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David Smith, Guardian
Mon 30 Mar 2026 08.00 EDT
Guardian on Google
‘Battle of the titans’: Trump’s distorted
reality
on Iran war runs into a brick wall
War is testing the operating principle that
has guided Trump for decades:
*construct a narrative,
*declare it to be true and
*relentlessly force the
world to submit to it
“Let me say, we’ve won,” he told a rally in Kentucky on 11
March. “I think we’ve won,” he said on the White House south
lawn on 20 March. “We’ve won this war. The war has been won,”
he said in the Oval Office on 24 March. “We are winning so big,”
he promised a fundraising dinner on 25 March.
Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over
does not make it so. While the US president insists that his military campaign
in the Middle East is a historic success, the world is bracing for a conflict
that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy.
The war is turning into the ultimate test of an operating principle that has
guided Trump for decades: construct a narrative, declare it to be true and relentlessly
force the world to submit to it. It has proved effective in Manhattan boardrooms,
on reality television and even at the heart of power in Washington.
But in Iran, Trump’s unique brand of “truthful hyperbole”
has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into
a brick wall.
“This is war and you can’t just will a win into existence in war,”
said Tara Setmayer, cofounder of the Seneca Project, a women-led political action
committee. “The American people are not on board with what’s going
on because he cannot articulate an argument for why we’re there or what
victory actually looks like.”
Trump has led a charmed life that bred self-belief. He grew up in a secluded
suburb of Queens, New York, where his father Fred, a wealthy property developer,
is said to have taught him to never apologise or show weakness. Sundays were
spent at a church where the head pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, author of
the influential bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking.
The book’s directives include: “Formulate and stamp indelibly
on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously.
Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture …
Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.”
Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, said: “When he was in high school,
the military academy, he already told his roommate that his goal was to be famous,
to be a celebrity, and he got it that being a celebrity let you bend reality,
let you get away with things, to be as big as possible. His roommate described
Trump lying on his bed in the dorm and announcing his plans to become famous.
“He got that was the ticket and he was right. The bigger you are, the
more people are attracted to that fame and the more willing they are to overlook
what it is that’s actually happening because you can tell them what’s
happening. You can tell them what is in front of their eyes and what is actually
in front of their eyes is just so much more boring and less dramatic and less
exciting.”
The approach served Trump well as he went into the family business. He opened
hotels and casinos and was notorious for exaggerating his own wealth. He marketed
the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City as the “eighth wonder of the world”
and promised regulators and investors it would be a guaranteed cash cow; it
filed for bankruptcy a year after opening.
In fact Trump’s businesses went bust six times, although he never declared
personal bankruptcy. Meanwhile he cemented his fame by hosting the reality TV
show The Apprentice and entered politics with the lie that Barack Obama had
been born overseas. His false assertions during the 2016 election campaign –
that Mexico would pay for a border wall, for example – proved no barrier
to him winning.
During his first term Trump made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims,
according to a count by the Washington Post newspaper. Time and again, he created
his own alternate reality. But the strategy came unstuck when America was hit
by the Covid-19 pandemic and hundreds of thousands of deaths could not be wished
away. Trump duly lost the 2020 election.
He continues to insist, without evidence, that the poll was “rigged”
against him, and millions of his supporters believe him. When a mob of his supporters
ransacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 in a bid to overturn the result,
he subsequently recast them as patriotic heroes rallying in defence of democracy.
And he pardoned them on his first day back in office.
Trump also held up an inverted mirror to reality by framing the criminal investigations
against him as a witch hunt and accusing Democrats of weaponising the justice
department, even as Trump himself ordered the attorney general to pursue his
political opponents. Big tech executives, law firms, media companies and universities
have surrendered to his narratives.
Numerous foreign leaders have also indulged Trump’s version of the
world, praising his leadership in the Ukraine war, making concessions on tariffs
or agreeing he deserves the Nobel peace prize for supposedly ending seven wars.
But his designs on Greenland stretched the boundaries of his positive thinking.
War in Iran threatens to break them.
A month into the conflict, Trump is in trouble. It has already cost 13 US
lives and billions of dollars. Yet there is little sign of the Iranian regime
losing its grip. Instead, as many observers predicted, Tehran has triggered
a global energy crisis by blocking the strait of Hormuz. Opinion polls show
the war is already unpopular with US voters and a ground invasion would be even
more so. There is no obvious exit strategy.
Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential
Candidate, believes that Trump has finally met his match. Noting Iran’s
proud culture and unwillingness to bend the knee, she said: “He has zero
interest in their history; they have zero interest in his fame.
“It’s an interesting parallel because Iran has been constructing
the reality that it wants its citizens to embrace. Donald Trump has been constructing
the reality he wants his citizens to embrace. So it’s reality constructor
regime versus reality constructor regime. A battle of the titans.”
It is a battle with deadly geopolitical consequences. Joel Rubin, a former
deputy assistant secretary of state, argues that Trump’s belief in his
own mental supremacy fundamentally misunderstands the mechanics of warfare.
“Trump clearly is a real believer in the power of the mind to control
events and to shape how people perceive events and shape reality,” Rubin
said.
“The problem with that in the case of the war is the Iranians don’t
have to bend to that. There are time-tested ways to win wars and end wars through
force of arms or diplomacy that have nothing to do with the mind and willpower
and willing it because the other side will do what we want. He’s going
to buck up against that and the sooner he relies not just on the reality of
military power but the reality of diplomatic power the more likely he is to
be successful.”
Media reports suggest that Trump is getting “bored” of the war
and looking to move on. If and when that happens, the president and his allies
will once again face the challenge of spinning it as an overwhelming victory
that only he could have achieved. Some political commentators are not buying
this carefully curated omnipotence.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance
at the University of Minnesota, said: “Iran is Trump’s Waterloo.
This is the demolition of the Donald Trump myth. His supporters rave about his
instincts and his improvisational style but the other interpretation is that
he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he hasn’t taken care
to investigate the devastating consequences of his actions and so he’s
digging himself deeper and deeper into a quagmire. This is plain to all.”
Jacobs added: “Whether you’re a military analyst or a political
analyst, whether you’re in the Democratic or Republican party, there’s
a reality here. Donald Trump has met the moment of truth. The kind of fictional
life that he’s led and evoked over the last four or five decades has now
been unmasked as a deadly drama. It’s going to cost the lives of so many
people. It’s going to devastate the US economy and the regional economy.
It’s going to set back America and its standing in the world. It’s
a horrific moment.”
David Smith
David Smith in Washington
Mon 30 Mar 2026 08.00 EDT
Guardian on Google