The President posts in all caps that there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.

Hon. Friday afternoon. Truth Social. The President of the United States, in all capitals, posts the following sentence. There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.

That is the post. That is the whole post. No comma. No qualifier. No mention, hon, of which Iran, or what surrender, or to whom, or of what. Just the line. In the capitals. On a Friday. In the first week of a war.

The same morning, at the Pentagon press briefing, the Defense Secretary, in the same shirt he wears every Tuesday, told reporters the war has only just begun.

The war, hon, has only just begun. The war, hon, demands unconditional surrender. You cannot, in any usage I have ever heard at the diner counter, demand unconditional surrender from a country whose war with you has just begun. That is not how unconditional surrender works. Unconditional surrender is the end of a war. It is the thing the loser signs on the deck of the battleship in Tokyo Bay in 1945. It is not, hon, the opening line.

The President, the same week, said the war is almost over. The President, the same week, said the war is going great. The President, the same week, said the war has only begun. The President, the same week, said unconditional surrender. Pick any two of those statements and they cannot both be true.

What is also on the public record this week is that the President’s intelligence chiefs are scheduled, the following week, to testify on Capitol Hill about the Annual Threat Assessment. The Annual Threat Assessment is the document the intelligence community produces that says what is the threat from Iran. The Annual Threat Assessment, on the desk of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not, in any of its leaked language, call for unconditional surrender. It called for containment and negotiation. It is the standard product of the intelligence community on this file for forty years.

The President, on Friday, in capitals, on his social media platform, overruled it.

What I want you to picture, hon, is the meeting that followed the post. In which the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council all sat down with their coffee and tried to figure out how to operationalize the post. You cannot, hon, operationalize a Truth Social post. The State Department issues cables. The cables are signed. The cables are transmitted through secure channels. The cables go to embassies. The cables, hon, do not read, in capitals, UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. That is not how a cable looks.

So somewhere, on Friday, an acting deputy assistant secretary of state sat down at a desk and tried to write the cable that converts the Truth Social post into an instruction. I would love to read that cable. I bet, hon, the cable is one paragraph long and says nothing.

You ever notice how the people who say they have the deal of the century are the people who keep demanding the unconditional surrender of the other side?

Funny how that works.