President Donald Trump remains trapped in a stalemate over the war in Iran, and as one prominent conservative commentator noted recently, he has been left “genuinely shocked” in the face of an enemy he cannot simply pay off.
Charlie Sykes is a notable anti-Trump conservative, best known for helping co-found The Bulwark, for which he also previously served as editor-at-large. In the latest edition of the “Fast Politics” podcast, Sykes spoke with host and fellow commentator Molly Jong-Fast about the deteriorating state of Trump’s war, and why his fundamental flaws make him uniquely ill-suited to ending it peacefully.
Iniitially, Sykes noted the absurdity of how often Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have declared that the operation in Iran has been a sweeping success, with Iran left in shambles and the U.S. good to leave soon. Despite all of those claims, however, Trump still finds himself in a “widening, escalating war that he can’t figure out.” He also suggested that, at this point in the conflict, there is little apparent reason why the Iranians should be in any hurry to make a deal with Trump.
Jong-Fast noted further that, when Trump was eager to push his prior “memorandum of understanding” through, fearing an impact on the midterms, he seemed willing to offer “big payoffs,” but now, Iran does not seem interested in anything like that. Sykes said that this was “an interesting point,” and explained how it exposed the fatal flaws in Trump’s worldview.
“This is actually an interesting point, because in Donald Trump’s world, he just assumes that… everybody is transactional,” Sykes explained. “And he appears to be genuinely shocked to find out that the Mullahs [in Iran] may have a different set of incentives.”
He continued: “And also, he seems genuinely shocked that — having on day one assassinated the supreme leader of Iran, his wife, the family of all of them, their dogs, who knows? — Genuinely surprised… ‘I’m going to give them a lot of money, right? Shouldn’t they be our friends?”
Sykes also noted that Iran, as well as Saudi Arabia, has learned a key point about the way Trump approaches dealmaking, which is that the nature of any given deal with him “is only what he thinks it is on any given day.”
“So that you can sit down, negotiate a deal, sign and seal the deal,” he continued. “Donald Trump wakes up, sees somebody on Twitter, and changes the deal. Canada has discovered that. Europe has discovered that. Ukraine has discovered that. And so the Iranians are going, can we even trust this guy to stick to any deal that we give him, especially since he killed our supreme leader?”