You cannot understand Vietnam without the Cold War. And you cannot understand the Iran War without considering the sun and the moon of Trump’s dysfunction: Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama.
Marcy Wheeler identified these two men at the center of Trump’s two intractable psychological dilemmas that make an Iran deal not merely unlikely but structurally impossible. Either you make a deal that validates Barack Obama’s excellence, or you try to defeat Iran militarily enough to get the world back where it was until you handed Iran the ability to choke off the Strait of Hormuz and almost a third of the global economy. To beat Iran, you must cut off Russian resupply through the Caspian. That means confronting Putin.
Ten years of evidence have established that Trump will not do this at any cost to anyone.
Trump’s obeisance to the leader of a third-rate power, currently losing his own war of aggression, is worth wondering about each time you consider it anew. It forces you to imagine there’s some glowing box filled with kompromat menacing Trump. However, Marcy has also made clear that we should stop looking for a pee tape and instead focus on the mountain of leverage the dictator of Russia has accumulated over the wannabe dictator of the United States.
But there’s even a simpler answer.
Adorno’s authoritarian personality—developed in 1950 by Theodor Adorno and a team of researchers at Berkeley, built from interviews with Americans susceptible to fascist appeals, trying to understand how ordinary people had enabled the Holocaust — described a man who worships strength above him and punishes weakness below him. This drive isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a single hunger: the need to locate himself in a hierarchy where someone powerful protects him and someone weaker confirms his power. The submission and the cruelty are the same impulse, aimed in two directions. Putin is the strong man above. Obama, in Trump’s cosmology, was required to be the diminished man below. Obama refused. America agreed, making him the first president since Eisenhower to win 51% of the vote twice. That refusal is the wound the Iran war is bleeding from.
What Putin offers is the fantasy made flesh: a white man who seized power by discarding every rule that constrained him — law, democratic norms, the opinion of allies, the pretense of legitimacy — and was rewarded with more power. He took what he wanted. He answers to nothing. For Trump, who has spent his life performing strength for audiences he privately fears, Putin is proof that a certain kind of white man can refuse the rules and win. Trump does not want to negotiate with Putin. He wants to be him.
The second dilemma has, at its center, a dinner party. But to understand why it cut so deep, you have to understand what Barack Obama represented to a man like Trump — and what Trump could never forgive him for.
Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary theorist whose 1952 Black Skin, White Masks remains a clear anatomy of what racism does to both the colonized and the colonizer, wrote that the colonizer’s identity is not self-made but extracted: built on the negation of the colonized person’s humanity. You are what he is not. Your luxury is purchased by his exclusion. Your inheritance is legitimate because his claim is always deemed bogus. The colonizer requires this arrangement. His sense of self depends on someone below his boot. When the colonized man rises anyway — not just rises but excels, leads, commands the room — he does not merely succeed. He destroys the story the colonizer has been telling himself about why he deserved what he was given.
To become the first Black president in a nation whose founding, at the very least, tolerated the white supremacy necessary to make chattel enslavement survive centuries, Obama had to be perfect. Not good. Not excellent. Perfect, and then more than perfect, at least compared to all of his predecessors and especially his most immediate successor.
The system that handed Trump his inheritance, his access, his repeated rescues from consequence — none of that was available to Obama. Trump could fail upward through six bankruptcies and a thousand humiliations and still command a room. Obama had to win the presidency of Harvard Law Review, then the United States Senate, then the White House itself, defeating the most powerful political machine in the Democratic Party, before anyone would concede he had earned his place.
He did it with a grace and wit that made it look, to Donald Trump, like an insult specifically designed for him. So Trump became the world’s most famous birther, embracing the exact role Adorno and Fanon would have imagined for him: the revenge of the order that Obama violated, the rich, white, famous man willing to say, “You cannot be what you appear to be for a simple reason, you can’t even be American.” He had no actual evidence beyond a few email forwards, but he didn’t need anything more than what he—and what tens of millions of other Americans with similar wounds—saw: Obama’s skin color.
And then came the actual insults, the barbs that made all the subtext real—the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Obama made Trump the punchline, about 25 times. The room laughed, knowing Trump was there, soaking it all up. He sat there, tried to grimace, and felt it all — the bankruptcies, the contempt of other elites, his father — and converted it into the lust to reassert an order with him on top that has always driven him.
He entered politics for revenge.
JCPOA — the Iran deal that worked, that inspectors confirmed, that held for as long as the United States honored it — was Obama’s name on a wall of history. Trump ripped it up. The decision was not policy. It was ceremony: the act of a man who cannot bear that someone who had to work that hard, who had to be that good, who was handed nothing that Trump was handed, had outperformed him in every room they ever shared.
The only deal Trump can now negotiate is a Temu JCPOA: same terms, worse position, likely with $20 billion returned to Iran, after Trump spent years citing a $1.7 billion restitution as proof Obama had been weak. To sign it is to say the first Black president, working against every headwind the country could produce, made the best deal available—and that Trump, handed every advantage, destroyed it for nothing. He is already tweeting that whatever he signs will have nothing to do with JCPOA. It’s that deep.
This is the context without which none of it makes sense. Not the troop deployments, not the casualty figures, not the diplomatic headfakes and social media posts. You can’t get to the Escalation Trap we’re in without it.
Historians will have to begin here, the way historians of Vietnam had to go back to the whole terrified logic of containment that made a generation of policymakers incapable of thinking clearly about a country they were destroying. They’ll have to look at Trump and see an America that tried to shake off its colonizer roots and for that was punished with the rise of an authoritarian of the sort it once united to defeat, after it had tried every other option.
Trump’s project is to become our Putin: the leader who answers to no law, no norm, no result he didn’t sanction. His failures in Iran—the way attacking Iran has made it more powerful, the way the war scrambled markets in a way he cannot ignore—undermined that. And Jared Kushner, whose Gulf investment deals require the Strait of Hormuz to remain open and whose Saudi backers are watching the energy crisis through their own calculations, will eventually make the stock market argument in terms Trump understands—big down red arrows.
So here is the prediction: after far too long of being unable to deal, Trump will declare total victory, turn to Putin to provide cover, and sign a Temu JCPOA with enough new branding that he never has to say the word. The strong white man who answers to nothing will have solved the problem of the Black man who answered to everything — by erasing him, as much as possible, from the conclusion.
The war may end. The wound will definitely grow. To some, it looks like the sun itself, too familiar to see, too glaring to look at directly. Trump did not create it. He is what it made.
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We wait and see whether he will destroy the whole planet while he destroys himself...
...excellent essay........I just ordered T. Adorno's book...............