This is the August 3, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.
President Trump is in a bind of his own making. He began the Iran war believing it would take a handful of days, a few weeks at most, and never made his case for the conflict to Congress or the American public.
And now that the war has bogged down, he is unable to escape.
With the midterms fast approaching, the president doesn’t want to escalate an already deeply unpopular war. Yet, were he to cut and run, he’d be leaving behind an empowered and embittered regime in Tehran that now knows it can inflict deep pain on the global economy.
Part of Trump’s problem — and why the war continues to lurch along — is that he never truly understood his opponent. As Nancy A. Youssef and I write in The Atlantic:
The Trump administration’s greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand Tehran’s priorities and motivations — and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail …
Part of the confusion may stem from the fact that Trump himself appears to be of (at least) two minds about how he wants to proceed. He has vacillated between backing more military action and giving peace talks a chance.
The U.S. cannot begin to understand its enemy if it has yet to settle on its own aims — or how to achieve them.
Trump backed away from yet another strike over the weekend and claims that talks have restarted in earnest. Iran denies that. And Trump remains in that bind.
Read the full piece in The Atlantic.
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