President Donald Trump never shows doubt — his policies always work great, even better than expected, while his opponents fail at everything they try. This simplistic approach has proved remarkably effective for the former real estate developer. He shamelessly spins everything, even failure, as a success.
But there’s a big reason why the war with Iran could end his streak. The regime will “win” as long as it endures.
Time and again, Trump has succeeded by drowning out the other side of the argument, speaking over the facts or making a simple refrain stick when the facts are complicated. But the facts here are inescapable.
By choosing to attack Iran, Trump broke two high-profile promises in one fell swoop. He campaigned in 2024 on reducing prices and pledging not to start wars. “I will tell you, you’re not going to have a war with me and you’re not going to have a Third World War with me, that I can tell you,” he said at a rally in New York days before the 2024 election.
Of course, Trump has talked his way out of broken promises before. But Iran has split the MAGA movement in dramatic ways. A high-ranking counterterrorism official resigned, saying Trump started the war under pressure from Israel. Meanwhile, gasoline prices are a constant reminder to anyone who drives a car. Even if the war ends soon, the sharp rise in oil prices will reverberate through the economy for months to come.
Trump will find it hard to blame Iran on someone else. Iran is a war of choice, with ill-defined, constantly shifting aims.
Luck often saves Trump from his excesses. Because he was defeated in 2020, he escaped blame for two events that crippled Joe Biden’s presidency — the spike in inflation and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pandemic supply shocks would have contributed to inflation no matter who was president. (This did not stop Trump from claiming, falsely, that there would have been no inflation if he had won a second term.)
As for Afghanistan, Biden basically implemented Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban, which called for removing all U.S. troops by mid-2021. Before the withdrawal turned into a disaster, Trump complained that Biden wasn’t removing troops fast enough.
But Trump will find it hard to blame Iran on someone else. Iran is a war of choice, with ill-defined, constantly shifting aims.
The conflict has led Trump to perform some stunning flip-flops. In his first term, Trump criticized the Obama administration as “insane” for giving Iran $1.7 billion in cash — which was owed to Iran — in order to secure the release of detained Americans, including a Washington Post reporter. Now, spooked by rising oil prices, Trump has approved lifting sanctions that could give Iran $14 billion in oil revenue.
And Trump has said that this war has killed so many Iranian leaders that there is no one he can negotiate with — yet he said Monday that the administration has held “very, very strong talks” and that “we have major points of agreement.”
As average gasoline prices in the United States head toward $4 a gallon, Trump has played down the increase, arguing that this was to be expected and that he thought the rise in oil prices would “be worse, much worse actually. I thought there was a chance it could be much worse. It’s not bad and it’s going to be over with pretty soon.” But energy infrastructure destroyed by military strikes will take years to rebuild, possibly keeping prices high for some time.
Even for Trump, consistent inflation could be difficult to spin. He’s somehow managed to talk his way past the fact that 2025 was the worst year for American job creation in a non-recessionary year since 2003, and the second worst since 1960. The U.S. economy grew by just 2.1% in 2025 — half the target set by Trump in numerous speeches. The president’s own tariff policies were one of the factors weakening the economy. But some analysts say supply shocks from the war with Iran could lead to stagflation — high unemployment, low growth and high inflation. That last happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, when Trump was first profiled in The New York Times as “tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth” and possessing a $200 million fortune. (It was later revealed in a regulatory filing that his annual income at the time was only $26,000.) Before Trump attacked Iran, the Federal Reserve appeared poised to further reduce interest rates, a long-sought goal of the president’s. But policymakers last week hit pause because of uncertainty about how the conflict might affect inflation. “The thing I really want to emphasize is that nobody knows,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said. “The economic effect could be bigger, they could be smaller, they could be much smaller or much bigger. We just don’t know.” The irony is that Trump’s spin and falsehoods convinced many Americans he was an economic wizard. He repeatedly — and falsely — claimed that in his first term he created the greatest economy in U.S. history, even though manufacturing had slipped into a recession just before the pandemic upended the economy in 2020. But the claim stuck in many Americans’ minds. If Trump had never run again, he might have rested on his self-perceived laurels. Now Trump’s legacy will be defined by his second term. Trump is trying hard to change the subject. On Sunday, he posted on social media, “Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!” But Iran isn’t dead — not as long as the regime can keep a stranglehold on the world economy. The Harry Houdini of political spin might have finally found himself in a box from which he cannot escape. Header photo: Murtadha Al-Sudani / Anadolu via Getty Images; Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images; Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images; Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images; Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images; Vahid Salemi / AP
Glenn Kessler was a journalist at The Washington Post for nearly 28 years, most recently writing The Fact Checker column. He is chief content officer at Sourcebase.ai and writes at https://glennkessler.substack.com. 
