Loser In Chief: Trump’s Iran War Surrender

Of Course He Lost the War He Started With Iran

This post is brought to you free by Incogni — the service I personally use to take my home address, phone, and family off the data-broker sites that fuel every scam, stalker, and political harassment campaign in America.

Get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

Let’s start with the photograph, because the photograph tells you everything.

Donald Trump, in France, at the G7, slumped at a table in Evian-les-Bains with the affect of a man who has just been told the buffet closed early. Macron beaming beside him. Von der Leyen on a tear about energy weaponization. The Emir of Qatar getting his own bilateral. And the President of the United States sitting there like a deflated parade float, eyes half-lidded, the famous motor mouth idling at a stoplight that never turns green.

This is what victory looks like, apparently. This is the wind-at-his-back, page-turning, global-security breakthrough we were promised. A tired old man in a foreign chair, surrounded by allies he spent fifteen weeks insulting, signing nothing while claiming everything.

He started a war with Iran. And he lost it. And the proof is the room.

Look at who’s running that room. It isn’t us. Macron invited Egypt, Qatar, and the UAE to the Middle East session, the Gulf money that actually demanded an end to, and then settled this thing...with cash. Von der Leyen is lecturing on how to wean Europe off the Strait of Hormuz so it never again depends on an American president’s mood swings. The G7 has politely promoted the United States from leader of the free world to an amusing, if rather dotty, guest.

We are a peripheral player at the table we built. Trump didn’t turn a page. He transformed America into a footnote in the global power structure we should steer. Odd how abandoning every value will do that.

Now to the deal. And I use that word the way I’d use “Michelin Star” to describe a gas station hot dogs on the roller for 36 hours.

What did they sign? A page and a half. JD Vance said it himself: a page and a half. The text won’t be released until Friday, after a signing ceremony that Trump may not even bother attending, because of course he won’t: the man has the attention span of a goldfish at a rave. A page and a half, signed virtually, by a president and a vice president on one end and an Iranian parliament speaker on the other.

That’s not a treaty. The Senate ratifies treaties. That’s not even a real memorandum of understanding. That’s a DocuSign. That’s an agreement to make an agreement, a coupon for a future deal that may or may not be honored, redeemable nowhere, expiring whenever Tehran decides it’s bored.

The whole thing is another Trump prank, the same con he ran with North Korea, the same beautiful-letters routine, the same handshake-and-a-headline with nothing underneath. He didn’t end a war. He scheduled sixty more days of talks and called it peace.

And here’s the part that should make your teeth itch because it’s an article of faith with the GOP that Secret Muslim Sleeper Agent Barack HUSSEIN Obama shipped C-17s full of cash to Iran.

It’s the Trump bribe.

Reporting now indicates the United States secretly approved a financial arrangement letting Qatar funnel billions to Iran, some of it disguised as tanker fees through Hormuz, a credit line opened for Iranian purchases, the whole thing greased while the U.S. Navy ran a blockade with one hand and held the cash spigot open with the other.

A dual policy. Tough-guy press releases up top, financial oxygen pumped to Tehran underneath. Qatar says no funds have moved yet. Trump stood next to the Emir on Tuesday and swore up and down that America isn’t “investing any money in Iran.”

Sure. And the check is in the mail, and he’ll respect you in the morning.

This is what the maximum-pressure tough guy actually delivered. He gave the regime he bombed a financial lifeline. He gave the Iranian state a bridge loan. He campaigned for a decade, calling the Obama deal a catastrophe that funneled billions to the mullahs, then turned around and built a worse version with a Gulf cutout to keep his own fingerprints off the cash. Everything Trump touches dies, and then he bills you for the funeral.

A Word From Our Sponsor — Speaking Of Cons Being Run On You In The Background

While Trump was busy in Evian arranging for billions to flow to the mullahs through a Gulf cutout, a smaller, quieter, considerably more relevant con was being run on every American with a phone, an inbox, and a mailing address.

Got scam calls? The worst part hasn’t happened yet.

When scammers get hold of your data, they don’t just take your money. They sell what’s left — your name, address, phone number, the names of people close to you — to the next buyer.

Congress put a number on it: four breaches alone have cost Americans $20 billion. But the financial loss is round one. That same data is what anyone who means you harm uses to find you and your home.

Incogni removes your data from those databases before round two. Get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

Twenty billion dollars vanishing into a scam economy is the kind of catastrophic loss a normal president would notice. This one is too busy DocuSigning love letters to Tehran. So you’re going to have to handle it yourself.

Now, back to the loser-in-chief.

So why now? Why the sudden urgency from a man who told us for weeks that time was on our side, that we shouldn’t rush, that gas at the pump was “a small price to pay”?

Two reasons, and neither of them is strategy.

One: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve hit the floor. Three hundred and forty million barrels, the lowest since 1983, when the number-one song was something you danced to in parachute pants. (Did I own them? I’ll never tell.) Trump drained it faster than Biden ever did, the same Biden he spent years savaging for draining it. He’s been burning the national emergency stockpile like a trust-fund kid torching the principal, and the tank is now scraping bottom heading into hurricane season with no cushion left.

But gas prices never came down. They sat high and ugly through a war he started, an unauthorized war nobody voted for, with families eating fifty-cent-a-gallon increases while he told them to tough it out. He needed this over not because we won but because the meter was running and the wallet was empty.

So he caved. He grabbed the first page-and-a-half he could DocuSign and ran to France to call it a triumph.

And here’s the cruelest joke. The relief won’t come fast. The energy analysts are blunt: months, not days. Maybe September. Maybe October. Conveniently, the relief arrives right around the midterms, which I’m sure is a coincidence.

Because prices work like a ratchet, and Trump just learned the physics of it the hard way. The ratchet is lubed. Prices rocket the second a chokepoint waterway closes, or a missile flies. But the ratchet down is sticky as hell. It crawls. Rockets and feathers, the economists call it. Up like a rocket, down like a feather, and the feather is in no hurry.

That’s the whole presidency in a metaphor. Impulsive on the way up, paralyzed on the way down, and the American family pays for the differential.

He started a war he didn’t have to start. He drained the reserve we swore to protect. He bribed the same enemy he bombed..and enemy now arguably more extreme and dug in. He signed an IOU and called it a treaty. He handed power to Iran and China in ways only Trump could accomplish, and while they’re grateful, they also simply have to pinch themselves to believe it’s true.

And we did it all so a tired man could sit in a French chair, half-asleep, and pretend the room still revolved around him.

Of course, he lost. He was always going to lose. You don’t win a war you started for a headline. You just find out, eventually, what the headline costs. Finally, and in the delicious category of “there’s always a Tweet,” I will close with this gem: “The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don’t win anymore!”

So true, Mr. President. So true.

Rick Wilson’s Against All Enemies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This post was sponsored by Incogni. Don’t let the con get to you, too — get 55% off an Annual Plan with code RICK55 and take your data off the market.