Iran won't break — and Trump's tabloid tactics won't work on them: GOP strategist

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026. REUTERS_Nathan Howard

President Donald Trump probably didn’t smell his own trap coming when he launched attacks on Iran weeks ago, but critics say he’s definitely in a hole now, and he’s pulled his Republican Party into it with him.

The worst thing about it: Iranian leaders see Trump’s hole — and they’re smiling.

“[Iranian leaders] can look right now and see that they have leverage and see that Donald Trump wants to get out of this war. And, so, you can be hard-nosed and pragmatic and say, ‘well, let's wait it out and see how much more we can get out of Trump,’” former Republican speechwriter Tim Miller told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur. “And … Trump is known to give terrible deals. And I think that puts Trump in a very tough situation. And that explains in part why he's calling up [Fox News entertainer] Bret Baier saying ‘we're going to get a deal’ every two days and nothing is coming because the Iranians see that he wants that deal badly.”

Zeteo reported last week that U.S. officials are already privately admitting Iran is nowhere “close to breaking, even after two months of war and a sustained economic assault,” according to four anonymous sources.

“Administration officials, citing US intel, have also warned that senior Iranian officials are keenly aware that if the war drags on much longer, it could further damage Trump and the Republican Party’s chances at the polls in November,” reports Zeteo.

“They know they can Carter him,” said one senior administration official, referring to how the Iranian hostage crisis tanked former president Jimmy Carter by the time of the 1980 U.S. election.

Former Republican Max Boot told Tur that Trump’s flailing has created the international image of “a clueless, wounded hegemon,” which looks terrible going into the midterm election. But Miller said Trump’s tactics just aren’t delivering the goods as they have in the past.

“[H]e's trying to win the micro news cycles and try to survive [but] … these two quagmires, the Russia/Ukraine war and the war that he started in Iran are cases where his little gimmicks … to convince people that something is true for a day in order to win a news cycle, in order to get a good headline on the New York Post — the regime in Iran doesn't care about that. Vladimir Putin doesn't care about that. They have much more deep-seated, entrenched interests. And I think he's running into the limits of what his madman tabloid style can, you know, can get for him.”

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