Trump keeps announcing a win that is not showing up
“Let me say, we’ve won,” Donald Trump told a rally in Kentucky on 11 March. “I think we’ve won,” he said on the White House south lawn on 20 March. “We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” he said in the Oval Office on 24 March. “We are winning so big,” he promised at a fundraising dinner on 25 March.
The problem is that repeating the line does not make it real. While Trump insists his military campaign in the Middle East is a historic triumph, the conflict in Iran keeps widening, and the rest of the world is preparing for the possibility that it could inflict serious damage on the global economy.
This war has become a direct test of one of Trump’s oldest habits: build a story, declare it true, and push until everyone else caves. That method has worked for him in Manhattan dealmaking, on television and, at times, in Washington. In Iran, though, his usual brand of “truthful hyperbole” has run into something less cooperative than public relations.
“This is war and you can’t just will a win into existence in war,” said Tara Setmayer, cofounder of the Seneca Project, a women-led political action committee. “The American people are not on board with what’s going on because he cannot articulate an argument for why we’re there or what victory actually looks like.”
A lifetime of telling the story first
Trump’s confidence did not appear out of nowhere. It was shaped by a sheltered upbringing in Queens, New York, where his father, Fred Trump, a wealthy property developer, is said to have drilled into him the rule that weakness and apology were to be avoided. Sundays were spent at a church led by Norman Vincent Peale, the minister and author of The Power of Positive Thinking.
That book offers advice that sounds very much like a pre-internet version of the Trump method: picture yourself succeeding, hold on to the image, and do not spend too much time imagining obstacles.
Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, said that pattern was visible long before politics.
“When he was in high school, the military academy, he already told his roommate that his goal was to be famous, to be a celebrity, and he got it that being a celebrity let you bend reality, let you get away with things, to be as big as possible,” she said. “His roommate described Trump lying on his bed in the dorm and announcing his plans to become famous.”
Blair said Trump understood that fame brings a kind of immunity. The bigger the persona, the easier it becomes to get people to overlook the facts in front of them because the performance is louder, flashier and far more dramatic than whatever is actually happening.
That approach served him well in business. He opened hotels and casinos and became known for inflating his own wealth. The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City was marketed as the “eighth wonder of the world,” and Trump promised regulators and investors it would be a cash machine. It filed for bankruptcy a year after opening.
In total, Trump’s businesses went bust six times, although he never declared personal bankruptcy. He later turned himself into a household name by hosting The Apprentice and then entered politics by promoting the false claim that Barack Obama had been born overseas. The untruths kept coming during the 2016 campaign, including the promise that Mexico would pay for a border wall. It did not stop him from winning.
The strategy worked until reality got in the way
During his first term, Trump made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, according to a count by The Washington Post. Again and again, he created an alternate reality and asked everyone else to live in it. That finally ran into a wall during the Covid-19 pandemic, when deaths on a vast scale could not be talked away. He lost the 2020 election.
Trump still says, without evidence, that the vote was “rigged” against him, and millions of his supporters believe him. When a mob of his followers stormed the US Capitol on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overturn the result, he later recast them as patriotic defenders of democracy. On his first day back in office, he pardoned them.
He has also insisted that the criminal investigations against him were a witch hunt and accused Democrats of weaponising the Justice Department, even as Trump himself ordered the attorney general to go after his political opponents. Big tech leaders, law firms, media companies and universities have all, in various ways, bent to his version of events.
Some foreign leaders have done the same. They have praised him over the Ukraine war, made tariff concessions or even agreed that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for supposedly ending seven wars. But his designs on Greenland were already stretching the limits of positive thinking. Iran may be where those limits finally snap.
Iran is a different kind of opponent
A month into the conflict, Trump is facing a mess. The war has already cost 13 US lives and billions of dollars. There is little sign that the Iranian regime is losing control. Instead, as many observers expected, Tehran has triggered a global energy crisis by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Public opinion in the US is already turning against the war, and a ground invasion would be even less popular. There is no obvious exit.
Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, said Trump may have finally met an opponent that cannot be bludgeoned by branding.
“He has zero interest in their history; they have zero interest in his fame,” she said.
“It’s an interesting parallel because Iran has been constructing the reality that it wants its citizens to embrace. Donald Trump has been constructing the reality he wants his citizens to embrace. So it’s reality constructor regime versus reality constructor regime. A battle of the titans.”
The problem with trying to think your way through a war
The stakes are not theoretical. Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, said Trump’s belief in mental dominance misunderstands how war actually works.
“Trump clearly is a real believer in the power of the mind to control events and to shape how people perceive events and shape reality,” Rubin said.
“The problem with that in the case of the war is the Iranians don’t have to bend to that. There are time-tested ways to win wars and end wars through force of arms or diplomacy that have nothing to do with the mind and willpower and willing it because the other side will do what we want. He’s going to buck up against that and the sooner he relies not just on the reality of military power but the reality of diplomatic power the more likely he is to be successful.”
Media reports suggest Trump is growing “bored” with the war and looking for the exit. If he does move on, he and his allies will still need to package the outcome as a huge victory only he could have delivered. Not everyone is in the mood to buy the sales pitch.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said the conflict may end up exposing the whole Trump mythology.
“Iran is Trump’s Waterloo. This is the demolition of the Donald Trump myth,” Jacobs said. “His supporters rave about his instincts and his improvisational style but the other interpretation is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he hasn’t taken care to investigate the devastating consequences of his actions and so he’s digging himself deeper and deeper into a quagmire. This is plain to all.”
Jacobs added that the consequences are larger than Trump’s image.
“Whether you’re a military analyst or a political analyst, whether you’re in the Democratic or Republican party, there’s a reality here. Donald Trump has met the moment of truth. The kind of fictional life that he’s led and evoked over the last four or five decades has now been unmasked as a deadly drama. It’s going to cost the lives of so many people. It’s going to devastate the US economy and the regional economy. It’s going to set back America and its standing in the world. It’s a horrific moment.”
