Why Trump Has ‘No F*cking Way Out’ Of His Failed Iran War

By Asawin Suebsaeng|Zeteo

Photos: Wikimedia Commons

“Trump has no fucking way out,” one senior administration official tells me. I scribbled those six words down in my notes in recent days, as Donald Trump considered wildly escalating his failed war in Iran, and I’ve been repeating them to myself ever since.

It was true months ago that President Trump had very few ways out of his illegal war on Iran – a war he managed to lose within its first few days of existence. Many within the Trump-Vance government have feared for a long while that their leader started yet another “forever war” in the Middle East, dooming the United States to a new armed conflict for the duration of this and future administrations. But if there was no good way out then, it’s even more true now.

At this very moment, it seems that Trump will not immediately sign off on executing the “massive attack” plan that he had his Pentagon draw up. But sources stress to me they absolutely do not believe that Trump’s gigantic expansion of the war is off the table – far, far from it.

Indeed, this war almost certainly won’t end without the Trump White House fully embracing an objectively mortifying capitulation to Tehran, an enemy this president claimed he could easily knock over within just days. That is not a visual that Trump’s titanic ego is willing to accept, hence the ease with which he is able to so forcefully pull himself back into a quagmire, when he’d otherwise prefer to change the channel. To make matters more gross, virtually all the top officials in the federal government are refusing to tell President Trump what they all actually think – which is that the war is FUBAR.

After two weeks of ramping up the war he had so desperately sought to end, because it threatened to wreck his administration and the global economy, Trump spent days seriously weighing a major expansion of the war.

The planning, as described to Zeteo by people with knowledge of the matter, did not include ground troops (yet, at least). It would have involved attacking a large array of new targets – military and civilian infrastructure, meaning war crimes – and at a level of destruction possibly exceeding the previous heights of the war early this year.

That escalation plan is not off the table. The president, knowledgeable sources say, has signaled privately that he could revisit it, as soon as within the coming days. Separately, the New York Times reports that one leading factor in nudging Trump to hold off for right now is that “expanded hostilities could dangerously drain the diminished stockpile of air defense munitions in the Middle East.”

Make no mistake: The global community is nowhere close to out of the woods on this yet. President Trump’s war on Iran has now entered its most demented, dangerous, and cowardly phase for the American side. The world’s dumbest war has, somehow, managed to get even dumber. And it’s not just Trump’s fault. You can also blame everybody working for him.

No one is winning any awards for profiles in courage today.

Practically everyone in Trump’s inner circle thinks the new plan he ordered up for “massive” escalation in the bombing blitz is, as one adviser tells me succinctly, a “terrible fucking idea.” According to knowledgeable sources in and close to the White House, senior administration officials – nearly across the board – think that if Trump ultimately decides to pull the trigger, the steeply expanded warfare simply won’t achieve the president’s desired goals. These U.S. officials and Trump confidants emphatically believe the plan would make the situation much worse for this administration, domestically and abroad.

In recent days, the sources add, when the president was briefed on his newer military options and the lengthy menu of fresh targets, he was also told this campaign would invariably trigger a dramatic, hugely painful Iranian retaliation. These recent internal deliberations also included U.S. casualty estimates from the Iranian response – numbers that have spooked some of Trump’s closest advisers.

“There is almost no scenario [if we do this] where Americans don’t die,” a White House official says.

And this is before you factor in how this is the worst possible moment for Trump to re-escalate the regional conflict – given how low critical oil reserves are currently – if he doesn’t want to plunge the U.S. and global economy off a steep cliff.

Elite Republicans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere broadly fear that high gas prices from the war could easily lead to a wipeout for their party in the 2026 midterms. Indeed, Trump himself has publicly stressed that he is worried that a prolonged war with Iran will turn him into “Herbert Hoover.”

So Team Trump and their Republican allies all know how bad it could get and, frankly, how horrifically bad it already is. The problem is: The vast majority of Trump’s most senior advisers are just “too scared to just say it to the president,” one U.S. official says, adding that almost “no one is just telling Trump this won’t work … They soft-sell it or tone it down when they talk to the president about this, when what they all should be doing is telling him that none of this is going to work and it will destroy everything he’s worked for.”

This dynamic is largely caused by the fact that President Trump demands to hear, well, what he wants to hear, and too many close advisers don’t want to lose access to him or piss him off. It’s the same reason why, as Zeteo reported in May, Pentagon staff has been under tremendous pressure to essentially cook their own Iran war intel (and downplay the data showing America is losing badly) before it gets briefed to Trump.

It’s why so many of the president’s lieutenants – including but certainly not limited to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles – have been skeptical of escalations in this war but have just gone along to get along with Trump’s warmongering anyway, making sure that Trump knows that they think whatever decision he makes is the righteous one.

Sure, senior Trump officials will raise concerns to him, here and there… but not nearly at the five-alarm levels that many of them think they should. Too often, the sources say, they’re in a position where they’re sitting or standing in the room with Trump, and – as one source with direct knowledge of the matter says – “people are just waiting for one guy to say what everyone there is thinking, but nobody really wants to be the first one to get screamed at.”

In recent weeks, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has privately told other U.S. officials how disastrous or counterproductive he thinks some of these major escalations would be – and yet when he’s in the room with Trump, he doesn’t give the same blunt assessments to the commander-in-chief, three sources with knowledge of the situation tell me.

And on Sunday, Axios reported that “the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, Adm. Brad Cooper, recommended stopping [Trump’s] bombing campaign around the Strait of Hormuz because it has reached the limit of its effectiveness.” However, the news outlet continued, “absent a decision to return to major combat operations, he stressed there was no point in continuing the bombing campaign of the previous two weeks, the sources said.”

Even as everyone left the door wide open for barrelling toward further major combat operations, by Sunday, senior officials in the U.S. government had already started leaking that Trump was, once again, willing to give peace (or, “peace…”) a chance.

Indeed, multiple Trump administration appointees who spoke to me over the weekend were hoping that the president would hold off on a decision on escalation for the entire weekend, so that he could take Saturday and Sunday to cool off from his own self-imposed war fever. These officials vented about how pro-war Fox talking heads have been flooding the airwaves and getting in Trump’s ear in recent weeks about how he needs to “finish the job.” See, these Trump appointees often privately talk about their boss like he’s a moody teenager who had a bad week – except this teenager has access to B-1 bombers and wants to do war crimes all the time.

But ultimately, Trump is doing this to himself (and the planet). No one made him become history’s sloppiest, stupidest, laziest warmonger. The biggest reason there doesn’t seem to be any “fucking way out” for Trump right now is because our president is a humongous moron and morally vacant egotist, one who deliberately surrounded himself with a team of sycophants and cultists, many of whom also have no real qualifications for their jobs.

The Iranians have known for a long time that they have a ton of leverage over the Americans in this war, and they are prepared to keep flexing it between now and Election Day 2026, and beyond, if the regime feels it’s necessary. The Iranian leaders are also not currently willing to hand the Trump-Vance team any sort of fig leaf that the president could wave around as some sort of phony victory, no matter how much U.S. negotiators Jared Kushner or Steve Witkoff plead for one.

And in the past several weeks, President Trump grew furious at how people in the Iranian regime, and even in his own government and military, weren’t taking his apocalyptic-sounding threats seriously anymore. So, the president decided to have at least a little apocalypse, as a treat… and maybe gorge on a lot more at a later date, if he feels like it.

It appears the only way out for the U.S. commander in chief is to – diplomatically speaking – wave a white flag of surrender in some of the most humiliating ways the American empire has ever endured. He had that chance, multiple times, this summer. Sometimes, it appeared like he was itching to grab hold of the white flag, just so he could be done with this politically toxic war. Even when he tried to do that, he could never hold on to it, simply because he’s too violent, too stupid, too emotional, and too short-sighted to stop the killing.

In many ways, we’ve been here before. We, and the world, are beyond tired of this seemingly endless cycle of bloodshed; failed diplomacy; last-minute withdrawals of barbaric, escalatory plans for total war on civilians; fake ceasefires; and the re-ramping-up of an American war machine that feels both like it’s on its last stable leg and still willing to drag the rest of the world down with it – all because our nation is now ruled by cowards, madmen, and the racist former game-show host whom they all proudly serve.

There is no end in sight. The potential for everything to spiral out of control beyond Trump’s, or anyone else’s, grasp remains unspeakably high.