As the blunderous war in Iran comes to its humiliating end — assuming it’s the end — Donald Trump faces his greatest test as two-term president:
How’s he going to lie his way out of this one?
Trump declared victory, you’ll recall, on day one of the bombing, which didn’t work out all that well. He announced the end of the war many weeks later — praising the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran — just before his 80th birthday present of a UFC cage match on the White House lawn, which also didn’t work out all that well. Trump nemesis Michelle Obama turned out to be the big winner that night.
He made a self-congratulatory speech to the Gang of 7 in Europe, praising the MOU to what you might call modest applause, as he tried to explain why Iran needs to keep its missile stockpile (self-defense?) and why he doesn’t want to become the next Herbert Hoover (and be responsible for a global recession) and why his bombing campaign didn’t work.
Trump had many laugh lines in the speech. But almost none of them were intentional.
So what’s a desperate president gonna do? This already looks like the biggest unconditional surrender since Jared Polis pardoned Tina Peters. I mean, he’s too busy to deal with details of the negotiations, which were put off for a day while Israel and Hezbollah exchanged niceties — and Trump’s already got the reflecting pool disaster to worry about. As others have pointed out, Trump always promised to drain the swamp, and now he’s created one.
But while he’s sinking — just like his polls — under the force of this very bad, horrible, no good deal, he did have an idea. In order to avoid as much personal blame as possible, he threw JD Vance under the bus — not necessarily a bad idea, by the way — by making the vice president the chief defender of the MOU.
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All Vance has to do is tell maybe a million lies, and even that is unlikely to be enough. As Trump said to Vance — OK, I’m paraphrasing — good luck on that one.
Here’s where things stand.
The American people overwhelmingly see the war as a disaster, which according to Moody’s Analytics, has cost U.S. taxpayers and consumers at least $132 billion. In a rare moment of truth, Trump said we needed to end the war — the war of choice that he started for no good reason — because he didn’t want to be remembered like Hoover, the president often blamed for the Great Depression.
The right-wing press is turning on the MOU. The National Review, for one example, calls the war a “total humiliation.” The New York Post and Wall Street Journal weren’t any kinder.
Even some GOP senators are giving it bad reviews. Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, whom Trump worked to defeat in a recent Republican primary, said of the deal: “Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave.”
Ted Cruz, a reliable Trump sycophant, offered this: “History demonstrates that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is an exceptionally bad idea. If we give billions of dollars to Iran, that money will be used to murder Americans, and so I don’t believe we should do that.”
But, one might say to the critics — whom Trump calls either “fools” or “bad people” and says they should just shut up — that Trump did get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. OK, we know the answer to that. The strait was open, and never threatened, before the bombs began dropping. And the lesson Iran has taken from this war is that it can choke off the strait — through which 20% of the world’s oil passes — any time it wants.
Which is leverage, as Trump would put it, like no one has ever seen before. So, what’s a desperate president gonna do? I mean, he’s already got the embarrassment of the $14 million reflecting pool to explain away.
So, how’s Vance’s propaganda tour going? What do you think? Is anyone counting this as a win yet?
Trump admitted, jokingly, that if the final negotiations with Iran — which will probably end when Trump is being dragged out of the White House — go well, he’ll take the credit. And if not, he’ll blame Vance.
But was it a joke? I think not.
It’s a test, I believe, for Vance, who — if you’re in the mood for irony — was the loudest voice in the administration against the war. If he wants Trump’s blessing as his successor, he’ll have to show he can lie nearly as well as Trump can.
We know Vance can lie. Who can forget his racist lie about Somalis eating their neighbors’ pets? It was such a good lie, in Trump’s view, that he repeated it himself.
But this is different. To claim the MOU as a win for America (meaning for Trump), he has to count on at least three things:
One, that the great majority of people will never read the MOU. Two, that people would take Vance’s word on anything. Three, that people will forget the war by the midterms.
Here are a few of Vance’s more obvious lies, as outlined by the Bulwark’s Will Saletan. He fact-checked Vance in the most obvious way — by actually reading the two-page MOU. And so, Vance has said:
- Iran has agreed to nuclear inspections. It has not.
- That Iran built up its nuclear capabilities because of the Barack Obama deal with Iran in 2015. Actually, the Iranians started their buildup after Trump tore up the deal — which allowed for rigorous inspections — because, you know, it has Obama’s signature on it. And maybe the most important thing Vance has to lie about is that the Obama deal with Iran, which Trump called the “worst” in history, was not a better deal than Trump got.
- Iran has agreed to destroy its nuclear material. And yet nowhere in the memo does it say that. What Iran did agree to was down blending of the enriched nuclear material, which means diluting it — a dilution that can, wait for it, be reversed.
- Iran has to agree to stop funding terrorism. No mention in the memo.
- Conditions have to be met before the U.S. would unfreeze billions in Iranian assets. No such conditions in the memo. In fact, the memo says the U.S. would unfreeze the money as soon as the MOU was signed. Trump signed it in Versailles. You history buffs may recall a ruinous treaty once signed there. Let’s agree Trump is not a history buff, unless it’s the history of arches, golden or otherwise.
We can go on. And on. I mean, defending the $300 billion in investments that Iran can use to rebuild its infrastructure is virtually impossible. We annihilated that infrastructure at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
But Trump — who calls the $300 billion reward fake news promulgated by, uh, “Dumocrats” — thinks he has found a way around this further embarrassment. He’s pressuring the Gulf states to invest heavily in the $300 billion, which could be used in part by Iran to, well, further destabilize the region.
But here’s where the truth comes in.
It was Trump’s choice to go to war. But he had no choice in ending it. Even though he says he might, it’s hard to imagine that he would actually start bombing Iran again.
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As Trump admitted — was this part of his grand strategy? — at the G7 speech: “If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open. You would never have success.”
So, the “unconditional surrender” plan had to go. And the bluff to end Iran’s civilization had to go. And the strength of America’s military, the strongest in the world, had to be compromised by Trump’s, uh, brilliant air campaign.
And now, Iran has the cards, not Trump. Iran has the leverage, not Trump. Iran, one of the world’s worst actors, will end up stronger than before the war.
And Trump, with Vance’s help, ends up looking every bit the incompetent buffoon many of us know him to be.
Which is why I believe Trump’s threat to go after Cuba next. Marco Rubio would be in charge of this one, in case it goes wrong.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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