The Iran War: Why Now?
This is another in my series on the Iran war. See also: Iran: The Bill Has Come Due, Will the US Seize Iranian Oil and Natural Gas Assets?, and The Iran War: A Game of Three Card Monte.
The midterms are coming up. Democrats are being gifted a lot of fuel as a result of the war. Trump promised no more wars. Gas prices would climb, and affordability is the number one voter issue. Nobody on his national security team would have told him this would be a slam dunk or end quickly.
He did it anyway.
The foreign policy establishment wants to debate that diplomacy was working. The anti-war left wants to discuss the humanitarian cost. The generals want to debate exit strategies. The media wants to know why Trump made different claims on different days.
The right question is simpler: why now with midterms around the corner?
He Wanted to Finish Iran
For forty years, every American president chose to manage Iran rather than confront it. The nuclear program that Obama slow-walked into a decade-long deferral. The proxy network funding terror from Lebanon to Yemen. The regime that kept exporting instability while the international community held summits and issued statements. Confronting it was hard. Deferring it was easy. So they deferred.
History is not on his side to win the midterms anyway. If he had waited until after the midterms, he most likely would not have been able to finish Iran.
He pulled the trigger.
He killed Khamenei. He degraded the IRGC. He did the thing nobody else would do. The midterms have nothing to do with it. This was always on his list. The question of whether it helps or hurts in November is separate — and largely beside the point. Republicans almost certainly lose the House regardless. The president’s party has lost House seats in 26 of the last 28 midterms. There’s a slim chance he holds it. If he loses it, two years of investigations, subpoenas, and the end of his agenda follow. That’s the downside he was already looking at before the first strike landed.
The press, the DC know-it-alls and other pundits consistently underestimate and fail to understand Trump. I have written about this repeatedly. These are people who think they are very smart. They are not. I would have to reference at least a dozen op-eds I’ve written over the past year to cover this.
Being Right Covers a Lot of Ground
And he was right about Iran. The same way he was right about the border. The same way he was right about NATO burden-sharing. He says things that make serious people wince, takes actions that make serious people reach for their hair, and then the results arrive. Being right covers a lot of ground.
If the war wraps before November and he can stand at a podium and say he finished what nobody else would touch, that helps the slim chance of holding the House. If it drags and gas stays elevated, the midterms get harder. But they were already hard.
The Fool’s Mask
The people calling this reckless are making the same mistake they’ve made since 2015.
I’ve written about this directly. Trump is not a fool. He plays one. The caricature of the bumbling impulsive president who blunders into decisions, who listens to whoever whispered in his ear last, who needs to be managed by serious adults — that caricature has been wrong for ten years and the people holding it still won’t put it down. The man survived two impeachments, multiple indictments, bent the Republican Party to his will, banished the Democrats to a dark corner in the basement, and walked back into the Oval Office. That’s not what a fool being played looks like.
The Iran strike looks impulsive to everyone running the same analysis they ran in 2016, 2020, and 2024 — and got wrong every time. They see chaos and conclude he didn’t think it through. He saw a closing window and made his move.
The Putin narrative runs the same way. Before every major decision, the news cycle floods with stories about what Putin whispered in his ear. Trump lets it run — it’s useful cover if something goes wrong, and he gets the credit if it goes right. Whether you agree with his Ukraine policy or not, it’s a choice, not a con.
The Diploma Problem
Here is what unites every instance of Trump being catastrophically underestimated: the people doing it went to the right schools.
Harvard degrees. Nobel Prizes — the real kind, or the ideologically convenient kind they hand out every few years to academics who tell powerful people what they want to hear. The credential class has been trained to believe that certification equals insight. Trump has no such credential. Therefore he cannot be the smart one in the room. Therefore strategy must be chaos. Therefore calculation must be impulse.
The diploma is not a lens. It’s a blindfold.
The Two-Minute Drill
Iran is the mission. But Trump is also running a two-minute drill on the midterms, and he knows it.
Six months is not a lot of time. But it may be enough. He’s reining in Robert Kennedy. He got rid of Pam Bondi. Kristi Noem is gone. The cabinet faces that generated the most friction, that gave late-night television its material, that made Republicans in swing districts uncomfortable — they’re being quietly cycled out. The administration is behaving more like a government and less like a reality show. That’s not an accident.
If the economy cooperates, and Iran wraps with something he can credibly call a win, and gas comes back down — Republicans have a real chance to hold on. Slim, but real.
And the Democrats are helping. They own the shutdowns. Every one. They forced them, accomplished nothing, and made ordinary people’s lives miserable in the process. Now they’re the party that opposed a war while Americans were fighting it. The unpatriotic optics during wartime are not a small thing. Voters don’t forget which side was rooting against the home team.
But history doesn’t account for a Democratic Party this determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and an adversary they consistently underestimate.
Charlie Munger Had It Right
Charlie Munger — Warren Buffett’s partner, one of the greatest investors who ever lived — was asked about Trump early in his first term. He had previously said Trump wasn’t morally qualified for the presidency. Then he reconsidered.
“He’s not wrong on everything,” Munger said. “And just because he isn’t like us, roll with it.”
That’s the whole argument in three sentences. Trump is different from us. He operates by different rules, takes different risks, makes decisions the credentialed class would never make. The instinct is to resist, to dismiss, to explain why he doesn’t understand what he’s doing.
The smarter move is to roll with it — and watch what happens.
The people calling it reckless are the same people who have been wrong about him for a decade. They are still certain they’re the smart ones in the room.
They could be right this time. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
For more context, see: The Fool’s Mask, Do Democrats Really Have the Midterms in the Bag?, and my earlier Iran and Ukraine series.