Trump Got Schooled by Iran. He’ll Never Learn

Educating Donald Trump has been an expensive and perilous proposition, for the US and the world.

His war with Iran has cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars since it was launched Feb. 28 and the tab seems well on its way to reaching at least $100 billion. American soldiers have died and thousands of Iranians have perished. More than 22 million people in the Middle East are estimated to live near reported military strikes. Oil and gas prices have soared. Inflation has been spurred and economic uncertainty looms.

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The reputational, civic and strategic costs for the US have also been enormous. In the run-up to a two-week ceasefire announced on Tuesday evening, the president took to social media and the airwaves to warn Iran and the world that “a whole civilization will die” and he intended to bomb the country “back to the stone ages.” He brushed off questions about whether he was willing to commit war crimes by noting that Iranians are “animals.”

Trump’s dangerous and reckless flexes in Iran may have been nothing more than bluffing, but sophisticated dealmakers know that undeliverable threats backfire when your bluff is called. Iran called Trump’s bluff. His options now are limited to trying to save face by taking an off-ramp the ceasefire offers or doubling down on an unforgiving war that isn’t likely to achieve regime change or most other practical goals.

The world can hope for the former but should brace itself for the latter. Ceasefires aren’t permanent peace pacts and Trump is, essentially, a downed power line. If he is left to his own devices, sputtering, further conflagrations could consume the Middle East.

All of this should remind Americans and the various institutions Trump has been testing and savaging since he vaulted onto the electoral stage in 2015 that presidents shouldn’t need the White House to be their finishing school. They should come to the job with tangible aptitudes for management, leadership, policy, rationality and decency, regardless of party or persuasion. The consequences of having a different kind of student squatting in the Oval Office – say, for example, one who is an inexperienced, aging and befuddled wanna-be-strongman who treats war like it’s a promo for his own unhinged reality TV show – are existential.

Though Trump is largely uneducable and his myriad shortcomings had decades of examination and substantiation before he became president, he has eagerly coached other students who needed a bit of a shove to recognize what their tutor is made of. “25th Amendment!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness,” Trump’s former fellow traveler and congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, advised in a social media post about the Iran war on Tuesday.

Belatedly seeing the president for who he is, and invoking a constitutional amendment that Trump’s own Cabinet and vice president are unlikely to wield, isn’t reassuring, however. The Iran ceasefire is a recess of sorts for the world’s most powerful and incendiary pupil, and he may return to class having failed to absorb his studies.

Iran is run by a vicious, oppressive theocracy that doesn’t share Trump’s predilections for short-term bursts of violent performance art. They are in it for the long haul, gaudy White House ballrooms and soaring presidential libraries be damned. They’re willing to absorb extraordinary punishment to protect their faith and country. Trump failed to recognize that before he went to war and may not even understand it now. His cognitive boundaries are circumscribed by wealth, celebrity, self-aggrandizement and self-preservation – and little else.

Trump is also notably lacking the secret sauce of good character. John Kennedy brought distinct measures of self-control, insight, lived military experience and imagination to the White House during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that Richard Nixon, whom he defeated in the 1960 presidential election, lacked. It made a difference in how that nuclear standoff between the US and Russia was resolved. Both Kennedy and Nixon would be far better stewards of global interests now than Trump.

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Trump remains a blinkered, close-minded leader, as well. The New York Times’ illuminating account of what led Trump to go to war in Iran, and how Israel helped speed things along, is a study of a student surrounded by largely incompetent instructors who he really has no interest in minding anyhow. That resulted in a handful of oblivious amateurs committing the US to a bloody, seismic confrontation in a faraway land they don’t understand.

A possibly devastating escalation of the Iran war was only avoided on Tuesday evening because brighter minds successfully intervened. That effort “was dominated by allies from across Trump’s coalition warning him not to follow through on a genocidal threat to end Persian civilization,” Bloomberg News reported. “Trump’s decision was a last-minute one.”

The reality is that Trump, a serial bankruptcy artist before entering the White House, was never an adept dealmaker. He has followed suit by demonstrating that he’s also incapable of making essential deals that improve the country’s standing in the world, from his tariff lunacies to retrogressive industrial policies. He has gone to war with the self-assuredness of someone who wrangled multiple deferrals from military service during the Vietnam War, and who remains insulated from most of the consequences – economic and social – of what he has described as his “little journey” to Iran.

The ceasefire’s breathing room hasn’t fully extricated Trump from the quagmire he created in Iran. A serious student would try to learn from that tough lesson, grow and move on. But a Trump cornered, and left without his preferred options, can become a Trump even more dangerous and thuggish.

So as the ceasefire runs its course, a foolhardy and unpredictable executive-in-training will be measured by whether he defines his Iranian studies by weeks of failed exams – or commits himself to years of mindless and cataclysmic classwork.

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