Editor's Desk 
An offhand comment from Donald Trump to Vice President JD Vance may not have been meant for public consumption, according to political analyst Heather Digby Parton.
In an unguarded moment this week, Vance disclosed that Trump told envoys tasked with negotiating a peace deal with Iran to “use the [memorandum of understanding] to refill the world’s oil economy, refill some stocks and then to see where the hand is.”
According to Parton, that was an admission that the administration is stalling negotiations to drive down gas prices before possibly restarting the war, but that Vance’s blunder is simply business as usual in an administration where “verbal incontinence” cascades from the top down.
Trump’s tendency to blurt out whatever pops into his head has become so normalized that his vice president is now doing the same thing — casually revealing strategic calculations about a potential Middle East conflict to the public, she suggested.
According to Parton, during Trump’s first term, “… administration officials like John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, and Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, his first two defense secretaries, tried to contain the president’s worst impulses, they were often unsuccessful. Trump seemed congenitally undisciplined, unable to stop himself from articulating every thought that passed through his head, usually to brag, blame or threaten. The result was a presidency that was, in a word, unstable.”
Now a year and a half into his second term, that instability has grown because he believes he can do no wrong.
“Trump’s old compulsion to behave erratically and shoot his mouth off is now combined with a megalomania that has him building monuments to himself and musing openly about being included in the pantheon of dictators like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Today he’s driven by a belief that he is omnipotent, and nothing he does will have any negative consequences. He has come to believe that whatever he says is the right thing, no matter what,” she wrote.
Even worse, she suggested, if Trump faces “blowback,” he dismisses it and makes more outrageous claims.
“He is impervious to criticism now because he literally believes he can do no wrong, and there are tens of millions of people who believe that too,” she warned.
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