While President Trump threatens to destroy “ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT” in Iran for every shot they take at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, Americans back home are hoping and praying this folly of a war wraps up yesterday.
Strikes over the weekend brought the death toll for U.S. troops to 18, with 100 more injured; the Strait of Hormuz is essentially closed again, with Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threatening to block other oil routes; gas prices are up 16 cents from the average a week ago, 88 cents higher than last year and $1.04 higher than the week before the war, per Politico; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth admitted in a hearing on Tuesday that the conflict had already cost U.S. taxpayers $37.5 billion — as he asked for $67 billion more.
All of this while no one — not Hegseth, not Trump, not Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Vice President JD Vance — can tell voters how or when we plan to exit this war having achieved anything of long-term significance. It’s the very definition of a quagmire.
Meanwhile, Iran and its dangerous proxies are clearly playing the long game, hoping that upcoming American midterm elections force the U.S. to exit the war we started without accomplishing a single one of our stated objectives — a very real possibility.
Trump is posturing, as he’s wont to do, insisting he’s not influenced by the calendar. “I don’t view it as ‘Gee, we’re having an election in a period of time,’ ” he said on Tuesday. “No, the election — I can’t think about that having to do with this. I think people are very impressed.”
Not so, as a majority of Americans now say the war in Iran was the wrong decision, while a belief that the war is worth the economic cost among Trump’s MAGA base has dropped to just over a third — a 13 point drop in two months.
Voters, Republican lawmakers up for reelection, and the Iranian regime — all united in their hope that Trump can be pushed to the exits by the election politics of an unpopular war.
But for once, I hope Trump isn’t bluffing.
We shouldn’t have entered this war, and we most definitely shouldn’t have entered it without a clear strategy. But here we are, and it’s now our job to leave it responsibly.
What does that mean?
Unfortunately, it means admitting we likely can’t make good on a number of the grandiose promises Trump made to justify the war in the first place. It seems we’ve given up on the idea of regime change and liberating the Iranian people, to name two. But we can and should pursue other objectives that would leave the U.S., our allies, and the region better off.
First and foremost, we must leave with verifiable restraints on and multilateral monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program. If it’s unrealistic or costly to retrieve Iran’s buried uranium cache, we must secure a non-conditional non-proliferation agreement — with teeth.
We must leave having guaranteed unfettered access to shipping routes, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Our European, Asian and Gulf allies must be integrated into a joint coalition to protect international shipping lanes from repeated extortion attempts.
And we must leave our regional allies, like Kuwait, protected from retaliatory strikes through binding non-aggression commitments and a long-term off-shore carrier strike group presence to prevent a security vacuum.
This is a far cry from what Trump promised with his ill-advised and ill-prepared blunder of a war — and in the case of Hormuz, it’s merely restoring access we already had before the war. But it’s the least we should accept in our retreat.
As much as we want to get out now, we owe it to our allies, our Gulf partners, our troops — and the Iranian people — to leave this mess of our own making with something to show for it.
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.