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Trump Can’t Admit That He Lost the Iran War

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.

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........

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