are his own, not those of civil society. To succeed the con artist must exaggerate, change the subject, and convince the buyer of his great success. In this case the American voter is the buyer, oftentimes conned to praise the con artist for solutions to problems he himself authored.
The con artist relies on the worst instincts in his audiences to make the sale; emotions of fear, being better than other people, envy, and greed. To be successful he must bring out the worst in his customer (i.e. the voter), vanishing from responsibility once the trap of the con is laid and set. But this is not to diminish the con man's ability; he pulls complicated and delicate strings, establishing himself as the man in the arena with unique responsibility. We are already witnessing the accusations and innuendos, the misinformation and vilification of those within the Justice Department.
Will we find the courage as a nation to have our voices heard to protect and defend our democratic republic for future generations? Will we understand that, whether we are Democrats, Republicans or Independents, what we have in common is stronger than what separates us. Will we have the wisdom and confidence to overcome our current circumstances? Will our nation be an example of the profiles in courage expressed by President John F. Kennedy over 50 years ago:
“In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience – the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men – each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.”
The survival of our democratic republic will require each of us individually to have the courage to take action outside of our normal comfort zone. If we each do so, our individual courage will inspire others to do the same and be the galvanizing force to change what is possible.
Will we have that courage?
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.