{"id":1470,"date":"2026-07-20T23:15:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T23:15:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1470"},"modified":"2026-07-20T23:15:55","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T23:15:55","slug":"trump-is-caught-in-the-trap-he-set","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1470","title":{"rendered":"Trump Is Caught in the Trap He Set"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This is an edition of The<\/i> Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more The \u2018Outsider Trading\u2019 Problem<\/a><\/p>\n

You could, if you were so inclined, tell a story of the Donald Trump era via memes. Pepe the Frog, \u201cThis Is Fine\u201d Dog, \u201cCovfefe,\u201d Leopards Eating People\u2019s Faces\u2014things of that nature. One of the essential examples would be an October 2016 Twitter post by Jesse Farrar, parodying the enduring belief that the walls were closing in on Trump:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Well, I\u2019d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!<\/p>\n

*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*<\/p>\n

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The conviction that Trump was on the brink of final collapse remained popular in some quarters for years after Farrar\u2019s post\u2014as anyone who remembers the fevered anticipation around Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s report and the subsequent letdown can attest\u2014but at some moment, the tweet transformed from a riposte to naive pundits into a shorthand for the strangeness of American politics.<\/p>\n

During the previous decade, Trump weathered a series of scandals that would likely have been career-ending for any other politician: the Access Hollywood <\/i>tape, in which he boasted that he would \u201cgrab\u201d women \u201cby the pussy\u201d without consent; the firing of then\u2013FBI Director James Comey; his indiscreet sharing of intelligence with Russian officials in the Oval Office; an impeachment for attempting to extort Ukraine; an egregious approach to COVID-19, followed by a bout with the disease that reportedly nearly killed him; a series of attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection; his absconding with sensitive documents to Mar-a-Lago after his term ended; and 34 felony convictions. Despite all of this, Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. The notion of his invincibility became canon. Perhaps Trump himself came to believe it.<\/p>\n

But the war in Iran has dealt a serious blow to the idea that Trump can slip out of any bind easily. Over the past three days, three American service members died in that conflict: two in Jordan, where Iranian missiles struck a military base, and a third in Iraq, killed by debris during the intentional destruction of an Iranian drone. The official American death toll in the Iran war now sits at 17.<\/p>\n

That number is low\u2014still less, for example, than the toll from the 1983 invasion of Grenada\u2014although the military appears to have been keeping quiet just how many troops have been injured. As my colleague Tom Nichols wrote over the weekend, the president\u2019s limp attempt at consolation (\u201cIt\u2019s a very sad thing,\u201d he said) is especially dismaying because \u201cTrump has offered no comprehensive explanation about why his administration is ordering U.S. military personnel to put their lives on the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the death toll may begin to rise, because Trump appears to be on the verge of being drawn into a larger war. As the defense analyst Brynn Tannehill wrote in The Atlantic <\/i>last week, the president faces only bad choices. The United States could effectively cede control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, accepting a fee system that breaks global precedent and centuries of American policy and granting a hostile power the opportunity to close an important shipping lane at any future moment. Or the White House could embark on a major ground war, because fighting over the past few months has shown the limitations of relying on air power. That would be politically hazardous, likely lead to more American deaths, and suck the U.S. into a long-running presence in the region, and it might still fail. Meanwhile, the conflict threatens to grow even larger as Iran\u2019s Houthi allies in Yemen threaten to close some traffic to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n

Deciding what to do is hard when you don\u2019t know what you want. Trump has vacillated over whether the point of the war is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and whether the war has already achieved that. He\u2019s offered different answers about whether one goal is regime change, and whether that has been achieved. He has suggested that the purpose is to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, even though it was open before the war and even though that may no longer be manageable. The administration has also struggled to explain to skeptical members of Congress why it needs more war funding.<\/p>\n

Read more Photos: 50 Years Since Viking 1 Landed on Mars<\/a><\/p>\n

In short, Trump\u2019s misadventure in Iran is a story of hubris. The president didn\u2019t bother to plan or consider the dangers before he started a war, and now it has spiraled to a point where even he seems unable to find a way to wriggle out of a jam. For the first time in a very long time\u2014to some extent, the first time in his life\u2014Trump appears to be facing the consequences of his actions.<\/p>\n

These circumstances might give Trump\u2019s critics and opponents a chance to feel some delicious schadenfreude if the results of the blunder were not so terrible. The costs are measured not only in the blood of American service members but also in the deaths of Iranian civilians and of merchant mariners trying to sail through the Persian Gulf, in the damage to the global economy, and in the erosion of American alliances and a long-standing global order. Being confronted with a snare that he can\u2019t escape must be unpleasant for Trump, but people around the globe will face misery because of it.<\/p>\n

Related:<\/b><\/p>\n

\n