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.One of Donald Trump’s current favorite riffs is to contrast how (in his opinion) the United States was seen under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and how it’s seen now.“They didn’t respect us two years ago. They laughed at us. NATO laughed at us. Everybody laughed at us,” Trump said at a summit in Turkey with allies last month. “They don’t laugh anymore. There’s no more laughing.”He’s right. It’s worse than laughing—they’re ignoring the president of the United States altogether. Trump styles himself as an heir to Theodore Roosevelt, but where Roosevelt said that America should speak softly and carry a big stick, Trump speaks loudly and carries a small one. Roosevelt’s bully pulpit has been reduced to a bullshit pulpit.This week, Trump made two announcements that, in the past, would have shaken the globe. Speaking to Fox News’s Trey Yingst about negotiations with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” In an ordinary world, such a threat would be a huge news event. Oman is not a hostile nation: It is one of the oldest U.S. allies in the Gulf region and has been a key intermediary in negotiations with Iran for years.Yet the news drew little governmental response. Neither Oman nor other U.S. allies in the region issued official comments or took any other action that suggested that they found the threat realistic. One possible reason for their muted response is that Trump has actually made this threat before: He said in May that if Oman didn’t cooperate with Americans’ plans for the strait, “we’ll have to blow them up.”Trump’s credibility has been undercut by his own capriciousness. Back then, he was threatening Oman over any negotiations that would imperil the neutrality of the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, however, he posted a graphic on Truth Social that declared the strait a “NEW U.S. Territory.” (He’d previously said that he would soon declare it U.S. territory.) American annexation of an international waterway would represent a major shift in maritime legal precedent and require an enormous U.S.-military presence, but everyone knew that the pronouncement was nonsense. Trump has no means of controlling the strait, and The Washington Post reports that the Defense Department is actually considering a reduced regional footprint. Trump has also repeatedly promised that a deal with Iran is near completion, but after multiple false starts, these announcements fool only the markets.This is a big shift. During his first term, Trump garnered outsized attention for outrageous statements. In August 2017, for example, he created an international incident by threatening North Korea with “fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Trump clearly delighted in how the press and global leaders would scramble to respond to these provocations, and some people argued that he was pursuing Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of keeping adversaries off balance. One can draw a direct connection between the fire-and-fury threat in 2017 and Trump’s friendly statements about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the past week. But over time, the world has grown jaundiced about Trump’s threats.The good news is that few world leaders and observers feel the need to take Trump’s outbursts seriously anymore. Fire drills driven by Trump’s idle talk fatigue the media, the public, and geopolitical systems, and they distract from more important stories. But that’s also the bad news. First, some of the things that Trump says are very dangerous. His favoritism toward North Korea could destabilize the region and encourage South Korea and Japan—to say nothing of Iran and other rogue states—to pursue nuclear-weapons programs. Second, he does occasionally follow through; Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro may have thought that Trump was bluffing before he was arrested during an American incursion in January.Third, Trump needs credibility to enact his agenda, including to try to end the quagmire in Iran. On Wednesday, he said that he was “announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!” All-caps notwithstanding, this declaration didn’t receive a great deal of attention. (“They have no clear plan, unfortunately,” one Middle Eastern diplomat told NOTUS.) In order for the sanctions regime he envisions to have its greatest effect, Trump will need the cooperation of allies as well as rival powers such as China. But years of empty boasts and months of feints on Iran mean that other world leaders don’t really heed Trump’s statements. He’s failed to enlist key allies in the war effort, and China has declined to take any concrete action in the strait, despite Trump traveling to Beijing in May to pressure Xi Jinping.This diminished respect given to presidential statements is self-evidently bad for Trump, and it does nothing to make America great again. But it’s also bad for the world. Even now, no other country has the power the U.S. has to maintain order, and the closest challengers, Russia and China, pursue systems that are repressive and dangerous. The U.S. can regain credibility only by using its rhetoric more carefully and matching its actions to its words—two things that are unlikely to happen under Trump. If he wants to be believed, the president needs to either surrender some American influence or show that his threats are real, and neither option is appealing. The costs of not being taken seriously are very serious indeed.Related:Oman has gone from “indispensable” ally to target of annihilation.David Frum: Only losers play the madman.Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:The White House freak-out over Natalie HarpFrom “indispensable” ally to target of annihilationRachel Bedard: America’s gerontocracy needs a public physician.Today’s NewsIran’s lead negotiator with the United States said that Iran must plan to counter U.S. sanctions as the Trump administration prepares new economic measures against Tehran. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to announce details of the measures on Monday, after Trump vowed an “economic D-Day” against Iran.President Trump said that he will exempt 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef from tariffs and that the beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices. A White House official said that Trump is expected to sign an executive order implementing the plan within the next two weeks.A charter plane crashed near a remote radar site in western Alaska yesterday afternoon, killing all eight people on board, including two pilots and six passengers; two of the passengers were members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The cause of the crash is still being investigated.Evening ReadIllustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?By Lila ShroffSilicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being “high agency” and making “orthogonal bets.” But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn—people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots. If you misspeak, maybe you’re “hallucinating.” Don’t know the answer to a question? That’s because it’s not in your “training data.” Feeling forgetful? Perhaps you have a case of “context rot,” a phrase that refers to the degradation of a bot’s responses over a long conversation. “I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months,” Conor Bronsdon, the host of an AI-focused podcast, told me.Where I live, in San Francisco, such comparisons are inescapable. “I’ve described myself as high temperature,” a friend recently told me; in AI-speak, this means he is prone to randomness …Such speech easily comes off as unsettling, if not aggressively bleak: Why describe beautiful, tender life in detached, algorithmic terms?Read the full article.More From The AtlanticIt’s low-calorie and packed with protein. Is it healthy?Joshua Sohn: Liberal families are looking pretty traditional.An unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s futurePresident Trump has a pet-project docket at the national parks.Ossoff’s “Natalie” momentCulture BreakReflect. What’s happening to the WNBA isn’t normal, Jemele Hill argues. The league’s unprecedented success has come with unprecedented controversy.Read. Last year, Sophia Stewart recommended eight books for people who like to dabble in casual pursuits. Each read reminds us of the possibilities that lie in our hobbies—even the ones we’re bad at.Play our daily crossword.PSA decade ago, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber named FLOTUS, by the indie-folk group Lambchop, as one of the best albums of 2016, likening the band to Bon Iver. Today, Lambchop is out with a gorgeous new record that actually features Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Lambchop’s music always has wry humor and good melodies, but I wasn’t prepared for the sumptuous harmonies on Punching the Clown. The band’s leader, Kurt Wagner, says that he was inspired by a chance hearing on the radio of lined-out singing, a centuries-old practice of church music that migrated from Britain to Appalachia. (For more on the style, read David Ramsey in the Oxford American.) If that seems like an odd basis for an indie record, the results speak—or sing—for themselves.— DavidRafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.