Trump has cornered himself with his war in Iran | Sidney Blumenthal

Donald Trump has trapped himself in his war with Iran by announcing that his intention is regime change. That uncertain objective is linked to his most urgent objective at home. While pursuing regime change in Iran, he is desperately attempting to stop regime change through the midterm elections. He needs a swift victory in Iran to avoid a quagmire, but he needs a long war to attempt the assertion of unconstitutional emergency authority over the electoral process.

Plunging into war followed Trump’s signature style: he negotiated in bad faith, turned to bombing when the sides were making “significant progress”, according to Oman’s foreign minister, was heedless of international law, and shut out congressional consultation. He offered as his imperative Iranian “imminent threats”, which the Pentagon briefed congressional staffers after Operation Epic Fury began was simply without basis in fact. There was no intelligence suggesting an “imminent threat”. Where’s the WMD?

Trump has created a scenario in which he has cornered himself, so he has declared he has a series of supposed “off-ramps”. “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: see you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs]. In any case, it will take them several years to recover from this attack.” His fantasizing, however, reveals the absence of any strategy.

Shortly after contriving that confused statement, he announced that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had died in an airstrike. Trump has no idea what will happen other than more bombing. He is spinning hour by hour. The Supreme Leader has killed the Supreme Leader. His war is ultimately about himself, branded like everything from the Trump-Kennedy Center to the Donald J Trump Peace Institute to the President Donald J Trump International Airport to, now, the Trump Iran War. He boasts: “No president was willing to do what I am doing.” The war, above any of its geopolitical dimensions, is about the narcissism of the will.

Three days before Trump began his attack, the director of the joint chiefs of staff, vice-admiral Fred Kacher, was summarily dismissed after serving for only three months. The Pentagon offered no reason for his removal. The day before, the Washington Post reported that the chair of the joint chiefs, Gen Dan Caine, had “cautioned” Trump and other officials “that shortfalls in critical munitions and a lack of support from allies will add significant risk to the operation and to U.S. personnel”. But Trump did not want to hear or heed the risk assessment. Off with a head.

Achieving regime change would require more than a lightning raid or assassinations. Obsessed with short-term gain, Trump could not tolerate a prolonged or complex war either psychologically or politically. Rather than a Venezuelan-like foray, he might be confronted with a Ukrainian-like stalemate. Trump has already arrived at the logic of the US army major who in 1968 ordered the napalming of the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” he reportedly said. In the first wave of the Iran attack, at least 100 children were killed in a strike on a school in southern Iran.

If there is a hidden strategy, it would be an obvious Trump play to gain control over the raw materials of the country, in this case principally oil, for distribution to his supplicants and cronies. Trump’s pseudo-diplomats, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are commercial agents. One kleptocracy, the Iranian, would be replaced with another, the Trumpian. But who could Trump actually install to make such a deal?

Trump has staked his political survival on the kind of war he has pledged for years he would never launch. From the beginning of his entrance into politics, his opposition to foreign wars was a pillar of his America First appeal. Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former La Pasionaria of Maga, whom Trump called a “traitor” for advocating the public release of the Epstein files and who quit Congress in a rage, provided the most bitter running commentary about Trump’s “betrayal”: “The Trump admin actually asked in a poll how many casualties voters were willing to accept in a war with Iran??? How about ZERO you bunch of sick fucking liars. We voted for America First and ZERO wars.”

Whatever happens in Iran, Trump has splintered his coalition. He has divided America First from his cult of personality. The pretenses of Maga as a political philosophy are eviscerated. Loyalty to Trump demands giving up on America First. The Trump Doctrine is Trump First.

In the wake of the Iran attack, an ally of JD Vance, Sohrab Ahmari, one of the leading Maga explainers, expressed his disillusionment: “Seemingly against all odds, it is the neoconservative hawks who have emerged as the winners of the Trump era, with the Trumpian intellectuals left holding the bag.” About the king’s heir apparent, Ahmari wrote: “To put this in stark terms: somehow Vice President JD Vance, a fierce Trumpian critic of the neoconservatives, ended up in government at the highest levels, only to help implement the foreign-policy preferences of, say, John Bolton or Elliott Abrams.”

To “make America great again”, Trump had promised he would avoid foreign wars. “Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate,” Trump said of Barack Obama in November 2011. “He is weak and he’s ineffective. So, the only way he figures that he’s going to get re-elected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.” In the 2016 primary campaign, he slammed his Republican opponent Jeb Bush over the “big fat mistake” in Iraq. Then, he accused Hillary Clinton of being “trigger-happy and very unstable”, responsible for “only turmoil, suffering and death,” and said he would end the “failed policy of nation-building and regime change.”

Trump did not sleepwalk into his war. He willfully fostered instability, beginning with his termination of US participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015 by Iran, the US and five other countries that limited Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for targeted sanctions relief. Trump called it “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into”, and he disavowed it in 2018.

As Trump careened to war, Wendy Sherman, a chief negotiator of the agreement and former deputy secretary of state, remarked: “If Donald Trump had not withdrawn from the original JCPOA, we would not be here.”

And yet, as Trump’s agents went through the pantomime of reinventing a version of the deal that Trump had trashed, his administration had made a very different kind of deal with Iran to deport Iranian asylum seekers in the US fleeing persecution back to Iran. Those deported throughout 2025 and as recently as January 2026 included Christians, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents, reversing decades of US policy that protected such individuals from the Iranian regime. Among them were gay people who faced almost certain execution. “Please save our lives,” pleaded one asylum seeker who had been detained in a Texas facility for more than a year. Presumably, the bombing has halted the deportations. One Trump priority has overridden another.

Trump’s Iran war may be closely entwined with his most pressing priority: preventing the Democrats from capturing the Congress in the midterm elections. The enemies abroad may provide a lever against the enemies within. In his State of the Union address, Trump defined Iran and the Democrats are his twin enemies, applying interchangeable epithets to them. One had “sinister ambitions” and was “very difficult”. The other was “crazy”, “destroying our country”, and “cheaters”. The first enemy was Iran, the second the Democrats.

War may be the justification he is looking for to impose his voter suppression plan. His White House has been in contact with rightwing activists who have written a detailed proposal for him to seize control of the elections from the states under the pretext of a national emergency. When a reporter from PBS asked him about it, Trump denied he was considering it. But using the claim of a quack Trump election denier as a rationale, Trump’s Department of Justice seized 2020 Fulton county, Georgia, ballots, already counted and investigated several times, though Trump still insists he won the state and was cheated.

This investigation into the 2020 election is being led by Kurt Olsen, appointed to a new White House position of director of election security and integrity. Olsen, who represented legal challenges to the 2020 result in Arizona, was sanctioned by a judge for making “false, misleading, and unsupported” statements, and described “by people in the first Trump administration to be a fringe menace”, according to the New York Times. As part of Trump’s comprehensive effort to sway the midterm elections, the justice department contacted at least 43 states demanding comprehensive voter details, including sensitive information such as partial social security numbers, and sued 29 mostly Democratic states and the District of Columbia for refusing to provide those lists.

The polls before Trump started his war were discouraging for him. Only 21% supported an attack on Iran, according to a University of Maryland survey. Just 27% trusted Trump to make the right decisions on military force, according to an AP-NORC poll. The beginning of military actions almost always causes a spike in public approval, a rally ‘round the flag phenomenon. But within 48 hours of the launch of Trump’s war a Reuters-Ipsos poll showed that only about 27% percent supported it. Whatever he does in Iran, what has he done for you lately?

Trump has caught himself in a vicious cycle of repulsion and retribution. The more he repulses people, the more he resorts to retribution. Every downtick of unpopularity drives him to ever further acts of revenge. As he seeks to dominate, he loses ground, which excites his impulse for coercion, only deepening repellence. The broader his unpopularity, the greater his fear that he is losing his ability to behave without inhibition. In reaction he becomes more uninhibited. Trump cannot grasp his rejection. He attributes his second coming to his irresistible self. He depicts himself as the victim as he victimizes himself in his spiraling descent. When his latest chaos-creating episode inevitably fails, his anger heightens and he begins all over again. He becomes more unpopular than before.

Now, he has rushed into war as though it can provide his conclusive political solution. But he has irrevocably cracked Maga. His motivation for Operation Epic Fury is at least partly to deflect from his tribulations that cannot be made to disappear: Operation Epstein Fury.