An expensive, ruinous conflict resumes for no other reason than one octogenarian narcissist’s inability to face reality.
President Donald Trump arrives at the White House on Sunday, July 5, 2026.
(Aaron Schwartz / CNP / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Nearly five months since it launched its war of choice against Iran, the United States appears no closer to achieving a single meaningful objective than it was when an outmaneuvered President Trump signed what was effectively a strategic surrender on June 17. The on-again, off-again war is a complex story of global economic interdependence, maritime logistics, drone warfare ascendance, nuclear panic, and imperial arrogance. But it is also, increasingly and more consequentially, a story about how a single octogenarian narcissist would prefer to inflict catastrophic damage on the global economy and his own political party rather than concede that he was wrong.
It would be wishcasting to say that the walls are closing in on Trump, who has two-and-a-half long years left in his gilded office and faces no plausible mechanism that can remove him. But he is unquestionably a deeply diminished, almost pitiful, figure.
To him, the Iran War should be little more than one of the movies playing on a screen in his mind’s multiplex, something he can dip in and out of while he refills his popcorn and props the doors open to the other theaters to catch up on “illegals” stealing the 2020 election but forgetting to steal the next one or pregnant women taking Tylenol causing autism or woke Communists sabotaging the Reflecting Pool or the deep state preventing him from stenciling his name on the Kennedy Center or Marco Rubio simultaneously serving as Trump’s national security adviser, US secretary of state, and unelected viceroy of Venezuela. The only thing about Trump’s Cinema Mar-a-Lago that matters to him is that when he’s finished with something, it concludes instantly at his say-so.
And that is why the Iran War vexes him. The bunkered clerics and hardened military ideologues he tried and failed to depose with his amateurish, late-imperial fireworks display simply refuse to do his bidding. Iran’s rulers aren’t just preventing the president from making the theft of the 2026 elections his full-time gig. They are threatening to turn him, in his own words, into Herbert Hoover, which are the only two words in the English language seemingly capable of getting him to reverse course once he has made up his mind to do something incredibly stupid and destructive.
This week’s embarrassing sequence of flip-flops, grand pronouncements, and fresh threats of war crimes is just the latest evidence that Trump has no idea what he is doing. He shows no interest in implementing the Memorandum of Understanding he signed in Versailles last month—the one that clearly gives Iran the right to dictate how vessels transit the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic shipping choke point that was open before Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu decided to capriciously blow it all up. And as the ceasefire unravels largely because of his inability to comprehend the humiliating terms he agreed to, Trump cycles from one gimmick to another in a vain and fruitless effort to extract himself from the consequences of his own failures.
On Monday, he announced, suddenly and bizarrely after weeks of comparatively low-level violence with Iran, that the United States would now serve as the “GUARDIAN OF HORMUZ” and that he would demand reimbursement for this act of beneficence by extracting a fee equivalent to 20 percent of the value of each ship’s cargo while also blockading Iranian shipping. As CNN somewhat decorously put it, this outburst “raise[d] “several questions of legality and feasibility.” Indeed, it did!
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That’s probably why, 24 hours later, Trump walked back the entire gambit. He wrote (on Truth Social of course, the National Archives of our time) that because “Oil is flowing like never before,” America would accept, in lieu of the 20 percent fee he invented just the day before,“Trade and Investment Deals” from unnamed Gulf countries that will make “Factories, Plants, and Equipment pour into the United States at Historic levels.” He added that Iran can no longer kill protesters and “WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON,” bold claims for someone who just a month ago put his signature on a document granting Iran everything on its geostrategic wishlist in return for absolutely nothing of substance.
As with everything that comes out of his mouth, you can’t even address the outrageous hallucinations of Trump’s post without first tackling the logical fallacies. If oil is “flowing like never before,” why does the United States need to serve as the “Guardian of Hormuz” in the first place? How can oil be flowing at all-time highs if the United States is once again enforcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports? If America is the “hottest country in the world,” as Trump keeps insanely asserting, why does it need the Gulf states to create jobs? How exactly will we calculate the exact number of “investment deals” needed to offset the money needed to try and fail to keep the Strait of Hormuz open with history’s most expensive navy? Will we be getting rebate checks the next time some Emirati potentate bankrolls a luxury condo development in Miami?
You aren’t supposed to ask these questions, of course. You’re just supposed to clap and look the other way. The problem is that everywhere you turn, the material consequences of this endless buffoonery are on display for anyone to see. The finger grease was barely dry on Trump’s phone before gas prices shot up again and oil futures spiked. The United States has resumed burning through hundreds of millions of dollars a day worth of sophisticated munitions to bomb a country that is successfully defending itself with $7,000 drones and speedboats—all while failing to intimidate Iran’s autocrats or even force them back to the negotiating table.
When Trump signed the MOU, there was some hope that the end of this ruinous ordeal might be in sight. Surely, having inked a document so unambiguously disastrous for the United States; having absorbed the hysterical, weeks-long caterwauling of lifelong Beltway Iran hawks seeing their life’s work vaporized in front of their eyes; having finally brought gas prices part of the way back down to where they were in February, he wouldn’t just blow the deal up for no reason, right? You guessed it—not right. We are now right back where we were in early June—global oil stockpiles dwindling, prices creeping up, Republican fortunes in the upcoming midterm elections crumbling, and the Iranians chuckling at the spectacular implosion of their erstwhile imperial overlords.
For America, the predicament remains the same. President Trump can always swallow his capacious pride and abide by the deal he signed, granting Iran’s autocrats control of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to the country’s long international economic isolation in exchange for modest, unspecified concessions on their nuclear program. If he won’t do that, he can either keep trying and failing to break Tehran’s resolve from the air, or he can launch a massive ground invasion of a country of 90 million people three months out from a national election that could result in his party’s kicking away both chambers of Congress.
Only 30 months to go before the Cinema Mar-a-Lago closes forever and takes all of this winning with it. In the meantime, the president is very, very busy posting through it, lauding the doomed Minnesota gubernatorial campaign of Mike Lindell, “the Pillow Man,” who is “one of America’s greatest and most hard working Patriots” and sharing pictures of himself with Xi Jinping, who probably still can’t believe his luck that this sundowning imbecile was somehow given another four years in power. Your own attention to this matter, as always, depends on your capacity for endurance.
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