Donald Trump launched in 2007 overpriced frozen meat as what he called “The World’s Greatest Steaks” through a paper catalog for a technology gadget store. A mail order frozen steak for $999 was supposed to be ordered with your electric screwdriver, or a pair of headphones. Everyone with a brain knew this would be a disaster. It launched anyway.
The Rockefeller Center was described as the largest press crowd the Sharper Image CEO had ever seen. Flash. Bang. Boom. Smoke. And then, two months later, Trump withdrew from it all completely as if he had never been there. A business disaster.
The CEO estimated total sales across all channels had reached… basically nothing. He expressed surprise that it had reached even that. And it doesn’t matter, because whether a few steaks sold in an orchestrated campaign like the Melania documentary opening day or not, the Trump plan was a bust as usual.
Bombing Iran without a clue now stands as just the latest chapter in Trump’s long pattern of being a big show with no go.
When he withdrew from Steaks, let alone his retreats from Vodka, Casinos, Airlines, Education… an endless list of cruelty covering up tactical and strategic blunders, it however was a different league.
The difference? Body count.
Who Pays Trump to Fail
Trump Steaks was a plain harm to ranchers, distributors, and investors who bought in on the ruse. The guy who made it happen walked the other direction from those he had pushed over a cliff. He moved on. They didn’t.
The Iran war follows the same structure at an immoral scale of historic disaster. Thirteen US service members dead, revealing command failures. More than 1,500 Iranian civilians dead, including nearly 200 school children triple-tapped to death in a war crime using millions in American weaponry. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a second school was bombed a week later. Upward of 5,000 Iranian military casualties. The Gulf states hosting American forces have been exposed for weakness and battered. The global economy clearly has been absorbing the Hormuz shock.
The man who launched Trump Steaks is already repositioning like he knows nobody is buying, again. Regime change went from done, and done, and done to now “a very big hurdle” that someone will need to do. Every day he keeps calling the war won, then starts promising a short war, then says negotiations are ongoing and war takes time. Negotiations? Tehran says they don’t exist.
The people working the line are hit hardest by the bad Trump brand. The owner is arguing about his pivot to the next thing.
Competent Complicity
This asymmetric resolve dynamic was well known in advance. Every serious analyst of US forever wars knew Iran would not fold.
A stronger power with less determination to fight starts a military conflict with a far weaker state whose government’s survival is on the line. The weaker side fights harder. Always has, always will. The Scythians checked Darius I. North Vietnam outsmarted and outlasted the United States blinded by Nixon. The Taliban outlasted the Soviet Union and then outlasted the United States again. The Eritreans outlasted the Soviet Union and the Ethiopians.
Rubio’s weak attempt to claim Iran is “weaker than ever” was a dishonest assessment. It was painting a dumb decision already made as analysis. Imagine him choking on his very first bite of Trump Steak and saying it’s more delicious than ever.
The professionals who remained in office under Trump to execute his plan had access to the literature telling them not to do it. They knew the history and the models. They chose to perform analysis that was asked of them, not report the analysis that was true. That’s a choice they made, to feed the decline of America.
The institution participates in its own corruption.
Mirror Image
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has now written an open letter to the American public asking whether the war serves “America First.”
It’s mocking America in a way that never could have landed before Trump. Iran is highlighting a distinction Trump has made himself between his administration and the people. Appealing over the head of the government directly to the population is possible because 60% oppose the war, and Trump popularity levels are dropping so low they remind us of Hitler in 1933.
This is what Israel and the US had planned to do to Iran. Encourage the population to separate from its government. It didn’t work there, despite massive violent clashes with the government and casualties in the tens of thousands. Pezeshkian has more raw material to work with because Trump himself has given American adversaries the audience.
Iran is simply appealing to what already exists, because of Trump. Deepening opposition that’s already there. The Iranian government is doing to American public opinion what information operations tried to do to Iranian public opinion. And the targeting of America is better because Trump spent a year painting targets domestically for foreign states to focus on.
The supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen or heard publicly since the war began. More than a month of the unknown. If he’s dead, the succession question is live and the regime the US is fighting may already be something different than what it says it targeted. If he’s alive and hidden, the decapitation theory failed at its primary objective while generating every cost it was supposed to avoid.
Trump avoids admitting the failures by saying every day his war is “nearing completion”, just like his late and over budget ballooning “ballroom” boondoggle. The 200, no 300, no wait, 400 million development project funded by Lockheed Martin and Google, built illegally without congressional authorization, on the demolished site of the historic White House East Wing. A judge halted it yesterday as Trump claimed it was ahead of schedule, just like Trump War and Trump Steaks.
Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz stays closed like everyone said it would. Trump calls it other peoples’ problem. Daily missile strikes continue like everyone said they would. Trump calls it other peoples’ problem. The Iranian president is writing letters to the American public, because Trump is less representative and more unpopular than ever. All this can’t coexist with the President declaring he’s “nearing completion” on anything.
The Architecture of Impunity
The Americans opposed have all the polling numbers and no leverage. That’s the interesting new development in terms of political science.
Nixon proved how a president could run a criminal war, get caught, and avoid real punishment. The system response was impeachment processes, resignation, pardon, and institutional reform that looked like accountability while actually removing all the mechanisms that would prevent the next one.
The War Powers Act of 1973 was passed explicitly to constrain presidential war-making. And it has never stopped a war. Every president since has ignored it, worked around it, or gotten retroactive congressional cover. The architecture of accountability became the architecture of impunity with extra steps.
The Church Committee unfortunately has shown the same weakness. It documented CIA abuses in detail. It created oversight committees. Those committees became the institutional laundering mechanism for the next generation of abuses. Oversight clearly exists. The committees are set up and talk about the abuses. The abuses continue.
The post-Nixon settlement thus has created the performance of democratic control over war. It is more durable than absence, because it preempts a demand for the real thing and real accountability to prevent another Nixon-level debacle.
Pezeshkian writing to the American public brings this into focus, because it acknowledges this. He’s going around the American architecture of holding the President accountable, because it is little more than decorative fluff.
The people who executed this war knew what Trump was selling and did it anyway. Sharper Image went to market with Steaks. The post-Nixon system was engineered to produce the appearance of accountability while preventing it, and that’s exactly what Iran doesn’t understand about regime change in America. Or do they?