The Scale Changes. The Reflex Doesn't.
From a $14 million paint job to a war in its fifth month, Trump has one move for every failure, and Congress keeps declining to stop him from making it.
On Friday, an Iranian missile barrage struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in eastern Jordan. Two American soldiers were killed. A third is missing. Four more were wounded and airlifted to hospitals in Amman.
It was the fourth Iranian attack on U.S. forces in Jordan in five days. The base had already been hit once that week, wounding roughly twenty American troops as they scrambled for cover in bunkers. This time, at least one missile got through.
The deaths bring the American toll in this war to sixteen. More than four hundred U.S. service members have been wounded since Washington and Israel opened the campaign against Iran on February 28. Iran’s Health Ministry says at least fifty people have been killed during the current escalation alone, part of a war now approaching its fifth month.
The ceasefire President Trump signed last month is, in the words of Iran’s supreme leader, “worthless and invalid.” He is not wrong that it has collapsed. Overnight, Iran said American projectiles struck the construction site of a nuclear power plant in the country’s southwest, while the United States attacked coastal surveillance systems, air defenses and Iranian forces near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran struck a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant for the second time in two days and fired missiles toward Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba. Iranian authorities say roughly ten thousand people are without reliable water because American attacks damaged bridges, pipelines and desalination infrastructure.
On Saturday, as news broke that two more Americans had been killed, the president was golfing at Bedminster, New Jersey. Reached briefly by telephone, Trump called their deaths “a very sad thing” before returning to his defense of the war and dismissing Iran’s declaration that the ceasefire had collapsed.
Trump will spend Sunday at MetLife Stadium beside Gianni Infantino, preparing to present the World Cup trophy. The trophy is an appropriate prop. It offers the kind of world Trump understands: one winner, one loser, a glittering object raised above the crowd and cameras recording the triumph from every angle.
It was Infantino, in fact, who handed Trump his last trophy. In December, three weeks after the Nobel committee passed him over for a Venezuelan opposition leader, FIFA presented Trump with its brand-new, first-ever Peace Prize. There was no nominating process, no named finalists, no criteria beyond what Infantino wished to award. Trump called it “one of the great honors of my life” and credited himself with ending eight wars, one of which the Indian government says he had nothing to do with.
Six weeks later, a ninth war is still finding new things to break.
Congress could begin restraining this war tomorrow. On paper, it would take only three Republicans joining the opposition to produce a House majority and four to do the same in the Senate. Both thresholds have already been crossed once this year. In May, four Republican senators supported advancing a war-powers measure. In June, four House Republicans joined Democrats to pass one, 215 to 208.
Trump called them the “Four Republican Losers,” rejected the resolution on the grounds that his administration considered it unconstitutional and continued bombing. Congress has not mounted another serious attempt since.
A narrow majority alone may not be enough to overcome a presidential veto or compel a president determined to defy Congress. But it would force every member to choose publicly between constitutional responsibility and Donald Trump.
Congress is not powerless to restrain, but it has repeatedly chosen not to use its power.
Robin Wright, who has covered Iran since 1973 and lived in Beirut during the disastrous American intervention there, was recently asked what she thought was driving Trump’s Iran strategy. Her answer had little to do with Iran. Trump, she said, “seems much more absorbed in what does the Reflecting Pool in Washington look like” and in erecting buildings and arches bearing his imprint. “And this is a tragedy.”
She was talking about a fountain.
She was also, whether she knew it or not, describing how this administration responds to every failure it cannot spin: not by acknowledging it, learning from it or changing course, but by finding somebody else to blame, or something shinier to place in front of the cameras.
This is a story about that pattern, and about what it costs when the failure in question is not a paint job, but a war.
