How Donald Trump betrayed himself

Throughout history, leaders have used ceremonial occasions as the backdrop for statements intended to rally support or as warnings to their foes, especially in times of war. We may consider Pericles’ Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War, or Mark Anthony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral, or more recently, Stalin’s Red Square address at the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the Germans were closing in on Moscow. The pomp and ceremony of such events confers legitimacy, and serves as an enhancement to a leader’s physical bearing. It was in this vein that Donald Trump bestrode the White House balcony on Monday to mark the annual Easter Egg Roll. 

Flanked by his wife, and by a man in an anthropomorphised rabbit costume, the President turned to Operation Epic Fury — his joint intervention along with Israel, against Iran, now entering its sixth week.  This is not the first occasion that Trump has used the Easter Egg roll as an opportunity to turn up the political heat. In 2017, he used it to position his agricultural policies as the basis for a rejuvenation of American power, and the following year, he announced a raft of military spending increases. On each occasion, the rabbit stood resolutely by the side of his commander-in-chief, as a sort of interspecific Varangian Guard; his head bowed slightly, with the mortified solemnity of a football club mascot during a minute’s silence.  

After praising the successful special forces operation to exfiltrate a downed American airman from inside Iranian territory, the President moved on to the substance of his statement — an ultimatum to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. He reiterated in more temperate terms comments he had made on Easter Day, demanding Iran cease its blockade by Tuesday, or else America and Israel would obliterate Iran’s energy and civil infrastructure. It is becoming increasingly difficult not to notice the President’s tone of increasing desperation, particularly when we think back to the almighty and terrible figure he cut on the world stage only three months ago. 

Having inflicted a sudden and humiliating raid on Venezuela to abduct President Maduro, European leaders had been reduced to accepting Trump as a force of nature, immune to appeals to reason, as he threatened to annex Greenland from Denmark. In the weeks since, along with the Israelis, the US has systematically annihilated Iran’s nuclear programme, and massively degraded the Islamic Republic’s air and missile capabilities. The leadership of the IRGC and the regime itself have been decimated, with the remnants left virtually unable to gather for fear of further attacks, inhibiting their ability to make decisions or govern. The killing of the 86 year old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei underscored Trump’s ruthlessness, lending his threats a ferocious credibility. 

This has been an immensely powerful overturning of almost two generations’ American approach to Iran, and a seismic break with Obama-era policy, which Trump failed to repudiate during his first term due to a lack of grip over the organs of state. Iran had been left the beneficiary of two decades of American missteps in the Middle East, firstly and most inexcusably with the dissolution of the Iraqi Army in 2003, and later the path-dependent liberal muddle that was Obama’s approach to the continuation civil war in Syria after the rise of ISIS in 2014. From 2017 until December 2024, Iranian proxies lingered across the region like the Red Army in Central Europe in the late 1940s, subsuming Iraq, Syria and Lebanon into varying degrees of quasi-colonial rule from Tehran. Their baleful presence might have endured as long as that of the Soviets in Europe, were it not for Trump II. 

Nevertheless, Trump is now in trouble, and the Iranians have got him in a spot tighter than that of any of his foes, domestic or foreign, at any point in his political career. Their blockade of Hormuz is not quite a tourniquet around the neck of the world economy, but it is a severe constriction that is going to impose big costs onto people who had absolutely no investment in the question of what to do about Iran’s nuclear programme. The vast majority of those people are foreign and thus of no concern, but others are Americans who voted for Trump. 

Donald Trump’s political staying power came from the faith that he kept with the peculiar coalition of supporters who coalesced behind his presidential bids. People have talked about many lesser political operators as “Teflon” for their ability to weather scandals, but usually this referred to the hold that their apparatchiks held over the media, and thus their power to make inconvenient stories disappear after a while. Trump has been the only notable figure to have entered into a profound communion directly with his public, or at least a sufficiently large percentage of it, perhaps since Ronald Reagan himself. Through thick and thin, Trump never dogged his base, and it was this that made the procedural lawfare of his enemies in 2023 and 2024 look hollow and pathetic. It was an imitation of power politics, where Trump was doing the real thing. 

This faith was based on a small handful of basic assumptions. That Trump would act as a bulwark protecting Middle America from hated and vengeful domestic elites, and that he would prioritise American interests over both foreign alliances and economic theory. Yet perhaps more fundamentally than any of these, there was the assurance that he would not lead America into any more military adventures in the Middle East. That this would prevent any more American blood from being shed in that theatre was its explicit justification, but preventing gas from hitting four dollars a gallon was not far behind. 

These voters are now torn wretchedly between their patriotic instinct to support their president in a time of war, and the lurching feeling of betrayal by the one man who swore he never would. In the short term, it may be that the Administration is saved from electoral catastrophe by coastal America’s urgent need to signal its gloating moral superiority over the plebs and rubes who had dared to defy them. But stood there next to his rabbit, Trump knew that something fundamental had snapped in the edifice holding him up. 

It is here that Trump has really got himself stuck, by ignoring his own time-honoured strategy

The President now faces a dilemma. Either he needs to commit a very large number of American troops to securing Iranian territory around Hormuz, to the point that the Iranians are no longer able to enforce a blockade, or he needs to induce the regime into coming to some sort of deal. The former would shatter whatever chance he had of restoring the trust of his electoral coalition — it would almost inevitably result in a Democratic victory at the next presidential election, which would see Trump personally, along with all of his family and anybody associated with his administration, become subject to a legal purge of such viciousness that even the BBC might wince at it. So, a deal it must be. 

It is here that Trump has really got himself stuck, by ignoring his own time-honoured strategy. Trump does deals by cornering people — either by luring his quarry with a tantalising offer, or else by backing them into one directly. More recently, in geopolitics rather than in business, he has worked on those who have already found their way into corners by their own misadventure or bad luck. In any case, once firmly backed in enough, Trump eyeballs them, and lets them know that it is just them and him in the corner; nobody else. He is the only man in the world who can get them out — and then he gives them time to think about it. Eventually, they always fold.  No other leader in recent western history has had the capacity for brinkmanship to pull it off as he has. 

Part of the reason he can do this is that he has never directly cast himself as anybody’s enemy. His moral ambivalence about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in comparison with other western leaders, put him above the fray in his interactions with Putin in a manner that made the latter appeal smaller than the Stalin-like figure that others have turned him into. Trump’s line with his interlocutors was always that he could destroy you as easily as he could give you everything that you wanted; it didn’t mean much to him either way. They knew his terms. 

His approach to the Iranians since February has completely disregarded all of this. He has sworn that he will destroy the regime. The damage that has already been inflicted on them is so significant that they have almost nothing now to lose by escalating in any way that they can, and maintaining the blockade is the clearest way that they can hurt him, notwithstanding the two-week Pakistani brokered truce. Never before has an American president faced a foe that could well emerge stronger from a strategic nuclear strike than it looked beforehand, but the Administration has somehow managed to conjure one into existence.  

The decapitation of the regime has deprived Trump of the single, lonely human individual his strategy rests upon. They are all dead. At this point, there is only one man standing alone in the corner.