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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.