Why the Press Will NEVER Make Trump Take an L

You know this.

If a president who wasn’t a Republican lost a war within days and left Americans with an $80 billion spike in energy costs, the press would demolish him, non-stop, like Jake Tapper would get his own streaming service just to shake his head derisively. The Ellisons would acquire it.

Yet for months, our media has had difficulty treating Trump’s declarations of 'victory' as what they truly are: an endless stream of humiliations.

To me, this shows how deeply our political press buys into Trump as the personification of what George Lakoff calls “strict-father” morality. I’m not saying that’s their morality. I’m saying they respect it, even more than their own, sometimes.

Because a strict-father figure can never admit defeat, cable news treats every retreat as a feat of tactical genius, afraid to risk the regime’s disfavor in the form of legal or regulatory blowback.

But the public isn’t buying it. They know exactly who is paying for Trump’s floundering (and ballroom).

Within weeks, the Iran War became more unpopular than the Vietnam War, the decades-long debacle Trump, in a classic framing error, keeps comparing his lost war to.

Every trip to the gas pump is a reminder that when Trump bankrupts everyone else, he’s the only one who walks away richer.

Sabotaging Peace

On February 28, Israel and the United States struck Iran, killing its supreme leader and gutting its military and government. Trump declared he would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender, only to claim days later that the war was “very complete.”

Wrong. On both counts.

Iran immediately choked off the Strait of Hormuz—the pipeline for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Six months later, the strait remains effectively closed while American warships maintain the pretense of a blockade, and Trump continues promising a deal “any day now.”

Historian Phillips O’Brien summed up how history will view this miscalculation: start a war of choice, burn through your weapons stockpiles, and leave the target country dictating terms from a position of strength.

The verdict is obvious: Trump lost this war.

Trump also ignored clear warnings that a deal was within reach. Days before the strikes, Oman’s foreign minister appeared on “Face the Nation” to message Trump the only way he could: through television. The minister assured the American public that a peace deal was achievable. Iran had agreed to zero uranium stockpiling and full IAEA inspections. Striking first, he warned, would only prolong and complicate the crisis.

Oman asked for months to negotiate. Trump gave them hours.

His envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—real-estate cronies with zero nuclear expertise—told the White House Iran was stalling, an assessment diplomats and nuclear experts dismissed as flat wrong.

War hawks around Trump, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, moved to strike before Iran could sign. Pete Hegseth cheerled from the Pentagon.

Senator Lindsey Graham bragged about pushing Trump over the edge. Hopefully he’s not resting in the peace he sought to deny millions.

Complete Lack of a Strategy

Trump probably knows he was played, or at the very least misled. Either way, he knows for sure what Iran is doing is exactly what he’s always wanted to do. It’s taking the oil, but with the sea. It’s what Strict Father Daddy would do.

The geezer was gassed into a fantasy. Bibi and others had him thinking that a horrific and heartless regime that has spent nearly fifty years preparing to fight off America would fold as easily as an off-brand dictator like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

Whoops.

Now, Trump just can’t ever admit that he blew it. He wants to blame someone but knows the power dynamic that would betray.

A strict father isn’t supposed to be pushed around. He’s the decider, and he owns it.

But he knows that we know that he got owned.

Trump let a chorus of Netanyahu, Graham, Hegseth, and two unqualified real-estate negotiators talk him out of a deal Oman’s own mediator was begging him to take.

The bluster keeps curdling faster and faster.

By August, any memory of the demand for surrender had vanished a thousand news cycles ago, and he was telling Axios he’s “low-keying it,” insisting the war will simply work itself out, like a chess game, while Iran’s economy craters. Asked this week whether an Iranian plot to kill him with a shoulder-fired missile worried him, he didn’t even reach for tough-guy language. He just said: “Whatever.”

The strict-father pose requires steady wins or chest-beating. Without a reason for either, even Trump seems bored of his own threats.

And Tehran knows Trump is behaving like a trapped rat.

A senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guard commander told PBS NewsHour this week that Iran may simply wait Trump out, prolonging the war “until we get to the next term of the presidency” to establish deterrence. Iran has separately signaled it won’t even negotiate with Washington until after the November midterms.

And this is the big difference between these regimes that are similar in too many ways. One has a strategy. The other is just a human id.

Trump is constantly terrified of losing power, status, and the legal shield that comes with the Oval Office. Tehran knows Trump plays a madman and occasionally acts like one. But the incentives and competing interests in the Gulf favor him acting like a coward.

Intimidation is his only real move. But this isn’t twisting a cowardly GOP congressman to pass a bill. This is demanding that your opponent play by the rules after declaring to the world that the old rules were dead. And when that fails, distraction is all he has left.

This isn’t Trump the cat toying with John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, daring them to cross him after destroying their careers. He’s the one chasing the laser pointer.

And he’s doing it to keep Wall Street from realizing the truth, which, luckily for him, it seems to have no interest in doing.

Yet.

A Lost President

Democrats have a narrow opening to define this disaster in a way the press never will, as they try to force an immediate end to the war. But the framing has to be surgical.

Describing him as the “loser” he is could be seen as tarring the troops who did what they were told. Instead, say the war, like the president himself, is “lost”—a thing that happened to the country rather than a verdict on the people who fought it.

Skip “weak,” too, since it still contrasts him inside his own frame of strength. A sharper word for that is “doddering”: a man led around by louder, angrier voices because he cannot settle on a decision longer than a press conference.

Underneath both words is the same charge: he lies constantly to the American people, and worst of all, he betrays the military he sent to fight a war. He did this by sending them to war with no achievable goal and no coherent endgame.

Trump being so lost costs us all. Even a deal weaker than what Oman had on the table in February (and what Obama achieved a decade ago) beats more months of a blockade that only inflicts misery on innocents.

We must accept reality. For now, Donald Trump has handed Tehran’s theocrats a tollbooth on one of the world’s easiest-to-close waterways, costing America credibility, deterrence, and the post-1945 order that built its dominance. He didn’t lose to a superior enemy; he lost to his own psychology by starting a war he was bound to lose.

The troops carried out the mission they were given. They deserve a commander who can admit the mission was garbage. We all do.

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