On Wednesday, July 8, U.S. President Donald Trump was in Ankara, Turkey for the 2026 NATO Summit when he declared that the ceasefire with Iran was “over” — and Axios reported that the Trump White House was “preparing for what could become a multi-day or even multi-week exchange of fire with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz.” A U.S. official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Axios, “We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not f–– around.”
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But Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng, in a blistering column published Thursday morning, argues that Trump, not Iran, is the one who is being humiliated.
“This was supposed to be over,” Suebsaeng writes in Zeteo. “But Donald Trump has a problem. Basically, nobody takes him seriously anymore. Not in his own government, not in Iran or elsewhere — at least when it comes to his most malevolent threats against the Islamic Republic. … Sure, President Trump can reboot his bombing campaign, as he already did late last month and is huffily doing this week, all while claiming that maybe he doesn’t even want to cut a peace deal with the Iranians anymore. … Trump can name-call the Iranian leadership, and he can re-threaten the grand-scale war crimes and ground invasions he and his administration actively planned for but haven’t carried out. And he can keep lying to the world that time is on his side and that he’s in no rush to end the bloodbath that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started back in February.”
Suebsaeng adds, “But ever since last month, the Iranian government has continued its campaign of humiliation against the Trump administration by refusing to bend to the U.S. president’s renewed threats of mass murder and his resumed bombing sprees.”
In contrast to the U.S. official who told Axios that the U.S. is “not f–– around” with Iran, a Zeteo interviewee — also a U.S. official — said of Trump, “Nobody’s afraid of him right now.”
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That official, according to Suebsaeng, isn’t the only one in Washington D.C. who feels that way.
“All of Trump’s violence and bluster clearly are not imposing an effective deterrence to aggressive Iranian activity, including in the key global economic leverage point of the Strait of Hormuz,” Suebsaeng explains. “There’s a good reason for that. In months past, various Trump administration officials and other sources kept leaking to Zeteo about how close Trump was to ordering an invasion of different parts of Iran, or ratcheting up the war on a truly apocalyptic scale. A solid number of these sources were leaking out of alarm, given how much they did not want the president to do this, fearing it would blow up the world economy, tear down his administration, and drag the Republican Party down with him.”
The Zeteo journalist continues, “Flash forward to today: Virtually none of these people think Trump has it in him anymore. Many senior officials within Trump’s own government do not believe he has the stomach for ramping the war back up to 11. They certainly don’t think he has the tolerance for a protracted conflict now, if he ever had it to begin with. And they really don’t buy his more recent threats, including, this week, to deploy ground troops to Kharg Island, the Iranian oil hub.”
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