Alan Zendell, July 12, 2026

We’re watching Trump Administration II unravel before our eyes. President Donald Trump, whose principal governing philosophy is extracting personal profit and power from the chaos he is adept at creating, is slowly drowning in a different kind of chaos. Most of it is of his own making, but the difference is that this chaos was unintentional. This time, it’s the natural consequence of Trump’s incompetent decisions and planning.

It’s interesting, too, that Trump and his idol, Vladimir Putin both appear to be succumbing to their own overreach and errors in strategic planning. Both started wars they believed would be walks in the park. In 2022 when Putin massed huge armies along Ukraine’s border with Russia and Belarus, he believed Ukraine and Kyiv would fall within days. When Trump let his ego be seduced into attacking Iran, he announced, repeatedly, that the conflict would last four to six weeks and would obliterate Iran’s capability to develop a nuclear weapon.

Both seriously underestimated their enemy and largely for the same reason. They both surrounded themselves with yes people and advisors who understood disagreeing with the boss could be fatal. Shooting the messenger when you don’t like the message is a leadership style that invariably self-destructs.

Putin’s and Trump’s failures have striking things in common. Both overestimated their military’s ability to achieve their stated objectives and seriously underestimated the punishment their adversaries  were willing to absorb to preserve their sovereignty. But perhaps  the most shocking similarity was that both the Russian and American military advisors totally failed to anticipate the role of drones, which turned out to be assets both Iran and Ukraine have successfully used to hold back and in many important ways, defeat their much larger and more powerful opponents.

Drones have become the “David’s slingshots” in their war against world superpowers, and both Trump and Putin are paying a heavy price for their mistakes. Ukraine estimates that Russia has lost almost 1.5 million combatants and  more than 620,000 units of military equipment, including everything from naval ships to artillery to missiles. The American military publication Stars and Stripes, supports these estimates, and points out that Russian losses in Ukraine over four years are eight times as great as American losses in Vietnam in twice that time.

American personnel losses in the Iran War remain extremely low because to date, Trump has eschewed a ground invasion of places like Kharg Island. But both Ukrainian and Iranian drone and missile attacks have been quite effective in destroying billions of dollars worth of military infrastructure and oil refining capabilities. When the full cost of Trump’s invasion of Iran are tallied, including the dangerous dilution of American precision weaponry, the shock to our economy will be enormous, further dividing us politically, as warring American political factions compete for scarce dollars. There is no way we can re-build our military assets and maintain our social safety net without reversing the Trump tax cuts. The resulting political strife will weaken the United States’ standing as a world power and hurt millions of Americans, most of whom opposed this war from the outset.

With fifteen weeks to go before our midterm elections, the loss of Senator Lindsey Graham and the indefinite absence of Senator Mitch McConnell, combined with Trump’s alienation of four key Republican Senators has effectively taken away his Senate majority. That means he has virtually no chance of getting his voter suppression bill passed into law, and as he ramps up hostilities in Iran, with no ability to prevent the war from escalating out of control, it becomes far more likely that Congress will unite in a new war powers resolution that forces him to get approval from Congress to continue the war.

With much of the oil refining capacity in Russia and the Gulf states damaged by the two wars, any hope of gas prices coming down, even if oil prices don’t rise precipitously is also vanishing. And with China showing signs of needing to increase its oil imports, the increased demand can only have an upward impact on prices. And what’s Trump’s answer? He wants to build new coal plants and he plans to extort a fee of twenty percent of the value of every ship’s cargo for the American Navy to escort them through the Strait of Hormuz, after declaring that the Strait was an international waterway, and ships of every nation should be able to freely use it.

Given all that, Americans are asking what we got out of the war with Iran. To date, the answer is: NOTHING. A better question is how much we’ve lost, and the answer in terms of both dollars and America’s standing around the world is staggeringly. Trump knows he will be impeached if he loses his majorities in Congress. What he may not realize, is that his own party may determine that their survival depends on removing him from office, too.