David Driggers

I will litigate this. Diet Coke is just not the same drink. Coke Zero is regular Coke with no calories

Trump threatening to “take out the entire country in one night" and bombing Iran's power plants and bridges was actually one of his greatest plays of all time. I'm not exaggerating. But most people lost their minds over Trump's recent comments and post. And that's because they lack a negotiation filter to make sense of him. Trump has been aggressively scope-setting--establishing a ceiling so high and gruesome that everything below it would eventually look like a reasonable outcome. I would even argue that this ceasefire wouldn’t have seemed reasonable at all had we not have had Trump’s Easter post. Think about it. Imagine Trump never having threatened to blow Iran off the map, and the world spending 48 hours ruminating about it. A ceasefire would’ve seemed mediocre. Not anymore. It feels like Trump stopped WWIII. He put the image in everyone’s head that Iran was going to get sent back to the stone age. That didn’t happen, so a ceasefire and more negotiations seem like such a big win. And here’s another move that nobody is talking about. Each time Trump extended a deadline (and he extended four of them) he wasn’t just buying time. He was letting the architecture get bigger. Deadline one: US-Iran bilateral. Reopen the strait or face strikes. Deadline two: Pakistan enters the channel. The conversation is no longer two parties; it’s three. Deadline three: Pakistan hosts Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in Islamabad. Now it’s a regional table. Deadline four: the “Islamabad Accord” framework--a named document with regional backing and two phases. By the time tonight arrived, Trump hadn’t just been negotiating with Iran. He’d been building a coalition of every major regional stakeholder around a shared interest in the outcome. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have wanted Iran contained for decades. Egypt and Turkey wanted regional stability and a seat at the table. Pakistan wanted the credibility of brokering a historic deal. In tonight’s post, Trump did something extraordinary: he announced the ceasefire “on behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East.” He’s not brokering a US-Iran deal anymore. What he's doing is positioning himself as the representative of a regional coalition--Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan--all behind the framework that’s now being finalized. The permanent deal, when it comes, won’t be Trump versus Iran. It’ll be Iran versus a bloc that includes every major power in the region, with Trump holding the pen. Again, Trump went from a Strait of Hormuz negotiation to a Middle East security architecture. A week ago this didn’t seem possible. Even a few days ago it didn’t seem possible. And yet here we are. Trump kept the ceiling high enough that the deal had room to grow into something much larger than where it started. Trump is on an all-time run.

Trump threatening to “take out the entire country in one night" and bombing Iran's power plants and bridges was actually one of his greatest plays of all time. I'm not exaggerating. But most people lost their minds over Trump's recent comments and post. And that's because they lack a negotiation filter to make sense of him. Trump has been aggressively scope-setting--establishing a ceiling so high and gruesome that everything below it would eventually look like a reasonable outcome. I would even argue that this ceasefire wouldn’t have seemed reasonable at all had we not have had Trump’s Easter post. Think about it. Imagine Trump never having threatened to blow Iran off the map, and the world spending 48 hours ruminating about it. A ceasefire would’ve seemed mediocre. Not anymore. It feels like Trump stopped WWIII. He put the image in everyone’s head that Iran was going to get sent back to the stone age. That didn’t happen, so a ceasefire and more negotiations seem like such a big win. And here’s another move that nobody is talking about. Each time Trump extended a deadline (and he extended four of them) he wasn’t just buying time. He was letting the architecture get bigger. Deadline one: US-Iran bilateral. Reopen the strait or face strikes. Deadline two: Pakistan enters the channel. The conversation is no longer two parties; it’s three. Deadline three: Pakistan hosts Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in Islamabad. Now it’s a regional table. Deadline four: the “Islamabad Accord” framework--a named document with regional backing and two phases. By the time tonight arrived, Trump hadn’t just been negotiating with Iran. He’d been building a coalition of every major regional stakeholder around a shared interest in the outcome. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have wanted Iran contained for decades. Egypt and Turkey wanted regional stability and a seat at the table. Pakistan wanted the credibility of brokering a historic deal. In tonight’s post, Trump did something extraordinary: he announced the ceasefire “on behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East.” He’s not brokering a US-Iran deal anymore. What he's doing is positioning himself as the representative of a regional coalition--Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan--all behind the framework that’s now being finalized. The permanent deal, when it comes, won’t be Trump versus Iran. It’ll be Iran versus a bloc that includes every major power in the region, with Trump holding the pen. Again, Trump went from a Strait of Hormuz negotiation to a Middle East security architecture. A week ago this didn’t seem possible. Even a few days ago it didn’t seem possible. And yet here we are. Trump kept the ceiling high enough that the deal had room to grow into something much larger than where it started. Trump is on an all-time run.

Looking like an unambiguous military defeat for Trump and the US. I confess I didn’t expect Trump to accept it so easily, thought he would rehearse some ground stunt before giving up