1. Trump announces on Truth Social that he will solve the crisis in one day, and this will win him the Nobel Peace Prize.
2. Trump accidentally says, out of habit, that this war “never would have started if I were president.” Then he remembers he’s currently the president but still blames Joe Biden anyway.
3. Trump repeatedly claims all the other presidents in US history were stupid for not getting a deal, because the conflict is so easy and simple.
4. Trump doesn’t read any of the briefings he’s given detailing the current status of the various negotiations between Iran, Israel, and his own national security team.
5. Trump asks his advisers why no one ever thought to make a deal where Iran gives up its nuclear ambitions in exchange for the US lifting sanctions to entice more civil behavior from Iran by opening it up to foreign investments and economic growth. His advisers remind him that Obama made that deal, but he ripped it up. Trump folds his arms tightly across his chest and frowns.
6. Trump finally goes to a peace meeting between Iran and Israel, but has trouble staying awake. Also, they’re in a city that doesn’t have a McDonald’s, and he’s annoyed that the local Diet Cokes “taste off.”
7. Trump feels uncomfortable sitting at a table full of highly educated and professional Israeli and Iranian engineers, nuclear physicists, and career bureaucrats who are intimately aware of every detail of past negotiations and have had extensive personal experiences with all the related technological capacities to measure and monitor specific scientific thresholds of fissile materials and processes. To compensate for his utter ignorance of the details, Trump monopolizes the conversation and exaggerates with his trademark superlative vocabulary, calling everything “amazing” or “unbelievable.”
8. Trump wants a photo op and gets pissed when officials from Israel and Iran refuse to participate. Trump suggests they stand on either side of him and shake hands as he gives a thumbs-up gesture and smiles. Trump asks if anyone has an official-looking binder or thick paper he can sign his name really big on in a permanent marker for the photos. All the Israelis and Iranians just stare at him.
9. At the end of the first day of negotiations, Trump announces that Iran and Israel have “concepts of a peace plan,” while media staffers from both governments describe the meeting as “not constructive.”
10. Trump tells Fox News, “No one knew the Middle East’s thousand-year geopolitical rivalries could be so complicated."
11. Trump blatantly takes Israel’s side because of the Jewish donors and supporters who assist his domestic political interests and wonders to himself how peculiar it is that within America’s complex political culture he’s somehow simultaneously super popular with both zealously nationalistic Zionists and rabidly antisemitic neo-Nazis.
12. Trump claims Iran “doesn’t have the cards,” prompting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to buy the company that makes his newly unveiled Trump Mobile phones, and forces the Trump phone service into bankruptcy.
13. Trump repeatedly takes credit for all the successful Israeli airstrikes against Iranian military installations.
14. Trump repeatedly claims he’s not involved to keep the isolationist wing of his MAGA base from abandoning him for involving America in another Middle East war.
15. Trump repeatedly takes credit for any temporary ceasefire deliberations.
16. Trump repeatedly blames Netanyahu and Khamenei for being “not nice” after no deal materializes.
17. Trump has a meeting with Khamenei in Switzerland. Afterward, he claims Iran has some of the “best real estate in the world” along the Caspian Sea shoreline, and how it would be a shame if it weren’t developed into a “Persian Riviera.” Trump wonders aloud if maybe there should be a Trump Tower in Tehran, or a casino. An Iranian official awkwardly tells Trump that gambling is a strict taboo in Islam.
18. Trump has a meeting with Netanyahu and, in the succeeding press conference, calls Khamenei “the literal devil.”
19. Trump has a dinner with Steve Bannon and claims he will not let Netanyahu humiliate him by going behind his back and escalating the conflict and single-handedly drawing the US into a wider war with Iran.
20. Whistleblowers in the government claim Trump is soliciting personal bribes from both Netanyahu and Khamenei, as well as hawking his various crypto grift coins if they want to “grease the wheels a little bit.”
21. Trump has lunch with Laura Loomer and announces he’s firing his entire National Security Council for not being loyal enough to mind their own business about the bribery.
22. Trump loses interest while Iran and Israel continue fighting among themselves, and claims the Nobel Committee is rigged against him anyway, so what’s the point of trying to get a Peace Prize?