Donald Trump is Not a Failed President
April 8, 2026
As the world absorbed this morning the good news that Persian civilization has not been obliterated per an apparent nuclear threat issued by an American president to end an avoidable war that he started, the question remains: “What just happened?!”
In superficial terms, what just happened was an unjustified war in the Middle East launched by Donald Trump acting on no clear casus belli, with neither a plausible battle strategy nor a stated exit plan, amid an apparent disregard for the entirely predictable consequences to the most combustible region in the world, to the global economy, and to his own auto-extinguishing superpower.
So, the level-one narrative of Mr. Trump’s war on Iran is that it was the reckless adventurism of a volatile and amateurish president under the influence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose most un-democratic, disruptive choices benefit from Mr. Trump’s tactical affinity for unbiddable strongmen.
This is the same narrative element often evoked to rationalize Mr. Trump’s susceptibility to the autocratic machinations of Russian President Vladimir Putin — it’s not geopolitical, it’s personal.
This personality-driven rationale has enabled a range of otherwise unthinkable developments and outcomes, from the absurd “resolution” of Netanyahu’s war on Gaza to Putin’s U.S.- enabled stalemate with Ukraine in a gamble he had already lost until recent events replenished his war chest thanks to Trump’s autocrat-enthralled personality.
As for the two-week, Pakistan-brokered cease-fire agreed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s existential threat against Iran of Tuesday night, here’s David Sanger of the New York Times — the most trusted national security writer and reporter working today:
“It leaves a theocratic government, backed by the vicious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in charge of a cowed population that has been pummeled by missiles and bombs, and finds itself still under the thumb of a familiar regime, even if under new management.”
On the two crucial power levers of Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz and the country’s nuclear weapons capability, the Strait may end up in the joint control of Tehran and its New World Order counterpart, Trumpian Washington.
On its nuclear status, Sanger writes that if Mr. Trump “fails to get the 970 pounds of 60-percent enriched uranium out of the country, along with far larger quantities of lower-enriched nuclear fuel, he will have accomplished less in the billion-dollar-a-day war than Mr. Obama accomplished 11 years ago,” adding, “In that agreement, Iran shipped 97 percent of its nuclear stockpile out of the country.”
The ‘help’ Trump had promised to oppressed Iranians in January has redounded to the benefit of their oppressors — a lesson Trump’s latest autocratic beneficiary, Viktor Orban, has surely absorbed.
Beyond the benefits for Iran of this war, Mr. Trump’s actions may have also altered America’s status quo, in that the world’s democratic superpower is weaker — barring a stunning reversal in the immediate takeaways — than it was six weeks ago in that way that only foolish wars can degrade their perpetrators more than their targets. An important reminder that just because no casus belli is publicly articulated, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
This is not the first time Donald Trump’s otherwise inexplicable choices have discredited and diminished his own country. Indeed, both Trump presidencies have served to accelerate the two-decade global shift from the U.S.-led liberal world order to a post-democracy order by effectively positioning and portraying America — via both substantive if not irreversible debasements (cancelling the Iran nuclear deal) and Trump’s daily propaganda assault (check a screen, any screen) — as a dangerous and unpredictable basket case.
Power not only abhors a vacuum; it doesn’t deplete in isolation. As the United States under Donald Trump has incrementally, systematically and deliberately shed power in the form of wilfully obliterated moral authority, self-sabotaged economic credibility, decommissioned soft-power influence, and renounced multilateral leadership, that power has accrued elsewhere — to China, to Russia, to the autocrats around the world newly uninhibited in abusing their own citizens by any threat of American recourse.
Indeed, the “help” Donald Trump had promised to oppressed Iranians in January has now redounded to the benefit of their oppressors — a lesson Trump’s latest autocratic beneficiary, Viktor Orban, has surely absorbed.
For the Iranian regime, the post-Epic Fury status quo includes what appears at this writing to be a classic New World Order decapitation operation — Mubarak, Mugabe, Maduro, et al. — whereby an entrenched dictator too set in his ways to be trained in the power-consolidation stylings of the new geopolitical reality (using that word loosely here, given the performative quality of so many change-catalyzing crises these days) is replaced by a more amenable incumbent wholly beholden for their power.
Whether that model applies to or will star Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei remains to be seen, with the latest reporting from the Times of London that the new ayatollah is being treated in Qom for a severe medical condition, “unable to be involved in any decision-making by the regime,” per “a diplomatic memo based on US-Israeli intelligence and shared with their Gulf allies.”
Meanwhile, in metabolizing this latest avoidable polycrisis, a useful thought experiment; it can sometimes help to shift the paradigm and conceptualize Mr. Trump’s fateful role as an undeniable asset to the New World Order as an intelligence operation rather than a presidency.
In that sense, Donald Trump is not a failed president, he’s a successful weapon of mass destruction.
Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.