In October, in a speech in Derry, N.H., he informed his audience that Viktor Orban, the strongman who rules Hungary, is “the leader of Turkey.”

In November, in a speech in Claremont, N.H., he advised the crowd that the current leader of the United States is “President Obama.” (He later claimed this mistake, which he made on several other occasions, was actually him being “sarcastic” — get it?)

Then, on Friday night, at a rally in Concord, N.H., Trump confused his Republican primary opponent, Nikki Haley, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He claimed that Haley was “in charge of security” during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that she refused all of his offers of help, and that she destroyed the evidence.

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I went to Trump’s rally on Saturday night in Manchester, where he didn’t address the Haley-Pelosi mix-up but assured his supporters that he “took a cognitive test” and “I aced it.” He has previously boasted of his ability to identify an image of a “whale” on said assessment, but, as The Post’s Ashley Parker and Dan Diamond pointed out, there is no such marine mammal on any version of the test. (Maybe he was being “sarcastic” about the whale, too.)

But I listened carefully to Trump that night — no easy feat because he went on for 100 minutes — and noticed that, even though his text was fed to him through a teleprompter, he told many of the same stories over and over again, repeating some lines almost word for word in the same speech, with no apparent awareness that he had done so.

For many Americans, hearing that the United States had engaged in a military action like Friday morning’s joint strikes with the British against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels must trigger a degree of anxiety, call it “Post Forever Wars Stress Disorder (PFWSD).” Some part of our brains says, “We have seen this movie before and it does not end well. Sometimes, it seems like it does not end at all.”

But, not all military actions are the same. The late night raids undertaken by the U.S. and the U.K. (with the support of Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands) against the Houthis that had been terrorizing international shipping in the Red Sea, were actually the kind of step that is more likely to limit the risk of further engagement by the U.S. military in the Middle East.


In fact, despite the early reaction of many on social media, the steps taken by the U.S.—in conjunction with our allies, as parallel to a much broader effort to limit the risks associated with the Houthi attacks, following extended diplomacy and work in the United Nations—were dramatically different to the hubristic unilateralism of the U.S. military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.


In the wake of those wars, there was a natural instinct among many to be extremely reluctant to ever use U.S. force anywhere and, in particular, in the Middle East. This is a healthy reaction, no doubt. Conflict should always be the last resort. But it also led to circumstances during the Obama years in which the U.S. was too slow to react effectively (see standing up to Assad in Syria or to Putin in Ukraine). Sometimes, limited uses of force in conjunction with active diplomacy, are necessary to keeping the peace.