The President gives Iran 48 hours, then plays golf.

Hon. Sunday morning. Truth Social. The President of the United States, on his social media platform, on the fifteenth day of the war, posts a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Iran. The post says, quote, Iran has only 48 hours, or all hell will break loose.

The same morning, hon, in the pool photo from Sterling, Virginia, at the Trump National Golf Club, the President of the United States is on the third tee. In a white shirt. In Florida slacks. The pool photo, hon, is time-stamped about forty-five minutes after the post.

So. Hon. The President of the United States, on Sunday morning, on a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to a country he is bombing, hit the third tee. The third tee. Then the fourth. Then the fifth. The pool photographers, hon, counted eighteen. The eighteenth tee was at roughly five p.m. local time. The forty-eight-hour clock was, by then, down to forty-five hours and change.

I want you to picture, hon, the junior National Security Council staffer who was on duty on Sunday morning, watching the post go up on the cell phone in the Situation Room, and then watching the pool photo go up on the wire about the third tee. I want you to picture the email chain that junior staffer did not send to the NSC director. I want you to picture the tweet the NSC director did not write. I want you to picture the meeting in which the Pentagon and the State Department tried to figure out what to do with the forty-eight-hour clock now that the commander in chief was on the eighteenth fairway in Virginia.

The forty-eight hours, hon, expired on Tuesday morning. Nothing happened on Tuesday morning. The Strait of Hormuz was still closed on Tuesday morning. Iran did not surrender on Tuesday morning. All hell did not break loose on Tuesday morning. What did happen on Tuesday morning, hon, was another post. The next post moved the clock to seventy-two hours.

Seventy-two hours, hon, is another round of golf. Seventy-two hours is Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday afternoon, hon, on the Truth Social timeline, the President posted that the United States and Iran had very good and productive conversations and that he was postponing the strikes on Iranian power plants for five days.

The five days, hon, is not the forty-eight hours. The five days is also not the seventy-two hours. The five days is the new clock on the new ultimatum that did not match the old ultimatum that also did not match the previous ultimatum. You cannot move an ultimatum every forty-eight hours, hon. That is not what an ultimatum is. That is what a request is. And a request, hon, is not what was posted on Sunday.

E.J. Dionne wrote, in the New York Times, that from the very beginning of this war, we got a sense that there wasn’t a great deal of serious thought put into it by the president of the United States about how it might end, what our objectives were, what needed to be done to protect Americans who are in the Middle East, what might happen to oil in the Strait of Hormuz. Dionne, hon, said it more politely than I would have. The thing the President did not put serious thought into is the war. The thing the President did put serious thought into is Sunday morning at the third tee.

You ever notice how the people who say all hell will break loose are the people who go play eighteen?

Funny how that works.