The reporting today by Steven Erlanger of the New York Times is devastating. A comprehensive yet compact article, nary an extraneous word, every sentence, paragraph after paragraph, defeat in every way, none of Trump's goals met, a strategic defeat, an economic defeat, a geopolitical defeat, a stronger Iran, a weakened and depleted U.S. and Israel, comprehensive defeat in every way.
Trump cannot deal with this. I am concerned that he is just going to move on, not try to win, not pull out, just move on and let it run on autopilot. We've seen this before in Trump. It got to a point where Trump just ignored COVID when he couldn't stop it and said (40 times in 2020) it would just go away. He already has shown this on Iran. On May 20, that's over two months ago now, he blithely stated that the Strait of Hormuz, the geopolitical defeat, "at a certain point, it'll open itself".
Trump has an ego defense mechanism that enables him to ignore bad reality for the narrative inside his head, e.g. 2018, 2026. Just as he did with COVID, he has said many times that he took care of the Iran problem, that he had "totally obliterated" its nuclear capacity, that the U.S. had won the war in the first forty-eight hours; many, many times he has claimed to have defeated Iran.
He didn't. Iran, like COVID, is continuing to bite back. Just the other day, he denied that Iran was biting back, said Minnesota and seven other states had cyberattacks on their water systems from...Minnesota and Gov. Tim Walz. How could he be expected to believe that Iran could cyberattack the homeland when they have been completely defeated?
That is the danger. I am not pro-Iran anymore than I was pro-COVID. Both are deadly. Trump lived in his own mind bubble that COVID would just go away. It didn't. Over a million people died. Now, knowing how his mind works, we hear him saying the identical things about Iran: defeated, Strait will miraculously open itself.
Iran is not going away. Trump is walking away. People are going to die.