Time, the mood inside the White House Situation Room resembled a pressure cooker on the verge of rupture. President Donald J. Trump—cheeks flushed, voice louder than the war drums beating in Tel Aviv—gathered what was left of his National Security Council to wrestle with the boiling consequences of a powder-keg Middle East and the unraveling threads of a nuclear deal he shredded like a tax return in an audit.
The president doesn’t want a war. That’s what he says. That’s what his people say. But he pulled the pin years ago, and now the grenade has rolled back into the tent.
Trump once torched the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multinational accord crafted painstakingly by diplomats and scientists and warriors alike, aimed at caging Iran’s nuclear ambitions with locks, timers, and chains. For fifteen years, Iran’s atomic dreams were trapped in a bureaucratic amber, a nuclear bomb reduced to a mirage in the desert—until Trump, in a bluster of ignorance and defiance, yanked the U.S. out of the deal and set fire to the fuse.
Now, the world watches as the sky glows and embassies tremble. An Israeli strike—years in the making, executed in the shadows—reduced parts of Iran to smoldering concrete and broken teeth. Reports scream that Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator was among the dead, turned to ash by a precision strike not carried out by the United States, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wasted no time in distancing Uncle Sam from the scene of the incineration.
“This was Israel. Not us,” Rubio said, as if saying it fast enough would erase the stench of complicity. But Trump had already confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that his team knew. They knew, and they watched. And now, as American troops and bases across the region batten the hatches, Trump posts to Truth Social with all the subtlety of a gunshot: “THEY’RE DEAD. They didn’t die of the flu. They didn’t die of Covid.”
No, Mr. President. They died of geopolitics. They died of secrets and silence, and of missiles fired in the dark.
Iran is licking its wounds, but its claws are out. Washington has warned the Islamic Republic: don’t strike Americans. Don’t touch our bases. Don’t make us do what we’ll pretend we didn’t want to do. Trump, playing the world’s least believable dove, dangles a poisoned olive branch. Iran “may have another opportunity” to negotiate, he muses aloud, painting himself as the peacemaker in a war he helped choreograph.
The irony is biblical, and it burns like incense over charred ruins. Trump boasts that Iranian officials are trying to reach him. His claim is met with silence from Tehran. They’re not picking up the phone—they’re burying their dead.
The United Nations is scrambling, convening an emergency Security Council session while its atomic watchdog blasts Iran for violations. Iran calls the watchdog’s findings “politically motivated” and pledges to crank up uranium enrichment in defiance. The centrifuges are spinning again, like roulette wheels in a cursed casino.
Meanwhile, in America, lawmakers clap like seals for Israel’s boldness. “Game on. Pray for Israel,” Senator Lindsey Graham barked on X, as if cheerleading a firestorm. Most Republicans followed suit, backs arched in military devotion, hearts bleeding for an ally that just threw the region into chaos.
But this—this—is the endgame of an era that began with a lie: that diplomacy is weakness and force is king. That lies in the teeth of every intelligence report that said Iran was not building a bomb. That the deal worked. That for a brief moment, we had them in a box.
Trump didn’t believe it then. He doesn’t believe it now. He believes in bluster, in gold-plated speeches and fireworks over military parades, like the one planned tomorrow for the Army’s 250th birthday—and, incidentally, his 79th.
But even his parade may get washed away. Storm clouds are rolling into Washington, literal ones. Thunder over the tanks, lightning on the asphalt. God himself may not be pleased with the theater.
Elsewhere, things boil. The American Pope, Leo XIV, will address the masses from Chicago in a spiritual counterpoint to the messianic mania in D.C. Protesters plan “No Kings” demonstrations across the country—some for democracy, others for sheer rage.
And in a courtroom that Trump no longer controls, the federal appeals court has refused to wipe clean the $5 million stain from the E. Jean Carroll verdict. Only the Supreme Court remains between him and accountability. But that’s a story for another day.
Today, the winds of war howl through the capital. Today, the President who wanted no part of this war finds himself neck-deep in it, dragged by the gravity of choices made with swagger instead of sense.
He didn’t want to get pulled in.
He just lit the match.