Trump just walked into a staggering trap

As of this writing, six American troops are dead. Donald Trump says there will be more. More than 1,000 Iranians are dead, and there will certainly be many more. The map of the Middle East is a sea of fire under “Operation Epic Fury,” and only 27 percent of the U.S. public is onboard.

So the real question isn’t whether “we” can win this war. It’s how fast Trump will claim he already has.

Trump has been crowing that while Iran allegedly tried to kill him three times, he “got Khamenei on the first try.” Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth called that “guts.” It isn’t guts. It’s the reckless bragging of a man treating a potential world war like the season finale of a reality series: blow everything up, grab the ratings, cancel the show before the numbers tank and the shark is jumped.

But in Iran, the shark is taking a big bite out of the truth about why the war began.

The trap Trump has walked into is staggering. He explicitly demanded regime change. Every historian and military strategist will tell you regime change has never happened without boots on the ground. Trump ruled that out. Sort of. It depends on the day.

Utterly distasteful and offensive, Trump said he doesn’t get “the yips” about troops on the ground. The reason his predecessors, like anyone with a soul, got the yips was because they were risking American lives. What a heartless jerk.

The most dishonest person in the world keeps making half-assed promises. As each falls apart, he makes another.

We are almost a week in, and the reasons America went to war remain embarrassingly murky. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed it was to neutralize an imminent threat to Israel. Trump said he was the one who pushed Benjamin Netanyahu, not the other way around. Hegseth, equally untruthful and idiotic, has his own theories.

Americans were disillusioned and confused from day one. Now they’re getting angrier by the hour. There is no justification for this war. There never was. There never will be. And that’s becoming horrifically obvious.

Meanwhile, the dominoes are falling. Gas prices are spiking. Economists warn that petroleum-linked inflation is just getting started. Refineries are destroyed. The Dow is spooked.

Trump built his entire political identity on economic and no-war braggadocio: “best economy ever,” “I alone can fix it,” “no World War III,” “no forever wars.” Now he owns an oil shock and a war he started that has the makings of World War III.

In May 2003, just six weeks into the Iraq War, George W. Bush famously strutted onto the USS Abraham Lincoln under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. He wanted to project strength, declare an end to major combat operations, and pivot to domestic politics before a long, bloody insurgency exposed the whole enterprise as a catastrophe built on lies.

The same false premises are in play now: imminent threat, weapons of mass destruction, regime change, a grateful population to welcome Americans as liberators. Those premises collapsed. Wars started on false pretenses never end well.

Trump is too ill-informed, and too reckless, to understand.

There can be little doubt he is preparing his own “Mission Accomplished” moment — except he is more selfish, less humble, and has even less patience than Bush. To be clear, Bush was never known for humility. But compared to Trump, he looks like a pussycat.

Trump will surely declare “victory” soon, not because the threat is eliminated but because the markets are screaming, the oil industry is hemorrhaging, and Trump sees giant losses on the horizon, along with the prospect of getting tied down trying to fix a country he broke.

The only difference is that Trump won’t bother with a flight suit. He’ll do it in front of those flimsy black curtains that doubled as a Situation Room at Mar-a-Lago.

Fresh off his attack on Venezuela, Trump wants the world to see him as the man who makes strongmen disappear, the most imperial of imperialists.

But just as the Iraq justifications shape-shifted from WMDs to spreading democracy when the WMDs turned out not to exist, so “Operation Epic Fury” has mutated in real time from stopping an “imminent nuclear threat” to personal score-settling by a president who treats foreign policy like a drive-by shooting.

Trump will simply “kill you,” as Hegseth might say. Make a mess, speed away, let someone else clean it up.

Trump didn’t go to war for America. He went to war for Trump. And now he has to get out fast — for Trump.

After September 11, Bush had the benefit of 90 percent public approval. He had goodwill. Trump is starting his war in the basement, with an approval rating at a record low, 36-39 percent, and 60 percent disapproval.

With his war, he barely has a quarter of Americans behind him.

Rising body counts will not move Trump the way they would move a normal president. What will move him are the Dow and oil futures. When the financial fallout becomes intolerable, he will declare victory and bolt, leaving a destabilized Middle East to deal with the wreckage he made.

Trump has zero patience. He cannot stand to be associated with losing. A grinding, inconclusive Middle East war is the definition of losing — slowly, expensively, in public.

When his lies grow old and the polls get even worse, Trump will sprint for his “Mission Accomplished” banner. He will announce that he has eliminated Iran’s nuclear program, degraded its drone and missile capabilities, avenged three assassination attempts, and secured a historic win.

Then he will leave Israel alone in the fight, the region in flames, the cleanup to whoever’s still standing.

Trump doesn’t care about our soldiers. He doesn’t care about peace, stability, or the families of the six Americans already killed and the others to follow. He cares about one thing: how Donald Trump looks when “the show” comes to an end.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”