Tuesday was a day like no other in living memory, with bookends provided by two Truth Social posts from Donald Trump. At 8:06 a.m. ET, the president expressed genocidal rage in warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz by a contrived deadline of 8 p.m. The post shocked Trump’s allies into silence and triggered a host of Democratic calls for his removal from office under the 25th Amendment provisions for sidelining a president suffering from a debilitating incapacity. After ten tense hours during which it became necessary for the White House to reassure Americans that Trump was not planning to deploy nuclear weapons, at 6:32 p.m. ET the president announced on Truth Social that he was accepting a Pakistani-brokered two-week cease-fire.

In the course of one day, Trump appeared to transform himself from a 21st-century Attila the Hun, prepared to lay waste to an entire nation, into “TACO Trump,” the politician whose psychotic threats are usually empty. While many of his friends and most of his critics were relieved that the president backed down from his earlier vows to return Iran to the Stone Age, the dénouement made everyone wonder why exactly Trump had launched this war at all. His articulation of U.S. war aims was never clear and often drifted from topic to topic. But it appears the only goal the cease-fire arguably (not even very definitely) accomplished was a temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, resolving a problem created by the war itself. There was no regime change. Iran still controls its nuclear materials. As Bloomberg’s Jonathan Tamari observed, it’s hard to identify anything Trump “won,” and the price he paid, not just in lives and treasure but in American credibility, was enormous and potentially rising:

Trump’s erratic month as a war-time president, and his frantic search for an off-ramp, will color how enemies and allies deal with him going forward. …Adversaries and allies alike described the outcome as a strategic setback for the US, one that will “dent Trump’s........

© Daily Intelligencer