“Let me say, we’ve won,” he 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 a fundraising dinner on 25 March.
Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so. While the US president insists that his military campaign in the Middle East is a historic success, the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy.
The war is turning into the ultimate test of an operating principle that has guided Trump for decades: construct a narrative, declare it to be true and relentlessly force the world to submit to it. It has proved effective in Manhattan boardrooms, on reality television and even at the heart of power in Washington.
But in Iran, Trump’s unique brand of “truthful hyperbole” has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into a brick wall.
“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.”
Trump has led a charmed life that bred self-belief. He grew up in a secluded suburb of Queens, New York, where his father Fred, a wealthy property developer, is said to have taught him to never apologise or show weakness. Sundays were spent at a church where the head pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, author of the influential bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking.
The book’s directives include: “Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture … Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.”
Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, said: “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. His roommate described Trump lying on his bed in the dorm and announcing his plans to become famous.
“He got that was the ticket and he was right. The bigger you are, the more people are attracted to that fame and the more willing they are to overlook what it is that’s actually happening because you can tell them what’s happening. You can tell them what is in front of their eyes and what is actually in front of their eyes is just so much more boring and less dramatic and less exciting.”
The approach served Trump well as he went into the family business. He opened hotels and casinos and was notorious for exaggerating his own wealth. He marketed the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City as the “eighth wonder of the world” and promised regulators and investors it would be a guaranteed cash cow; it filed for bankruptcy a year after opening.
In fact Trump’s businesses went bust six times, although he never declared personal bankruptcy. Meanwhile he cemented his fame by hosting the reality TV show The Apprentice and entered politics with the lie that Barack Obama had been born overseas. His false assertions during the 2016 election campaign – that Mexico would pay for a border wall, for example – proved no barrier to him winning.
During his first term Trump made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, according to a count by the Washington Post newspaper. Time and again, he created his own alternate reality. But the strategy came unstuck when America was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and hundreds of thousands of deaths could not be wished away. Trump duly lost the 2020 election.
He continues to insist, without evidence, that the poll was “rigged” against him, and millions of his supporters believe him. When a mob of his supporters ransacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 in a bid to overturn the result, he subsequently recast them as patriotic heroes rallying in defence of democracy. And he pardoned them on his first day back in office.
Trump also held up an inverted mirror to reality by framing the criminal investigations against him as a witch hunt and accusing Democrats of weaponising the justice department, even as Trump himself ordered the attorney general to pursue his political opponents. Big tech executives, law firms, media companies and universities have surrendered to his narratives.
Numerous foreign leaders have also indulged Trump’s version of the world, praising his leadership in the Ukraine war, making concessions on tariffs or agreeing he deserves the Nobel peace prize for supposedly ending seven wars. But his designs on Greenland stretched the boundaries of his positive thinking. War in Iran threatens to break them.
A month into the conflict, Trump is in trouble. It has already cost 13 US lives and billions of dollars. Yet there is little sign of the Iranian regime losing its grip. Instead, as many observers predicted, Tehran has triggered a global energy crisis by blocking the strait of Hormuz. Opinion polls show the war is already unpopular with US voters and a ground invasion would be even more so. There is no obvious exit strategy.
Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, believes that Trump has finally met his match. Noting Iran’s proud culture and unwillingness to bend the knee, she said: “He has zero interest in their history; they have zero interest in his fame.
“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.”
It is a battle with deadly geopolitical consequences. Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, argues that Trump’s belief in his own mental supremacy fundamentally misunderstands the mechanics of warfare. “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 that Trump is getting “bored” of the war and looking to move on. If and when that happens, the president and his allies will once again face the challenge of spinning it as an overwhelming victory that only he could have achieved. Some political commentators are not buying this carefully curated omnipotence.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Iran is Trump’s Waterloo. This is the demolition of the Donald Trump myth. 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: “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.”
