Red Zone

A humiliated Trump is at his most dangerous

As the deadline approached for Trump to inflict his promised genocidal war crimes on Iran, the Pentagon was still making preparations for a massive missile barrage. His decision to announce a ceasefire agreement with the enemy came as a surprise to everyone.

“We had no idea what was going to happen. It was wild,” a Pentagon insider told Axios.

Allies were relieved. Apart from the moral aspect, they feared Iran would retaliate in devastating style. Every right thinking person everywhere was cheered, especially as the Trump administration had dropped broad hints about using nukes while at the same time denying it.

Yet no one should have been surprised. Trump Always Chickens Out — TACO — has become common currency for a reason.

Trump is a coward. The yellow streak has been deeply embedded in his back since childhood, through the Vietnam draft right up to refusing to accept consequences for his criminality. As President, he has taken no action where the unforeseen might come back to bite him.

Like the toddler doing a nervous u-turn in the internet meme, he swaggers on, boasting and beating his chest, until he’s teetering on the edge of the abyss, peers down into the dark and realises he’s massively overreached, then turns tail and flees while blaming everyone else or saying he has, in fact, actually won.

Iran is the ultimate example of that. Billions wasted, American lives lost, jets destroyed, munitions depleted and no war objectives achieved. Zero. The deal he’s now trying to reach will be worse than Obama’s which he tore up.

The more he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pronounce victory, the more foolish they both look. Even many of his own supporters don’t believe it.

Iran is emboldened, as are America’s other enemies, and richer too. The US has been weakened on the world stage and by association so has Trump because this is a catastrophe entirely of his own making.

He realised very early on that he’d got it all wrong and his Bully’s Charter of overwhelming force wasn’t going to work. As a racist white supremacist, he didn’t have the slightest inkling that another culture might react differently to how he imagined. By the time realisation dawned it was already too late — there was no option that wouldn’t appear as a defeat.

He might have been able to frame his final decision as a win to a few simple-minded Fox News viewers, but everyone else knows this is an Operation Epic Failure for the history books.

And Trump knows that too. He can see all those former allies that he derided laughing at him. Iran is laughing at him.

The strongman image he’s desperately been trying to cultivate all his life has collapsed. And that is why we’re now all in a dangerous situation.

Understanding Trump’s psychology is important to know what comes next.

A classic narcissist, Trump is a bully and a coward, venal, and, underpinning it all, incredibly stupid — he doesn’t read and as such he’s developed no critical faculties so he can’t extrapolate consequences from any information presented to him. That’s a toxic combination.

He’s not strong like the embarrassing lickspittles around him say. He’s very, very weak, fundamentally frightened that he’s not up to the challenges he faces and so overcompensating on every front.

Being seen to be weak is the ultimate crushing blow for someone who grew up with a bullying father declaring that the weak were losers undeserving of any rewards, emotional or material.

As the Mayo Clinic points out, people with narcissistic personality disorder have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure.

The only way to ease that torment is to be seen as being strong again, even if that means lashing out.

We saw the first evidence of that as the scale of his failure began to become known: an all caps Truth Social rant blaming NATO for his own inadequacy. It was the whine of a spoiled child who’d been denied the reward he expected.

But however embarrassing it was, the post had a sinister ending. The mention of Greenland wasn’t a throwaway comment — it showed where his mind was going.

From the start of his term, he’s stated publicly that he wants to seize Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, because he believes the US/he himself deserves it. He was denied before when his former European allies stood firm against him.

After that, he turned his attention to Venezuela, deposing its President Nicolas Maduro and taking control of its oil, a minor victory which assuaged him for a while.

But following his Iran humiliation he needs a Venezuela-style win to soothe his psychic agony. Another attempt to gain Greenland is now clearly in his thoughts.

But his compulsion to be seen as strong could push him even further. Nothing should be ruled out. He’s already destroying Cuba economically as a precursor to taking it over. He could turn his attention back to Canada, or move on to Colombia.

His private Gestapo ICE have already murdered two American citizens. The public outcry forced him to take his foot off that repressive pedal for a little while. He may now feel he needs to double-down to show his strength domestically.

Or like the wounded child he is, he could go back into Iran to bring about that civilisational destruction to erase the stain of his defeat. In that case, another loss cannot be tolerated. He will need to go all out. If you think he wouldn’t use a nuke to save himself, I would suggest you haven’t been paying attention to the kind of man he is.

We are now at the point of greatest danger. Trump is not psychologically capable of admitting defeat. That means he has to win, at any cost.

Much of his term has been characterised by failure and pushback, not the least with tariffs, the keystone of his economic platform and perhaps of everything he wants to do. He’s fast running out of psychological road, particularly with the midterms approaching and with Democratic victories in recent key races suggesting another big loss is on the cards.

A Democrat-controlled Congress would end his Presidency. Impeachment would be a distinct possibility.

Would a cornered, wounded, mentally unstable man like Trump allow that to happen? How far is he prepared to go?