Trump Is Caught in the Trap He Set

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You could, if you were so inclined, tell a story of the Donald Trump era via memes. Pepe the Frog, “This Is Fine” Dog, “Covfefe,” Leopards Eating People’s Faces—things of that nature. One of the essential examples would be an October 2016 Twitter post by Jesse Farrar, parodying the enduring belief that the walls were closing in on Trump:

Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!

*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

The conviction that Trump was on the brink of final collapse remained popular in some quarters for years after Farrar’s post—as anyone who remembers the fevered anticipation around Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and the subsequent letdown can attest—but at some moment, the tweet transformed from a riposte to naive pundits into a shorthand for the strangeness of American politics.

During the previous decade, Trump weathered 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 pussy” without consent; the firing of then–FBI Director James Comey; his indiscreet sharing of intelligence with Russian officials in the Oval Office; an impeachment for attempting to extort Ukraine; an egregious approach to COVID-19, followed by a bout 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 absconding 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 canon. Perhaps Trump himself came to believe it.

But the war in Iran has dealt a serious blow to the idea that Trump can slip out of any bind easily. Over the past three days, three American service members died in that conflict: two in Jordan, where Iranian missiles struck a military base, and a third in Iraq, killed by debris during the intentional destruction of an Iranian drone. The official American death toll in the Iran war now sits at 17.

That number is low—still less, for example, than the toll from the 1983 invasion of Grenada—although the military appears to have been keeping quiet just how many troops have been injured. As my colleague Tom Nichols wrote over the weekend, the president’s limp attempt at consolation (“It’s a very sad thing,” he said) is especially dismaying because “Trump has offered no comprehensive explanation about why his administration is ordering U.S. military personnel to put their lives on the line.”

And the death toll may begin to rise, because Trump appears to be on the verge of being drawn into a larger war. As the defense analyst Brynn Tannehill wrote in The Atlantic last week, the president faces only bad choices. The United States could effectively cede control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, accepting a fee system that breaks global precedent and centuries of American policy and granting a hostile power the opportunity to close an important shipping lane at any future moment. Or the White House could embark on a major ground war, because fighting over the past few months has shown the limitations of relying on air power. That would be politically hazardous, likely lead to more American deaths, and suck the U.S. into a long-running presence in the region, and it might still fail. Meanwhile, the conflict threatens to grow even larger as Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threaten to close some traffic to 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 vacillated over whether the point of the war is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and whether the war has already achieved that. He’s offered different answers about whether one goal is regime change, and whether that has been achieved. He has suggested that the purpose 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 war funding.

In short, Trump’s misadventure in Iran is a story of hubris. The president didn’t bother to plan or consider the dangers before he started a war, and now it has spiraled to a point where even he seems unable to find a way to wriggle out of a jam. 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 some delicious schadenfreude if the results of the blunder were not so terrible. The costs are measured not only in the blood of American service members but also in the deaths of Iranian civilians and of merchant mariners trying to sail through the Persian Gulf, in the damage to the global economy, and in the erosion of American alliances and a long-standing global order. Being confronted with a snare that he can’t escape must be unpleasant for Trump, but people around the globe will face misery because of it.

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Today’s News

The Pentagon confirmed that dozens of U.S. service members were injured in three previously undisclosed Iranian strikes on bases in the Middle East before the attack on Friday that killed two American soldiers. A military official said those earlier attacks had not been publicly announced because the military does not routinely disclose injuries, particularly when troops quickly return to duty, and cited operational security concerns.
A man was taken into custody after authorities say he threw an incendiary device outside a federal building in New York City, setting a fire that caused minor injuries to three people. An investigator said he was carrying items including anti-ICE material and a pellet gun.
The FDA said it is continuing to investigate Taylor Farms, the produce company allegedly linked to the multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak, a day after it said that the company’s lettuce had produced a false-positive test. Taylor Farms’ voluntary recall of shredded iceberg lettuce remains in effect.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: As young people struggle to sit through even an hour of a film, modern blockbusters are getting longer, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Mark Kelly in front of a tan backdrop — Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

The Wingman

By Mark Leibovich

“My wife, Gabby, was shot in the head.”

Obviously, I knew this. Senator Mark Kelly’s wife, the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and grievously wounded in a mass shooting outside a Tucson Safeway in 2011. It was one of the most notorious acts of political violence in America.

In several recent conversations with Kelly, however, I was struck by how often and how bluntly he repeated these exact words. Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut, seems to appreciate the curt repetition of the statement: My wife was shot in the head. It captures how stark and defining this incident was, and continues to be, in his life.

Read the full article.