Trump Knows He Lost the War

Trump doesn’t really understand why Herbert Hoover has the reputation for a catastrophic president, but he knows that he lost the war and he believes that he was going to be the next Hoover if he continued it.

But it was Mr. Trump himself who offered what may be the most cleareyed answer about why he needed to end this war so fast. He didn’t want comparisons to Herbert Hoover, he told reporters at the Hotel Royal in Évian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on Wednesday.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Mr. Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.” Later he noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.

That combination — economic chaos and disrupted oil markets — is exactly what the Iranians viewed from the opening days of the war as their most potent weapon. They executed on that vision with precision, closing the strait and blowing up petrochemical facilities, desalination plants, hotels and air bases across the Gulf. And by the president’s own testimony, it worked.

This will probably be memory-holed like everything else concerning Trump. But Republican senators do hate Muslims and there seems to be real anger about this. So we will see, maybe there’s meaningful consequences for once. Doubt it, but hey, who knows.