If you ask President Trump, he’ll tell you we’ve already won the war in Iran.
When asked for an update by Axios on Wednesday, Trump responded with the kind of upbeat nonchalance and flippant boastfulness you’d usually see when asked about the progress on one of his hotels.
“The war is going great,” he said. “We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible, even in the original six-week period.” He then offered that there’s “practically nothing left to target.”
As for an ending? “Any time I want it to end, it will end.”
How, exactly, is it “going great”? What is the “timetable”? Shouldn’t it end when the mission is achieved and not when Trump simply wants it to?
His administration has simultaneously given no rationale to justify our strikes on Iran — failing to prove we were the target of an imminent attack — and all the reasons why we had to, from regime change, to oil, to support for Israel.
It’s sent mixed messages on timing, promising both that it’s practically over and that it could take a while. And it’s been unreliable in its own accounting of what’s actually happened. Have we decimated Iran’s nukes? (I thought we’d already done that.) And who is responsible for the attack that killed 160 schoolchildren in Iran?
We still have no answers to these important questions. When pressed on the school attack, for one, Trump has said everything from Iran was responsible to, most recently, “I don’t know about it.” But an initial report determined the U.S. was at fault, the result of a targeting mistake.
As for the nukes, which the White House declared“ obliterated” last June, our own intelligence assessment just found that Iran can still access about 60% of its enriched material stored at Esfahan. As the non-partisan Arms Control Association notes, “Although strikes can set back Iran’s nuclear program and destroy key infrastructure…military force cannot eliminate Tehran’s proliferation risk.”
Trump’s version of events, as is so often the case, isn’t based on facts, but wishcasting, projection, bombast and bluffs.
And abroad, it isn’t working.
In France, for example, Le Monde derides Trump’s treatment of the war as “spectacle,” lambasting his “celebratory tone.” It noted his grotesque joke that it’s “more fun” to sink Iranian warships than to seize them,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s boast that “we are punching [the Iranians] while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
In The Guardian, columnist Rafael Behr points out the chaos and incompetence of Trump’s war: “Regime change was the plan, but Trump finds it easier to change plans than regimes. He says he has won, but also that he has more winning to do. This is the familiar stage of rhetorical climbdown, indicating dawning awareness that a problem is more complicated than the president initially thought. Complexity resists his whim. It bores him.”
And in Germany’s Bild, Europe’s highest-circulating newspaper, the question is pointed: “Whose pockets is Trump filling with bombs?” It declares “the clearest winner in the biggest Middle East conflict in decades is the U.S. arms industry” and Trump’s sons, who are conveniently now in the drone business.
The world can see through Trump’s charade, but do American voters? Most polls show more voters oppose the war than support it, but by a slim margin.
That margin will widen with time, most certainly. And then Trump’s slick sales pitch will be less and less effective. Or maybe I’m the one who’s wishcasting.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
