I hope I am wrong. But after more than 40 years covering politics and lying politicians, I think it’s obvious Donald Trump cannot and will not end the war he started with Iran. I don’t think it has a chance of ending until he’s out of office. The clues are clear: Trump not only can’t end the war, but he also obviously doesn’t want to do so.
I’m not alone in this thought. At least three people I still talk with inside the Pentagon believe it. Former national security experts I’ve known for years from both political parties believe it. More importantly, it’s apparent Donald Trump is now admitting it.
On Tuesday, he told Fox News’ Trey Yingst that you can’t trust the Iranians, and that he will continue to bomb them for as long as he wants. They break agreements, he claimed, and “they have to be beat up.”
“The only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength,” he said. “And the only strength is military strength. And that’s what we’ve done. And I mean, literally two days ago, we had a deal and then they broke it at the last moment.”
Trump continued to hint at a ground war. Yingst pressed him on a “limited” campaign. Trump wouldn’t rule it out. “I’d say sometimes you need a ground campaign,” he said, “but we have other people that will do the ground campaign for us.” By Wednesday afternoon Trump was hinting he would consider expanding the United States presence in Iran.
If this sounds like the Vietnam War, it’s only because it is eerily similar, but with a Trumpian twist.
If this sounds like the Vietnam War, it’s only because it is eerily similar, but with a Trumpian twist. While Lyndon Johnson infamously said, “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” Trump maintains we “have other people” who will do our bidding and wage a ground war.
Really? Who? The obvious implication is Israel, but it’s equally obvious that Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister, has Trump doing his bidding, rather than the other way around.
We also know, thanks to Yingst, that Trump never had a specific reason for launching the war. “Well, it was specific in the sense that it just never stops and they’re gonna go forward and they wanted a nuclear weapon. We knew they wanted a nuclear weapon.”
One national security expert I spoke with said, “For all intents and purposes, CENTCOM has now been let off the leash, and they are going on the offense. On the plus side, that means reduced capabilities for the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]. But on the negative side, it means the regime will dig in and the war will continue. I don’t see them suing for peace. It’s just not in their DNA. And they don’t give a s**t about the desires or the needs of the Iranian people, who are and will continue to be the biggest losers in all this.”
That may be a bit shortsighted, say others, including some Republicans. “This war will continue to impact Americans where it will hurt worse — in our pocketbooks,” a leading GOP senator told me. He also said he feared “it will also cost additional lives.”
But Trump says the war was necessary: “They would’ve never made a deal with Obama. That deal was the worst deal. What they did sign was a worthless piece of paper. What they signed, what they signed with Obama was a worthless piece of paper that was a road to a nuclear weapon.”
The truth, for those who adhere to facts, is that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed in 2015 by the U.S. and Iran, along with Russia, the United Kingdom, China, France and Germany following 20 months of negotiations by the Obama administration. Iran agreed to limits on uranium enrichment and pledged to reduce its stockpile, with the International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring Iran’s compliance. In exchange, the international community agreed to lift nuclear-related economic and financial sanctions, allowing Iran to access global markets and trade. Trump later claimed Obama put $1.6 billion on a 747, clearing out the banks in Virginia and Maryland to pay off the Iranians. That is a flat out lie.
Trump tore up the JCPOA during his first administration, and Iran once again began enriching uranium. So while he complains that Iran won’t make a deal, perhaps it is because the agreement we had with Iran was torn up simply because Trump was still livid with Barack Obama after Obama made fun of him at the annual White House Correspondents dinner in 2011.
I was there. I remember Trump’s face. He was mad then and he’s still mad now. He hates Obama for making fun of him then. He hates Joe Biden for beating him in 2020. Trump has sought revenge against Obama by trying to undo everything Obama did as president. He is seeking revenge against Biden by nullifying the election he himself lost in 2020.
As much as Trump says about his desire to limit Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons, the truth is we are now five months into a war that was supposed to last only four weeks but that we “won” in two days over a weapons program that was “obliterated” in June 2025.
Meanwhile, the bombs keep falling, and Trump doesn’t care. But it goes far deeper than that.
The president doesn’t care if the war goes on. He doesn’t care if housing prices spiral upward and out of control. He said he wants housing prices to climb to protect the wealthy. He doesn’t care if Immigration and Customs Enforcement kills people indiscriminately. He recently posted a statement on Truth Social that ICE is doing a great job after killing four people without due process and abusing established police procedures. On Monday in Portland, Maine, ICE agents gunned down Joan Sebastian Guerrero in his car, later handcuffing his lifeless body while his three-year-old daughter watched in her pajamas. Trump doesn’t care if his toy airplane, given to him by the Qatari royal family and pressed into service as Air Force One, took flight without the necessary security retrofitting. He said in front of reporters that yes, he could die, but reporters would go with him. That’s a hell of a recruiting tool for reporters to join the travel pool.
Trump also doesn’t care about the poor or due process or how many people die so he can claim peace. He apparently doesn’t even care about himself.
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At this very moment, his court jesters, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who wants to juice soldiers with testosterone, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who wants to eject 3,000 people from the country daily, are running wild. Trump doesn’t care. Former Tea Party congressman Joe Walsh describes him as a “sociopath.”
Chris Vance, spokesperson for Our Republican Legacy, an organization founded by ex-lawmakers to promote what they have called the GOP’s “traditional principles,” said that the president’s “unilateral actions and disdain for the War Powers Act undermines the Constitution.” He called on congressional Republicans to “do their constitutional duty under Article 1 and “take control of this conflict.”
The main issue, former Trump staffer Miles Taylor told me, is that the president’s only agenda is himself. “Donald Trump has signed America up for one of things he railed hardest against: a forever war, driven by the grievances and hubris of Washington swamp creatures. Only this time, it’s powered by the most short-sighted, self-interested man to ever have held public office in American history. The only confidence I have is that, eventually, Iran gets a really good deal. Americans are guaranteed a raw one. Now it’s just a question of how bad a deal we get.”
The Wall Street Journal, usually sympathetic to Trump on its editorial pages, revealed this week that the president “hosted a Situation Room meeting Tuesday evening to discuss the potential seizure of Kharg Island and other territory along the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. troops, as well as the potential bombing of a tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear-linked site the U.S. has yet to target. Expanding airstrikes against more targets in Iran, including energy sites, also remains a possibility.”
Other options include boots on the ground to seize Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz and bombing a fortified site suspected to be used for covert nuclear production.
If Trump is as dangerous as some claim, and I believe he may well be, and if he is determined to continue hammering Iran, then I wonder this: how dangerous is the president of the United States to himself and others? Does he represent an existential threat?
His discussion of dying in an unprotected Air Force One and taking reporters with him, and his constant acknowledgement of threats against his life, are sobering and concerning. We can all see he is physically unwell. Many of us believe he is mentally fading.
He won’t and can’t end the war in Iran because he doesn’t want to do so, and because the Islamic Republic obviously doesn’t trust him.
He won’t and can’t end the war in Iran because he doesn’t want to do so, and because the Islamic Republic obviously doesn’t trust him. They won’t make a deal — and continue to break agreements — because Trump first broke one agreed to by seven nations that was working. The Iranians cannot be trusted, but part of that is our fault.
Trump often refers to being at war with Iran “for 47 years” — since the 1979 revolution — but Iran has been upset with us and Britain since 1953 when we staged a coup d’etat using the CIA when the Iranian democracy wanted to nationalize its oil industry against the desires of some of the world’s largest oil companies. We then allowed the shah to assume absolute control. In the process, he claimed to modernize and westernize the country, but he also tortured and killed his own citizens until an even crazier bunch of zealots took over the country.
The U.S. owns this mess, or it should. It may well be the single greatest failure of the CIA in the history of that agency — far bigger than the Bay of Pigs.
But at the end of the day, we’re staring at an unhinged president who began the war for intensely personal reasons. He is desperate to run Obama through the mud, and he doesn’t care who suffers as he does it.
Let’s be honest: if Donald Trump can’t get his way, he wants to burn it all down.
I saw it in Trump’s eyes in 2011 at the White House Correspondents Dinner. And I see it now.
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