Trump's 'hunger for respect' sees him blindly stagger into 'obvious trap': ex-aide

President Donald Trump's personality flaws make him extraordinarily vulnerable to Iran's efforts to drag the U.S. further into a grinding war, according to a former White House insider.

The 80-year-old president has been promising the war he launched Feb. 28 would end in days, but instead fighting has intensified in its fifth month because U.S. adversaries want the conflict to drag on – and former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor wrote for The i Paper how they have learned to manipulate Trump to get what they want.

"Unfortunately, I learned how easily Trump could be played during his first term," Taylor wrote.

Most allies chose to flatter Trump, which Taylor said "worked with depressing regularity," with while adversaries learned that insulting him works best to their advantage.

"The hunger for respect that makes Trump easy to flatter also makes him even easier to provoke," Taylor wrote. "A well-aimed insult could send the president into a tailspin and upend the operations of the White House and the federal government for a day or more."

Taylor described how Trump hijacked policy meetings to rant about payback to whatever some foreign figure had said about him on television, saying that North Korea's Kim Jong-un became particularly adept at pushing his buttons – toggling between praise and provocation – to gain leverage.

"Washington insiders treated that episode as a punchline, but evidently the regime in Iran treated it as an instruction manual," Taylor wrote. "If you have any doubt, just look at what the Iranians have done since the war began in February. Regime propagandists have flooded the internet with videos ridiculing Trump, with content engineered for an audience of one."

"The regime has studied Trump for a decade," Taylor added. "They know their taunts goad him, maybe not always exactly how they’d hope, but enough to give them leverage the regime has never had before."

Trump sees the Iran war as something of a personal feud instead of a geopolitical conflict, Taylor wrote, which makes the regime's provocations even more effective at weakening the U.S. position in the Middle East to the benefit of Russia and China.

"A stable U.S. president would see this obvious trap and starve it," Taylor wrote. "They would recognize that their enemies are conspiring and exploiting their ego, and would decline, publicly and repeatedly, to be baited. Yet, in four decades of public life, Trump has not been known to decline a bait. Now, he is preparing to double down again in what some officials say might become a wider war."

Taylor offered a grim prediction of where Trump's personality flaws would lead the U.S. as the conflict drags on.

"Iran will drag the U.S. into an expanded air campaign," he warned. "The regime will deploy more proxies to harass shipping and American bases at a tempo calibrated to justify the next sortie without ever forcing a decision. In other words, it will keep the war too hot to leave and too cold to win."

"Meanwhile, we should be watching for Russia probing NATO's edges while U.S. aircraft carriers idle in the Gulf," Taylor wrote. "We should also be watching for China to grow bolder around Taiwan on the theory that Washington cannot manage two crises at once."

Taylor also expected Iran to dangle peace talks just before the November midterm elections, which he said would distract Trump from the moves it was making with China and Russia to gather strength.

"Trump will not rescue himself from this," Taylor wrote. "His character was settled long ago, and no adviser that I worked with has ever successfully talked him out of a grievance, at least not in the long term ... America’s enemies are spending next to nothing on insults and cartoons to purchase the exhaustion of the West. Until Trump learns that taking the bait is more expensive than restraint, they will keep getting serious value for their money."