Knives Out

Trump looks fatally wounded

The humiliation for the US keeps coming. As a new round of post-war talks opened in Bürgenstock, Switzerland, the US team led by Vice President J D Vance and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff was kept waiting by the Iranian delegation. When Tehran’s experienced senior diplomats finally did turn up after the media had departed, they refused to shake hands with their counterparts.

That told you all you needed to know about who were the winners here and who was desperate.

The talks ended a day later with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif saying they “yielded encouraging progress” which doesn’t sound like a resounding success.

And it’s understandable — there’s zero pressure on Iran to reach a swift conclusion. They emerged from the war the victors and they have set the terms for Trump’s surrender. The whole world sees it. And now Trump’s biggest supporters see it too and they’re growing angry. The knives are most definitely out.

In January I identified five flashpoints that could bring Trump down, one of which was “foreign adventures” with a war on Iran highlighted. “Where next on the Chaos Agenda? Every time he does something abroad he risks disaster.” This increasingly looks to be the one.

The Surrender document that Trump agreed as a framework to talks to end the war gave Iran everything it wanted. The US got nothing. The line that Iran will agree to no nukes is a smokescreen — they agreed to that years ago.

The truth: Trump has been so badly defeated that with spiralling costs both economic and political he was prepared to agree to literally anything to get out of the mess of his own making. Throwing masses of cash at Iran to bribe them to step down was only one aspect.

It’s gone down terribly in MAGA World.

Trump’s favourite newspaper, the New York Post, published a scathing editorial which said Trump’s so-called “deal” was worse than the one Obama achieved which Trump tore up.

Fox News, the main conduit for Far Right messaging, agreed. These were both huge interventions, the first time, certainly with Fox, where Trump has truly been challenged by the machine that elevated him to power.

These things don’t happen in isolation. Those media organisations are puppets too.

Once this happens, there’s no going back. Trump has sold himself to his MAGA followers as someone who is infallible. He’s maintained that illusion through extreme bullying that kept everyone in line behind him. But the thing about bullies is that once there’s a hint of weakness, everyone piles on.

GOP Senator Ted Cruz went on TV criticising Trump’s decision to pay Iran $500 billion dollars, a cash windfall that will be used to rearm and further oppress its population. Other Republicans followed suit. Once loyal online influencers, the cohort that helped build Trump up, are now criticising what he’s done.

Before the Iran War, none of Trump’s political allies would have dared speak out in this way. Trump would have crushed them. But now he’s wounded and his power is draining away. Once that happens it’s almost impossible to recapture it.

Trump still clings on to hope that he may be able to salvage something that will allow people to forget his massive, costly blunder. But in the cliche that he and his administration love to bandy about, he has none of the cards. Zilch. And stupidly he told that to the world — and Iran — in his closing speech at the recent G7 meeting in Evian-Les-Bains.

“We run out of (oil) reserves at about four weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. It would be bedlam.”

Four more weeks and there would have been an economic catastrophe that would have rocked the world. In the speech Trump said he didn’t want to be remembered like Herbert Hoover, the US president in October 1929 when the stock market crashed, triggering what became known as the Great Depression.

“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” he continued.

Iran, of course, doesn’t care about economic catastrophe. It was facing its own before Trump started his hopeless war. But at the G7 Trump told them very clearly that he can no longer afford to keep fighting. It’s the US that is now cap in hand for something, anything that might save his neck.

It won’t happen.

Every now and then Trump blusters that he will start bombing again if Iran doesn’t do what he wants. But that will simply close the Strait of Hormuz, cut oil supplies, drive up prices and rapidly lead to the depletion of the remaining reserves. Economic disaster.

There is nothing he can do. No way out. No cards at all.

And his backers can see what an absolute mess he’s made of it. They support winners, but Trump has turned himself into the Biggest Loser. Analysts are now talking about the Iran War as the biggest strategic error in America’s history.

There might have been a way to salvage face if Trump was winning somewhere else, but his entire agenda is failing. His tariff regime has been gutted by the courts and it’s only added to the economic harm that’s being inflicted on American consumers. His attempt to build a Far Right paramilitary force in ICE has been blunted by the furious response of citizens.

No one is prepared to pay for his ballroom now he’s turned the White House into a rubble-strewn wasteland. His name has come off the Kennedy Center. And now the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is falling apart days before America’s big 250th birthday party. Crank up the Metaphor Klaxon.

Trump might have made a grifting fortune for his family, but his Project 2025 puppeteers don’t care about that. They only see him wrecking their one chance to reshape America.

The Far Right love their simplistic solutions: all we need to do is take power and will our agenda into being. They always ignore one of the basic rules of everything: nothing is simple, everything is complicated, and if it looks simple it’s probably wrong.

As they typed up their agenda, it no doubt looked like a fait accompli. They failed to reckon with Trump’s staggering incompetence and lack of intelligence. Anyone with half a wit would have realised what a disaster it would be to go into Iran with no plan, thinking it was simply a bigger Venezuela. And now he can’t hide from what he’s done.

How long can he go on? How long will those shadowy backers let him go on? His approval ratings are in the sewer. The public overwhelmingly hate everything he’s doing. His mental acuity is fading fast before the world’s eyes.

He’s now become a liability and that’s the last thing those power-hungry oligarchs and religious fanatics need at the head of their big project.

Soon. Soon.