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Trump is caught in the trap he set himself

2026-07-22 23:54:47Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA NGA DAVID A. GRAHAM

Trump is caught in the trap he set himself

If you wanted, you could tell a story of the Donald Trump era through memes.

One of the quintessential examples would be an October 2016 tweet by Jesse Farrar, which parodied the enduring belief that walls were coming to Trump:

Well, I'd like to see old Donny Trump get out of THIS jam!

*Trump gets out of the deadlock easily*

Ah! Well. Anyway,

The belief that Trump was on the verge of ultimate collapse remained popular in some circles for years after Farrar’s post — as anyone who remembers the fevered anticipation surrounding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and the subsequent disappointment can attest — but at some point, the tweet transformed from a retort to naive pundits into a shorthand for the strangeness of American politics.

Over the past decade, Trump has survived a series of scandals that would likely have been career-ending for any other politician: the Access Hollywood tape, in which he boasted that he would “grab” women “by the vagina” without their consent; the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey; his reckless sharing of intelligence with Russian officials in the Oval Office; an impeachment for trying to extort Ukraine; a wild approach to COVID-19, followed by a battle with the disease that reportedly nearly killed him; a series of attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection; his escape with sensitive documents to Mar-a-Lago after his term ended; and 34 felony convictions.

Despite all of this, Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

The notion of his invincibility became real. Perhaps Trump himself began to believe it.

But the war in Iran has dealt a serious blow to the idea that Trump can easily escape any situation.

Over the past three days, three American soldiers have died in that conflict: two in Jordan, where Iranian missiles struck a military base, and a third in Iraq, killed by debris during the deliberate destruction of an Iranian drone. The official American death toll in the Iran war now stands at 17.

This number is low – even lower, for example, than the death toll from the 1983 invasion of Grenada – although the military appears to have kept secret how many troops were wounded.

As my colleague Tom Nichols wrote over the weekend, the president’s feeble attempt at consolation is particularly disappointing because “Trump has offered no comprehensive explanation for why his administration is ordering American military personnel to put their lives at risk.”

And the death toll could start to rise, because Trump appears to be on the verge of retreating into a larger war.

As defense analyst Brynn Tannehill wrote in The Atlantic last week, the president faces only bad choices.

The United States could effectively hand over control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, accepting a tariff system that breaks global precedents and centuries of American policy and gives an enemy power the ability to close a vital maritime corridor at any future moment.

Or the White House could launch a major ground war, because the fighting over the past few months has shown the limitations of relying on air power.

This would be politically risky, likely lead to more American deaths, and would draw the US into a long-term presence in the region, and it could still fail.

Meanwhile, the conflict threatens to escalate further as Iran's Houthi allies in Yemen threaten to close off part of the traffic in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

Deciding what to do is hard when you don't know what you want. Trump has wavered on whether the goal of the war is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and whether the war has already achieved that.

He has offered varying answers about whether regime change is a goal and whether that has been achieved. He has suggested that the goal is to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, even though it was open before the war and even though that may no longer be manageable. The administration has also struggled to explain to skeptical members of Congress why it needs more funding for the war.

In short, Trump's ill-fated adventure in Iran is a story of arrogance. The president didn't bother to plan or consider the risks before starting a war, and now it has reached a point where even he seems unable to find a way out of a stalemate.

For the first time in a very long time – to some extent, the first time in his life – Trump appears to be facing the consequences of his actions.

These circumstances might give Trump's critics and opponents a chance to feel a kind of delicious joy if the results of the mistake weren't so dire.

The costs are measured not only in the blood of American service members, but also in the deaths of Iranian civilians and merchant mariners trying to navigate the Persian Gulf, in the damage done to the global economy, and in the destruction of American alliances and a long-term global order.

Facing a trap he can't escape from must be unpleasant for Trump, but people around the world will face misery because of him.


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