How ‘I, Me, Myself’ dictates Trump’s Iran adventure

The warning against attacking Iran and intelligence reports contradicting the unfounded claims of the Islamic nation posing “imminent threats” to Americans were all over the place.

Air Force General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had warned that attacking Iran could potentially draw the US into a prolonged conflict.

Moreover, no intelligence report concluded that Iran could build a nuke in two to four weeks or was developing an ICBM to strike the US. Even the IAEA, before and during Donald Trump’s two terms, never reported that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb.

Trump’s director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March 2025 that Iran wasn’t “building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”.

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Moreover, pre-war intelligence indicated a potential retaliation and closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran if the US launched an attack.

Iran had also warned of striking American military assets in West Asian countries.

Yet Donald Trump launched Operation Midnight Hammer last June and Operation Epic Fury in coordination with Israel’s Operation Roaring Lion last month.

Even the Pentagon acknowledged to Congress on March 1, Day 2 of the war, that Iran wasn’t planning a pre-emptive strike against US forces or bases in West Asia.

And Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee’s annual hearing earlier this month that Iran wasn’t trying to rebuild uranium enrichment after the June strike on the Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

The region has been dragged into a conflagration, destabilising world markets and oil prices and supplies as Iran continues to attack the Gulf Cooperation Council member states.

Why did Trump Attack Iran

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, especially the 444-day hostage crisis, Iran-US relations went from bad to worse.

Except for the Iran-Contra affair (1981-86) and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the nuclear deal (2015), relations were always frosty.

Iran turned into America’s and Israel’s bête noire in West Asia. The Islamic theocracy is the only country in the region that openly challenged American and Israeli hegemony in the region.

The US always wanted the Iranian regime to collapse. However, no president attacked Iran reali sing that the regime would survive with the support of the deeply entrenched IRGC and its Basij paramilitary and fearing retaliation and a regional quagmire.

Still, Trump went ahead with his biggest military misadventure.

What’s the exact reason(s) for attacking Iran?

Trump and his cabal of cronies have struggled to justify the reasons, at times contradicting themselves and the president, who contradicted himself.

The reasons were numerous and shifting: Iran’s nuclear and missile threats, regime change, fears of a pre-emptive attack by Tehran, Israel itself and the regime’s plan to assassinate Trump.

Even a person without military or strategic expertise would conclude that attacking Iran would trigger a wider war, that Iran wasn’t developing nukes or an ICBM and that the reasons for the war were flimsy.

Trump was an exception. His obsession with attacking Iran started during his first term.

In January 2019, the National Security Council, headed by warmongering NSA and Iran hawk John Bolton, asked the Pentagon to provide options for striking Iran following mortar attacks near US diplomatic facilities in Iraq, The Wall Street Journal reported.

In early 2020, Trump’s foreign policy advisers twice suggested attacking Iran’s nuclear plants if he lost the election. After losing the election, Trump considered missile strikes in response to provocations against American interests in the region. Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, stopped him. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fuc*ing war,” he said.

In November 2020, Trump convened an Oval Office meeting and asked senior aides about options for attacking Natanz. Milley and other then-Cabinet members, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and acting-defence secretary Christopher C Miller, warned that a strike could trigger a broader conflict.

According to a WSJ report in late 2024, Trump’s transition team was seriously considering striking Iran’s nuclear facilities to stop Tehran from building nukes.

So, why did Trump set out on the most extraordinary, yet uncalibrated and dangerous, foreign policy “excursion” in his second term?

Several opinion/analysis pieces and reports have highlighted how the president dismissed/ignored the warnings and intelligence reports about Iran, miscalculated in launching the attack, ignored the potential fallout in the region and had no clear objectives or an exit strategy.

Trump isn’t a fool—he was aware of all the impending dangers and the spiralling consequences of attacking Iran.

So were his top aides, two of whom were National Guards deployed in combat zones. Defence secretary Pete Hegseth was deployed in Gitmo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Gabbard, who oversees 18 intelligence agencies, was deployed in Iraq.

CIA director John Ractliffe was Trump’s DNI during his first term. Secretary of state and acting NSA Marco Rubio was a Florida senator from 2011 to 2025.

The main reason for Trump’s current misadventure is to create a legacy of being the only president who dared to attack Iran.

“No other president had the guts to do it... I don’t want some President who hasn’t got the courage in five years or in ten years to go in,” he told Fox News.

“The President’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury is one that presidents of both parties have contemplated for more than 50 years, but none had the courage to execute,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

In an eight-minute video posted on Truth Social on Day 1 of the attack, Trump said, “For many years, you [Iranians] have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight.”

Trump also claimed twice that a former president told him that he wished he had attacked Iran like “what you did”.

Let there be no doubt that Trump has created history. The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the riskiest gamble, at the orders of an American president, followed by a full-fledged war, will go down in history as the worst example of American military aggression and overreach.

Still, Trump will bask in its glory and tout it as the biggest achievement of his presidency—a (mis)adventure no other president even thought of, let alone going on it.

Trump employs every means and deploys every source, including the lives of troops and taxpayers’ money, as long as he can brandish his false strongman image and pursue his personal agenda.

The war is costing a staggering $2 billion per day

The US spent around $12.7 billion in the first six days, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Offensive strike munitions cost $5.5 billion with the 319 BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles alone costing $1.2 billion.

Defensive munitions cost around $5.7 billion, of which $2 billion was spent on Thaad alone.

The US sustained combat losses of $1.4 billion and spend $27 million on operations.

Now, the Pentagon wants another $200 billion for the war.

Trump’s “I, Me and Myself” Psychology

Trump’s malignant narcissism is all about “I, Me and Myself”.

In the process, he disregards and dismisses every sane opinion and suggestion that could soften or weaken his strongman image or intelligence contrary to his irrationality and parallel universe.

Trump’s foreign policy is all about making deals, not military, strategic or geopolitical gains, with him at the centre.

‘America First’ or MAGA is only a façade to further Trump’s interests politically. personally and financially.

In Trump’s unbridled madness for self-aggrandisement and image promotion, reality is the main casualty.

“An important way to understand Trump and Trumpism is as an assault on reality. At issue is the attempt to control, to own, immediate truth along with any part of history that feeds such truth,” wrote the late Robert Jay Lifton, an eminent psychiatrist at Columbia University and author of many books, including The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, in 2018.

And Trump exactly does that. He assaults reality and tries to control and own the truth: Iran is a threat to the US, will launch a pre-emptive attack on American bases in West Asia, is developing an ICBM and can produce a nuclear bomb in weeks.

Though Trump’s behaviour is narcissistic, Lifton termed it solipsistic reality.

“Solipsism has more to do with a cognitive process of interpreting the world exclusively through the experience and needs of the self,” he wrote.

Lifton, who founded psychohistory, explained Trump’s solipsism as “rendering the self an insistent source of all reality”.

“With extreme forms of solipsism, the external world and other minds cannot be known and may, in effect, have no existence.”

Two examples perfectly describe Trump’s extreme solipsism as he prepared to bomb Iran in June and launch the war this year.

Last June, Trump dismissed Gabbard’s March 2025 assessment that Iran wasn’t seeking a nuke. In February, he denied reports that General Caine warned against attacking Iran.

“What results is continuous falsehood, whether of an almost automatic kind or of the intentional form we call lying,” wrote Lifton, who also authored Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China.

In 2017, Lifton joined other experts to publish The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President, which became an instant number one bestseller.

In the chapter “A Clinical Case for the Dangerousness of Donald J. Trump”, Diane Jhueck also mentions how Trump dismisses any feedback that “does not affirm his self-image and psychopathic tendencies”.

“… he consistently displays a revenge-oriented response to any such feedback. Holding this office at once feeds his grandiosity and claws at the fragile sense of self underneath it. His patterns of behaviour while in the role of president of the United States have potentially dire impact on every individual living not only in this nation but across the entire globe.”

Political, strategic and military experts have spoken and written a lot about how Trump is upending the world order, the decades-old US-Europe relations, Nato and bullying friends and foes alike.

The bigger point isn’t Trump’s authoritarian, disruptive and reckless style, which was expected to be more evident in his second term.

Trump simply doesn’t care—about the war’s repercussions on Americans.

First, Trump has always bragged that the stock market peaked during his presidency.

However, the Iran War has wiped out trillions. Markets reversed course only after Trump announced that he postponed strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure.

The benchmark S&P 500 tanked 4.9 per cent this year and 5.83 per cent in one month, wiping out more than $3 trillion in market cap. Nasdaq was down 6.8 per cent for the year till last week. The Dow was down 5.2 per cent for the year.

Second, Brent crude hit $113 a barrel at one point from $72 before the war with Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 20 per cent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes. The previous two largest rises in Brent’s price were $147 in 2008 and $139 in 2022.

Oil prices have driven gas prices in the US to 32 per cent to $3.93 a gallon from February’s $2.98. According to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, gas could hit $4.36 per gallon in May if the war continues with households spending $740 more on gas this year.

Third, inflation was steady at 2.4 per cent in January and February. However, economists expect the war to affect inflation for this month.

Last week, the US Federal Reserve raised its 2026 inflation forecast to 2.7 per cent, up from 2.4 per cent. Chairman Jerome Powell said that “there will be some effects” on inflation due to the war.

A February Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 78 per cent of Americans feel that inflation is a “very big” concern for them personally—73 per cent of Republicans, 86 per cent of Democrats and 77 per cent of independents.

Only 30 per cent said that the economy is “booming”, and 29 per cent approve of Trump’s handling of inflation/rising prices and the cost of living.

Trump returned to the White House by leveraging the rising inflation and illegal immigration against Joe Biden. However, he still slapped tariffs on other nations and went to war, aware that the consumer ultimately bears the burden.

Fourth, consumer sentiment in March fell to 55.5, the lowest this year, from 56.6 in February, per the University of Michigan’s latest survey.

The first casualty of war is the economy. The rise in oil prices always has a cascading effect on the economy. Trump, being a businessman, was well aware of the aftershocks.

Still, Trump attacked Iran.

Why Trump Doesn’t Care

Trump doesn’t care because his presidency is secure with the GOP continuing to back him.

He animates the Republican Party; it’s no longer Lincoln’s Party but Trump’s Party.

Republicans have rarely opposed Trump due to the fear of losing the support of his Maga base.

The latest example is the Iran War.

The joint resolution “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress” has been defeated thrice in the Senate by 53-47 with all Republicans, except for one, voting against it.

Only in a few instances has the GOP voted against Trump or rebuked him.

In October 2025, five GOP senators joined Democrats to overturn Trump’s 50 per cent tariffs on Brazil. In February this year, six representatives voted to disapprove of the tariffs on Canada.

During Trump’s first term, both the GOP-controlled Senate and House voted 98-2 and 419-3, respectively, to slap sanctions on Russia in 2017.

In 2018, the Senate voted 56-41 to end the American support for the Saudi Arabia-led war in Yemen.

In 2019, the House voted 357-22 to make it more difficult for the president to withdraw from Nato.

Only once, every GOP member, except for one, in the House and all in the Senate voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November.

Trump knows his second term is secure also because the two impeachments in his first term failed.

On December 18, 2019, all 197 House Republicans voted against his impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

On January 13, 2021, during the second impeachment, for insurrection, of the 211 House Republicans, only 10 voted in favour.

Iran War Polls and Midterms

Several surveys/polls show that a majority of Americans don’t support the Iran war.

Only 35 per cent approve of the US strikes on Iran, per the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, down from 37 per cent in the previous poll. Around 46 per cent of respondents said that the US will be less safe in West Asia due to the war.

The latest Economist/YouGov Poll found around the same percentage of Americans supporting the war (36 per cent).

A CBS News/YouGov poll (March 17-20) found that 60 per cent were against the war.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating has fallen as well due to the war.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Trump’s approval rating falling to a record low of 36 per cent, a drop of four points compared to the previous poll.

According to The New York Times’ (NYT) poll tracker, a daily average of polls conducted by dozens of organisations since Trump’s second Inauguration Day, his approval rating fell from 52 per cent on January 27, 2025, to 41 per cent on January 21 this year, but has been steady since then.

News outlets and analysts have jumped onto these polls with some even predicting a negative impact on the GOP’s prospects in the November Midterms.

Even Republicans are worried. According to Reuters, Trump’s senior aides had warned of a “slow burn effect” if the war were prolonged, Iran retaliated fiercely, American troops died and gas prices jumped.

While these polls are concerning, they also show Trump’s strong support among Republicans, especially his MAGA base—and the president knows it.

Trump’s support base in the Republican Party remains strong, per the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, at 82 per cent. Moreover, 75 per cent approve of the war compared to 77 per cent in the previous poll.

A March 17-20 CBS News/YouGov poll showed that only 40 per cent support the war, 90 per cent believe that the war will make oil and gas prices higher, 67 per cent are unwilling to pay more for gas, 63 per cent said it will make the economy weaker, 53 per cent felt the war is going badly, 92 per cent want it to end and only 36 per cent believe the war will make the US safer.

Besides, Trump’s approval rating was 40 per cent—only 38 per cent believed he delivered on Iran, 36 per cent on the economy 36 and 33 per cent on inflation.

Yet 82 per cent of Republicans supported Trump and were confident about him.

Among Maga Republicans, Trump’s approval rating was much higher at 92 per cent with 75 per cent confident of him making the right decisions,

A recent NBC News poll showed that 100 per cent of Maga Republicans backed Trump. A March 13-16 Economist/YouGov poll found that 87 per cent of Maga supporters backed Trump’s handling of Iran and 78 per cent supported the war.

A Navigator Research poll this month found that while 84 per cent of MAGA Republicans support the war.

Similarly, a March 13-18 Politico poll showed that 81 per cent of Maga Republicans and 70 per cent of Trump’s 2024 voters support the war.

Trump, who repeatedly said that the US should end involvement in foreign and forever wars and yet attacked Venezuela and Iran, is confident that MAGA voters will stick with him.

“Maga loves it. Maga loves what I’m doing. Maga loves everything I do,” Trump told NBC News in January. “Maga is me.”

Trump’s strength is his core supporters buying his lies—2020 rigged election, witch-hunt by Joe Biden’s DoJ and the grave dangers of Iran developing a nuke and an ICBM.

Per the Politico poll, 54 per cent of Maga voters and 56 per cent of non-Maga Trump voters believed that Iran was developing nukes. Two-thirds of Maga voters and more than half of non-Maga Trump voters believe that Iran posed a security threat to the US at the time of the strikes.

The numbers confirm Trump’s statement that “Maga loves everything I do” with 53 per cent supporting the strikes because they trust him to do the right thing.

Midterms, in which all 435 House and 35 of 100 Senate seats are up for election, are still seven months away. It’s too early to conclude that the conflict will harm the GOP’s election prospects.

In Midterms, the sitting president’s party usually loses seats. In only eight Midterms, the president’s party gained seats in the House and Senate. Only in two elections, the president’s party gained seats in both chambers (Franklin D Roosevelt in 1934 and George W Bush).

However, Trump has an innate ability to turn the tide. His thunderclap return in 2024 and the 2016 win against all odds prove his ability to swing the narrative in his favour.

Trump has already started aggressively campaigning in the swing states of Iowa, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan as if he’s on the ballot.

“He’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again,” his chief of staff and former campaign manager, Susie Wiles, said in December.

If the GOP loses the Midterms, Trump has warned Republicans of “very bad things” with Democrats finding a reason to impeach him.

The war has been handy in deflecting the heat of the Epstein files and the not-so-rosy economy, as Trump promised during the campaign trail.

Both issues could be decisive factors in the Midterms.

The media is rarely reporting on the Epstein files, which contain allegations of sexual assault against Trump.

Trump has said that the war’s aftershocks, such as higher gas prices, are temporary. If the war doesn’t extend for months, he will sell it as a massive victory in which he was the only president to have dared to attack Iran for the safety of Americans and “obliterate” its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

Trump’s Agenda Getting Richer

A few days after winning the 2016 election, Trump told NYT that he could run both his business and the country “perfectly”.

“There’s never been a case like this. The law’s totally on my side. The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he said.

The US Constitution doesn’t explicitly prohibit a sitting president from owning or running private businesses, but an incumbent should ideally avoid a conflict of interest.

However, Trump made more than $1.6 billion from the Trump Organization and other outside income during his first presidency, according to a review of his financial disclosures by Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).

Trump has publicly said that he won because of his brand. “I became president because of the brand...I think it’s the hottest brand in the world,” he testified in the New York civil investigation in April 2023.

During his first term, Trump visited the Trump Hotel in DC, Mar-a-Lago and his golf courses Doral, Bedminster and Trump National Washington 399 times, which became the main source of the Trump Organization’s revenue, according to CREW.

He also earned $138,726,106 from his three European golf courses of Turnberry and Aberdeen (Scotland) and Doonbeg (Ireland).

Trump used the presidency to make profits. Period.

According to Forbes, Trump’s business earned $2.4 billion in revenue despite the pandemic, making around $650 million annually in the first three years mainly from his clubs and golf properties.

In his second term, Trump wants to maximise his wealth—that’s his only agenda.

According to Forbes, Trump’s net worth galloped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion in 2025 as investors invested in Trump Media and Technology Group and his

The value of Trump’s social media company, which reported sales of only $3.6 million in 2024, jumped to $2 billion last September.

TAE Technologies, which competes with other nuclear fusion companies regulated by the administration, is merging with Trump’s media company, a clear case of conflict of interest.

Trump’s 2025 financial disclosures show that he received millions of dollars from the sale of Bibles, watches, guitars, books and fragrances.

Cryptocurrency firms gave $18 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, according to Fortune. Last September, $Trump and $Melania meme coins, World Liberty Financial tokens and $1 stablecoin were valued at $1.28 billion, per a Forbes estimate.

Trump and his family have profited the maximum from the wealthy West Asian nations, especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.

The sovereign funds of these three nations have committed more than $3.5 billion to Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. By December-end, the Fund’s AUM was $6.2 billion, mainly due to funds committed by the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Trump secured more than $2 trillion in investment from the three nations during his Gulf tour last May—but that was only one aspect.

Trump’s family and business have signed major golf resort, hotel and real estate deals and projects in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.

In Saudi Arabia, the Trump Organisation has signed deals to construct a Trump Tower in Riyadh and another $530 million residential tower in Jeddah. Without investing a penny, the Organization will earn millions of dollars in licensing fees from the two projects, headed by top real estate developer Dar Global, which is dependent on contracts of the Saudi government. Trump also makes money from the Saudi-funded LIV Golf League with several tours held at his golf courses.

In Qatar, Dar Global will build Trump International Golf Club & Villas with the Trump Organization earning millions of dollars in branding and management fees with zero investment. Besides, Trump has accepted a Boeing 747-8 from the Qatari royal family, violating the US Constitution’s Article I, Section 9, Clause 8, which prohibits any person holding any office of profit or trust under them from accepting any present, emolument, office or title from any king, prince or foreign State without the consent of Congress.

In the UAE, the Trump International Golf Club opened in Dubai during his first term. Now, Dar Global is constructing the $1 billion 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower with each apartment priced at $20 million.

Before Trump landed in the UAE, the Trump Organization’s head, Eric Trump, and his business partner, Zach Witkoff (the son of Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff), announced a major new cryptocurrency deal with an Abu Dhabi-backed venture fund. The fund would invest $2 billion using a digital currency offered by the Trump family’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial.

(The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. He tweets as @FightTheBigots. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)