The golden chariot of fate has often carried President Donald Trump to safer shores when financial, business, political or legal failures trapped him in a corner. But he has hit a wall with his war against Iran, stymied by his inability to secure the “unconditional Iranian surrender” he promised at the outset of the campaign.
Was the war worth the cost? Thirteen American soldiers lost their lives; 3,375 Iranians were killed, including 175 people, mostly children, who died in a US Tomahawk missile strike on a girls’ school. And it cost the American taxpayers $132 billion—twice the cost of all of Obamacare! Trump has little to show for it. The initial agreement between the United States and Iran, mediated primarily by Pakistan, offers Iran sanctions relief, a promise of reconstruction funds, and the potential to collect tolls on the Strait of Hormuz.
In our new book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, we reveal the rhetorical weapons Trump deploys to deflect blame and escape responsibility for a military campaign that, by most measures, failed well short of its stated objectives. The signing of the initial agreement between Washington and Tehran by Trump left unaddressed the massive arsenal of intact Iranian missile launchers, permitted the continued Iranian possession of enriched uranium, granted Iran the right to levy passage fees in the Strait of Hormuz.
The agreement did nothing to stop Iran from continuing funding its proxy terrorists—Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah—while promising to work with regional partners to raise reconstruction funds of $300 billion for Iran. And Trump left the repressive, militarist theocratic Iranian regime intact, a combination widely seen as a stunning American capitulation. However, Trump invariably denies all setbacks from bankruptcies and election losses to failures in courtrooms and on battlefields.
President Trump has received widespread scorn from not just Democratic Congressional leaders such as Hakim Jefferies, Jack Reed, and Seth Moulton, but also from a wide array of Republican Senate leaders, from Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz to Roger Wicker, Bill Cassidy, and John Thune.
This bipartisan American condemnation mirrored a rare consensus across Israel’s political spectrum. From the far-right flanks of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to the leadership of the center-left opposition, Israeli political leaders are fiercely condemning the 14-point deal as a catastrophic capitulation that compromises the nation’s security, leaving Iran emboldened and taking the restraints off its regional terrorist proxies.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid protested loudly that Israel is “not a vassal state,” calling the deal as “bad for Israel, bad for the region, [and] bad for the citizens of Iran.” But perhaps should Israel have seen it coming.
Roy Cohn, the legendary fixer for Fred Trump, the president’s father, advised: “No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.” As we have written previously, nobody should be surprised by Trump’s flip-flopping. In our book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, we predicted exactly this outcome, because it fits perfectly with Trump’s long-established patterns of behaviour. And here is how.
What critics sometimes misinterpret as inexplicable and sudden shifts, actually reflects a core tenet of Trump’s strategy: he has no permanent loyalty to anyone or anything. By rapidly substituting the influence of interventionist hardliners with proponents of military restraint, Trump ensures he is never boxed into a single course of action. He navigates politics entirely free from entrenched allegiances or rigid doctrines. For him, avoiding a fixed compass in order to preserve absolute leverage, maximum flexibility and endless choices is the very cornerstone of Trumpian scheming.
The flips can be vertiginous to behold. Trump went from denouncing Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader of Iran, as “unacceptable” and a “lightweight” to heaping him with praise, calling him "professional" and a man of "very good reputation," insisting “there’s a bravery there,” describing him as “more rational,” and declaring that he would be “honored” to speak with him.
Trump went from championing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a hero deserving of a pardon to reportedly using expletives to describe him. He has touted the potential for a bright future for Iran while castigating hardline supporters of Israel as “stupid” and representative of only “10 percent of the people.” For Trump, these flips represent a feature, not a bug.
No bull market, no bear market but a Trump market
Instead of securing freedom for Iran’s oppressed population, seizing its enriched uranium, or the dismantling Iranian missile capabilities and its proxy terrorist groups, Trump shifted the goalposts.
His primary yardstick for measuring success has always been money, and America has never had a president more minutely attuned to financial markets and more willing to drive huge swings in those markets through his words and actions.
As we argued earlier, we are not living in a bull market or a bear market but a Trump market. With oil prices hovering near $100 a barrel and strategic reserves dwindling, Trump was feeling the financial pressure to make a deal, a pressure he himself acknowledged, one that outweighed all other considerations. Indeed, the very first words that Trump uttered upon signing the initial agreement at the Palace of Versailles were telling: “Oil down, Stocks up.”
Trump always declares victory and relentlessly repeats that narrative, regardless of the facts or the outcome, in any and every situation. That relentless repetition, until it becomes conventionally accepted as a truth, is known as the “sleeper effect.”
In the case of Iran, Trump declared victory even though virtually every expert agrees that nearly of all his stated objectives, as he himself laid out at the beginning of the conflict, were unmet, even as he claims to have accomplished each and every goal.
There was no “unconditional surrender” and no “regime change,” even though Trump insists he achieved both. He had vowed to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” and ensure that Iran’s terrorist proxies “can no longer” destabilize the region or the world, and to remove enriched uranium from Iran.
None of that has come to pass. Nevertheless, Trump will continue declaring himself the winner, repeating the message relentlessly, as he always does.
The tribal chieftain of American power
Trump has always centralized all power in his own hands, leaving competing factions to vie for his blessings, much like an old-fashioned tribal chieftain. This dynamic gives Trump maximum flexibility to pivot between completely opposite factions with seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.
Trump has conspicuously made Vice President JD Vance the public face of the new Iran deal, even declaring that “if it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.” It is a characteristically Trumpian move, given that Vance has long led the faction most inclined to pursue a negotiated settlement with Iran.
By contrast, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reportedly opposed the deal and wished to continue pressuring Iran militarily, has said little publicly in defense of—or even in praise of—the deal. Rubio has maintained a carefully studied stone face at public appearances.
The wall of sound: Trump’s perpetual distraction machine
Trump’s perpetual noise machine is an ever-spinning engine of new headlines, intentionally outrageous statements, and sudden moves designed to overwhelm, scatter, and redirect public attention—especially when he is intent on burying bad news.
Through sheer tenacity and frenetic activity, Trump bends the news cycle to his will and reshape the public narrative. He disorients and exhausts opponents while preventing any single story from dominating the narrative long enough to inflict lasting political damage.
Trump is already trying to pivot public attention toward other issues, with Truth Social posts on everything from algae in the Reflecting Pool to GOP primary endorsements, potential denuclearization talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the Save America Act, and Cuba—all in the 48 hours since the initial agreement with Iran was signed. He will almost assuredly continue to manufacture fresh controversies to divert attention from the deal’s shortcomings.
Across all of these dimensions, Trump’s Ten Commandments reveals and makes clear that Trump’s Iran deal was anything but surprising, with his seemingly dizzying flip-flops representing merely another entry in a long catalogue of Trump’s well-documented modus operandi.
Trump’s tools are the narratives he constructs as he reinvents the facts and defies the empirical evidence plainly before the eyes of the public. In the 1933 classic Marx Brothers comedy Duck Soup, Chico Marx is a spy caught in a failed disguise to resemble a rival leader. Chico defiantly counters a skeptic’s challenge of his failed impersonation arguing, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?”
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