Some mornings the war, on Donald Trump’s smartphone, seems like a Saturday night program. Acronym, announcement, tense face, huge sentence, imaginary applause. The now well-known international conflict began on February 28, 2026 with the joint attack of the United States and Israel against Iran.
On March 3, Trump already declared that he had won, and continued to repeat it for days, with the tenacity of someone who tries to convince himself first and foremost. On March 12, security just cracked:
We won, but we haven’t won completely yet.
The next day, again:
We won the war.
On March 14th the return to reality and the intuition that maybe, just maybe, there is a need for help from the NATO countries. First the request made with “kindness”, then, the tantrums of March 15th:
If you don’t help us, I’ll remember.
The next day, March 16:
We don’t actually need help, I was just testing loyalty. If NATO doesn’t help, there will be consequences.
A hashtag like #gnegnegne would also have been good here. Also because, from March 17 onwards, NATO, for Trump, is something bad and bad to get away from as soon as possible. In short, he was offended.
The pinnacle of the show is April 7, 2026:
An entire civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back to life again. I don’t want it to happen, but it probably will.
A few hours later the two-week truce arrived. The next day, the Middle East tourism promoter version appeared, with a promise to work “closely” with Iran and a dream of a “Golden Age of the Middle East,” which sounds more like a brochure with an infinity pool than foreign policy. On April 5th he turns to colorful language because, who knows, he got up in a bad mood:
Open the damn strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll live in hell.
Shortly after, on April 13, Trump returned from the dock, ready to have Iranian units “eliminated” too close to the naval blockade. On April 14th he reopened the drawer of talks and, while he was at it, he brought out Meloni too. One man, five registers, forty-eight hours. A real war used as a schedule.
The progress of the conflict, however, tells a different story. In mid-April, Washington imposed a blockade of Iranian ports, several ships reversed course, the UN considers a restart of negotiations likely and the nuclear dossier remains open. On the ground there are still bottlenecks, oil, sea routes, international pressure and a balance that changes hour by hour. In the Trumpian story, however, every day demands its sign in large letters: victory, ultimatum, close agreement, last warning, new enemy of the day. It’s the quickest way to make something that isn’t linear at all seem linear.
First the Apocalypse, then the negotiation, then the insult
Trump uses Hormuz as the perfect backdrop. The strait is a nerve of the planet: an enormous share of the world’s oil passes through it, the American blockade has hit the maritime route of the Iranian economy and the effect on the energy markets is immediate. At that point the conflict stops seeming distant and presents itself in the form of fuel, transportation, rising prices and tense faces in European governments. Geopolitics, when it enters from the petrol pump, immediately loses the air of a seminar for people in blue jackets.
It went the same way with the Pope. After the Vatican’s criticism of the war and its rhetoric, Trump called him weak and terrible at foreign policy. Then he publishes an image of himself that quickly goes viral, read by many as a call to Jesus. He, obviously, offers another version:
I posted it, I thought it was a picture of me as a doctor, dealing with the Red Cross, which we support. Only Fake News could come up with something like this. As soon as I heard it, I thought, “How did he come up with that?” It was just a picture of me as a doctor who does good for people, because I do good for people.
A doctor with a halo, of course. After all, this is how you enter the ward now: lab coat, stethoscope and resurrection on the third day. Then it’s the turn of her friend Giorgia Meloni, who up until that moment has done nothing but support her every single choice. After twelve hours of silence from Trump’s attacks against the Pope, declaring them unacceptable, she too becomes a target.
I’m shocked by her. I thought he had courage. I was wrong.
Ok, we get it, he’s extremely touchy, you might think. If only it were that simple. Reuters he described this swing for what it is: a sequence of sharp reversals that highlights the limits of his leverage and the unpredictable nature of his style. In the United States they even stuck the acronym TACO on him, “Trump always chickens out”, to make fun of this continuous oscillation between hard jaw and sudden braking. The nickname is poisonous, but it captures a piece of the matter. Trump sells strength even when he is retreating. He needs every step back to feel like a domination move. Reality then gets in the way with the grace of a wardrobe falling down the stairs.
The noise helps him stay at the center
Every time Trump moves from “end of civilization” to “productive talks”, the catchphrase about his mental health and the old label of “malignant narcissism” explodes again, complete with an open letter signed in 2024 by over 200 professionals who spoke of megalomania, irritability and repeated lies. The Reuters/Ipsos poll from February also falls in the same vein: 61% of Americans believe Trump is more unpredictable with age, while only 45% consider him mentally clear and capable of facing the challenges of the role.
It’s best to keep your feet on the ground. The American Psychiatric Association still recalls the Goldwater Rule, that is, the rule according to which it is incorrect to offer a professional opinion on a public figure without direct examination and authorization. Remote diagnosis always has that smell of a clever shortcut that arrives five minutes before simplification and ten minutes before making a fool of itself. It is more useful to observe the public effects of this style: that’s enough to understand the mechanism without putting on a fake lab coat.
The algorithm, as we know, loves exalted people
The explanation for this delirium is miserably modern. Negativity works. A study published in Nature Human Behavior showed that negative words increase online news consumption. The sober sentence walks, the angry sentence runs. Trump has lived within this mechanism for years and knows it like one knows the defects of a house. He knows where the floor creaks, he knows where to raise his voice, he knows that a well-placed shot spreads more than a reasoned position.
A study on Perspectives on Politics describes the MAGA world as a politics of status, of lost recognition, of the need to see identities that feel despised publicly reevaluated. In that climate, the shot acts as symbolic compensation. And Trump sells strength. Even when it backs up, it should look like it’s charging. A 2025 study on Language and Literature describes Trump as a “tough-guy politician”, one who builds his effectiveness with an abrasive, quarrelsome, muscular persona.
Another Cambridge study on the languages of right-wing populists shows that their strength lies in the brutal clarity of the message: people against elites, friends against enemies, innocents against traitors. It works very well in war, because war is already a machine that simplifies everything. Reutersspeaking about the most tense days of the crisis, wrote that Trump used his typical showmanship to keep public attention on himself while the real objectives remained opaque and the ceasefire already showed all its ambiguities. The contradiction, in this system, weighs little. Speed weighs a lot. Coherence, in this theatre, is a silent appearance.
The final point is almost offensively simple. Trump uses the war as a show because it pays more. War demands times, limits, consequences, allies, bills to pay. The show just demands a center stage, a spotlight and someone to humiliate before the commercials. The cast changes, the script doesn’t. And as I write, in today’s episode, April 15, 2026, we have already returned to “the war is almost over”. Trust me.
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