Media Meltdown: How Trump Outsmarted Iran

April 18, 2026

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Trump Outsmarted Iran While Critics Rooted Against America

The legacy media, the so-called anti-MAGA Right, and the Democrat grandees in Congress have two things in common:

They never wanted the U.S.-Iran war to go in America’s favor.

Many of the critiques of Operation Epic Fury were not historically empirical, meaning they didn’t compare the ongoing conflict with Iran to past U.S. wars, such as the bombing campaign in Serbia or even the war in Afghanistan.

But the evidence—in five weeks alone, the United States, with the Israeli Air Force, wiped out most of the top echelon of the four ruling cliques in the Iranian nation—was there, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words”:

We’ve never taken on a country of 93 million people that had the most fearsome, terrible reputation of being dangerous and unpredictable, and running the Middle East with a ring-of-fire proxies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon—indomitable. They had terrified seven presidents. And yet, in five weeks, we destroyed its ability to make war.