U.S. President Donald Trump in Dearborn, Michigan, January 13, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump “cannot be trusted,” warned an adviser to a different Republican president — and he left America weaker after retreating from his war against Iran.
“Donald Trump started a war with no plan to win, no strategy to leave,” declared former President George W. Bush adviser Steve Schmidt in a Substack post on Wednesday. “Without the support of the American people, he threatened nuclear war and then backed down. And there wasn't one single Republican in the entire Congress who said a word about it, but his poll numbers keep dropping and he's down to about a 30% approval level.”
Schmidt concluded that Trump’s behavior during the Iran war demonstrates that he “cannot be trusted. And what we're witnessing is a defeat that will shape the future for many, many years to come. And it will make the world more dangerous — far more dangerous than an already dangerous world has been. Trump's folly is our burden.”
Describing Trump’s Iran war as an “unmitigated disaster,” he added that it is “worse than a disaster: a strategic defeat for the United States, dealt to us by the hand of the man who said, just a short time ago, he wanted a Nobel Peace Prize.”
Earlier on Wednesday Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth defended Trump’s withdrawal from Iran even though a reporter pointed out that all America accomplished was to “replace the Ayatollah Khamenei with another Ayatollah Khamenei.”
In response, Hegseth argued Iran is currently run by “a new group of people” and that so many leaders have been killed that “[the new ones] came to the table.”
“So, OK, it’s not changed changed,” the Independent wrote, “as in a different outlook or a different way of governing or a different family in charge… It’s different because it’s the same regime but they agreed to a ceasefire with America after threats (and then declared victory themselves to their own population).”
Despite Trump’s failure in Iran, conservative commentator Jonathan V. Last predicted on Wednesday that it will be spun to be favorable to them by his MAGA base.
“Can you believe all the pearl-clutching over ‘war crimes’ and ‘genocide’?” Last wrote. “Trump didn’t do it, so there’s nothing wrong with threatening it. In fact, that threat probably got the peace deal done. So threatening genocide is good, actually.”
He added they will say things like “Look at gas prices — they’re already falling! Oil is down to $93/barrel. Have you even said ‘Thank you?'” and “The economy may not be great, but it’s already recovering! All those people who said the war would wreck the American economy were wrong!”
Last described this as a “pattern.”