Charlie Warzel writes:

If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.

That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.

In the Trumpian vision of the world, the U.S. invasion of Iran was not only necessary but also urgent: In February, Trump alleged that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and had continued developing long-range missiles that were threatening U.S. allies and could reach the United States “soon.” But Trump’s claim is dubious, at least according to a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment, which noted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Experts also cast doubt on the strength of Iran’s missiles: “There is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future,” Emma Sandifer of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation told FactCheck.org in March. [Continue reading…]