Confessions of an “And Yet” Columnist

Writing about a president who can’t keep his story straight on war and peace.

I have a writing tic. Two words, two syllables, infinite exasperation.

My commentaries on Donald Trump and his national security policies all seem to hinge on this compound conjunction. He announces, often with great ceremony, that he has ended more wars than any of his predecessors and restored the world’s respect for America. And yet—within days or hours—he moves the United States closer to a military conflict with Venezuela.

And yet ... I can’t help myself.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

At some point I realized I had become the Chandler Bing of Trump-era columnists. Once you see my byline but before reading, you say it out loud. Trump calls himself the peace president ... and yet.

Could I be any more predictable?

I have tried to shake this affliction. It has not gone well.

Part of it is occupational hazard. Spend enough time writing about a president who treats pronouncements as disposable, and your paragraphs start to grow their own warning labels. You watch him declare that he has tamed global chaos, then boast about striking another “suspected” narco-trafficker boat heading to somewhere other than U.S. shores. After a while, your fingers learn to reach automatically for something that says, gently but firmly, “not so fast.”

It’s the hinge between the claim and what happened next. Trump proclaims that alliances have never been stronger, and yet ambassadors quietly describe phone calls that sound more like shakedowns than strategy. He promises “no more dumb wars,” and yet the fine print of his rhetoric keeps generating new scenarios that someone in uniform has to plan for. He praises national sovereignty, and yet he floats exceptions for governments that fail his personal vibe check.

I have tried substitutes. “Even so.” “Still.” “Meanwhile, back on Earth.” They all have their charms, but none of them quite work.

And yet has the right snap. It is a two-word seatbelt. It keeps the paragraph from flying through the windshield when the story hits the inevitable contradiction. The claim and the reality share the same sentence, and you can hear the click in the middle.

Trump, for his part, does not make it easy to retire the device. He is not a president who naturally produces clean, linear prose in his wake. If he were dull and methodical—“we assessed, consulted, and here is the measured course of action”—I might write like a grown-up more often. We could all go home early with a tidy paragraph about strategy.

Instead, we are treated again and again to his policy-lite, fact-optional rhetorical whiplash, which all but demands a hinge.

There is a serious point buried in this grammatical neurosis. Democracies need their and yets. We need some small, stubborn compound phrase that shows up between the speech and the scoreboard, between the promise and the pattern. Otherwise, politics becomes nothing but declarations—no friction, no follow-through, just a perpetual loop of victory laps.

Trump is especially good at overwhelming the system with declarations. That’s the crack between the speech and the scoreboard where and yet wedges itself. It is a reminder that, yes, the president gets to describe his own policy—but reality gets a vote as well.

So as the new year approaches, I have considered making a resolution: 2026 will be the year I retire and yet. I will give the phrase a gold watch, hang its jersey in the rafters, and learn to fashion a sentence without the editorial equivalent of a raised eyebrow. I will trust the reader to see the gap between Trump’s self-portrait and the news ticker without my little verbal nudge.

And yet—of course—nothing about the situation suggests that will be easy.

Trump will step in front of a camera on New Year’s Day and proclaim another inconvenient reality a hoax or fake news or deflect a question from a skilled and respected news reporter with a disparagement. Allies will be left parsing his ad-libs for signs of continuity and assurance. Adversaries will be chuckling at how they came to be blessed with such an inarticulate and ever-distracted person as their foil.

And I will be sitting at my laptop, typing a commentary, fighting the reflex that sends my left hand to press Shift-A.

Maybe I’ll find a new way to signal doubt without leaning on my old crutch.

And yet….

Could I be any more predictable?

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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