Ann Coulter tears Trump apart: ‘Everybody pretend this is a huge victory’

On Friday, as news circulated that Iran was reopening the Strait of Hormuz amidst other signals that President Donald Trump’s war against the country may be coming to an end after nearly two months, conservative commentator Ann Coulter had a sarcastic take on the situation.

“Yay. The Strait that was open before we began bombing Iran open, is open again,” she posted to X. “Everybody pretend this is a huge victory for Trump so he'll end this catastrophe.”

Coulter’s tongue-in-cheek remark refers to the fact that the Strait of Hormuz was not an issue until the U.S. and Israel began strikes against Iran at the end of February. Iran closed the Strait in response, wreaking havoc on the global economy. While the Trump Administration famously offered inconsistent justifications for the war at its onset, the asserted goal quickly became the reopening of the economically vital waterway. So as Coulter suggests, Trump is now certain to claim credit for solving a crisis of his own creation.

She is far from the only person to argue that this outcome isn’t the success that the White House claims it is.

“We need to be honest about what we are seeing here,” wrote respected international security expert Phillips P. O’Brien. “The Iranian government is still the same theocratic dictatorship and the Iranian people are in desperate straits after the US promised them liberation. The Iranians still control the Strait of Hormuz, still maintain their right to collect tolls, still have their nuclear program, and have Trump promising to return them $20 billion in frozen assets… Trump has thrown in the towel. A massive strategic failure by the USA.”

Or as former Department of Defense official Ilan Goldenberg put it, “A reasonable deal is better than a return to war and I’ll support it. But let’s remember that this is a colossal failure for Trump and for US interests.” He notes that if Trump hadn’t left the previous Iran nuclear deal, Iran would have faced much harsher restrictions on its nuclear program. And that even having left the deal, the U.S. could likely have negotiated something similar to what has resulted from the war, without “the death and destruction across the Middle East,” the “massive damage to US allies and partners and global relationships,” the “huge use of military resources that will take years to rebuild,” “and significant damage to the global economy.”

Coulter — who has criticized the war on Iran since day one — voted for Trump in 2024, though begrudgingly, saying that he was an “awful, awful person” and that she “can’t trust Trump as far as I can throw him.” At the time, she said she made an “exception” because she wanted “a wall on the border.”