It was a predictable development that was predicted.
The loudest media voices cheering President Donald Trump when he attacked Iran were never likely to be with him when he inevitably decided to cut his losses and end the war.
Even before the full details of the nascent agreement were published, the Wall Street Journal reported the hawks were already flapping their wings.
“If the president signed a bad deal, many of us who cheered and stood by him and thought that his action in Iran was heroic, will be extraordinarily disappointed,” the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro told the outlet, before likening the war to closing out a basketball game.
Other pundits who had been with Trump longer, when some of his new friends were still Never Trumpers, were disappointed by the decision to go to war in the first place.
Now the question is who the president can count on to sell the deal, which will unavoidably be compared to Barack Obama’s from more than a decade ago, after the Iran War reshuffled Trump’s media support.
It won’t be the Democrats, who largely opposed the war but aren’t inclined to throw Trump a lifeline now. It will be TACO Tuesday everyday between now and the midterm elections as they try to demoralize the older Republican voters Trump was still counting on to show up in November.
It won’t necessarily be Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has now safely won his Republican primary (with Trump’s endorsement) and avoided a runoff.
It won’t be the laptop bombardiers or the 82nd talk radio division.
“If the only people who end up liking this deal are the people who have spent months screaming at Trump for taking on a 47-year enemy of the U.S.… then it will be, definitionally, a bad deal,” Shapiro told the Journal.
But will the people “screaming at Trump” be there after the president dismissed them as irrelevant to MAGA?
It is not wholly a book-promoton-related coincidence that Vice President J.D. Vance is at the moment more prominently defending the Trump administration’s diplomacy than its chief diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
While this could mend some fences, in other corners this will be used as a cudgel with which to beat Vance ahead of the 2028 Republican primaries. They are already calling it the “Vance deal.”
The administration’s reluctance to release the terms, which may become increasingly untenable to defend, suggests at a minimum they know it is difficult for both Trump and Iran to find a face-saving way out politically.
There will be little introspection about whether a better deal was achievable before the war or why the war—Trump, unlike that weakling Obama, has clearly demonstrated a willingness to use military force—did not produce a better deal.
Many of Trump’s detractors would not have trusted any deal reached with the Islamic Republic and would not hold military action to the same standards when evaluating whether a policy was working or not.
And while Trump has at times tried to blame a war-weary electorate for limiting his military options, it was clear from the beginning that he did not himself have the appetite for an Iraq-style quagmire.
Once the war was clearly doing more to fuel inflation than topple a regime Trump had hoped was already on the brink before he struck, he was not going to continue it indefinitely.
Trump had allowed his relative successes with more limited and performative military operations to deceive him into believing he had found the cheat code for avoiding forever wars.
And while Trump is perhaps the least predictable of all the political actors involved here, he does seem willing to do the one thing that will keep this from becoming a forever war.
The lack of congressional authorization and proximity to an event like the 9/11 terrorist attacks makes this in some respects more troubling than its predecessor wars. Episodic Trump allies are trying to set the precedent that presidents can start wars without Congress, but not end them.
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But if the deal holds against tough scrutiny at home and abroad, Trump will have avoided a genuine Iraq-like fiasco. Perhaps he will have degraded Iranian military capacity or reset relations with Tehran in ways that could produce some benefits, though that very much remains to be seen.
As to whether the war ends or restarts, two other questions aside from unpredictable international events remain. Will Trump stick to his guns if the Republicans whose congressional seats he may be trying to save decide to savage the deal? And will those who want to end the war allow hurt feelings over mean Truth Social posts to override that objective?
We’ll soon find out.
