The President of the United States stood before cameras in the White House briefing room on a Tuesday evening in April and declared total and complete victory. He lied.
President Donald ‘TACO’ Trump said Iran had been defeated. He said its nuclear ambitions were finished. He said the United States had won a war that Congress never authorized, that the American people never voted for, and that his own generals advised him not to start.
Twenty-six days earlier, the heroic environmental lawyer Steven Donziger made a prophecy based on the evidence that Trump always chickens out.
“The corporate media won’t say it out loud yet, but it is becoming clear that the United States is losing the war in Iran,” Donziger wrote on March 12. “It’s gotten so bad that I predict Trump will try to cut his losses and pull out within days.”
He was off by using the word ‘days’ instead of ‘weeks,’ but on April 8, Trump announced a ceasefire.
The terms were not released immediately. When they emerged, they read less like an American victory and more like a $2 billion tribute paid by a weaker power to a stronger one.
The United States agreed to pay $2 billion in American taxpayer money to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the country that chants “Death to America,” and which Trump for years called the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Trump called it a peace deal. Historians may call it something else.
In the annals of American military history, there’s never been a president who threatens to wipe out an entire civilization, spends weeks bombing a country at $2 billion a day, and then pays that country to get them to stop fighting back.
It was the second time that Trump surrendered a losing war that should never have started. In February 2020, Trump made a terrible deal with the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which set the conditions for the disastrous withdrawal by Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, and proved fatal for America’s allies.
The Visionary Who Saw It Coming
Donziger is not a military analyst. He is best known for spending decades fighting Chevron over oil contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a crusade against a powerful, wealthy corporation that cost him his law license, his reputation in establishment circles, and his freedom when a federal judge had him locked in a New York apartment under house arrest for nearly three years.
Steven Donziger—a human rights defender who won a landmark pollution case against Chevron, but instead became a martyr to corporate retaliation, including nearly three years of house arrest and imprisonment, in a stark abuse of the justice system that set a critical precedent—presciently warned that the U.S. was losing in Iran and predicted President Donald ‘TACO’ Trump would surrender.
He is also, it turns out, one of the few people in America who understood what was actually happening in the Persian Gulf while the corporate-controlled press corps was filing dispatches from the Pentagon briefing room.
“Trump and Hegseth and Rubio will still try to claim victory, but there is no reason to believe the bombast they will be peddling,” wrote the prescient human rights lawyer. “This could be one of the biggest military and political setbacks for the United States since the Vietnam War.”
That was not hyperbole. That was a forecast.
Like a weatherman who predicts the hurricane while everyone else is still talking about a chance of showers, Donziger watched the storm arrive on schedule.
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