U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t like to lose. And as his chances of pulling off a win in the war on Iran look increasingly slim, the world may soon face the prospect of a volatile president confronting a foreign-policy dilemma that is utterly out of his control. To be sure, Trump may yet pull off a feat that is lauded by geopolitical analysts as advancing U.S. interests and justifying the human, economic, and political costs of the war. But as Trump finds himself in an increasingly tight corner, it’s time to anticipate how he might react to the specter of failure in Iran—and prepare for the possibility that his response could make the conflict even more dangerous.
The challenges of the Iran war seem to mount by the day. While the U.S. military, working together with the Israel Defense Forces, has been largely successful in destroying Iran’s air defense, naval, and ballistics capabilities, the country’s political system and sources of economic leverage have proved far less tractable. There is also the matter of Iran’s remaining fissile material and nuclear capabilities—not to mention the risk that Tehran emerges from the conflict determined that it can only properly defend itself with nukes. Hopes of either a mostly seamless Venezuela-style transition to a pliable leader or a widespread people’s revolution have faded.
Trump’s past approaches to failure may shed light on what’s to come in the Middle East. Failure is nothing new for Trump: He has suffered high-profile setbacks in business, the courtroom, and politics. A consummate survivor, he has a well-worn playbook of strategies for when he is on the ropes. These involve bullying subordinates, blame-casting, suppressing facts, and doubling down on fruitless strategies.
Trump’s approach to defeat was on most vivid display after he lost the 2020 election. That fall, he quarterbacked a vigorous multipronged campaign to try to thwart the inevitable results while also deflecting blame for them.
The first element of this was denial, whereby Trump spurned his own election officials’ pronouncements that the vote was fair. He then put relentless pressure on his subordinates and counterparts, including by imploring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn the state’s results and urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to eschew his duty to certify the results. Trump also beseeched top Justice Department officials to “[j]ust say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” When election official Chris Krebs reported that the vote was secure, Trump fired him.
The efforts did not stop there. Trump empowered a group of fringe loyalists, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell, to parade false claims before the media and courts—acts for which they were later prosecuted. Trump also doubled down on manifestly fruitless strategies: The president and his allies ultimately filed 62 lawsuits challenging the results, only to lose every one.
In his lame-duck period, Trump and his supporters cast blame every which way: on faulty voting machines, corrupt election workers, mail-in ballots, the media, conniving Democrats, faithless Republicans, judges who rejected his claims, and even foreign actors.
Trump also attempted to compel media validation of his false claims. After Fox News and The Associated Press called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, Trump publicly demanded a retraction and excoriated the outlets’ refusals. He attacked Facebook and Twitter for tamping down on disinformation from his “Stop the Steal” campaign and castigated news networks that cut away from speeches spewing falsehoods.
The most dangerous element of Trump’s response to defeat was, of course, his encouragement of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. While he denied having masterminded the riot, his actions lent it legitimacy. And as his later pardons of violent rioters made plain, he had no qualms with putting foundational U.S. institutions and lives at risk in service of his vain cause.
While these tactics were at their most extreme in 2020, their origins date back much further. As a real estate magnate in New York and in his personal dealings, Trump has demonstrated a similar belligerence in response to major setbacks. When he faced financial crises and bankruptcies in the 1990s, Trump put heavy pressure on his own attorneys and executives and aggressively shaped the media narrative by browbeating reporters through personal calls, sometimes under pseudonyms.
When Trump University was exposed as a scam, Trump attacked the judge in the case and continued to deny culpability after paying a $25 million settlement. In response to the sparse crowd at his 2016 inauguration, Trump muscled White House press secretary Sean Spicer to lie for him from the White House podium, claiming that the turnout was the largest in history. In battling a lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll accusing him of rape and sexual assault, Trump pursued repeated appeals while mounting public attacks that a federal appeals court described as reprehensible and unprecedented.
If Trump handles the prospect of being outflanked in Iran as he has setbacks in other arenas, then the consequences could be grave. The ripple effects would go far beyond the president’s self-image, reputation, or fortune—or those of his acolytes. Military morale, alliances, and Washington’s global standing are all at stake in how Trump navigates the bind. As early optimism about the war has faded, Trump and his associates have already begun to enact elements of his old playbook.
There are reports that, leading into the war, Trump overrode warnings by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that U.S. troops could be imperiled by insufficient munitions and allied support. Trump has a long track record of sidelining and even firing military officers and civilian officials who disagree with him. Amid a high-stakes military conflict, such pressures could skew officers’ decision-making, resulting in inflated battle-damage claims, faulty risk assessments, incomplete or distorted reports to Congress, muzzled warnings about escalation, and compromised operational decisions that risk lives and strategic objectives.
Trump’s rash approach to high-pressure crises could compound the problem. If the White House pushes officers to hit targets without adequate legal oversight, disregard safeguards to avoid civilian harm, or otherwise breach laws of war, the conflict could be even deadlier, and military morale and readiness could be at risk. While mounting duplicative, futile legal challenges is a waste of time and money, redoubling failed military strategies out of sheer stubbornness could jeopardize the safety of U.S. service members and Washington’s military reputation.
The second Trump administration is already missing the seasoned voices of respected, dispassionate officials, such as former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who served in his first term. Those who surround Trump now are fighting over how to spin the narrative of a war that may itself be spinning out of control.
If Trump reverts to form under duress, freezing out the few more independent voices in his cabinet—such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—to rely exclusively on inner-circle cronies, then standards of professionalism, judgment, and internal cohesion will further deteriorate.
Trump’s penchant to hide and distort facts is already evident in his administration’s approach to the Iran war. In the first week, Trump accused Iran of being responsible for a deadly attack on an elementary school—a strike that U.S. investigators later attributed to the U.S. military after a preliminary probe. Last week, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke network broadcast licenses over what he claimed were distorted reports about an Iranian attack on U.S. refueling planes in Saudi Arabia.
These moves compound the opaque information environment created by the Defense Department’s unprecedentedly restrictive and punitive stance on media access in recent months, as well as a global epidemic of artificial intelligence-powered disinformation campaigns on the conflict, turning the age-old fog of war into an even more impenetrable smog.
In wartime, disinformation does not just mislead the public or seed distrust in fact-based reporting. If markets distrust information, risk premiums inflate, intensifying economic fallout. A polluted information landscape could make it impossible for Congress to judge the success of the operation and compound allied distrust of Washington
In the coming weeks, Trump’s “never admit failure” mantra could lead him to marginalize inspectors general, retaliate against whistleblowers, and attack oversight as sabotage. The Pentagon has already taken steps in Trump’s second term to crack down on critics and rein in watchdog mechanisms and complaint systems—which critics say could deter reporting, raising the likelihood that misconduct could go undetected.
It is not hard to imagine how Trump might deflect blame for a failed Iran operation. Trump’s hostile reaction to allies’ refusal to send ships to a booby-trapped Strait of Hormuz offers a preview of what this could look like. Going forward, he could cast aspersions on the U.S. military for its shortcomings, Gulf allies for declining to further escalate hostilities, China and Russia for abetting Iran, Israel’s government for urging war, Democrats for seeking to assert their oversight powers, or all of the above.
Going further still, if Trump comes to feel trapped or desperate, he might resort to extreme measures that involve reckless deployments of ground troops or even the use of unconventional weapons, leading to a protracted conflict or a wider global war. There’s also the chance that, faced with a reversal in Iran, Trump locks into another priority—Cuba or a domestic matter, perhaps—and undertakes a controversial, high-wire effort to reverse his fortunes and prove his continued dominance.
There remains a chance, of course, that cooler heads will prevail. Trump could opt to accept something less than victory in Iran, engaging in modest spin rather than a full-court press to deny and remake the facts. But if he treats this stand-off with Iran’s clerical regime as a legacy-defining showdown, then military and civilian leaders who surround him may face crucial decisions about how to handle wanton directives that thwart the truth and put institutions and objectives at risk.
Unlike in 2020, Trump still has nearly three years ahead in the White House, which means that those who defy him could face the risk of immediate retribution. But kowtowing to unsound presidential instincts, on the other hand, could exact a heavy price in the form of lives and safety. Trump’s cabinet secretaries, generals, close advisors, and congressional supporters could end up being the only ones with a chance of standing between the president and decisions that could deepen an already mounting crisis and set back U.S. national security for decades to come.
