Trump Supporters Got Conned: Foreign Policy Failures, Iran, and the Coming Blowback

The strange thing about political frauds is not that they occur—they are the normal currency of democratic life—but that their victims so rarely admit what has happened even after the evidence becomes overwhelming. In fact, the greater the scale of the deception, the stronger the psychological resistance to acknowledging it.

I saw this at my motel over the Easter Holiday. I hosted a convention of paper bag salesmen. The attendees spent half their time looking at rebarbative PowerPoint slides, half speaking in tongues at the impromptu prayer meetings that were their contribution to the festive mood. Every one of them a Trump supporter, they prayed solidly for victory in the Iran War, and took the rescue of the lost airman as a sign of Divine Favor.

I can laugh. In England, you probably will. But the truth is that we really have arrived at the present moment, in which tens of millions of Trump supporters find themselves trapped in a narrative that reality has already demolished, yet which they continue to defend out of habit or simple embarrassment.

Let us speak plainly: We were conned. I say We, because I voted for the man. I knew he was a fraud, up to his neck in dirt, and that the Israeli secret services had every atom of this. I guessed there would be betrayals. But I never expected this. I never thought he’d take us within spitting distance of World War 3, and do so with the competence of a drunken teenager speeding down the freeway in a stolen Lamborghini. But he has. And we put him there.

Perhaps you tell yourself that the alternative would have been worse—that Biden, or Harris, or whichever interchangeable figure in the Epstein Class the establishment might have installed, would have accelerated the decline even further. That may well be true. But it is also beside the point. A man who campaigns as the savior of a nation and then proceeds to preside over outcomes indistinguishable from—or in some cases worse than—those he denounced cannot be excused on the grounds that his opponents are incompetent or corrupt. That standard is far too low, and accepting it guarantees only further decay.

Trump’s appeal rested on a simple implicit promise: that he would break the entrenched machinery of failure, both at home and abroad. Instead, what we have witnessed is something far more revealing—a pattern of grandiose declarations followed by humiliating reversals, each one more damaging than the last.

Consider the record that has quietly accumulated beneath the noise.

He was going to dominate Iran, yet somehow the Strait of Hormuz slips from effective control, one of the most strategically vital chokepoints on earth. He was going to eliminate Khamenei, yet the likely outcome is the emergence of a successor even younger, more hardened, and less susceptible to pressure. He was going to engineer regime change, yet Iran responds not with collapse but with internal consolidation, purging its ranks and emerging more ideologically unified.

He was going to reinforce the petrodollar—the very foundation of American global power—yet oil transactions increasingly migrate toward yuan-based pricing, signaling a structural shift that Washington has spent decades trying to prevent. He was going to crush resistance movements, yet they reconstitute themselves with renewed strength, suggesting not defeat but adaptation.

On the nuclear question, the results are even more catastrophic. Rather than halting Iran’s program, the pressure campaign appears to have driven Tehran to abandon the Non-Proliferation Treaty entirely, removing the last formal constraints. The likely announcement of a nuclear capability is no longer a distant hypothetical but an imminent reality.

And what of the military dimension? The promise was decisive superiority—missiles neutralized, enemies deterred, American bases secure. Instead, we see the opposite pattern: vulnerability exposed, assets lost, and deterrence eroded. Even the symbolic boast of airpower supremacy collapses under reports of multiple aircraft losses in a single day—events that would once have been unthinkable.

Meanwhile, the broader economic consequences ripple outward. Energy prices rise rather than fall. Allies, supposedly strengthened, find their economies strained and their industries destabilized. The Gulf itself—long treated as a secure reservoir of global oil—becomes uncertain terrain. Ordinary Americans, far from experiencing renewed prosperity, feel the tightening pressure of a system that no longer delivers.

And hovering over all of this is a deeper, more unsettling possibility—one that few are willing to articulate openly. What if these outcomes are not merely the result of incompetence? What if the pattern is too consistent, too aligned with long-term geopolitical shifts that weaken the United States while empowering its rivals?

Historically, the most effective transformations of great powers have not come through direct confrontation, but through internal misdirection—leaders who promise restoration while presiding over irreversible decline. The Soviet Union did not collapse because its enemies outmatched it militarily; it collapsed because its own system hollowed itself out under the weight of illusion and denial. China, for all its rivalry, never achieved what is now unfolding through America’s own strategic missteps.

Which brings us to the term that few seem willing to confront: blowback.

This is not a slogan but a well-established phenomenon—the unintended consequences of misguided policies returning with amplified force. When a nation repeatedly overreaches and destabilizes regions it does not fully understand, the eventual reaction is not contained; it reverberates. It accelerates rival systems and erodes the foundations of domestic stability.

If you consider yourself a patriot—if you believe in constitutional governance, in restrained foreign policy, in the libertarian suspicion of centralized power—then the appropriate response is not continued rationalization. It is recognition.

Because the real danger is not that Trump failed. Politicians fail all the time. The danger is that his failure, if left unacknowledged, sets the stage for something worse—a more extreme reaction, a more desperate electorate, a more reckless leadership class in 2028 and beyond.

You can continue pretending this is not happening. Many will. Or you can admit, now, that you were sold something that did not exist—and that the longer this admission is delayed, the more severe the eventual consequences will be.