With the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Donald Trump is now officially on a roll – he has toppled two heads of state in just two months, on two different continents.
That is, by any standard, a display of US overseas power that is impossible to ignore, especially when it comes from a President who so openly campaigned on the basis of “America First”.
Much of Trump’s base was drawn to him in the first place because he was so openly critical of American soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East – and of footing the bills for the world’s conflicts.
Why, then, many of them are asking, has Trump launched the second major offensive operation against Iran in less than a year, on the taxpayer’s dime? What’s he ultimately trying to achieve? The alarming answer is that even Trump doesn’t seem to know.
In the run-up to the strikes this weekend, Trump and his team had been banging the drum about Iran’s nuclear programme and saying how Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
This messaging was confusing on a number of fronts – not least because Trump had insisted that Iran’s nuclear programme was entirely wiped out by a series of strikes he launched last summer. A statement posted on the White House website, still online today, insists that “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News”.
Trump has also suggested the new strikes were part of a negotiation tactic: that he would launch strikes for 24 to 48 hours and then pause them to reopen negotiations. If the Iranians didn’t give him what he wants, he would then launch even heavier strikes.
Smoke rising after an explosion in Tehran on 28 February, 2026 (Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)The problem is that you can’t easily negotiate with a regime if there is no one to sit at the other side of the table. America and Israel have wiped out many of Khamenei’s likeliest successors. There’s no one to negotiate with.
Another option is that Trump is trying to engage in 2000s style regime change, as the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan – with disastrous consequences for the region and the world. However, most experts agree this is essentially impossible without long-term American deployment in the region, and Trump seems constitutionally allergic to putting US boots on the ground.
Without committing to this step, Khamenei is almost certainly just going to be replaced with a new hardliner.
Trump’s social media post on Khamenei’s death suggested that Iranians should now rise up and try to take power. This idea is almost offensively bad: Iran’s people rose up weeks ago, were promised help by Trump, and then were abandoned by the world as the regime killed them in their thousands. Asking them to take to the streets again in the middle of an ongoing bombing campaign is nonsensical.
For Iranians, and for anyone in the Middle East, the idea of the US engaging in a seismic military operation with no clear goal and no exit strategy is likely to prove disastrous.
But it could also rapidly cause problems for Trump at home. When the US launches attacks overseas, support on Day 1 is usually as good as it gets – it falls, rather than rises, over time.
A protest in Washington DC on 28 February, 2026 (Photo: Ken Cedeno / AFP via Getty Images)Trump’s Day 1 support on the Iran strikes was -10 per cent, even before any reprisals or longer-term repercussions. Those are terrible numbers (net support for invading Iraq in March 2003 was roughly 20 per cent).
Trump has regularly mocked Barack Obama for launching military operations in the Middle East. He promised to get troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and tapped into a huge sentiment among US voters to stop overseas adventures. Now he has launched one with no approval from Congress, no legal basis and with barely any explanation.
Trump’s aggression against Iran is already dividing his supporters. Tucker Carlson, still one of the most influential commentators among the Maga base, is strongly against it. That groundswell of discontent will surely grow.
The influencers and figures who would stay most loyal to Trump have a problem, too. How are they supposed to defend the Iran operation when they don’t know what the narrative he wants them to spin is?
Trump’s boosters are often without shame. Many flipped overnight from calling for the release of the Epstein Files to insisting they should never have been released and that they showed nothing anyway, just because Trump said so. But even they can only work with what they’re given, and right now they’ve got nothing.
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The US has shown the terrifying extent of its military capabilities for the second time in two months. Its power is not in doubt. The US President is a different story.
Has Trump simply become addicted to the adrenaline rush of audacious military strikes? Is he looking down the list of world leaders to see who he might take out next? Does he really not worry that some form of retaliation against US citizens is inevitable?
Hubris followed by nemesis is one of the oldest stories told by humanity. Trump may feel all-powerful now, but that feeling will almost certainly not last for very long.
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