Americans demand reckoning as Trump's term spirals into economic bedlam

As we near the fourth week of Trump’s war with no end in sight, I want to make sure you are aware of what he said today, and its implications.

After Tehran dismissed his 15-point ceasefire plan, Trump claimed today that Iran is “begging to make a deal” and that he wasn’t the one pushing for negotiations. (Earlier, he told Tehran to “get serious soon” about negotiating an end to the war.)

“They’ll tell you, ‘We’re not negotiating,’” Trump said. “Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.” He said Iran is allowing some oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz as a “present”to show how serious it is about negotiating to end the war.

He rejected reports that he was looking for an exit ramp. “I read a story today that I’m desperate to make a deal,” Trump told reporters. “I’m the opposite of desperate. I don’t care.”

Is he naive? Ignorant? Stupid? Or does he think we’re so stupid as not to see that he’s making this up as he goes, that he has no plan, no exit strategy, no way out?

Trump — and Pete Hegseth and anyone else who may be advising him — have already blown this.

They thought the Iranian regime would fall as easily as the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. They assumed they could use air power alone. Wrong on both counts.

They overestimated the capacity and desire of Iranians to overthrow the regime.

They underestimated the regime’s resilience. They didn’t count on it expanding the conflict through the use of cheap drones aimed at closing the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting supply chains throughout the region, and raising oil prices — thereby putting mounting political and economic pressure on the United States.

They didn’t anticipate that they’d have to lift sanctions on Iran, delivering the regime a huge windfall. Nor that they’d deliver vast oil profits to Vladimir Putin.

To the extent they engaged in any planning at all, they focused on America’s military might rather than the consequences of what might happen next. But as we should have learned years ago from bombing North Vietnam, political outcomes cannot be achieved solely from the skies.

Wars are judged by how they end, not how they begin. It is still possible, although highly improbable, that America will come out of this more secure than we went into it. But wars started without clear political objectives have rarely ended well.

The Trump regime now faces the task of trying to reopen Hormuz to prevent even worse economic chaos.

Either it prolongs the war and puts boots on the ground at a significance cost of human life, or it walks away and risks further economic chaos, major damage to America’s image and influence, and an Iranian regime more committed than ever to building a nuclear bomb.

Meanwhile, the costs of this war are accelerating rapidly. The price of oil has resumed its upward trajectory and the stock market its downward drift.

The American public is paying in many ways — not just for more expensive gas but soon for more costly food due to pricier fertilizer.

The average rate on a 30-year mortgage has now hit 6.38 percent, the fourth increase since the war began.

The Pentagon is requesting an additional $200 billion to fund the war. This comes to more than $1,400 per American household.

More costs will emerge. The George W. Bush administration in 2003 put the cost of the Iraq War at $40 billion; it ended up costing about $3 trillion.

Soldiers who develop medical disorders or aggravate existing ones, for example, will receive lifelong benefits and medical care, as they should. If today’s troops claim such benefits at the same rate as those who participated in the 1990-91 Gulf War, this cost alone would eventually total at least $600 billion, not counting the human toll.

So far, the war has cost us more than $1.3 million per minute.

At this rate, as Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has calculated, for a bit more than two weeks of this war, we could offer free college education to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually.

For less than three weeks of this war, we could run a nationwide pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds. For less than 13 hours of this war, we could screen all uninsured women for cervical cancer, saving several hundred lives.

For four hours of this war we could get glasses to all 2.3 million low-income schoolchildren in the United States who need them but don’t have them. For less than three weeks of this war, we could restore health insurance subsidies that the Trump administration let expire last year and thus prevent an estimated 8,800 deaths.

For a bit more than five hours of this war, we could deworm all children worldwide. For less than five hours of this war, we could provide vitamin A supplementation for the 190 million children around the world who need it, preventing up to 480,000 child deaths each year and virtually eliminating blindness from vitamin A deficiency.

For about one day’s worth of war spending we could save more than 350,000 lives worldwide from malaria.

Most Americans oppose this war. Congress did not authorize it. It is one man’s war: Donald Trump’s. He alone decided to put us into this horrific, bloody, hugely expensive bind.

I hope and pray we come out of it without even more deaths and higher costs, but that seems improbable. The war is a deepening tragedy, a horrific waste of life and money, a mounting bill we will be paying for years to come.

Focus on this stark reality: One man has put us in this Middle East quagmire. One man is wrecking our economy. One man’s immigration agents have terrorized our neighbors and neighborhoods. One man has ridden roughshod over our system of government.

That man is not our king. He did not even win a majority of the national popular vote in 2024. (He won with a plurality of 49.8 percent, or just 32.5 percent of all eligible voters.)

He’s the only former or sitting president to have been impeached twice, the only former or sitting president to have been convicted of criminal charges (34 felony counts), the only former or sitting president to have sought to overturn an election to remain in office.

So far he has gotten away with all of this.

We will march against him Saturday as a prelude to organizing and mobilizing to take over Congress in the midterm elections.

Someday, I sincerely hope, we will hold him accountable for the wreckage he has made of our country and much of the rest of the world.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.