Desperation and defeat: Why Trump’s war trumpeting is starting to ring hollow

On April Fools’ Day, the American president addressed the nation and the world to send not one message about the war that the US and Israel launched against Iran a month ago, but all possible messages at once.The conflict is “nearing completion,” Donald Trump said, before repeating that the US might also escalate by hitting Iran’s power plants if there’s “no deal.” The US is “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” he asserted, before claiming that “we never said ‘regime change’” while simultaneously musing that the regime, which remains ensconced, sort of has changed, since American and Israeli forces have killed so many leaders.Again he claimed that the US “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, even though evidence is accumulating that the Iranians had safely moved their enriched uranium to other locations before those strikes. Trump knows this too, since he has been considering ordering ground troops to try to seize that fissile material, while fearing the quagmire such a mission could end in.“We have all the cards, they have none,” the president boasted.

And yet the Iranian regime keeps playing cards that seem to surprise the administration, most notably the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that has disrupted the global economy. Trump’s address follows days of contradictory and increasingly confusing signals that suggest not victory but desperation.

One minute he posts on social media that reopening the strait is a prerequisite for ending the war, the next he tells reporters or aides that Iran wouldn’t necessarily even have to do that for a deal. Here he is vilifying the regime in Tehran as evil terrorists, there he is praising its “New Regime President”—it’s not