Good morning! Karoline Leavitt opened by spiking the football over Trump’s “historically swift and successful military triumph,” only to get sideswiped by real-time developments she plainly was not ready for. When reporters asked who was bombing Iran and whether the ceasefire was already fraying, the swagger vanished fast: “I’m standing out here with all of you,” she said, adding, “I haven’t seen these reports. I’m not verifying them.” For someone who is usually so smug, so dismissive, and so comfortable lying through her teeth, it was deeply satisfying to watch Karoline Leavitt squirm after delivering a chest-thumping victory lap and then discovering, in real time, that the press corps is more up to date than you are.
Live coverage out of the region made the administration’s “victory” narrative look even more ridiculous. Israel kept pounding Lebanon. Iranian officials kept calling that a blatant violation of the deal. Basic questions about what the agreement even covered were still being fought over in public. Oil began climbing again, markets grew skittish, shipping through Hormuz remained unstable, and America’s allies were being leaned on to clean up a mess the White House had already tried to package as a masterstroke. So once again, Trump announced peace the way he announces everything else: loudly, prematurely, and with absolutely no regard for whether reality planned to cooperate.
Professor Robert Pape offered one of the bluntest verdicts yet on Trump’s Iran fiasco, arguing that this was not a show of strength but “the worst strategic defeat since the Vietnam War,” and warning that it may become “a bigger defeat than the Vietnam War.” He went even further, saying this was not really a ceasefire at all but “a shift in global power.” In Pape’s telling, this was not some brilliant display of deterrence but a strategic humiliation dressed up in macho posturing. Kakistocracy in action. The same people who cannot run a government without setting it sideways somehow always ....
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