The world hoped to hear that Donald Trump, reeling in domestic polls and bereft of strategic wisdom, was ready to end his reckless assault on Iran. His absurdly boastful address, vowing to persist, threatening war crimes, and offering no prospect of a negotiated exit, provoked an instant global response in falling markets and spiking energy prices.

Despite expectations that Trump would shuffle toward a conclusion to this ruinous “excursion,” no matter how undignified, he resorted instead to beating his chest and berating our allies.

“I want to provide an update on the tremendous progress our warriors have made in Iran and discuss why Operation Epic Fury is necessary for the safety of America and the security of the free world…We will continue until our objectives are fully achieved.”

Americans wondering what objectives Trump is pursuing and why may still be puzzled after this speech, in which he boasted of destroying Iran’s aging air force and navy while ruling out efforts to retrieve its large cache of highly enriched uranium or to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, whose closure has so badly disrupted the global economy.

Reiterating the childish rhetoric of dominance that appears in every Trump utterance, he invited listeners to “celebrate this progress,” insisting, “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated both militarily and economically and in every other way…There’s never been anything like it militarily. Everyone is talking about it.” What everyone is talking about, in fact, is the astonishing vacuity of this speech, which explained nothing and resolved nothing.

While Trump said that the war’s “core objectives” are nearing completion, that claim depends on redefining the objectives that he and his administration announced at the beginning. Nobody except him believes that these weeks of bombing have achieved regime change in Teheran, where the Islamic Republic remains in power despite the deaths of previous top leaders. If anything, the successors of the late Supreme Leader may be even more radical and intransigent, having learned the hard way that negotiations with the United States are a meaningless prelude to missile strikes.

As for the Iranian nuclear program, Trump could only justify this war by spewing a series of ridiculous lies. The nuclear deal achieved by the US and an international coalition -- which he abandoned solely because President Obama oversaw its negotiation and implementation – would not have led to “a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran.” Nor would they “have had them years ago, and…used them.” What they have is a stockpile of nuclear fuel which Trump said the United States would monitor via satellite – just as we could have done without any bombing campaign. His complaint that Obama’s agreement turned over $1.7 billion to Teheran rings with irony now that he has lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, which will bring at least ten times that amount to the regime’s treasury.

They can use those funds to rebuild their missile and drone arsenals, their damaged military production facilities, and eventually even their nuclear enrichment program.

So the most compelling rationale for Trump’s Iran misadventure is in fact no reason at all. He has achieved nothing to insure against Teheran building a nuclear weapon than the safeguards that existed a month ago, before we lost 13 Americans, many more wounded, thousands of Iranian civilians, including children, and tens of billions of dollars that could have been better used at home. His complaint

Behind the incessant chest beating that Trump constantly indulges is a distinctly less uplifting reality. Iran has learned that it can cripple international shipping through the Gulf and the United States won’t risk a naval mission to reopen it. Our allies and the rest of the world have learned that the US is an unreliable ally that will betray those who negotiate with us, wantonly inflict destruction, and leave the wreckage behind for others to manage.

Or, as Trump suggested last night, if the Iranian government refuses to meet his conditions for a ceasefire, “We are going to bomb them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.” Such a spree of war crimes against the Iranian people, whom he once promised to liberate, would be the ultimate disgrace – not just for Trump but for the country he has so badly betrayed.

Few circumstances are more dangerous to American and world security than an American president – specifically, Donald J. Trump – who lies brazenly to the public in time of war. At a moment when his assault on Iran has jeopardized the global economy in a way not seen for four decades, Trump appears to be prevaricating about the “very good talks” his envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are conducting with the regime in Teheran.

It is reassuring that Trump used these alleged talks to postpone his mad threat of military strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure. It is not reassuring that Iranian officials immediately denied that they are engaged in any contacts, let alone negotiations, with the Trump White House. And while it isn’t impossible that the president has at last authorized contacts with the Iranians, who are also prone to mendacity, there is simply no reason to believe him now.

But given the history of falsehoods leading up to the first strike on Iran and the fog of contradictory justifications for this war of choice, such deception is hardly surprising. After so gravely disrupting the world’s energy supply lines, at a cost of more than a dozen American troops, thousands of innocent Iranian lives, and countless billions of dollars – with no sign of achieving the vague and ever-changing objectives of this mission – Trump suddenly seems desperate for an exit.

Whatever bluster he and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may emit, they have so far failed to eliminate Iran as a military threat to the Middle East, let alone accomplished the “regime change” that has long been sought by Israel, its only ally in this venture. They have failed as well to secure the highly enriched uranium at bombed Iranian sites, and they have likewise failed to protect the critical shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.

And all of this came to pass because, from the beginning, Trump remained focused on trashing Barack Obama, whose multilateral effort to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions had at least forestalled them for a decade. By appointing the greedy but feckless and utterly inexperienced team of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to seek a new settlement with Iran, he ensured failure. Many observers suspect that was his aim – or at least Kushner’s aim – all along, because that was what the far-right Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu wanted.

None of that has transpired as the war criminal Netanyahu and his Washington cronies would have predicted – indeed, as they did predict at the outset of this conflict. Despite the massive military and leadership losses sustained by the Iranians, they appear to have prepared far more carefully for this fight than their counterparts in the Trump White House, and therefore are prepared to continue an asymmetric battle that the US president wants to abandon.

After the killing of his father, comrades and immediate family, Iran’s Supreme Leader probably won’t make it easy for Trump to declare victory and move on. What is the basis for ceasefire talks with an adversary who began bombing while engaged in the last round of negotiations, even as observers indicated that agreement was near? Without that bare minimum of honor and trust, it is hard to imagine how that would work.

Had Trump not trashed America’s diplomatic relations with its traditional allies, we might have called upon more trusted European or Asian friends to broker an exit deal. They have no reason to trust us anymore or to put their own credibility on the line – except that they too will suffer as long as this fiasco continues and worsens. We will be lucky if their enlightened self-interest is enough to help us out of Trump’s latest catastrophe.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

The global crisis that America and its allies now confront, as well as the multiple threats to our country’s prosperity, democracy, and security at home, arise from the same singular source: Donald Trump’s unshackled and rampant egomania.

The president is pursuing his instincts and gratifying his conceits, in a world where nobody exercises the power or the will to thwart him. He believes, as he always has, that he alone deserves attention and obedience. He believes that he is the smartest person in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the Mar-a-Lago terrace or anywhere else he happens to go.

We are now surrounded by the ruinous evidence of how wrong he is about himself and everything else.

The immediate consequences of Trump’s wholly unnecessary and apparently pointless war on Iran are driving the world toward economic crisis – for reasons that were entirely predictable and that he nevertheless failed to foresee. In the first days of the conflict, according to an initial investigation, US forces perpetrated a hideous war crime on an Iranian girls’ school.

What Trump thought would be a quick triumph – just like the overnight capture of Venezuela’s dictator -- is turning into a panic room without any clear exit. He ignored warnings from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many others that Iran is nothing like Venezuela, and in fact still seems to think that purloined Venezuelan oil will swiftly solve the current shortage.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows that is a false hope, just as they all know that Trump’s tariffs are causing grave damage to the American economy, that he isn’t restoring manufacturing and is wrecking agriculture, and that his dismantling of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and US intelligence agencies leaves us vulnerable to the rising terror threat provoked by his war.

Did his enablers in the White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Republican Party and America’s corporate suites always see the shallow fraudulence and bone stupidity behind his blustering self-confidence? To those of us who have been following Trump’s career for the past four decades or so, the void of intellectual substance and personal achievement has long been obvious. But now the disjunction between his image of himself and the reality of his ruinous reign must be plain even to his most sedulous servants.

Those who promoted the myth of Trump as a brilliant business man, a “genius” in his own estimation, ought to have realized how dangerous it would be to place the nation’s fate in his hands, without any constraints. His perennial bankruptcies were not a byproduct of clever strategy, and his constant scamming offered the clearest possible warning of a defective character.

The only spark of genius, as his early political adviser Roger Stone understood 20 years ago, lies in Trump’s capacity to manipulate the political media, to insist on lies against truth, and to bamboozle the low-information masses. That was enough to launch him into Republican politics.

Many of those around Trump have long been aware of his real nature but chose to use their proximity to him for their own advancement. Others are simply dim-witted figures, chosen by because they look like they’re from “central casting.” Characters of both varieties are playing major roles in this disastrous war, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio exemplifying the former and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth the latter.

Unlike nearly every other member of Trump’s incompetent cabinet, Rubio has at least some qualifications for his job and is less stupid than average. Indeed, he was smart enough to realize during the 2016 primary, when he ran against Trump, that the New York real estate heir had committed enormous frauds and should never be president, as Rubio said at the time.

What the former Florida senator doesn’t possess is the spine to oppose a catastrophic decision.

As for Hegseth, whose personal history as a sexual harasser, notorious drunk and bully ought to have disqualified him from any public trust, Trump selected him precisely because he lacks any standing to oppose presidential excesses. In fact, his own pronouncements on war – he admires lawless killers and hates rules of engagement – foretold the disgrace that now haunts our assault on Iran.

The countervailing forces that ought to have constrained Trump – in Congress, the courts, the free press, or the world community – have barely been able to slow him, let alone stop him. Even if he pulls back from this war, there can be little doubt that he will do more and worse so long as his authority remains largely unchecked. The only way to oppose him now is to limit the power wielded by him and his party and erect constitutional obstacles in their path.

That is what elections are supposed to do.

.Our only hope is for those voters to fulfill their worst political nightmare.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.