Donald Trump's Many Failures in Iran
A war he's declared as already won many times over.
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IT IS BECOMING IMPOSSIBLE to overstate how badly the war on Iran has gone so far. More than two months have passed since the U.S. and Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran in late February. That’s two months of war, blockades, failed negotiations, human rights violations, and so much more. Gas prices are at record highs, the cost of anything that needs to be transported (see: pretty much everything) will start to increase as oil prices climb, and your life will be impacted.
It’s been a series of own-goals by Trump and Pete Hegseth—who seem to be the only two people working on the war in the administration. J.D. Vance leaked his grievances, failed to reach a deal with Iran in Pakistan, and then got completely sidelined. Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Head of USAID Marco Rubio, is hardly visible. It’s all Hegseth and Trump, and it shows. [My March essay, The Tragedy of Unserious People in Serious Jobs].
Even if we leave aside the economic toll of this (more on that below), if the goal was to stop Iran’s nuclear program—as Trump, Hegseth, and others have repeatedly said—it’s failed. This piece by Blacki Migliozzi and William J. Broad for The New York Times lays it out in plain terms. The 2015 JCPOA deal effectively neutralized Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Hours after Trump was elected in 2024, Iran started enriching again.
Now, Trump is mired in failure. Despite Israel’s targeting of Iran’s leadership structures, a Khamenei is still Iran’s Supreme Leader, the powerful Revolutionary Guards remains largely intact, the internal oppression continues apace, there is no shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran has more enriched uranium than it has had in a decade.
The economic chaos Trump unleashed speaks for itself in many ways. The Pentagon told lawmakers the war effort has cost $25 billion, a number that experts far-and-wide say is low-balled and then some. So, on the low end, the out-the-door cost is about a billion dollars per day.
It does not take any sort of expertise to see how that number—a HUGE number on its own—does not reflect anything approaching the real costs of this war.
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Harvard Kennedy School’s Linda Blimes thinks the real costs of the war will approach $1 trillion before it’s all said and done. Congressman Ro Khanna says the war is going to cost each American household an extra $5,000 this year, money very few can afford.
Then there are the costs to U.S. readiness and military installations in the Middle East. If you watch one thing this week, make it this CNN investigation on the real damage to U.S. bases in the region.
The cost to the U.S. military is, as of now, incalculable. It’s also largely being hidden from public view by the Trump administration.
Hegseth and other Pentagon officials testified in Congressional hearings last week, and the results went about as expected—Hegseth lashed out, lied repeatedly, and offered little in the way of strategy or off ramps. We should demand better from our public officials across the board in the best of times. With the global economy on the brink, global security flailing, and an entrenched Iranian regime, we deserve answers. The highlights (or, lowlights, as it were) are worth watching, but I want to highlight Senator Mark Kelly’s questions for Hegseth. They were to-the-point, but the Secretary of War simply cannot answer in anything but a Fox News soundbite. It’s all just the figment of a tweet that could potentially land—in printed form—on Trump’s desk.
These are not “gotcha” questions. This is a U.S. Senator asking very fundamental questions of a $1 trillion-per-year government agency that is prosecuting a war that is affecting the lives of billions around the world.
In fact, very few of the questions during Hegseth’s hearings were “gotcha” questions. His reactions portended a man personally affronted, but that’s his default response as it is, and we should all take note. These are your dollars being spent, your dollars funding global energy chaos, your dollars building the bombs killing thousands of civilians—as I keep saying, this is all being done in our name, and we deserve more in terms of leadership, answers, and accountability.
The easiest chart to read is gas prices in the U.S. in the past year. Again, the U.S. attacked Iran—while in the middle of negotiating with Iran—on February 28. Notice the chart’s trajectory since the beginning of March:
In Europe it’s a similar story, especially for diesel fuel. Across Asia and the Asia-Pacific, countries that import most or all of their petroleum products are either in, or on the verge of, a full-blown fuel crisis.
We deserve better. The world deserves better.
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33.33% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 66.66%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here
This Week in Voter Suppression
Trump II will go down as a presidency that tried (and, I hope, failed) to dismantle the institutions built to sustain American democracy. Last weekend, I wrote about just a few of the many threats to freedom of speech Trump represents, none more vital than our right to representation in government. After SCOTUS further eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, Trump and his allies got to work on their attempts to gerrymander their way to not losing the House to Democrats in the midterms. Think that’s alarmist? Here’s Trump, in his own words:
Folks, this is happening.
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Iran War Coverage:
