An army of yes men, in thrall to Donald Trump’s shifts of temper and short attention span, is hampering any prospect of peace with Iran. And with the president’s indefinite extension of a ceasefire being announced on Tuesday, a day after he threatened to resume bombing, the White House’s claims of success are running out of road, insiders say.
In the past 48 hours alone, the US president claimed that a deal was “close”, before then saying it was out of reach. Typifying the confusion, JD Vance, the vice-president, was still at the White House, after Mr Trump said on Sunday that his deputy was heading to Pakistan for talks with Iranian negotiators.
Tehran, after days of stalling, moved first, saying it was pulling out of the peace process, which had been cratering for days.
Mr Trump’s subsequent statement came minutes after US stock markets had closed. With the war in its eighth week, the president backed off again, saying Iran would be given more time to come up with a peace proposal.
“No one in the administration seems to know what’s going on. What the plans are. What we’re even aiming for now. It’s all just a giant clusterf— and there’s zero accountability, either,” a Trump-world source told The Telegraph.
Even Mr Trump’s closest aides are struggling to keep pace with his updates on Truth Social, which have generated a lot of noise but no discernible diplomatic progress.
No clear plan on Iran
On Sunday, Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, and Chris Wright, Mr Trump’s energy secretary, told morning news programmes that Mr Vance would be heading up negotiations in Islamabad.
At the same time, Mr Trump was telling reporters that his vice-president would not be travelling for security reasons, before changing tack and saying he was going to Pakistan after all.
Former officials say such actions indicate that the president is increasingly detached from the structures that typically guide an administration when conducting war operations.
Instead, Mr Trump relies on instincts and advice from a tight circle of loyalists who shape – and in some cases soften – the picture of the war.
Having long passed the “four to six weeks” he said the war would take, the constant mixed messaging and exaggerated claims about a deal point to one reality: there is no clear plan.
What once looked like a calculated campaign to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb has deteriorated into daily updates with no consistency.
Social media posts fired off by the president and Mohammad Ghalibaf, the Iranian parliament speaker, tend to shape the media narrative far more robustly than any comments made by cabinet ministers or even the president himself in various interviews.
The claims from Iran and the US remain at odds, reflecting that their respective demands have so far been irreconcilable.
Mr Trump’s actions indicate he has little patience for the long, structured national security meetings that traditionally anchor US decision-making during war. He prefers to react to events as they unfold, a style aides desperately tried to pry him away from during his first term.
“That is just not what happens anymore, Trump doesn’t like it, he feels constrained by it,” John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, told The Telegraph about the abandonment of traditional decision-making.
“It was more [of a] process in the first term because we were able to explain to him why it benefited him. Now he thinks he can do what he wants.”
Susie Wiles, Mr Trump’s all-powerful chief of staff, is said to have expressed concern that aides are giving the president “a rose-coloured view” of the war. But the stalemate between Iran and the US suggests she hasn’t been persuasive in changing the president’s unwavering view that all is going to plan.
“There is no one group in their command that speaks for the nation,” a source close to the president said.