One month into the Iran war, Donald Trump is discovering that his signature tactic — construct a narrative, declare it true, and force the world to submit — doesn't work when the other side refuses to play along.
According to Guardian columnist David Smith, Trump's decades-long operating principle has finally collided with an immovable object: geopolitical reality that cannot be wished away or spun into submission.
Because of that, "Trump is in trouble," he asserted.
"Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so." While the president insists his military campaign is a historic success, "the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy."
Trump's strategy has worked before — in Manhattan boardrooms, on reality television, even at the highest levels of Washington power. But Iran represents something fundamentally different: a conflict where "Trump's unique brand of 'truthful hyperbole' has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into a brick wall," Smith wrote.
The track record of Trump's fantasy-based policymaking is well documented. During his first term, he made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, according to the Washington Post. He constructed entire alternate realities. But that strategy catastrophically failed when COVID-19 arrived — hundreds of thousands of deaths couldn't be wished away — and voters rejected him in 2020.
Now the Iran war is exposing the same fatal vulnerability at catastrophic scale. The conflict has already cost 13 American lives and billions of dollars, yet the Iranian regime shows no signs of collapse. Instead, exactly as predicted, "Tehran has triggered a global energy crisis by blocking the strait of Hormuz." Opinion polls show the war is deeply unpopular, and a ground invasion would be even more so. "There is no obvious exit strategy."
Joel Rubin, former deputy assistant secretary of state, articulated the core problem: Trump's belief in his own mental supremacy fundamentally misunderstands how warfare actually functions.
"Trump clearly is a real believer in the power of the mind to control events and to shape how people perceive events and shape reality," Rubin said. "The problem with that in the case of the war is the Iranians don't have to bend to that. There are time-tested ways to win wars and end wars through force of arms or diplomacy that have nothing to do with the mind and willpower and willing it because the other side will do what we want. He's going to buck up against that and the sooner he relies not just on the reality of military power but the reality of diplomatic power the more likely he is to be successful."
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, was more blunt about the implications.
"Iran is Trump's Waterloo. This is the demolition of the Donald Trump myth. His supporters rave about his instincts and his improvisational style but the other interpretation is that he doesn't know what he's doing, that he hasn't taken care to investigate the devastating consequences of his actions and so he's digging himself deeper and deeper into a quagmire. This is plain to all."
