The president failed to deliver on his Iran bluster, and in the end fooled only himself.
Trump lost an unnecessary war which he himself started. The latest evidence that TRUMP IS A LOSER.
Trump started the February 28 war for reasons of personality, not strategy. He is on his way to losing the war for the same reasons of personality.
Trump is arrogant. Think how often Trump mocks his predecessors as “dumb” and praises himself as “smart.” Those predecessors, from Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, all had to ponder military responses to Iranian terrorism and aggression. They all ultimately decided not to wage a major war against Iranian national territory. Among the prime deterrents to action: the Strait of Hormuz problem. Trump apparently decided that a problem that was too hard for everybody else would magically disappear for him, because he is tough and growls in his official photographs.
Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.
Trump hates procedure. A lot of the apparatus of the modern presidency exists to force confrontations with unwelcome realities. Cabinet officers are confirmed by the Senate to assure the country that major offices are filled by people of character and competence. The National Security Council is supposed to process challenging data to ensure that the president receives necessary information. But to run the Department of Defense, Trump nominated and the Senate approved Pete Hegseth. Instead of choosing a national security adviser to replace Mike Waltz after Waltz’s resignation on May 1, 2025, Trump tapped Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take on the role. But to double up that particular job dooms the job not to be done at all, especially because Trump has shriveled the NSC’s staff and subjected it to loyalty tests demanded by his most screwball supporters.
Trump is panicky. For all his bluster and boasting, Trump cannot take the heat. Presidents who believe in their decisions ride out bad polls. Trump panics and reverses course. Trump has been signaling since mid-March that he wants an end to the Iran war at almost any price. The Iranians have read those signals. For all the damage the U.S. military inflicted on Iran, the Iranians seem to have gambled that they could outlast Trump. They’ve been proven right.
Trump is gullible. As Trump’s present secretary of state observed back in 2016, Trump is most fundamentally a con artist. But Trump is often a self-defeating con artist who falls victim to his own con. Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. Instead, he’s negotiating an exit that concedes most of Iran’s demands and leaves Iran in a more dominant position over Persian Gulf oil traffic than it occupied before the war. But Trump seems genuinely to have convinced himself that he’s won a mighty victory, and he seems truly baffled that others decline to endorse his flim-flam.
Trump can’t lead. Trump’s method of governance is command. He cannot work across party lines, and he cannot speak to any part of the American nation beyond his MAGA base. A war leader, however, must be a national leader. War imposes costly sacrifices. Leaders who take the nation to war must explain those costs and inspire those sacrifices. Trump simply cannot do any of that work, and he has no idea how it could be done.
Overall, Trump is an idiot and is unfit to lead.
I always laugh at those who claim that they voted for Trump because he's a "great businessman" or something like that. He got hundreds of millions of dollars from Daddy Fred and then wasted it on stupid projects that failed. He declared bankruptcy SIX times. This serial bankruptor was rescued by TV producer Mark Burnett who got him that gig on The Apprentice. Trump was never a great businessman but many gullible people got the impression he was from that TV franchise.
Putting a serial bankruptor in charge of the world's largest economy was a dumb idea.
For three years in his first term, Trump benefited from the strong economy that he inherited. Then the pandemic struck, and his first instinct was to hunt for someone to blame. In this second presidency, his main work has been spectacular self-enrichment, even as the economy has sagged under the weight of his catastrophic trade wars.
Trump is cartoonishly bad. If you made up a presidential character like him in a pre-2016 novel, your book would have been rejected by most serious publishers.
Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.
There isn't a lot we can do about Trump himself, but we can remove his willing enablers from Congress. The war, the tariffs, and the corruption would not be possible without Capitol Hill Republicans.
Midterm Election Day is just 161 days from today. Do something every one of those days in real life to make the 120th Congress a Blue Sea and every state capitol a Blue Lake.
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