Trump on Iran Truce (And His Own Presidency): “I Think It’s Over”
Uh oh, Trump is pulling another of his "I'll kill everyone" bluffs, saying that the truce with Iran is "over."
Photo by The White House SplinterTrump Administration Iran War
You honestly don’t know how tired I am at this point of reporting on any Trump-related pronouncement related to the Iran War, primarily because they so rarely actually mean anything in reality. Over the course of this conflict, the President of the United States has repeatedly revealed his own cowardice and distaste for actually reckoning with the greater impacts of the war he so hastily jumped into, which has led to an embarrassing dynamic in which he frequently makes grand, apocalyptic threats of death and destruction, only to crawl away from those threats on his ample belly at the last minute, claiming that new progress has been made through diplomatic channels. The only problem, of course, is that Iran always has an extremely different opinion on whether progress has been made, leading to the process simply starting over again. Still, you have to acknowledge there’s potential significance when Trump is asked about the status of the truce with Iran and his reply is “To me, I think it’s over.” If that’s true, he might as well be saying the same of his own presidency.
Q: Is the ceasefire over? Is the MOU dead?
TRUMP: I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. Do you know what scum is? They’re led by sick people. They’re vicious, violent people. They’re liars. They’re cuckoo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 7:54 AM · Jul 8, 2026
That’s what Trump told reporters this morning while in Turkey for a NATO meeting, and it follows a 48-hour period that has seen a notably revived sense of U.S.-Iran hostility and plenty of shooting. The Iranian military has claimed strikes on 80 or more U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait, while the United States responded with up to 80 airstrikes on military sites throughout Iran, while also reimposing sanctions on Iranian oil sales that had been lifted as part of the truce’s “memorandum of understanding.” That agreement was supposed to create a 60-day window to hash out the final details of an Iran War peace deal, including an agreement on what would become of the Iranian nuclear program. That now seems like an even more ludicrous time frame than it did at the time, considering that Trump is promising further bombing of Iran within the next 24 hours and is referring to the truce as “over.” You can certainly sense Trump’s outward frustration with the ineptitude of his diplomats, as he lashed out in his comments against Iranian negotiators.
“They’ll agree on everything and then they’ll go and have a news conference and say we never even talked about it,” Trump told reporters. “They’re cuckoo, there’s something wrong with these people.”
In response, Trump embarked on wild tangents and promises of renewed attacks, including everything from the restarting of the so-called U.S. “blockade” of the Strait of Hormuz, to musing on the possibility of directly attacking the oil depot on Iran’s Kharg Island, which would constitute a full ground invasion of Iran that has already been projected to cost numerous American lives. He also yet again issued threats to destroy Iran’s critical civilian infrastructure, including the power plants and water desalination plants necessary to keep 93 million Iranian civilians alive, echoing his already infamous “a whole civilization will die tonight” pronouncement.
The big problem here, of course, is that Trump has made every one of these same threats before and failed to actually follow through on them, demonstrating to Iranian leadership that he has no taste at all for full-scale renewed conflict. Headlines on the incredible waste and inefficiency of the Iran War directly contributed to Trump’s historically low approval rating, and only hopes for the definitive end of the conflict have helped that rating to slightly recover in the last few weeks. Plunging the country right back into full-fledged war in the Middle East, and the ensuing leaps in oil and gasoline prices (which has already begun with Trump’s comments today) will no doubt send his approval into freefall yet again, even as we draw closer to the all-important midterm elections. Iran’s leadership is not stupid. They can see the world’s most obvious bluffing pattern in front of them, and they’ve learned how sensitive TACO Trump is on this issue. They know how desperately he wants to avoid losing any of the tenuous support he still has, and have little reason at this point to take his threats seriously … which is also why Trump’s threats remain dangerous. If he feels truly impotent and backed into a corner, do we doubt that he’ll embark on a campaign of war crimes and attacks on civilian infrastructure to get his street cred back?
Trump, sitting next to Zelenskyy: “In one day, we could knock down every single bridge in Iran. There’s not a thing they can do about it … if we have to, we’ll take them out. They have desalinization plants. We’ll take them out if we have to … maybe we’ll take over Kharg island.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 9:31 AM · Jul 8, 2026
The man remains, to reiterate a point that should be very obvious, quite delusional. He repeated today, for instance, that the United States accomplished “regime change” in Iran, despite the fact that we installed an even more radical set of leaders, whose nominal head of state is the son of the Ayatollah currently being mourned in a state funeral. He’s ignored the terrible human cost of the conflict, saying simply that “mistakes are made, war is nasty” in response to an investigation that found the U.S. was indeed at fault in the deaths of 170 Iranian schoolgirls. And his assessment of the situation changes wildly from day to day, or even in the course of the same freaking interview, as when he stated that we had both “destroyed” Iran’s military and “left it alone,” minutes apart from each other.
One of the only things that is clear about the situation is that the United States unequivocally lost this war. We achieved none of our stated goals, and even if the conflict ended in total today, the most lasting contribution from a regional perspective would be that the war taught Iran it can effectively hold the Strait of Hormuz hostage whenever it wants to, and extort other nations for the ability to transit one of the Earth’s most critical economic waterways, something it wasn’t even doing before the war began. In totally unrelated news, by the way, the International Monetary Fund also announced projections today that the growth of the entire global economy would sharply decline in 2026. Quick, somebody give Trump a newly created award for global economic excellence!
The most likely outcome of the next 24 hours, when it comes to this renewed Iran aggression and Trump’s threats, is that the chief TACO chef scurries away yet again and forestalls any climactic confrontation, claiming that Iran has agreed to new U.S. demands while Iranian negotiators say “What the fuck are you talking about.” Or, you know … maybe an angry, jetlagged Trump finally snaps and orders all the Iranian drinking water destroyed. Hell, maybe he drops a nuke on Tehran, who can say?
When it comes to Iran, pretty much every scenario has become lose-lose for Donald Trump, and our Middle Eastern foe seems to be simply daring him to edge ever closer to the brink. As a spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee posted online today, directly at Trump: “Come—we are waiting for you—and we promise that not a single American soldier will return alive.”
Is anyone else tired of waiting to see if our President will take the bait?
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