Donald Trump has finally met his match.
The Iranian Supreme Leader lies just as boldly, with just as much bombast, as the American Supreme Leader.
On Thursday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei put out a video hailing Iran’s victory over Israel and the United States.
Trump was shocked, shocked at this blatant lie.
“As a man of great faith, he is not supposed to lie,” the president marveled on Truth Social.
Then Trump went on to his usual authoritarian etiquette lesson, complaining that the proper response by Khamenei to getting hit with 14 30,000-pound bombs should have been: “THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!”
Trump said that he deserved gratitude because he knew where the ayatollah was hiding and stopped Israeli and U.S. forces from killing him. He said that he made Israel recall a group of planes headed for Tehran that were, perhaps, looking for “the final knockout!”
“I wish the leadership of Iran would realize,” he tut-tutted, “that you often get more with HONEY than you do with VINEGAR. PEACE!!!”
Half an hour later, Mr. Honey put out a typically vinegary post abruptly cutting off “ALL” trade talks with Canada.
Before Trump did it, with an assist from the Supreme Court on Friday, it was Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who worked to erode checks and balances and hoover all the power into the executive branch.
With the malleable George W. Bush in the Oval, Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to create an alternate universe where they were never wrong — because they conjured up information to prove they were right.
The two malevolent regents had a fever about getting rid of Saddam, so they hyped up intelligence, redirecting Americans’ vengeful emotions about Osama bin Laden and 9/11 into that pet project. Tony Blair scaremongered that it would take only 45 minutes for Saddam to send his W.M.D.s westward.
But there were no W.M.D.s.
When it comes to the Middle East, presidents can’t resist indulging in a gasconade. Unlike Iraq, Iran was actually making progress on its nuclear program. President Trump did not need to warp intelligence to justify his decision. But he did anyway, to satisfy his unquenchable ego.
He bragged that the strikes had “OBLITERATED” Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
“I just don’t think the president was telling the truth,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told reporters. He believes Iran still has “significant remaining capability.”
When CNN’s Natasha Bertrand and her colleagues broke the story that a preliminary classified U.S. report suggested that the strikes had set back Iran by only a few months, Trump, Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt smeared her and The Times, which confirmed her scoop, as inaccurate, unpatriotic and disrespectful to our military.
On Friday afternoon, CNN revealed that the military did not even use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran’s largest nuclear targets because it was too deep.
Though Trump likes to hug the flag — and just raised two huge ones on the White House North and South Lawns — he ignores a basic tenet of patriotism: It is patriotic to tell the public the truth on life-or-death matters, and for the press to challenge power. It is unpatriotic to mislead the public in order to control it and suppress dissent, or as a way of puffing up your own ego.
Although he was dubbed the “Daddy” of NATO in The Hague on Wednesday, Trump clearly has daddy issues. (Pass the tissues!) He did not get the affirmation from his father that could have prevented this vainglorious vamping.
For Trump, it was not enough for the strikes to damage Iran’s nuclear capabilities; they had to “obliterate” them. It could not simply be an impressive mission; it had to be, as Hegseth said, “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.” (Move over, D-Day and crossing the Delaware.)
The president was so eager to magnify the mission that he eerily compared it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Trump has always believed in “truthful hyperbole,” as he called it in “The Art of the Deal.” But now it’s untruthful hyperbole. He has falsely claimed that an election was stolen and falsely claimed that $1.7 trillion in cuts to the social safety net in his Big, Unpopular Bill “won’t affect anybody; it is just fraud, waste and abuse.”
He’s getting help on his alternate universe from all the new partisan reporters in the White House briefing room who are eager to shill for him.
“So many Americans still have questions about the 2020 election,” a reporter told Trump at the news conference on Friday, wondering if he would appoint someone at D.O.J. to investigate judges “for the political persecution of you, your family and your supporters during the Biden administration?”
Trump beamed. “I love you,” he said to the young woman. “Who are you?”
She was, as it turned out, the reporter for Mike Lindell of “MyPillow” fame, who has his own “news” network.
Talk about fluffing your pillows.
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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