The Iran Peace Deal Is What Trumpism Looks Like

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

 

In Lethal Weapon 2 Joe Pesci offers some advice: “They f— you at the drive-thru.”

 

That line has kept popping into my head over the last few months, as one new crop of people after another learns what should have been obvious long ago: When it comes to politics, Donald Trump is the drive-thru.

 

I can’t write a whole “news”letter laden with more F-bombs than the Strait of Hormuz has mines. So, as the john said to the erudite hooker he worried was secretly recording him, let’s get euphemistic.

 

You can divide the people who have invested great trust in Donald Trump into two camps: those who are an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axis and those who will become an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axis. Or to put it another way: There are people who have been screwed by Trump, and people who are destined to be screwed by Trump.

 

Let’s flash back to March, when the anti-Israel and anti-“forever war” crowd felt “betrayed” by Trump’s Iranian adventure. I wrote, “The idea that Trump’s war on Iran is a betrayal of ‘True Trumpism’ is the last gasp of people who told themselves that Trumpism was an ideology. And it’s embarrassing.”

 

The title of the piece was “The Iran War Is What Trumpism Looks Like.”

 

Well, guess what? The Iran ‘peace’ deal is what Trumpism looks like, too.

 

When a weathervane points north, we don’t confuse it for a compass. When the winds shift and it points south, we don’t say, “We’ve been betrayed!” We just say, “That’s what weathervanes do.” But an amazing number of people think Trump is more like a compass, pointing toward the True North of “America First” or “patriotism” or some other blather.

 

Donald Trump has no ideological or moral compass. Or if he does, it doesn’t point outward toward any True North, but inward, toward himself.

 

When Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, many sincere hawks and sincere Trump apparatchiks (not the same thing) cheered, celebrating his courage and commitment to protecting America, Israel, the world. “I’m in awe of President Trump’s determination to be a man of peace but at the end of the day, evil’s worst nightmare,” proclaimed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Trump’s Nethers).

 

Mark Levin insisted, “He doesn’t want to go to war. But then again, he will do what has to be done to protect the American people who he loves. He’s a patriot.”

 

“Thank you for the courage to stop this terror state from holding the world hostage with missiles while building or attempting to build a nuclear bomb,” Levin said on another occasion. “Thank you for doing the work of the free world.” And: “The president of the United States knows what the hell he’s doing, okay? He knows what he’s doing.”

 

Pete Hegseth proclaimed, “The real endless war is the war that Iran has waged on us for 47 years. President Trump is the only president with the guts and moral clarity to finally do something about it.” He added that “President Trump’s fortitude is unshakable and his mission is crystal clear.”

 

His fortitude looks pretty shaky, the mission cloudier and more protean than a lava lamp. He didn’t know what he was doing. And he won’t do what has to be done. He is not evil’s best friend, but he’s hardly its worst nightmare. Because he’s nobody’s, no idea’s, no cause’s best friend. His best friend is the guy he sees in the mirror as he puts on his bronzer.

 

Trump did real damage to Iran and, in isolation, that’s a good thing. Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 bombing campaign that targeted the nuclear facility at Fordow, was a real and valuable accomplishment. I am skeptical of the more grandiose dunking on this fiasco as leaving Iran stronger than it was on February 27. But that doesn’t mean this hasn’t been a fiasco.

 

The terms of surrender.

 

Let’s detour for a moment to outline just some of the reasons this has been a fiasco.

 

First, fiasco is the right word, because it originates as a theatrical term for disastrously failed performance. And this was, like virtually everything Trump does, a performance.

 

The war was previewed with Trump promising the Iranian people “help is on its way” and unleashed with vows to accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender.” It ended with Trump recognizing the regime as “very rational”—not just rational, but very rational—and “not radicalized” at all, and “very nice to deal with.” Oh, and he explained, “I never cared about regime change. It was never a part” of the plan.

 

That’s not exactly evil’s nightmare fuel.

 

He insisted for months that he didn’t care about the damage to the economy caused by the war he unilaterally started because what mattered was depriving Iran of a nuclear bomb. Now he suggests that the people—like Graham, Levin et al.—who loyally supported him are “very stupid people” because they’re willing to risk a “global recession” by wanting to see Trump follow through on his “crystal clear” mission.

 

Now, in his own telling, he’s a hero for getting the Strait of Hormuz open and lowering the price of oil to “in the $70s.”  The price of oil on February 27, the day before the war started, was in the $70s, and the Strait of Hormuz was open. The Iranians get to keep their “dust.” They will also get some $300 billion for reconstruction, and according to some reports, $12 billion upfront and then another $24 billion just to agree to chat.

 

This afternoon he said the deal “achieves everything we set out to accomplish and much more.” The three objectives he cited: “ending the current conflict,” “reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” and “preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He added, “That’s what it was all about.” So by his own accounting a goal of the war he started was to end the war he started. Another was to open a waterway that was open until he started it. And to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon, which he has not done.

 

In short, Iran’s strategy to force Trump into a conditional surrender on its terms worked.

 

Of course, this is just a deal to talk about a deal for 60 days. Until this morning, J.D. Vance and others were saying leaked versions were Iranian propaganda or misinformation. They issued talking points that are so lame, if they were a horse you’d humanely unload your shotgun into its temple. It now turns out that the “propaganda” was essentially accurate—which Vance knew when he lied to all of those interviewers.

 

No wonder they’ve signaled that we shouldn’t put too much stock in the actual text when it is released. “People shouldn’t read too much into the language of the [memorandum of understanding],” one administration official told CNN’s Alayna Treene, describing the agreement as merely a “political document.” “What’s more important than the actual document is the understandings we have with each other. … We came up with language that allows [Iran] to say what they need to say for their domestic politics.”

 

The Trump administration—rightly—said Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was deeply flawed because it relied on a mere promise from the deceitful, untrustworthy, fanatical Iranian regime to not pursue nuclear weapons and because we gave them billions to reward that worthless promise. Now Trump is touting the exact same promise they made under the JCPOA. The administration claims the key difference between this “deal” and the JCPOA  is that we’re not giving Iran “U.S. taxpayer” money. Well, the vast bulk of the money Obama “gave” wasn’t U.S. taxpayer money, but frozen Iranian assets and sanctions relief. We’re doing the same thing, just on a far grander scale.

 

World War II analogies are overdone. But this is like agreeing to reparations and reconstruction funds for Germany or Japan before we defeated them.

 

There are several reasons why this deal could end up being worse than the JCPOA. I’ll name just three. First, the JCPOA at least held out the hypothetical option of taking military action against Iran. Trump’s fire, aim, ready approach probably exhausts that card. We’re not going back to war with Iran any time soon, and Iran is less scared of that possibility than before. We’ve pissed away deterrence. Second, the MOU says that the strait will be “toll free” for 60 days, which, okay, great. But Iran now considers the Strait of Hormuz its sovereign property and it appears it is planning to charge “fees” for passage, once our ships leave. Even if that falls away in negotiations—which I doubt—the billions up front are a massive toll payment for opening the strait. Last, if all this holds, we’re now condoning the Iranians’ pursuit of a nuclear program so long as they don’t rub it in Trump’s face while he’s still president. Oh, and just today, he said that of course Iran has to be allowed to have a ballistic missile program. And anyone who says exactly what the administration told them to say two months ago is “not very smart.”

 

We’ve gone from hearing that Trump is a hero for having the courage to solve a problem no other president was smart or brave enough to tackle to leaving it as a thornier problem for future presidents.

 

The drive-thru president.

 

Which brings me back to where I started. Tickets on the Trump Train are cheap because the fine print states that you can be thrown off, or even under, the train by the conductor at a time of his choosing. And the train is under no obligation to even slow down beforehand.

 

For instance, Bibi Netanyahu bet his political fortunes and Israel’s security on the conviction that Trump could be counted on to see this thing through. Now he’s getting a tour of the underside of the Trump Train. He ordered the kosher Filet-O-Fish and now he’s unwrapping a Big Mac with extra bacon.

 

We don’t need to dwell on Israel’s predicament. At the G7 summit in Évian, France, Trump provided rhetorical cover for Israel’s enemies, condemning Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. The MOU, according to the administration, is binding for Israel in Lebanon, meaning that Trump has traded Israel’s security and sovereignty at Iran’s behest to protect Iran’s terrorist proxies.

 

The salient point here is that the friends of Israel who supported Trump are now scapegoats for not putting Trump’s interests first, while the enemies of Israel who felt “betrayed” by Trump are ecstatic because “the real Trump” has returned. The guys who claimed he was a pawn of Israel are overjoyed to learn that their idiotic, and often antisemitic, theory of Trump’s treachery was nonsense all along. All they care about is that the real MAGA Trump is back.

 

The real Trump never left. He does what he does for reasons having to do with his self-interest. That’s it. It’s not more complicated than that. If he can do the right thing easily and at low cost, he’ll do the right thing if he gets the credit for it. If it becomes hard, boring, costly, or embarrassing, he’ll give up or reverse course.

 

The hilarious or pathetic or hilariously pathetic part is that the same “It’s never the czar’s fault” game is underway yet again. Trump can never fail, he can only be failed. When the MAGA isolationists and Israel-haters were pissed at Trump, they demanded to know who tricked Trump into going to war. Now, the hawks and friends of Israel are searching for someone other than Trump to blame for Trump’s decision. As of now, they’ve settled on J.D. Vance, the “architect” of this deal, according to Lindsey Graham. It’s the “Vance Plan” and “Hillbilly Obama” foreign policy. I take a backseat to nobody when it comes to criticizing Vance, and I am totally open to the idea that his fingerprints are all over this deal, but Vance isn’t the president. The buck doesn’t stop with him. You can’t go around claiming Trump is a unique, historic genius when you like what he’s doing, and a dupe of Wormtongues and string-pullers when he does something stupid. I mean, you actually can, because people do it every day.

 

Including Donald Trump himself. Today in Évian—which, coincidentally, is naïve spelled backward—Trump said that if the deal works out, he’ll take the credit. If it doesn’t, “I’m blaming J.D.”

 

Trump doesn’t hide who he is, he admits it. He might as well say over the intercom at the drive-thru: “What’s your order? I need to know so I can f— you.”