There Has Never Been Anyone Worse at Taking an L Than Donald Trump

History will record many things about Donald Trump. This one that matters most right now is obvious: the man cannot take an L.

He, a recently fired network TV reality host, conceded the 2016 Iowa caucus graciously in his speech. He then spent the next 48 hours on Twitter claiming Ted Cruz stole it. He got Covid. He almost died. He only survived because he got drugs that only presidents could get. He tore off his mask like he’d just swiped Goliath’s nuts. He lost the 2020 election. He sent a mob to hang his vice president.

The L doesn’t humble him. It doesn’t exhaust him. It refuels him while everyone else returns to their real life. Every humiliation is a renewable resource, and the nosedive it powers gets steeper each time.

Which brings us to this hellish war. Trump torched the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, certain he’d squeeze out something better. The IAEA had verified Iran was complying. The deal was working. He torched it anyway. Eight years of maximum pressure later, Iran had 440 kilograms of 60-percent enriched uranium, thousands of new centrifuges, and a hand on the throat of a fifth of the world’s oil supply. The policy produced the exact outcome the deal was designed to prevent. That’s the L.

The strikes “totally and completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, Trump announced. Within a year, he said Iran was on the verge of multiple nuclear weapons. Both claims were lies—fed to him by Bibi Netanyahu, who has been spreading such provocations for decades to far more discerning audiences.

Trump’s response to the L of knowing his strikes didn’t work was to launch a war, which of course he immediately declared he won. The war’s logic was brute force as its own justification without regard to the Congress, the UN, reality, the world’s economy, or the hordes of humans on ships in the Persian Gulf.

What Trump actually achieved was a massive victory for… the despicable leaders of Iran. Unleashed by their justified fear of imminent explosion killing them and their families, they claimed the Strait of Hormuz. Unable to take that L, Trump has now blockaded it, achieving through American military force the same vicious effect Iran would have achieved by holding it hostage, but at greater cost and with the blame of this sore loserism landing squarely on us.

Now Trump has extended the ceasefire. He announced on Truth Social that “the Government of Iran is seriously fractured” and that Pakistan’s Field Marshal asked him to hold off until Iran’s leaders can “come up with a unified proposal.” He’s presenting this as strength. It is Iran not showing up—and Trump agreeing to wait.

Here’s what we know: No amount of bombing has managed to dislodge the knowledge that the Strait cannot be reopened without Iran’s acquiescence or defeat. Every analyst who has examined the available negotiating space agrees on its shape: Iran keeps enrichment knowledge, Iran keeps but broadly loosens leverage over the Strait, the U.S. stops a war it started on the premise of total Iranian capitulation.

Now Iran gets to decide whether it’s even worth making a deal with a guy who breaks deals, bombs you for trying to take deals, and then blockades you during a ceasefire to protest your blockade. Let’s say somehow that happens.

To take whatever deal is made, Trump doesn’t have to say out loud that he has indeed taken an L. But he has to admit it to himself. Difficulty level: unprecedented.

So what he’ll do instead is hunt for ways to declare victory in the middle of an expanding fire—announcing deals that don’t exist, threatening civilizations, sending his son-in-law to a table Iran says it won’t sit at, each move burning more credibility, each credibility burn making the next deal harder to reach.

Iran is not surrendering its uranium without promises and guarantees that Trump can never make, and Netanyahu will never let him keep. That was a fantasy demand before Trump assassinated Soleimani and before Israeli strikes killed Ali Larijani mid-negotiation. The officials most willing to talk are dead, with U.S. cover. The ones who replaced them watched Trump tear up a signed agreement and watched him kill their predecessors.

So Trump absorbs the L. He accepts a deal that leaves Iran stronger than when he took office, which is the truth of the situation and the only thing that ends this.

Or he keeps swinging, the way George W. Bush kept swinging in Iraq, and we spend years or decades fighting our way back to a worse version of the place he led us from.

W. at least had the cover of genuine uncertainty about WMD in the post-9/11 daze. Trump was told the deal was working. His own team told him. They hated it because it was working. Because it had Obama’s name on it. So he torched it. The bill for that ego decision is now being paid by 45 million people projected to lose food security by year’s end—the fertilizer supply, the planting calendars of South Asia and East Africa, the ballistic missile that already crossed into NATO airspace over Turkey.

January 6th is the prologue. When the L was big enough, he didn’t fold. He blasted through the surly bonds of the Constitution. The question is what that looks like at the scale of a war, where the Constitution isn’t even being used to dab away Pete Hegseth’s Ivermectin.

This is why we, the people who never wanted him and now fund his every whim, must pray for the greatest miracle of our time. We must pray that Donald Trump gracefully takes an L and moves on. Difficulty level: Who are we kidding?

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