CBS News Names Outsider to Lead ‘60 Minutes’ as Part of Major Shake-Up

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“CBS News announced a major overhaul of “60 Minutes,” appointing Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker, as the new executive producer. This marks a significant shift as Bilton, who has no traditional broadcast news experience, replaces Tanya Simon, who led the show for over three decades. The shake-up also includes the firing of two on-air correspondents, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, and two producers, Draggan Mihailovich and Matthew Polevoy.

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Bari Weiss, CBS’s editor in chief, named Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker, as the show’s executive producer. The network also fired two on-air correspondents.

May 28, 2026

Nick Bilton is a filmmaker and former New York Times columnist.Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

In a bid to remake the country’s top-rated news program, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, on Thursday unveiled an overhaul of “60 Minutes,” replacing the show’s executive producer with a tech journalist and firing two of its on-air correspondents.

Ms. Weiss named Nick Bilton, a former New York Times technology columnist and a filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix, as her pick to lead the 58-year-old Sunday show. Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in traditional broadcast news, will replace Tanya Simon, who had been at the show for more than three decades.

CBS News also fired Cecilia Vega, the program’s first Latina correspondent, and Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly last year by Ms. Weiss, who requested more reporting. It aired in full at a later date. Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor of “60 Minutes,” was also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.

Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist with no prior experience in television, has made major changes at CBS since being appointed last year by the tech scion David Ellison. She has named Tony Dokoupil to helm “CBS Evening News,” hired new on-air contributors and personally booked some guests for interviews, a departure from the industry norm.

But the overhaul at “60 Minutes” is by far the largest gamble of Ms. Weiss’s tenure. The program remains appointment viewing for millions every Sunday night, and its viewership this season rose 9 percent from the year prior, according to Nielsen.

Ms. Weiss’s handling of “60 Minutes” has led to internal turmoil. Her decision to hold Ms. Alfonsi’s segment set off a firestorm, though it eventually ran with additional comments from the Trump administration. This week, Ms. Alfonsi told The Times that CBS was no longer separating editorial independence from corporate interests.

Mr. Bilton, 49, will start his position with a staff already anxious about how the long-held traditions of “60 Minutes” might change. In a joint interview with Ms. Weiss on Thursday, he said that his experience in documentary film and TV was in keeping with the founding ethos of the program, which he called “the most important news brand in American life.”

“Look at Don Hewitt and how he came up with the idea for this,” Mr. Bilton said, referring to the program’s creator. “He loved documentaries, but he did not have the patience to watch two-hour-long versions of them. So he came up with ‘60 Minutes,’ which was a series of short documentaries.”

Mr. Bilton said that the recent furor around “60 Minutes” was “just noise,” chalking it up to routine fallout spurred by disruption at a legacy business. He added that the “end result” of the change would be “quite frankly phenomenal.”

Ms. Weiss said that she was drawn to Mr. Bilton because of his career telling stories on multiple platforms, including in print, behind the camera and in nonfiction books. She said that his coverage of technology had given him experience on how to navigate industries like broadcast news that are undergoing profound disruption.

“He has been consistently prescient about the ways that the technological revolution that we’re living through is upending the way that we consume storytelling and information,” Ms. Weiss said. “He has been the one to see the tsunami before the wave hits the rest of us.”

Mr. Bilton, who will relocate to New York from Los Angeles, is an unconventional choice for the “60 Minutes” job: All his predecessors have come from traditional broadcast news.

“When you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes,” Mr. Bilton said. “I’m not saying that we’re going to change the show completely and drastically. I’m saying that there are all these approaches and ideas that we can do that I couldn’t be more excited to jump into. And I think you need that outside vision to be able to do that.”

He said it was too early to describe his plans for “60 Minutes” in detail, but added that he would place an emphasis on telling stories beyond the weekly show and experimenting with new voices from outside traditional broadcast news.

Mr. Bilton has had a varied career. After working as a designer at The Times, Mr. Bilton became a technology columnist for the newspaper in 2009, and left in 2016 to join Vanity Fair as a correspondent. Since then, he has worked in documentaries, writing and directing “Fake Famous,” an HBO film about aspiring social media influencers, and serving as a producer on “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” a film directed by Alex Gibney about the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Mr. Bilton is also set to publish a true-crime book about a Hawaiian crime syndicate with Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. (He also wrote the screenplay for its film adaptation, to be directed by Martin Scorsese.)

“60 Minutes” has been at the center of an ongoing drama about the future of CBS News.

President Trump sued CBS before the election in 2024 over an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris, who was running against him. The network’s owner, Paramount, eventually paid $16 million to settle the case, which many lawyers had deemed frivolous. Tensions within the network over how to respond to Mr. Trump also contributed to the resignation of a “60 Minutes” executive producer, Bill Owens, before Ms. Weiss joined.

For decades, “60 Minutes” has been something of an imperial institution within CBS News. Some of the show’s executive producers have had a direct line to the company’s chief executive, and its correspondents — who identify themselves by name at the top of the broadcast — operated out of offices separate from the rest of the network.

Ms. Vega, who joined the show in 2023, said in a statement on Thursday, “I very much fear what comes next for, and the future of, the legendary broadcast.” She said that in recent months, “reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.”

Ms. Simon, who had a year remaining on her contract at CBS, wrote in a farewell memo on Thursday that “60 Minutes” was “an institution built on independence, grit and rigorous search for the truth.”

Mr. Bilton, in the interview, said that he wanted “60 Minutes” to maintain its reputation for independence, while also collaborating with the rest of the news division.

“There’s incredible people at CBS News, and I think that it’s important for me to be able to tap into some of them at certain times, and vice versa,” Mr. Bilton said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s going to become one big organization. ‘60’ will still have its independence.”

Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.“

Trump Clears Way for Companies to Avoid Taxes in Havens Including Malta and Cyprus - The New York Times

Trump Clears Way for Corporate Tax Dodge Hidden in the Fine Print

"U.S. companies skirted at least $40 billion in taxes since the beginning of 2025 thanks to schemes in places like Malta, Bermuda and Cyprus.

May 29, 2026Updated 10:49 a.m. ET

A favorite destination for tax-dodging by U.S. companies was the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta.Susan Wright for The New York Times

A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.

A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.

Tax havens became more appealing after President Trump signed an order on his first day back in office withdrawing the United States from a 13-year international effort to end such schemes. The effort led to dozens of countries imposing a minimum corporate tax and rules for pursuing companies using tax havens. After House Republicans passed legislation last year targeting some of those countries with a new tax, international officials agreed to exempt U.S. companies from much of the crackdown.

American Express avoided paying $423 million in taxes last year using the island of Jersey. PayPal trimmed its taxes by nearly half during 2025 thanks to its units in Singapore. Stanley Black & Decker cut its bill by $27 million — nearly one third — using the island of Cyprus.

A favorite destination was the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, where Abbott Laboratories, the pharmaceutical giant, has claimed all its global profits were earned by a subsidiary with no employees. Malta helped the company cut its tax bill by $336 million last year, the filings show.

Companies making similar moves spanned nearly every sector of the economy: Walmart and Uber; Mastercard and Pepsi; Crocs and Merck; Honeywell and Cigna. To put the $40 billion in taxes they avoided in perspective, it would be enough to triple the annual budget of the Federal Aviation Administration or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

On the face of it, the offshore tax strategies don’t necessarily violate any laws. But the I.R.S. says some of the companies have gone too far, and tax advisers say the Trump administration’s actions will make it easier to pursue even more aggressive dodges.

“Accommodating the U.S.’s refusal to participate in the global reforms opens up the door to abuse,” said Philip Marcovici, the former chair of the European tax practice at the law firm Baker McKenzie.

The Times’s analysis relied on a new disclosure required by federal accounting rules. For the first time, in annual 10-K reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, public companies are required to include footnotes reporting the precise amount of tax avoided through each foreign jurisdiction.

U.S. companies avoided billions in taxes by pushing profits into tax havens around the world

Here were the most popular locales abroad to cut taxes, according to securities disclosures.

Company with over $1 billion saved in taxes

Company with over $100 million saved in taxes

Some companies using tax havens to avoid U.S. income tax rely on federal funding for their profits. Thermo Fisher Scientific, the scientific equipment maker, cut its taxes by $3.5 billion last year via Malta. Honeywell, which received over $30 billion in Defense Department contracts over the past decade, used Swiss units to cut its tax rate by more than a quarter — or $301 million — last year.

The widespread tax sheltering comes despite a law passed during the first Trump administration that was billed as a crackdown.

In 2017, Mr. Trump signed a $5.5 trillion package of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans. To keep down its overall cost, the package included a few new levies, including one on profits that companies moved into tax havens.

But the provision contained an escape hatch: it permitted companies to blend the profits and taxes reported in places like Germany, France or Japan with earnings reported in tax havens like Grand Cayman. That, in turn, helps many companies avoid the new offshore tax.

The 2017 law “doesn’t solve the profit-shifting problem,” said Elizabeth Stevens, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale.

In 2021, the Biden administration said it would join an effort coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to impose a minimum corporate income tax of 15 percent. That levy applies country by country, avoiding the blending loophole and reducing the incentive to shift income into tax havens.

Dozens of nations signed on, including most European Union members, Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia. But the Biden administration failed to muster the votes in Congress to pass the legislation. Mr. Trump’s executive order last year withdrew the United States from the global effort, known as Pillar 2.

“We will not get to the golden age of America unless we start removing some of the barriers,” Rebecca Burch, the Treasury Department’s top international tax official, said a few months later, and “until we get Pillar 2 off our backs.” Burch is a former lobbyist for EY, the accounting and advisory firm better known as Ernst & Young.

The Trump administration’s agreement with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development this year frees U.S. companies to park profits in favorable locations — often in conflict with I.R.S. enforcement efforts.

In 2022, the European Union issued a directive permitting a handful of countries including Malta to delay carrying out the 15 percent minimum tax. That tax in Malta will not kick in until the end of 2029.

Profits allocated by U.S. companies to Malta soared to $5.6 billion in 2022 from $134 million in 2017, according to the International Tax Observatory, a research group at the Paris School of Economics. That figure is most likely far larger today, advisers say.

Last year, S&P Global, the ratings company, used subsidiaries in Malta to cut its bill by $269 million. Yum! Brands, the owner of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut, trimmed its taxes by $121 million using Maltese units. Crocs, the shoemaker, used Malta — where it has no offices — to save $47 million.

Abbott made Malta the final destination of a cat-and-mouse game to stay one step ahead of tax authorities. In 2023, the drugmaker created a subsidiary in Bermuda, which had no corporate income tax. But Bermuda enacted one to comply with the O.E.C.D., which was scheduled to take effect in January 2025.

On Dec. 19, 2024, 13 days before the new Bermuda law kicked in, Abbott shifted the tax residency of the subsidiary to Malta, filings show. In 2024, the Abbott unit reported $17 billion in net income — more than its total global profit — and no income taxes anywhere.

Malta helped Abbott cut its tax bill by nearly 20 percent last year, filings show. The documents also disclose the number of employees at the Malta entity: zero.

The I.R.S. is challenging over $1 billion in Abbott’s tax savings, U.S. Tax Court filings show. As part of that dispute, the agency contends that a transaction generating $8 billion of deductions to shield profit from the U.S. minimum offshore tax was abusive and lacked economic substance.

Pepsi avoided taxes on profit earned in the United States by shifting income from at least $29 billion of sales of beverage and food concentrate around the world through Ireland and ultimately into Bermuda, disclosures show. A Pepsi unit in Bermuda funded the transaction, providing a more than $26 billion loan to finance the purchase of the rights.

Since then, Pepsi has shifted at least $7 billion in profit into Bermuda via the interest payments owed on that intra-company loan.

The income landed with a Pepsi unit with headquarters at a law firm that services thousands of similar shell companies, corporate filings show, helping the company save $310 million last year. Pepsi’s units in Bermuda, Switzerland, Ireland and Singapore cut the company’s bill last year by nearly one-third, or $691 million.

The true windfall from such maneuvers is likely to be far greater than the $40 billion indicated by the disclosures, said Anh Persson, a professor of accounting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The disclosures reflect the financial benefit companies present to investors rather than the actual payments they avoided.

And the new rule requires reporting a tax haven only if the sheltered profits exceed a threshold of at least 5 percent of the company’s tax bill at the full U.S. statutory rate, further understating the full cost of such sheltering.

Julian Bonnici and Antoine Harari contributed reporting.

1. 

   Jesse Drucker

   Investigative reporter covering business

   For more than 20 years, I have written about companies dodging taxes by pushing profits into offshore havens. Since 2013, there has been an international effort to crack down on these arrangements, but it now seems to be falling apart: last year, the Trump administration said it would withdraw the U.S. Meanwhile, a new accounting rule requires companies to disclose in their SEC annual reports, for the first time, the precise amount of tax avoided through each foreign jurisdiction.My colleague on the A.I. team, Dylan Freedman, created a database of over 50,000 line items from tax footnotes in every annual report filed this year. We also pulled reports filed by subsidiaries in places like Malta, Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. This provided a roadmap to figure out which companies still use these tax dodges, and exactly how they shift profits out of countries where they have actual operations (like the U.S., Germany, Japan, and Italy) into havens with little or no corporate income tax.

Jesse Drucker is an investigative reporter for the Business section and has written extensively on the world of high end tax avoidance.

Dylan Freedman is the A.I. projects editor for The Times, investigating a range of topics. He has experience as both a reporter and a machine-learning engineer."

Trump Clears Way for Companies to Avoid Taxes in Havens Including Malta and Cyprus - The New York Times

He Didn't Win by Being Bipartisan. Neither Will You.

 

 

The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords

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“President Trump proposed a deal to end the war with Iran, contingent on Middle Eastern and South Asian countries joining the Abraham Accords and recognizing Israel. However, analysts find the proposal puzzling, as many of the countries already have relations with Israel or are unlikely to establish them. The proposal also seems disconnected from the ongoing peace negotiations with Iran and the broader political dynamics in the region.

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The president said more countries should be required to recognize Israel as part of a deal to end the war with Iran. Analysts say the chances of that happening are close to zero.

May 28, 2026, 5:21 a.m. ET

President Trump with leaders from Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates at the signing of the Abraham Accords in Washington in 2020.Doug Mills/The New York Times

The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel.

In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interestin establishing them anytime soon.

As a result, the meandering ultimatum that Mr. Trump shared on Monday was met with a mix of silence and bemusement across the Middle East. Regional analysts said they were not even sure that they understood the rationale behind his proposal. Why would ending the war, which the United States and Israel initiated by bombing Iran on Feb. 28, provide an incentive to recognize Israel for countries like Qatar, which had lobbied desperately to prevent the war in the first place?

“It’s just bizarre,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “What’s the connection between a deal with Iran and that? I’m honestly puzzled.”

Two Western diplomats in the region said that no one was really taking the idea seriously. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomacy.

Asked to explain the connection between peace negotiations with Iran and expanding the Abraham Accords, a White House spokeswoman did not answer directly. Instead, she referred to remarks made by Mr. Trump on Wednesday, when he suggested that U.S. agreement on a deal with Iran could be made contingent upon countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar agreeing to recognize Israel.

“I think those countries owe it to us,” he said. “I’m not sure we should make the deal, if they don’t sign.”

The Saudi and Qatari governments did not respond to requests for comment.

A strike on an apartment building in Gaza City this month. The war has left an association with Israel even less politically popular in Arab nations.Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

Under the Abraham Accords — a deal brokered by the first Trump administration in 2020 — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. A wide range of American politicians have portrayed the pact as a major diplomatic achievement, and have frequently referred to the accords as a “peace deal.”

Scholars from the region say that is merely a turn of phrase, belying the fact that there has never been a war between Israel and Bahrain or the Emirates. In effect, the deals bypassed the central conflict — between Israel and the Palestinians — declaring harmony between parties that were not fighting.

Since then, the Abraham Accords have created opportunities for expanded trade, security cooperation and tourism between the countries that signed them. The Emirates, the Arab architect of the accords, has grown especially close to Israel. But the accords did not usher in a new era of regional peace — far from it — and the Emirates’ warm ties with Israel have increasingly made it an outlier in the Middle East.

For Israel, the crowning of the Abraham Accords would be the normalization of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy and home to Islam’s holiest sites. Saudi Arabia does not formally recognize Israel, although successive U.S. administrations have made it their goal to change that.

Few consider that a possibility now. Over the past couple of years, Saudi officials have consistently predicated ties with Israel on the creation of an independent state for Palestinians. Israel’s current government — the most right-wing in the country’s history — vehemently opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state and is unwilling to even talk of a pathway to one.

“Saudi Arabia will not be rushed into a historic decision that ignores Palestinian statehood,” said Salman al-Ansari, a Saudi political analyst. “Saudi Arabia’s commitment to a two-state solution is not a slogan, and it is not a bargaining chip.”

Mr. Trump’s language implied that he was giving an order, not making a request.

“It should start with the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and everybody else should follow suit,” he said. “If they don’t, they should not be part of this Deal in that it shows bad intention.”

Perhaps even Iran — Israel’s archenemy — could join the Abraham Accords, Mr. Trump mused.

“Wow, now that would be something special!” he wrote.

Soon after, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who had recently slammed the potential deal with Iran, wrote his own post on social media calling it a “simply brilliant” idea to link the deal with the expansion of the Abraham Accords.

“I expect our Arab allies to embrace this,” he wrote.

If taken at face value, those statements would seem to indicate an ignorance of political dynamics in the Middle East, analysts said. An association with Israel — never popular among Arab populations — has become even more toxic for many governments in the Middle East as a result of the devastating wars that Israel has waged in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023.

The more that American officials push for normalization as an imposition rather than as part of a mutually beneficial deal, “the more unpalatable it becomes,” said Abdulaziz Alghashian, a Saudi scholar and senior nonresident fellow at the Gulf International Forum, a research organization.

Under the Biden administration, the Saudi crown prince had been seeking substantial incentives from the United States in exchange for establishing ties with Israel, including access to American nuclear technology and a U.S.-Saudi defense pact.

The extent to which Mr. Trump’s mandate came across as a complete non sequitur in the Middle East made Mr. Alghashian think that the Abraham Accords were possibly “the only clear strategy the U.S. has in the region,” he said.

A deal with Iran appears shaky at best, and fighting has continued to flare as diplomats have negotiated the details. In Israel, Mr. Trump’s linkage between that deal and an expansion of the Abraham Accords has been largely met by baffled silence.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has not reacted publicly to Mr. Trump’s pronouncement. Analysts have said that the phased deal with Iran the president has proposed would most likely be hard for Mr. Netanyahu to swallow. If the bid to include an expansion of the Abraham Accords were meant as some kind of sweetener, the Israeli prime minister was not letting on.

Asked about the Abraham Accords becoming part of any Iran deal, or if Mr. Netanyahu had discussed this issue with Mr. Trump, the Israeli government responded with a statement saying only that “Israel is keen on expanding the circle of peace, which will be most beneficial to all signatories of the Abraham Accords.”

With Israeli elections expected this fall, and Mr. Netanyahu’s political future on the line, the prospect of Saudi Arabia or other Muslim-majority states handing him such a prize appear even more remote.

“Those countries won’t take a step before the elections in Israel and before seeing what the deal with Iran yields,” Mr. Guzansky said, adding, “We are still in such a fog of war.”

Mr. Trump even suggested that Pakistan — which has mediated between the United States and Iran to end the war — should join the accords.

In Pakistan, one of the world’s most populous Muslim-majority countries, officials and analysts greeted that call with a flat no. Pakistan does not recognize Israel, and its passports explicitly state that holders are barred from traveling there.

Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, said on local television that joining the accords would clash with the country’s “fundamental ideologies.” 

Mr. Trump’s statement might have been an attempt to please parts of his domestic audience — such as Iran hawks who view the potential deal with the Iranians as a disappointment — Pakistani analysts said. They called the proposal a distraction from the peace negotiations between the United States and Iran.

“Trump may be trying to divert attention with his Abraham Accords statement, but it is a poor effort at that,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States and the United Nations.

In the end, Mr. Trump appeared to give himself an offramp — raising questions about why he had made the proposal in the first place.

“It may be possible,” he wrote in the post, that some of the countries he named have acceptable reasons for not recognizing Israel, he said.

But the rest of the countries, he said, should be ready to join in — making his settlement with Iran “a far more Historic Event than it would, otherwise, be.”

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Adam Rasgon from Tel Aviv.

Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.

Elian Peltier is The Times’s bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, based in Islamabad.”

 

Why Trump Keeps Getting Rolled in Negotiations

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“Trump’s reputation for dealmaking is contradicted by his poor negotiation skills, as demonstrated by his dealings with North Korea, Russia, China, and now Iran. Despite claiming to be close to a deal with Iran, Trump’s proposed agreement lacks substance and has faced criticism from his own allies.

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The president will try to spin any Iran deal he makes, but he’s ill-equipped to gain real concessions.

David A. GrahamMay 26, 2026, 5:11 PM ET

Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.

Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.

The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. Hawkish Trump allies promptly criticized the deal, and despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday. “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” he posted. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.” Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.“