Two Trump Administrations, Two ‘Trump’ Economies

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

Now for a provocation: No one has done more to vindicate Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell than Donald Trump, and the sooner people understand that the quicker we’ll get back to something like normalcy.

 

Hold that thought.

 

One of the more frequent talking points of Democrats, pundits (including yours truly), and even some anti-war MAGA type critics of Trump is that the president has “taken his eye off the ball” when it comes to the economy and affordability.

 

Since I’ve used that formulation myself, I should defend it before I get to my denunciation of it. As a political matter, voters judge presidents as much by what they talk about as anything else. Trump won the 2024 election for a lot of reasons, but a very good case can be made that the decisive voters in the seven swing states that gave him the win cast their ballots for Trump out of an understandable nostalgia for the pre-COVID economy of the first Trump term and an equally understandable dyspeptic view of the economy under Joe Biden. That first “Trump economy” was indeed very, very, good. The “Biden economy” wasn’t (I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute). Inflation and other Biden-and-COVID-induced economic wreckage prompted lots of working-class voters—many of whom probably voted for Barack Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020—to vote for Trump again in 2024.

 

Then, when Trump got into office, he focused—either rhetorically or substantively—on all manner of things that many of those decisive voters didn’t necessarily support or prioritize. We don’t need to review the last year in granular detail, but surely a significant number of Trump’s Hispanic (or non-Hispanic!) voters didn’t think we’d see the specific mass deportation efforts that have so badly dented Trump’s approval on immigration. Some voters probably believed Trump when he said he didn’t have anything to do with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, only to be surprised by the performative vandalism of DOGE in practice. His biggest fans were undoubtedly stoked for all of the retribution against his personal enemies but, again, those majority-making swing voters probably didn’t expect it to take up so much presidential bandwidth. It seems reasonable to assume that many of them didn’t see the destruction of the East Wing, the renaming of the Kennedy Center, the deployment of National Guard troops, the Greenland bullying, or the riot of economic illiteracy of “Liberation Day” and say, “Yes, this is what I voted for!”

 

So, at the level of political perception, I think it’s perfectly fine to talk about the president “taking his eye off the ball” with regard to the economy.The point I want to get to is that there’s a fallacy at the heart of the idea that if the president does concentrate on the economy, the economy will actually roar. This is a very longstanding gripe of mine. For instance, in 2002, I wrote:

 

Then there’s the inconvenient fiction that the president of the United States “runs” a $10 trillion economy. All of the metaphors and verbs used by the press leave you with the impression that the president sits in some giant cockpit, fidgeting with flashing lights and humming doodads as he “drives” the economy. Meanwhile, the White House itself, somehow, “creates” jobs. “The White House created 200,000 jobs in the last quarter…” Is there a Play-Doh job factory next to the White House bowling alley? And — gird your loins! — if the president is “asleep at the switch,” the economy could “derail” and “plunge into a ditch.” Of course, others see the president as some sort of farmer who can “grow the economy,” so long as he “focuses like a laser” on doing just that.

 

When you think about it, such language betrays an almost medieval understanding of economics. If the king doth prosper, so doth the land. It reminds me of John Boorman’s Excalibur. Once King Arthur is restored by the Grail, so too is all of England. Does any serious person believe that if a president “pays more attention” to the economy, it will necessarily do better than it will if he “ignores” the economy? Well, actually a lot of serious people seriously believe that. … Jimmy Carter was a micro-detail guy, and few people would say he ended the debate on how to manage the economy (let alone the White House tennis-court schedule, another detail he focused like a laser on).

 

FDR was probably the most famous example of a president keeping his eye on the economy. Over four terms, he didn’t fix it. We had to wait for the “externalities” of the post-World War II era to really get the economy roaring.

 

Since FDR, every president has leaned, to one extent or another, into the idea that they “run” the economy and “create” jobs—so long as things are going well. And both parties, and much of the media, signal-boost these claims.

 

At the margins, I think this is defensible for three reasons. First, it’s endemic to politics. Second, it’s endemic to politics because lots of people think it’s to some extent true. Third, economic policy does matter, and because of reasons 1 and 2, it gets personalized around the president (particularly in an era of congressional impotence).

 

Nobody has internalized this idea more than Trump, who has literally described the economy as a department store that he runs.

 

Which brings me to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

 

To the extent that economic policy can be directly credited for the pre-COVID economy in Trump’s first term, they deserve the lion’s share of the credit. Look, I get it, all presidents take credit for the legislation they supported and signed. So if you want to give Trump that conventional form of credit, fine.

 

But the simple, historical fact is that Trump signed on to legislative packages forged by Ryan and McConnell and relied on basic normie, “establishment,” conservative policies and ideas. 

 

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, while also lowering individual rates and moving toward full expensing. This was basically the kind of supply-side, pro-investment tax agenda congressional Republicans and right-of-center think tanks had been pushing long before Trump won. It most immediately drew on Ryan’s 2016 “A Better Way” blueprint.

 

I should note that Ryan included a Border Adjustment Tax in that plan—taxing imports but exempting exports, to incentivize domestic manufacturing. I didn’t like it, but it was crafted in large part as a more elegant and less harmful way to satisfy Trump’s hunger for his Tariff Everybody! approach. It also failed to make it into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

 

I bring that up because it illustrates how little of Trumponomics made it into the major economic policies of the first Trump term. Yes, there were some tariffs (which Biden mostly kept), but their significance, never mind success, is highly debatable. He did renegotiate and rename NAFTA into the USMCA, but those changes were mostly cosmetic. He wanted the headline, not the substance.

 

The point is, if you want to credit “Washington” for the good economy of the first Trump term, you need to allow for the fact that it wasn’t Trump’s unique genius and economic mastery that were responsible. It was a conventional, mainstream, tax and regulatory agenda favored by the supposedly RINO, cuck, “establishment,” zombie Reaganites. Steve Bannon never got his new New Deal.

 

Now, the broader story pushed by Trump and his supporters is that Ryan, McConnell, and the other normie Republicans in Congress and the White House worked against Trump and Trumpism, not just on economics, but on everything. They wouldn’t “let Trump be Trump.”

 

Consider Mike Pence. A stalwart defender of Trump for four years, Pence did his best to be loyal to Trump while also pushing sound policies as best he could behind the scenes. But when he wouldn’t “let Trump be Trump” on January 6, he was denounced as a coward and traitor.

 

Trump and his inner circle of loyalists were determined not to repeat such mistakes in his second term. J.D. Vance was selected because he assured the Trump boys and Tucker Carlson that he would be no Mike Pence. He’d be a Renfield to Trump’s Dracula. Out went the Trump restrainers, in came the pliant yes men and women, charged with one overriding command, “Let the baby have his bottle”—on tariffs, retribution, NATO, myriad vanity projects such as Trump Accounts, the Trump Card, the Trump Institute of Peace, the Trump Kennedy Center, etc.—and of, of course, “taking the oil” in Venezuela and (if Operation Epic Fury had worked the way he planned) Iran.

 

I don’t want to rehash my “news”letter from last week, but I’ll say it again: The Iran war isn’t a “betrayal” of “Trumpism.” It’s exactly the kind of thing you get when you organize an administration and GOP congressional majority around the “principle” that you can’t say no to the boss. “In Trump we Trust” is not a policy agenda, it’s a cult of personality.

 

If the theory is that presidents in general, or Trump in particular, run the economy, then you have to ask why is this economy so inferior to the Trump I economy. Now, I want to be clear: I think Democrats wildly exaggerate how bad the economy is. At least until the Iran war, it was going pretty well. But prices were still too high. Housing remains a real problem. Job growth wasn’t stellar, but unemployment was okay. In Trump’s first year, the economy grew 2.1 percent, down from 2.8 percent in Biden’s last year. Affordability, for all its base-stealing as a slogan, was a legitimate issue.

 

But the economy wasn’t “roaring like never before.” Few Americans felt like we were in a new “Golden Age.”

 

As Richard Reinsch explained this week, the Liberation Day agenda—despite all of the TACOing and revisions—has not delivered what Trump said it would, in terms of jobs (we shed 100,000 manufacturing in 2025), revenues (billions not trillions, mostly paid by Americans), or restructuring the economy.

 

Of course, no one—even his closest admirers—will deny that Trump considers himself a great salesman or that all presidents try to talk up the economy. But you have to accept that all of his talk about how the economy is going unprecedentedly well falls somewhere between obvious lies to wild exaggeration. And when he says affordability is a “hoax” you have to decide whether he understands it’s not and is lying or whether he actually believes it, which means his mastery over the economy isn’t what his superfans claim. Again, if it was, he would have willed into existence the same economy, or a better one, that we had pre-COVID.

 

And if you still cling to the idea that Washington can deliver that kind of economy simply by pulling the right levers, you have to ask why they did it in Trump’s first term, but not his second. My answer to that, at least in part, is that a lot of smart, patriotic, and unfairly demonized Republicans didn’t let Trump be Trump.

Canada’s Polite Pogrom

By Jesse Brown

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

 

Ted Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years because his employer, the University of British Columbia, was too tolerant.

 

In the days and weeks following the Hamas massacre of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, students and colleagues alike in his academic community posted fiery condemnations of and expressions of moral disgust toward … Israel. Rosenberg felt that some of these messages crossed the line into bigotry. One note accused Israel of harvesting the organs of murdered Palestinians. Another, from a medical-school resident, warned of a sinister, unnamed group of people “pulling the strings, who have orchestrated every war to ever happen, the ones who profit off of death and sickness.” “ The way I saw it,” he told me, “that level of demonization put the whole Jewish community at risk.”

 

He did not resign because of the messages, though; he resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them. “ I tried to meet with the dean,” Rosenberg said, “and he said, ‘If you feel you’re being discriminated against, put it through the DEI program.’ So I met with the head of the diversity, equity, and inclusion program within the faculty, and she refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was an issue. They view Jews as white within their DEI framework.” The faculty of medicine’s dean at the time, Dermot Kelleher, referred Rosenberg to UBC’s Equity and Inclusion website. Rosenberg searched the site for the words anti-Semitism and Jew. Neither appeared.

 

In his letter of resignation, he wrote, “I have no faith in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred.” After Rosenberg’s resignation became the subject of media attention, the equity committee of the department of medicine of UBC added a note to its website: “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia will not be tolerated.”

 

***

 

Hatred against Jews in Canada has spiked to historic levels since October 7. It’s a crisis commonly measured via violence and vandalism. More synagogues in Canada in the past 28 months have been desecrated, burned, shot at, or threatened with bombings than in any other country. Jews in Canada are now statistically more likely to be victims of police-reported hate crimes than any other minority. A Jewish girls’ school in Toronto was shot at on three separate occasions. A Jewish grandmother was stabbed in a kosher supermarket in Ottawa, and a mother in Toronto was assaulted while picking her child up from a Jewish day care. Police have thwarted a half-dozen extremist murder plots since October 7 against Jews by Canadian residents.

 

These incidents have generated news coverage and sympathetic statements from mayors and members of Parliament, whose proclamations that This is not who we are as Canadians have become commonplace.

 

Documenting and denouncing shootings and arson attacks are easy. But it’s harder to account for stories like Rosenberg’s, where Jews exit public life without any glass or bones being broken. How many Jewish academics, health-care workers, teachers, and arts-organization employees have left institutions because they no longer feel welcome or protected? Nobody is counting. The diversity statistics collected by these organizations rarely include “Jewish” as a category of self-identification.

 

Here’s what can be said for sure: 80 percent of Jewish doctors and medical students surveyed by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario reported experiencing anti-Semitism at work after October 7. In 2024, more than 100 Jewish doctors stopped acknowledging their affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in protest of what they saw as a failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. Almost a third of Ontario’s Jewish doctors say they are considering leaving Canada because of hostile work environments, according to the JMAO survey.

 

A group of Jewish teachers in British Columbia filed a human-rights complaint against their own union, accusing the BC Teachers’ Federation of ostracizing, bullying, and silencing its Jewish members. A federal report into Ontario’s K–12 schools found nearly 800 anti-Semitic incidents reported in elementary and high schools since 2023, many relating to the conduct of teachers.

 

One hundred thirty-five cultural organizations across Canada joined the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel. The Toronto International Film Festival dropped a documentary from its lineup that told the story of an Israeli grandfather’s experience rescuing his family from Hamas on October 7, before an outcry forced its restoration. A Jewish film festival was postponed in Hamilton, Ontario, when the theater hosting the event backed out, citing “safety concerns.” The cartoonist Miriam Libicki was banned from the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival out of “public safety concerns,” because years earlier, she had written a book about her time serving in the Israel Defense Forces. (The festival later reversed course and apologized.)

 

And then there’s Canadian politics.

 

In 2023, the mayor of Calgary broke with a long-standing local tradition and refused to attend a City Hall Hanukkah-menorah lighting; she said the event had “political intentions” because it “had been repositioned to support Israel.”

 

The awkward reality is that a main driver of these incidents is a very Canadian aversion to causing offense: The deference of many politicians and institutions to the views of a rapidly growing minority community is too often leading them to reject another minority community. Although relatively few Canadians hold negative views of Jews, opinion polls have found that such views find greater levels of support within the Canadian Muslim community. From 2001 to 2021, the Muslim population of Canada more than tripled, to about 5 percent of the population. Just 4 percent of non-Jewish Canadians agree that Jews are largely to blame for the negative consequences of globalization, but that figure rises to 28 percent among Canadian Muslims, according to a survey conducted by the University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym. Similarly, only 16 percent of Canadians believe that it is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in Canada, but that claim finds support among 41 percent of Canadian Muslims.

 

Canada is also the birthplace of a new educational framework called APR—Anti-Palestinian racism. APR was developed by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, and in 2024 the Toronto District School Board, which serves more than 230,000 students, voted to integrate APR into its wider anti-hate strategy. Although a new policy against racism might sound benign, many Jewish groups argue that in practice, APR can function as a form of discrimination and censorship. For example, a group of Toronto teachers had been given APR training by their union, in which they were told that it would be racist, and therefore forbidden, to ask why Arab countries don’t help Palestinians. To the claim that the phrase From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free carries genocidal implications toward Israel, the APR training suggests responding that “Palestinian chants and poetry exist to give Palestinians hope, and are not for others to define.”

 

David S. Koffman, a historian at York University and the editor in chief of Canadian Jewish Studies, writes that Canada’s Jews are turning inward. “Our assumptions about safety, trust, acceptance, and solidarity have been punctured,” he observes. As a result, he says, more Jewish parents are enrolling their children in private Jewish day schools, and job applications at Jewish organizations are rising.

 

Which is not to say that Jewish spaces are safe from external judgment and scorn. An anti-Zionist website called The Maple published lists of the names of Canadian Jews who have served in the IDF, as well as the names of Jewish children’s schools and summer camps with which they were associated. The author of these lists, Davide Mastracci, wrote that “the complicit segment of Canada’s Jewish population deserves blame for what they do, not who they are.” Weeks after the list was published, five pro-Palestinian groups launched a campaign to revoke the accreditation of 17 Canadian Jewish sleepaway camps. The groups accused the summer camps of supporting “genocide” and called for “a gigantic change.” Then, both synagogues listed by The Maple as complicit Jewish institutions were shot at.

 

Among my Jewish friends and family, these efforts to intimidate and alienate Jews, to exclude them from civil society and from public life, and to close down private Jewish spaces are discussed with far more concern and frequency than the regular reports of graffiti and name-calling. Five Jewish families pulled their children from the downtown Toronto public school in my neighborhood last year, after a series of controversies. At least four Jewish journalists left the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, after the paper’s ombud on discrimination and bias wrote a social-media post questioning “who did what” on October 7, and reposted another criticizing North American Jews for “centering their feelings.”

 

I have a general sense that we’re witnessing a polite pogrom, that Jewish life in my country has forever changed, and that I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures. But I don’t know for sure. The data do not exist, and the institutions in question won’t collect them. Perhaps they consider it impolite to ask.

The Gorilla Channel

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

My favorite satire of the president and the political culture he’s created is three paragraphs long, takes 15 seconds to read, and managed the neat trick of fooling thousands into believing it was real despite being preposterously over the top.

 

If you were Very Online in 2018, you remember “the gorilla channel.” If you weren’t, treat yourself now.

 

“The gorilla channel” was presented as an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s newly published Fire and Fury, a behind-the-scenes account of Donald Trump’s chaotic first year as president. Screenshots of buzzworthy passages from the book, each more embarrassing than the last, were circulating at the time on social media. So when a new “excerpt” emerged chronicling the president’s keen interest in watching gorillas fight and the lengths to which aides had gone to accommodate him, it seemed … not plausible, exactly, but plausible enough.

 

The brilliance of the satire lay in how efficiently it mocked the authoritarian pathologies of Trumpism: the lowbrow attraction to displays of violence and dominance, the construction of a false reality to suit the president’s desires, the cowardly sycophancy of toadies in humoring him rather than telling him an uncomfortable truth. Ridiculous as it may seem, you can draw a straight line from “the gorilla channel” to crazed MAGA goons smashing windows at the Capitol to overturn a supposedly rigged election.

 

On top of all that, the spoof shrewdly zeroed in on an aspect of Trump’s personality that’s well known yet still underestimated as an influence on his behavior, I think. Like the television-obsessed Chauncey Gardiner in Being There, he likes to watch.

 

Now and then, something in the news will bring me back to “the gorilla channel”—like this new NBC News report on how the president is getting his information about the Iran war.

 

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

 

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

 

He’s also doing the usual stuff like conferring with military advisers, intelligence deputies, and foreign diplomats, NBC’s sources insisted, “but the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war.”

 

One official claimed that the president’s briefings tend to emphasize U.S. successes and downplay Iranian actions, to the point where Trump supposedly wasn’t told at all when Iran struck American refueling planes stationed at a Saudi base. Another observed that feedback from White House aides was better following briefings that emphasized U.S. victories.

 

Sensational footage of violent displays of dominance, a misleading reality manufactured to please the president, and deputies reluctant to risk angering him by delivering the unvarnished truth: The morning sizzle reel of explosions sure sounds like a wartime version of “the gorilla channel” to me.

 

He likes to watch. Like it or not, we’re all watching with him.

 

Spectators or hostages?

 

There’s something unusually spectatorial about this conflict.

 

In America, every war is spectatorial for most of the population. We don’t have conscription, major attacks on the homeland are a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime thing, and news outlets stream 24/7. When the United States engages in combat, the only thing to do is turn on the TV and watch.

 

Even so, this war seems different.

 

One reason, surely, is the autocratic way in which it’s being run. “Even at the top levels of the Trump administration, very few people know what is actually going on in terms of the outreach to Iran,” Axios reported this morning. Israeli intelligence supposedly knows nothing more than that “something is brewing” diplomatically between the U.S. and the Iranians.

 

When one of the combatants is stuck refreshing Truth Social along with the rest of us to find out its ally’s next move, that’s a whole new dimension of war as a spectator sport.

 

Modern American civilians are always spectators to war, but in our current autocratic reality it would be truer to say we’re hostages to it. The president attacked without popular support in polling, without authorization from Congress, and without any serious attempt to persuade voters of the wisdom of starting a fight that might wreck the global economy and require U.S. infantry to unwreck it. He wanted to watch the gorilla channel so he turned it on, without warning. Now the whole American family is forced to watch.

 

The fact that Trump is completely untrustworthy and constantly contradicting himself compounds the hostage dynamic.

 

On some days he’ll say the war is nearly over, on others he’ll wonder if it’s just begun. We might be deep in peace talks with Iran or we might be about to seize their coastline around the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday he told reporters cryptically that the Iranians had given the United States a “very big present worth a tremendous amount of money” related to the oil and gas industry—a claim that “baffled” multiple sources close to the White House, per Politico. Was he lying? Confused? Spilling a secret?

 

Who knows?

 

But one of the few ways in which Americans are treated as more than spectators in the typical conflict is when the White House updates them periodically about the state of battle. It’s a gesture of accountability, acknowledging that the war is nominally being fought in the people’s name. Because nothing Trump says is worth anything, that accountability is out the window in this case. His comments on the war always have some ulterior motive hiding in plain sight—happy talk to reassure his base or to manipulate markets, scary bluster to try to bluff Iran’s regime into surrendering.

 

We’re not being informed by our leadership in any meaningful way. We’re hostages, nervously watching and hoping for the best.

 

Reality television.

 

Still, that doesn’t account entirely for the sense I have of Americans passively rubbernecking at a conflict with tail risks more frightening than what we faced in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

If this conflict seems unusually spectatorial that’s because, to an unusual degree, it is a spectacle. By design.

 

Trump’s daily sizzle-reel briefing is the least of it. Consider the embarrassing videos that the White House comms team has spent the past month posting on social media intercutting footage of things blowing up in Iran with snippets of video games, movies, sports highlights, and assorted internet detritus. Some military veterans are mortified at seeing death reduced to viral content, but Team Trump is undaunted. “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” one White House official crowed to Politico. A second proudly boasted that the clips had received 3 billion impressions in four days.

 

That’s true to the spirit of populism, at least. Not only are those banger memes proudly vicious and in poor taste, they’re egalitarian. If the president gets to watch “gorilla channel” hype footage of Iranians dying every morning, why shouldn’t the rest of us?

 

Trump’s facile intoxication with showmanship has also spilled over into war messaging, starting with making Truth Social his main channel of communication about the war. Sam Stein of The Bulwark described precisely how it feels to see a new presidential “truth” float across your social media feed in March 2026: “Every one of these posts is now a gut-wrenching journey, in which you read on to discover if some international alliance is teetering or some mass casualty event is being threatened or if our global energy market is about to come undone.”

 

To be led in a war by Trump is to remain in a state of constant dramatic suspense. Oh God, what did he say now? What will he post next?

 

The drama is deliberate, too, needless to say. When he announces a 48-hour deadline for the regime to reopen Hormuz or see its power plants blown to smithereens, that’s suspenseful. When he calls Iran’s leaders “deranged scumbags” and luxuriates in the “great honor” he enjoys of killing them en masse, that’s exciting. When he teases reporters about the “very big present” Iran supposedly gave the United States without offering details, that’s mysterious. When his scowling defense secretary proclaims, “We negotiate with bombs,” that’s—uh, well, that’s deeply cringe. But you’re supposed to leap to your feet and pump your fist like you’re watching a crowd-pleasing action thriller.

 

None of this is a coincidence, is it?

 

“It helps to remember he’s a creature of television and spectacle is everything to him,” journalist Michael Weiss said of NBC News’ report this morning on Trump’s video briefings. “War is TV and TV is war. Sweeps week alternates with occasional programming pivots and canceled midseason replacements.” We made a reality television star president. Of course his sense of reality would be filtered through television.

 

He likes to watch.

 

And so no wonder that our “strategy” in this war consists of nothing much more complicated than dominance. “What we’re seeing [in Iran] is a situation where targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy,” retired Gen. James Mattis—Trump’s former defense secretary—said this week of America’s predicament, arguing that hitting 15,000 targets hasn’t gained us the upper hand strategically. True—but to a nimrod who thinks war is first and foremost a spectacle, those targets mean everything.

 

Iran’s success in shutting down the Strait of Hormuz might be devastating, but it’s entirely invisible apart from the prices displayed at your local gas station. Trump’s success, though? There are 15,000 big booms testifying to it, enough to support a “gorilla channel” of morning viewing for the president. And, of course, some banger memes.

 

Gamification.

 

I’ve been trying to think of something thoughtful to say about the remarkable, and remarkably lucrative, luck some traders have had this year in anticipating major developments in Iran.

 

“On Monday, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a sudden spike—with no public news to explain it—roughly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants,” Axios noted this morning. “On the Friday before the war began, an unusual surge of more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed hundreds of bets predicting a U.S. strike on Iran by the next day, according to a New York Times analysis.”

 

Coincidences do happen. But in an administration as filthy with corruption as this one, in which top aides reportedly brag about their legal impunity amid bribery allegations, the Occam’s razor explanation for those trades isn’t luck.

 

My interest in the matter has less to do with whether it will be properly investigated and punished (spoilers: no and no) than with the mentality of war-profiteering in such a shameless way. Surely it’s easier to rationalize cashing in on military conflict with insider trading when that conflict has been transformed from a horrifying real-world blood-and-guts fight into an online spectacle.

 

Into … content.

 

“Meme-ifying the war detaches the president’s supporters from the consequences of his viciousness,” I wrote earlier this month about the White House’s social media hype videos. The same could be said of the other ways in which Trump and his deputies have turned the conflict into a dramatic production. The manufactured will-he-or-won’t-he suspense, the Truth Social posts that blur military action and trolling—it’s all just dopamine hits for the average American spectator, not all that different from the randomized bite-sized thrills one gets from online gambling or matching on a dating app.

 

One veteran disgusted by the White House’s digital memes told the Washington Post that he feared Trump officials were creating “emotional distance between reality and actual suffering,” adding that, “If war is a game, then it’s pretty easy to press start.” Right. And if war is a game, it’s also less morally upsetting to cash in on it. It might terrify you if two gorillas tried to tear each other apart right in front of you, but if you got to watch it on television, at a safe emotional remove?

 

You’d be glued to the screen. You might even wager on one of them to win.

 

That’s Trump’s presidency in a nutshell: on the one hand the most recklessly dangerous leadership experiment America has ever conducted, on the other a ridiculous spectacle in which nothing is taken fully seriously and therefore everything on some level is a game. Maybe that will change once boots hit the ground on Kharg Island or gas reaches $9 a gallon. Until then, the memes will continue.

The Iran War Successes They Don’t Want You to Hear About

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

If you’re following the coverage of the U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, you’re liable to be disappointed by what you’re seeing.

 

America is “hapless,” battered, and bruised. Iran may not be “winning,” but it’s certainly not losing. And not losing is all that the regime must do to claim victory. The architects of this war, like Secretary Marco Rubio, should be hanging their heads in shame. “So why is his political star on the rise?” Politico columnist Nahal Toosi asked. After all, everyone with half a brain knows this war is a disaster for the United States.

 

Donald Trump’s comments about the war are all over the map. To his detractors, that looks like flailing inconstancy. Among his supporters, it’s brilliant strategic ambiguity. But most acknowledge that Trump appears to be suing for peace even as Iran continues to throttle maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, increasing global commodities prices and putting immense pressure on the U.S. and Israel to wrap this up soon — even, perhaps, short of their objectives.

 

The verdict from some quarters is in: The war is “quickly becoming a disaster.” The sooner Washington acknowledges its defeat, the better.

 

It seems now that rendering a pessimistic assessment of U.S. and Israeli progress in this war is the price of admission into sophisticated circles. If you’re not hopelessly melancholy, you’re not a serious person. At least, you’re not availing yourself of the news from the front.

 

That dour outlook seems wholly divorced from an objective appraisal of the war in its fourth week.

 

Start from the Start

 

To take the full measure of the war so far, we should start at the beginning.

 

The merciless slaughter of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters in December and January was not an anticipated result of the Twelve-Day War in June of last year, which culminated in Operation Midnight Hammer. The U.S.-Israeli decision to take advantage of the Iranian regime’s manifest weakness was an exigency that necessitated an emergency force buildup. Unlike the Iraq War, there was no long prelude to this war. But like the Iraq War, this conflict began with an attempted decapitation strike. This time, it succeeded.

 

U.S.-Israeli forces neutralized roughly 40 senior Iranian leadership figures in the opening salvos of the war. As the conflict progressed, Iran’s armed forces and intelligence leaders, national security figureheads, senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitary commanders, and the brainpower behind Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs met the same fate. Israeli forces lure Iranian military targets into kill boxes of their choosing, make direct phone calls to individual Basij commanders to intimidate them into surrendering, and hunt down individual IRGC targets in the wooded hills to which they’ve fled.

 

Iran’s command-and-control is famously decentralized, but these operations have contributed to Iran’s inability to coordinate strategically coherent attacks on U.S., Israeli, or Gulf region targets. Meanwhile, the U.S.-Israeli campaign has enjoyed spectacular tactical successes on the battlefield.

 

Within the first two weeks of the war, U.S. and Israeli forces unleashed a blistering wave of strikes on Iranian air defenses, radar systems, missile launch and storage facilities, drone capabilities, naval mines, air bases, and the pillars of regime stability. The Iranian air force is gone. Most of Iran’s air and missile bases have been rendered inoperable. Its naval installations along the Persian Gulf coast were incapacitated, and about 120 Iranian ships were disabled or sunk. And what remains of Iran’s once formidable network of terrorist proxies across the Middle East was decimated, their leadership ranks decapitated, and their local support networks disrupted or entirely cut off.

 

As the U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic entered its fourth week, their joint force embarked on what their military brass called “phase two” of the war: taking out Iran’s military infrastructure. The U.S. and Israel hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, including those that were struck in June 2025, as well as new targets, including undeclared nuclear sites. U.S.-Israeli strikes also began targeting Iran’s defense industrial base. Its missile-production facilities, drone manufacturers, explosives-production plants, and sensitive electronics developers came under sustained bombardment.

 

Before the end of the third week of fighting, the United States had achieved command of the skies in southern Iran sufficient to deploy vulnerable air assets like A-10 Thunderbolt IIs and Apache attack helicopters over the Strait of Hormuz to strafe small fast-attack boats and disable drones in flight. Similar air superiority had already been achieved over Iran’s northwest, including the capital city of Tehran, allowing non-stealth aircraft to execute sorties using precision-guided gravity munitions and allowing the U.S. to relieve the strain on its arsenal of “exquisite” missiles and interceptors.

 

The U.S. and Israel continue to degrade Iran’s ability to launch the ballistic missiles with which Tehran has terrorized its neighbors from the outset of the war. Their air forces have struck Iran’s buried missile-storage facilities and above-ground arsenals. They loiter above the entrances to intact bunkers, hitting them only when they spot activity. As of March 23, the Israel Defense Forces estimate that about 330 of Iran’s 470 ballistic missile launchers have been rendered inoperable or inaccessible. The roughly 4,700 strikes on Iran’s missile program alone are estimated to have eliminated 70 percent of Iran’s launcher array, contributing to a 90 percent decrease in Iran’s missile launch capability.

 

Some Iranian drones and missiles continue to evade the region’s layered air defense systems, striking civilian infrastructure and non-combatant targets like urban and suburban neighborhoods with devastating effect. Indeed, to evade Israel’s anti-missile defenses, Iran has deployed cluster munitions against Israeli civilian targets — a tactic with no objective other than to maximize civilian casualties. But unlike Iran’s coordinated drone strike on Saudi Arabian oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019, for example, Iran’s missile attacks on its neighbors lack the coordination to achieve a strategic effect. They have not sapped any of Iran’s regional targets of their will to support and prosecute the war against this regime.

 

And for all the visible signs of stress in the political class in Washington that this war has exposed, Iran is reeling, too. The statements issued by the remnants of its leadership are frequently contradicted by the actions of its field commanders, suggesting a breakdown of communications. The degree to which Iran’s omnidirectional attacks on soft targets across the Middle East have emboldened its neighbors to back the U.S.-Israeli campaign, or even to actively participate in it, chastened Iranian leadership and compelled them to issue conciliatory pronouncements (which, again, were also betrayed as hollow by continued Iranian attacks on its neighbors). “IDF Military Intelligence has identified ‘low morale, absenteeism, and burnout’ among IRGC ballistic missile units within the past week,” the Institute for the Study of War reported Tuesday night. “The IDF said that ballistic missile unit soldiers have refused to go to launch sites due to fear of IDF strikes.”

 

U.S. assets are still pouring into the region. Marine Expeditionary Units and thousands of U.S. Army paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne Division are reportedly en route to the Gulf as the U.S.-Israeli air campaign methodically neutralizes Iran’s power-projection capabilities. Meanwhile, Iranian representatives insist that the Strait of Hormuz is, in fact, open, despite reports that Iran laid about one dozen naval mines in its waterways. Those vessels that “neither participate in nor support acts of aggression against Iran” can pass safely, so long as they pay an extortion fee.

 

Opening the strait to maritime traffic — which U.S. commanders repeatedly assured anyone willing to listen would happen sequentially, following the significant degradation of Iran’s military capabilities — will follow the clearing of the strait’s mines and the elimination of the Iranian road-mobile anti-ship missile threat (possibly with the deployment of Marine Amphibious Ready Groups on the ground). That would be a dangerous operation. If successful, though, demonstrating that the strait is clear to merchant and naval traffic would be to duplicate the operations in the Gulf in which the U.S. Navy engaged in 1987 and 1988.

 

If such an operation succeeded, it would deprive Iran of one of its last points of leverage against the West.

 

Compared to What?

 

There is a temptation abroad — in the press, at least — to yadda-yadda away these spectacular tactical successes in combat against a nation that, as recently as 2022, commanded one of the most formidable militaries on earth. Iranian hubris and that of the terrorists in its orbit set into motion a sequence of events that would culminate in its destruction. But it was by no means foreseeable at the outset of this decade that the Iranian threat could suffer such a lopsided series of defeats.

 

The U.S. and its allies have been war-gaming scenarios involving an existential conflict with Iran for decades. Those simulations provided Western war planners with little confidence that such a mission would succeed. Rather, it was likely to stoke a global conflict typified by terrorist attacks throughout the West and unacceptable losses on the Middle East’s battlefields. And following a sustained and bloody war, it was by no means assured that the United States would achieve its objectives.

 

“Compared to what?” is a crucial question. Answering it grounds observers’ conclusions in a set of empirically verifiable conditions and tests them against conceivable counterfactuals. Compared to those scenarios, this war has so far been a spectacular tactical success. What’s more, it would be a mistake to conclude that the alternative to this war was a durable and peaceful regional status quo.

 

Pick any day that followed the October 7 massacre, and you’re likely to encounter a new and wholly unstable status quo in the region. Go back as far as you like, in fact. You aren’t going to find a period in which Iran was placidly committed to the preservation of the prevailing regional dynamic. Iran is a revisionist power. It is and has been doctrinally committed to revising the status quo in its favor. That’s what its proxy terrorist network, its nuclear-weapons program, and its crash-course ballistic-missile development enterprise were for, after all.

 

Where critics of this war — indeed, arguably every American war since 1945 — have a point is in the degree to which they are inclined to dismiss U.S.-Israeli tactical victories because, they conclude, those achievements do not beget strategic successes. We don’t fight to win, they accurately note. We lose our resolve. We meddle heedlessly in inscrutable tribal subtleties. We back the wrong horse. In short, we don’t lose the war; we lose the postwar.

 

Fair enough. Given our track record, cynicism may be warranted. But cynicism obscures a comprehensive appraisal of how much Iran has lost in this war, and how much it stands to lose going forward.

 

“Both China and Russia are showing that any partnerships they have are highly conditional,” RAND analyst Howard Shatz recently observed. The war has demonstrated that the “trilateral strategic pact” Moscow and Beijing signed with Tehran in January — the culmination of decades of strategic coordination — wasn’t worth the ink. So much for that “cornerstone for a new multipolar order.” And every revisionist power on the planet that was once willing to purchase Russian and Chinese radar and anti-air defense batteries now has ample evidence to conclude that they are no match for the West’s offensive air power.

 

The war has also clarified the thinking in the Persian Gulf. If Iran’s strategic calculus in executing attacks on the Gulf states’ civilians and critical infrastructure was aimed at forcing Washington’s nominal allies in the region to sue for peace, Iran’s approach had the opposite effect. The Gulf states have not engaged in hostile operations against Iran — not yet, at least, though the Saudis are flirting with the prospect — but those nations have gravitated closer to Washington’s orbit. They are supporting the U.S.-Israeli campaign materially, cracking down on Iranian assets, disrupting Iran’s operations, and exiling their envoys.

 

The United States alone has proven it has both the capability and willingness to contribute to the Gulf’s defense against the preeminent threat to that neighborhood. That will be a lasting consequence of this war. And Iran is sensitive to its own isolation, as the laughable appeal by one IRGC official to the Gulf states to join with Tehran in a postwar regional security architecture suggests.

 

The Forest for the Trees

 

Given all this, it is by no means credible to contend that Trump’s surprise statement on Monday, revealing his ongoing (and possibly successful) efforts to open a back-channel dialogue with Iranian representatives, suggests that the United States is on the back foot.

 

Many speculated that Trump’s announcement was an expression of his desire to find an off-ramp to this trying war. Some assumed that Trump was merely trying to manipulate global oil markets. Still others supposed that Trump was attempting to sow discord within what remains of the Iranian regime’s ranks, instilling in them the paranoid fear that their brothers-in-arms were preparing to sell them out. Any or all of these could be true at the same time.

 

Whether Trump has a plan or not, the president’s inconstancy is not reflected in the statements of his subordinates, Defense Department officials, or CENTCOM commanders. They have been clear from the outset about what this war would look like, and they’ve not deviated from what they initially outlined. And if the war proceeds as advertised, combat operations will conclude with a negotiated settlement with someone who has the authority to speak for the Iranian government. At that point, it progresses to the next phase: undermining the regime from within.

 

That phase was always going to look like failure to those who are impatient for something that approximates a definitive conclusion to this conflict. Both U.S. and Israeli officials have emphasized that fomenting internal dissent that flowers into an insurrection will take time, if it happens at all — and “the time has not yet come,” as Admiral Brad Cooper said this week. “There will be a clear signal at some point, as the president has indicated, for you to be able to come out,” he added.

 

No credible Western official has suggested that such an outcome would materialize overnight. It is, however, hardly a gamble to conclude that a regime that has put down popular insurrectionary revolts with near-metronomic regularity in this century will face another soon enough. When their citizens come for them this time, the regime will confront them without the apparatus of a terror state.

 

Only internal fragmentation will bring this regime down — intra-elite disagreements over the best course to ensure their own survival. Those disagreements won’t materialize in wartime. Patronage networks will have to break down first. Iran’s isolation on the world stage will have to bite. Institutions will have to cease to function. Nothing is guaranteed.

 

But the tactics the U.S. and Israel have deployed in pursuit of that strategic outcome have been immeasurably effective.

 

The End Game

 

This overlong article has not comprehensively detailed the degree to which Iran is imposing real costs on the U.S. and Israel, its Gulf neighbors, and the world. Such analyses are not hard to find. And there is a real risk that Donald Trump repeats the mistakes of the past, declares victory prematurely, and leaves the region in an ambiguous condition in which the Iranian regime can reconstitute itself and once again terrorize the world. That’s a fearsome prospect, but it’s also still a theoretical one.

 

As one unnamed Iranian citizen who spoke by phone with the New York Post’s reporters last week insisted, “More than 90 percent of the people are grateful to Trump and thankful to the USA.” The sentiment is, indeed, widespread. “The only time people become worried is when the number of missiles [decreases], when the noise stops,” another Iranian civilian concurred, “then for several hours everyone gets stressed thinking [a cease-fire] is going to happen again.”

 

The fall of the Islamic Republic would be an epochal development. The United States and Israel are methodically paving the way for such an event. If they succeed, a better world awaits all of us. Whatever setbacks American and Israeli forces experienced in the pursuit of that outcome will be seen through posterity’s lens as a small price to have paid. But even if the regime does not collapse, its offensive capabilities have been degraded and its value to the anti-American axis is far more limited than it was on February 27.

 

Whichever way you look at it, the U.S. and Israel are advancing their interests and strengthening international security.

An Unpersuadable Nation

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

The point of democracy is to elect leaders who govern with the public’s consent. In a democratic republic, therefore, it’s good political hygiene for elected officials to make a clear case for their policies before implementing them. This applies most crucially to matters of war. So I sympathize with the growing chorus lamenting Donald Trump’s failure to make his war aims in Iran clear and thereby get the public on board.

 

He should have presented a strong, lucid argument for the necessity of war because that’s his job. But I don’t for a minute believe that it would have made much of a difference in public opinion. And whatever support it might have garnered would have dissipated by now. Because whatever Trump might have said would have been challenged by and buried in the omnipresent antiwar media coverage.

 

If Americans can look at the stunning success of the war so far and proclaim it a failure, we’re not, at this moment, a people who can be convinced of the necessity of war (without a direct attack on the homeland). We no longer believe the evidence of our senses, let alone the pleadings of Donald Trump. America currently suffers from a set of stubborn comorbidities that make persuasion on military affairs a nonstarter. Our Vietnam Syndrome was compounded by Iraq and Afghanistan Syndrome and further complicated by Trump Derangement Syndrome.

 

On the left, the anti-colonialists view every U.S. military action as a prima facie war crime. Meanwhile, over the course of decades, they’ve conquered and colonized the liberal mainstream. On the right, patriotism has been eaten up by nationalism, which considers only the narrowest interpretation of the country’s national interests.

 

What about all those independents out there in the middle? Well, Trump has already turned his independent supporters into his largest group of detractors before the war began. He wasn’t going to get them back with a case for bombing Iran.

 

The whole thing reminds me of the argument that Israel failed to make an effective public case for its actions after October 7. As if Hamas itself hadn’t made the definitive case on that day. Sympathy for Israel, already in decline by that point, leveled off for a few days before the bottom fell out altogether. And that was well before the claims of genocide, starvation, and so on.

 

As I wrote in an earlier newsletter:

 

The vital information that Israel needed to disseminate … was this: We will not perish. We are fiercer in battle than you could ever imagine, more accomplished in intelligence and operational execution than any nation in history, peerless in the art of war, and unapologetic in our commitment to survival. We don’t bend to public opinion; we stop at nothing to defend our existence.

 

There’s a lot of talk about how Israel and the U.S. are different countries with different concerns that don’t always overlap. And it’s true. But in this case, what applies to Israel applies, mutatis mutandis, to America. The vital information we need to disseminate is that Iran, and other adversaries, cannot indefinitely threaten us or our allies with the world’s most dangerous weapons. They cannot blackmail or deter us from destroying them before they have an opportunity to destroy us. Or as Trump put it, “I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago.”

 

And when it’s done—successfully, God willing—it might reopen a space for persuadability in our doubtful and dug-in culture. Victory is Trump’s strongest argument.

Our Socialists in Havana

National Review Online

Thursday, March 26, 2026

 

If there is one thing communist regimes have excelled at over the years, it is creating showcases to gull sympathetic Western visitors.

 

It was in this spirit that Cuba mustered a single luxury hotel with a gas generator for the latest in a long train of useful idiots.

 

A motley collection of activists with the China-linked anti-war group Code Pink, as well as a handful of far-left influencers, descended on Havana set on convincing the long-suffering Cuban people that they’ve never had it so good. Sure, a rolling nationwide blackout spoiled some of the fun, but this crew still managed to blame the United States for the Cuban regime’s deficiencies.

 

“I cannot believe how cruel this U.S. policy is,” Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson marveled while surveying the darkened landscape from the balcony of his five-star redoubt. “We could stop this.” That’s the message the Cuban handlers of the “Nuestra América Convoy,” which was designed to “show the world that Cuba is under siege,” wanted.

 

Perhaps Robinson didn’t know that Cuba’s rolling blackouts are an endemic feature of life on that island. They predate the extradition of Nicolás Maduro, whose criminal regime was propped up by Cuban military and intelligence officials in exchange for privileged energy exports. Indeed, even oil-rich Venezuela’s power grid struggled for years amid a “brain drain” and “corruption,” and Cuba is beset by the same problems. These issues are a predictable outgrowth of socialist maladministration.

 

The Cuban regime and its fellow travelers insist, as they always do, that the capitalist world’s refusal to prop up their economy is the source of all their woes. The truth is that the system established by Fidel Castro and buttressed for decades by Soviet beneficence has never prioritized its own people. The Cuban government has preyed on its own people and sought to frustrate American geostrategic interests all over the globe.

 

Since its founding in 1959, communist Cuba has exported militancy throughout the developing world — from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was the destination for “dozens of planes each year” that were hijacked in America and “diverted by criminals and cranks” to Havana, as the author Jason Burke observed. Its militants have inspired and supported anti-American terrorists and anti-Western regimes across the globe, from West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang (a.k.a. the Red Army Faction) to the Iranian regime — the revolutionary founders of which were, for a bunch of theocrats, surprisingly enamored with Marxist thought.

 

Contrary to the propaganda, Cuba is one of the more racially segregated societies on earth, with high-status employment opportunities reserved for those with lighter skin and straight hair. Cuba has some of the worst “income inequality” on the planet. That is a feature of all officially “classless” societies, but the disparity between haves and have-nots is especially pronounced in Cuba. Deforestation, unsustainable mining and farming practices, and rampant pollution ensure that Cuba is home to a variety of ongoing environmental disasters. Not that this matters to the apologists for the Castroite regime.

 

The clock now may be ticking for the political project they so adore. Cuba is feeling the strain of both its system’s dysfunction and the additional pressure Washington has put on the regime’s functionaries. In early February, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel signaled his willingness to engage with the United States, no doubt motivated by the mortal terror that President Trump’s January 3 raid on Caracas instilled in Havana’s communist cadres.

 

The regime has, so far, offered mostly symbolic gestures toward reform. The Trump administration should demand real changes bringing greater economic and political openness, toward the goal of the eventual end of the regime. There is no reason to settle for the “Delcy Rodríguez model” here — Venezuela can give the U.S. oil, but Cuba has nothing similar to offer President Trump.

 

If such a U.S. push were to succeed, it would be of immense benefit to the Cuban people — and a profound disappointment to the likes of Code Pink.

The ‘Iran Deal’ Was Never the Solution to the Regime’s Nuclear Program

By Rebeccah Heinrichs

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

We are a mere three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, but with the “doomerism” coming out of a large segment of the professional national security world, you’d think we were a decade into a catastrophic, spiraling world war and on the precipice of a global economic recession.

 

In actuality, the United States and Israel are militarily crushing the Iranians, the Arab world is siding with America and condemning Iran, and the Europeans are leaning toward actively helping the United States secure the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The Iranian air force and navy are smoldering in rubble. The United States is mercilessly bombing  Iranian underground missile factories so that, years from now, if there are enough people still alive who know how to make them, they won’t be able to. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who claimed to be the leader of the Islamic world, was killed on the first day of Epic Fury, and his son, crowned the new supreme leader, is either dead or otherwise incapacitated. He has not appeared publicly. The Israelis have eliminated the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regime’s military police force, the Basij. These evil officials were the most competent at and responsible for arming and equipping terrorists, defending the regime, and repressing the Iranian people.

 

The worst-case-scenario predictions about Iran’s possible retaliations against America have not materialized. There have not been thousands of American deaths (there have, tragically, been 13 service member deaths, due mostly to accidents). As the operation goes on, the tempo of Iranian missile and drone strikes continue to decrease, with some periodic spikes. And Iran’s economy, already squeezed by American and European sanctions, is experiencing even greater degrees of distress. Even so, the mere threat of Iranian attacks against shipping in the vital Strait of Hormuz gives the flailing terrorist regime leverage to wield against the world’s superpower.

 

No analyst, no matter how well-informed and equipped with the best historical case studies, can predict with high confidence how this war will end. Will the regime utterly collapse or be sufficiently weakened so that a more pragmatic leader complies with U.S. demands? It’s impossible to know. This war is unprecedented in the overmatch of American-Israeli capabilities and military competency against a shockingly weaker enemy whose strongest backers have mostly decided against helping it (with the important exception of Russia’s reported willingness to aid Iran in targeting). That said, until the Strait of Hormuz is secure, and the Iranian drones and missiles stop soaring, the war isn’t over. Still, the extensive progress of the military campaign so far has not stopped the most ardent critics of the war from predicting — with the utmost confidence — that it will end in catastrophe for America and its allies.

 

Many national security pundits tell us that, despite America’s overwhelming success in destroying thousands of targets on the campaign’s list, the Iranians are winning the war.

 

We’re told that despite the United States’ destruction of Iranian cruise missile sites along the strait’s coastline and the elimination of their mine-dropping ships, there’s nothing the United States can do to stop the regime from holding the strait hostage.

 

They say that the United States’ successful bombing campaign and Israeli targeted strikes against regime leaders have only strengthened the Islamic Republic’s fanaticism and resolve.

 

We are told that, even though the tempo of the Iranian missile and drone launches has dramatically decreased, the Iranians have surprises up their sleeves and are holding back the best capabilities and about to unleash massive, and more precise, strikes (the same argument espoused by Iran’s state media propaganda).

 

We’re told the regime leaders who were renowned for their ruthless repression and terrorism, when eliminated, will be replaced by Islamist radicals who are far more hardened, more willing to take risks, and more dangerous, and that even though the Islamic Republic’s top nuclear scientists have been eliminated, new nuclear scientists will appear and accelerate the nuclear weapons program with abandon. We’re told that the Iranians will rebuild their missiles and drones and that the United States is woefully unable to replenish its stocks.

 

No matter how much the United States and Israel achieve everything on their to-do list, no matter the clearly explained military objectives, strategy, and success of the endeavor, the end is still somehow a humiliating defeat for President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

The architect of the Obama administration’s echo chamber, Ben Rhodes, has been the most insightful when trying to divine the meaning behind the fact-defying “doomerism.” He recently posted on X: “As with Iraq, the problem is not the strategy or tactics of the Iran war. It’s the decision to fight an unnecessary war in the first place.”

 

The reality is, many of the loudest critics are wedded to the fiction that the 2015 Iran deal was the solution to the terrorist state’s nuclear weapons work, that it shielded Iran from U.S. and Israeli military intervention, thereby keeping the United States from entering a war it would lose.

 

But even the Iran deal’s biggest defenders must admit that it uncorked billions of dollars in sanctions relief to the terrorist regime, even though it didn’t meet the criteria for a “good deal” set out by the Obama administration at the start of negotiations. It didn’t have “anywhere, anytime” inspections (rather, it provided Iran with a heads-up and a delay before inspections, allowing Iran to hide activity); it required cooperation from Russians and the Chinese for full snapback sanctions; it didn’t restrain its missile program (it shockingly relaxed sanctions on its missile program, to the dismay of senators); and it had sunset provisions.

 

Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) outlined some of the deal’s merits and its shortcomings in his explanation for why he opposed Obama’s deal. As he explained, the defenders insisted that the “imperfect” deal was better than no deal because the alternative was necessarily war.

 

This was the central claim of Ben Rhodes’s echo chamber: the Obama Iran deal or disastrous war. Why? As Schumer explained, this false choice relied on the logic that the Iran deal would moderate the regime, and without it, the regime would not change, inevitably leading to a high-cost clash with the West.

 

Schumer wrote:

 

If one thinks Iran will moderate, that contact with the West and a decrease in economic and political isolation will soften Iran’s hardline positions, one should approve the agreement.  After all, a moderate Iran is less likely to exploit holes in the inspection and sanctions regime, is less likely to seek to become a threshold nuclear power after ten years, and is more likely to use its newfound resources for domestic growth, not international adventurism.

 

But if one feels that Iranian leaders will not moderate and their unstated but very real goal is to get relief from the onerous sanctions, while still retaining their nuclear ambitions and their ability to increase belligerent activities in the Middle East and elsewhere, then one should conclude that it would be better not to approve this agreement.

 

Schumer was right then to reject the deal. Within a year of the agreement being finalized, reports indicated that Iran was busy on clandestine nuclear-related work while using billions of dollars in sanctions relief for funding, training, and supplying Islamist proxies around the region. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis were all well-resourced at the expense of American, European, and Gulf security — not to mention the long-suffering Iranian people.

 

President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018 for the same reasons Senator Schumer opposed it, and he immediately reimposed sanctions on the regime to dry up its funds and slow down its aggression and dangerous missile development.

 

But the echo chamber that was so active during the Obama administration is active now, still insisting on pushing the myth that the choices were the Iran deal or a doomed war that a supposedly resilient, formidable, and adaptable Iran regime would win. Today, those echoing the myth blame Trump and Netanyahu for the war, not Iran’s supreme leader or the IRGC for amassing thousands of missiles, advancing its nuclear program and lying to inspectors, and not the Basij for massacring tens of thousands of Iranian protesters, thereby proving the hardened, radical nature of the inhumane regime.

 

Operation Epic Fury is crushing the Iran regime and destroying its ability to threaten U.S. interests. In directing the campaign, Trump is bursting the myth of the loud and determined echo chamber.