How Republican Presidents Got So Good at Losing Wars

Having failed to convince even himself of the notion that he has won this war in the kind of quick “Arrest Maduro and everyone on Fox lines up to caress his cross!” win that Bibi Netanyahu promised, Donald Trump turned to the art form once practiced by The Dilbert Guy, Scott Adams: hypnotism.

Last month, Donald Trump posted a chart on Truth Social with a command that requires one to be staring at a gold watch, or a gold toilet: “Wow. Study this Chart!”

The graphic showed seven American wars ranked by length. At the top: Afghanistan, at 543 weeks. Then Iraq (457 weeks), Vietnam (439 weeks), the Civil War (209 weeks), World War II (196 weeks), the Korean War (161 weeks), the War of 1812 (139 weeks).

And at the very bottom, labeled an “Excursion,” Trump’s Iran war at six weeks.

The math was wrong, of course. You can wonder if it’s on purpose or not, but that’s pointless. The message is the same: He’s only appealing to the people who embrace and spread his lies, giving his followers something to yell at their stepnieces.

It wasn’t Sun Tzu who wrote, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” But he might as well have.

Trump has been losing this war since February 28th, and he’s admitted that tacitly through his endless declarations of dozens of peace deals that usually don’t even last the length of his Truth Social posts. He’s admitted that because he’s negotiating something BACK from Iran, the Strait of Hormuz. And he has nothing to offer in return except promises completely undermined by the way this war was STARTED to prevent a peace deal and how many, if not most, of the people he could negotiate with have been killed by Israel, because Netanyahu's plan is to keep Trump losing forever.

You know he knows he lost because he’s playing on a trope that Americans now understand: Republicans start wars, and then it’s someone else’s job to end them.

Donnie Ballroom lost Iran the way Republican Fortunate Sons have always lost wars this century:

1. They start them.

On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed a fighter jet on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, climbed out in a flight suit, and stood under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” The Iraq War ran another eight years.

Trump spent 2016 telling crowds he’d opposed that war from the start. The only contemporaneous record has him telling Howard Stern in 2002 that he guessed he supported it.

Nine years after running on that lie, Trump started a war of his own. He had forty years of intelligence assessments that Bush never had, two occupations’ worth of lessons, and a nuclear deal that his first administration tore up, which would have made this war unnecessary. He started it anyway, on February 28. This time, the banner is a chart.

2. They think they have the cheat codes. 

Torture. Bombing a girls’ school. Decimating water plants in Iran. There’s a reason only monsters like Putin and Pete Hegseth do these things: because they don’t work and they just put every American in danger.

The waterboarding program ran for most of the 2000s across eight countries. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent six years investigating it and found it produced no unique, actionable intelligence that prevented a single attack.

On February 28, the first day of this war, a missile destroyed Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, killing 156 people, 120 of them children. Amnesty International’s investigation found the munition was consistent with a U.S. Tomahawk. Trump told reporters, without evidence, “It was done by Iran.”

A month later, with the Strait of Hormuz still closed, he threatened to “completely obliterating” Iran’s power plants and “possibly all” of its desalination plants. He signed the post “Praise be to Allah.”

None of it worked. The torture didn’t produce intelligence. The strike on the school didn’t produce a surrender, or even an explanation Trump’s own Pentagon would back. The threats against the water supply didn’t open the strait. Iran knocked a desalination plant offline in Kuwait instead. The cheat codes aren’t secret because they work. They’re secret because using them out loud is a crime, with no statute of limitations. I know Republicans think Todd Blanche has inoculated this regime for all crimes forever, but the pardon power doesn’t reach the Hague.

3. They’ve got no fear of the underdog (or empathy in general).

The kind of stunted manifester’s brain that Trump has makes it impossible to understand the mindset of a country like Iran that has effectively been warding off American invasion and control for 45 years. But even George W. Bush! was smart enough to avoid an Iran boondoggle and hand one of the worst regimes on earth control of one of the planet’s key waterways, while achieving zero of his strategic ambitions.

On January 20, 1981, fifty-two Americans came home after 444 days in Tehran, the final word in a standoff that had already cost one Republican administration its second term. Forty-five years later, Trump’s chart ranks Iran’s war below the War of 1812. The chart shows how long America fought elsewhere. It does not measure how long Iran has been fighting America at home, which is most of its modern history.

Trump has run this play before. In January 2020, he ordered the killing of Iran’s top general on Iraqi soil. Iran answered five days later with more than a dozen missiles at a base full of American troops. No Americans were killed. That night, Trump tweeted, “All is well!”

The general’s death didn’t end anything. It went on the list. A country that survived a CIA-engineered coup, a war bankrolled by its neighbors, and decades of sanctions does not fold because an elementary school gets bombed or a general gets killed. Trump’s chart has no column for that. Forty-five years of refusing to fold is the data point the chart leaves out.

Michigan’s favorite economist Justin Wolfers counted Trump’s public predictions about an Iran deal since February. By June 11, the count stood at 50 claims over 25 days. None produced a deal.

Markets react anyway. Every time Trump signals de-escalation, stocks tick up. Every time he escalates, they fall. Wolfers’s explanation: investors know the odds of any Trump claim being true are low, so they price in only a fraction of the news. Even a fraction moves markets. That means an Iran war that’s actually over would be worth trillions.

That’s the trap. The more Trump lies, the less markets react. The less markets react, the less feedback he gets. Eventually the loop breaks, or American consumers will. He can say a deal is close, lose the war anyway, and post a chart claiming victory. Nothing happens. No crash. No correction. No moment where the gap between the chart and the casualties gets too expensive for him personally to ignore.

Trump can keep losing this war, and the losing can stop costing his ego anything, while Americans suck up the bills and price hikes he promised he’d reverse. He can keep announcing peace by the weekend, the way he’s done fifty times since February. He can keep announcing deals and posting charts that rank his own war as a footnote, as he finally lives out his dream of becoming America’s Vladimir Putin, but just in the way that neither can handle losing their chosen wars of aggression.

Sun Tzu never wrote about what happens when a commander-in-chief keeps explaining he’s winning to an audience that has already concluded he’s lying, stopped reacting, and moved on. But Trump found the loophole: an audience that’s stopped listening can’t tell you that you’ve lost. He can keep doing this forever, while pretending he’s won. Technically.

Hey, it’s worked for the 2020 election.

Join LOLGOP Studios to help stop The Trillionaire Kill Chain and rebuild America. Or if you just want to keep me working for democracy full-time, subscribe to THE FARCE newsletter, drop a tip, or just share this post. 

Free or paid, your support matters. Thank you!