Trump Can’t Stop Pretending the Iran War Is Over
Just as he lied about COVID quickly going away, he insists Iran is desperate for peace. The attacks on U.S. service members and the Strait of Hormuz suggest otherwise.
DONALD TRUMP GETS AWAY WITH LYING most of the time. But sometimes reality is so stark and serious that he can’t escape it. That’s what happened in his first term, when he pretended that COVID would quickly disappear.
Now it’s happening in the Persian Gulf. Trump’s phony deal with Iran has dissolved. Missile and drone attacks have resumed. Ships are under fire in the Strait of Hormuz. Oil traffic has slowed. Gas prices are going back up. More American troops have been injured, and some have died.
Trump is trying to fake his way through this fiasco. It’s not working.
Last month, when Trump signed his “memorandum of understanding” with Iran, he pretended that it was solid and enforceable. “It’s not like the Obama document, which was just a terrible document,” he bragged on July 15. “This is a very powerful document.”
But two days later, when the text of the deal was released, it turned out to be toothless. At the G7 meeting in France, a reporter asked Trump, “There’s nothing enforceable in the deal itself, is that correct?” Trump said it didn’t matter. “Doesn’t have to be,” he shrugged. The enforcement mechanism, he argued, was his threat to Iran’s leaders: If they didn’t honor the deal, “we’re going to bomb the hell out of you.”
Trump said that there was no need to worry about compliance, because Iran’s leaders were good people. “I think they’re far less radicalized” than the previous leaders, he asserted at the G7 meeting. “I think they’re really good. They love their country.” He predicted that the new leaders would “behave much differently” from the old leaders, because “they see a different way of life.”
Reporters pointed out that the new leaders were a lot like the old leaders. In fact, many of them were the same people, and the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was the son of the previous supreme leader. But Trump dismissed these warnings. “Khamenei Jr.’s different from the father,” he insisted, and the new leaders were “much less radicalized.”
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TRUMP GAVE A REMARKABLE INTERVIEW to Axios on June 19. He was irked at American hawks who had criticized his deal. The hawks wanted to continue the war. So Trump explained that more war wouldn’t help.
The president stipulated that he wasn’t planning to send ground troops. “You don’t want boots on the ground, right?” he told the interviewer, Marc Caputo. That left bombing as the remaining option.
“If I go in there for another two or three weeks and continue to bomb the hell out of ’em,” Trump asked, “what does that get us? The Strait of Hormuz will not be open.” Nor would it kill Iran’s leaders. “Probably the same people, you know, they go deep into the caves,” he said. “And then when we stop, they’ll come up, and they’ll probably be the same leaders.”
Then Trump explained how a return to war would hurt the United States and the world. “The Hormuz Strait would be totally closed. It would have mines all over it, and it would have missiles flying over billion-dollar ships,” he predicted, referring to oil tankers. “If I attacked them [Iran], none of those ships are leaving.”
The result, he concluded, would be grave injury to the two things he loved most: the stock market and himself. “If I went further, the stock market would be much lower,” said Trump. He told Caputo he couldn’t bear that. “I have one primary wish as president,” he said. “I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover.”
In effect, Trump was advertising that his military threats were empty and that he was emotionally vulnerable to economic pressure through blockage of the strait. He was telling Iran exactly how to beat him.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Iran did as he suggested. On June 25, two days after Trump claimed that the regime had “no missile capability,” Iran launched drones into the strait, hitting a ship. Then Iran fired missiles at neighboring countries, trying to hit American military bases.
Trump pretended everything was fine. “The denuclearization of Iran is moving along well,” he told reporters on July 1. “We’re getting along very well.” In a speech that day, he boasted, “We have total control of everything.”
On July 6, Iran fired more missiles into the strait, damaging three more ships. This prompted Trump to declare, at a NATO meeting in Turkey on July 8, that Iran’s leaders—the same leaders he had praised as “really good”—were “scum.” “I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” he fumed.
Trump’s professed resolve lasted less than twelve hours. On the flight home from the NATO meeting, he brushed off Iran’s attacks—“We’ve already won militarily,” he told the press—and he claimed that Iran was trying to kiss and make up. “They called a little while ago. They want to make a deal so badly,” he bragged.
A reporter asked the president how, in light of Iran’s persistent attacks, he could maintain that the regime still wanted to cut a deal. Trump groped for an answer. “They’re sort of crazy,” he offered, struggling to reconcile his story with the facts on the ground. “They’re a little bit out of control, but they want to make a deal.”
Trump promised that the flare-up would end soon. But Iran kept launching missiles and drones and hitting ships. Last week, when Fox News reporter Trey Yingst asked about Iran’s strikes, Trump assured him that “everything they have, offensive and also defense, is being wiped out.”
That proved to be another lie. On Friday, Iran fired missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan, killing two American soldiers. A third soldier died when an Iranian drone blew up in Iraq.
For three days, Trump tried to hide from the bad news. But on Tuesday, at the White House, ABC News reporter Mary Bruce forced him to address it. “There are no signs that Iran is ready to stop fighting,” she pointed out. “So what is the plan?”
Trump rebuked her. “You don’t know what the dialogue is behind the scenes, that they want to meet desperately to try and end it, because they’re getting decimated,” he huffed. “You don’t get that when you listen to your fake station.”
Essentially, Trump was dismissing what everyone could see—the ongoing warfare—and claiming that the real Iranian regime, the one that whispered only to him, was begging for peace.
On Wednesday, as Iran and its proxies escalated their assaults on oil tankers and America’s allies, Trump pretended he had always been skeptical of the agreement with Iran. “They thought we had a deal,” he told a crowd in Georgia. “I said, ‘I don’t think we have a deal with these guys. They break every deal they make.’”
But in the same speech, he promised that the regime would come around. “They’re not ready,” he suggested, but “they’ll be ready very soon.”
OBJECTIVELY, TRUMP’S BEHAVIOR is baffling. Reality keeps showing him that the Iranians aren’t capitulating, but Trump keeps insisting that they are. And strategically, his big mouth has sabotaged the United States. He has telegraphed his impotence and his vulnerabilities to the enemy.
But psychologically, everything Trump has done makes sense. Six weeks ago, to rationalize pulling out of the war, he committed himself to a story. The story was that Iran had capitulated, peace was at hand, and the world’s oil supply would soon be back online. He’s going to cling to that story, no matter how long the war goes on.
It is dispiriting, as an American, to have a person of such low moral character in the White House.
It will take many decades to undo the damage.