President Donald Trump flipped out with a 296-word tirade after an editorial writer on a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper said Iran “takes him for a sucker.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman wrote an op-ed on Monday that suggested Tehran was playing the president, as peace negotiations continue to falter.
Kaufman argues that this is by design. Iran’s playbook, he writes, is to promise something vague, get a concession from Trump, and then not fully deliver. But Trump disagrees with this assessment, to say the least.
“THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS LOST ITS WAY!” he responded to the article on Truth Social on Tuesday, before launching into a stunning meltdown.
“An IDIOT on The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board, named Elliot Kaufman, just wrote an Op Ed entitled, ‘The Iranians Take Trump for a Sucker.’ Really?” Trump began, before listing the merits of Operation Epic Fury and casting himself as uniquely forceful compared to his predecessors.
In his telling, the regime’s navy sits at the bottom of the sea, its air force is finished, its air systems wiped out, and its nuclear infrastructure “obliterated” in a single shadowy strike by U.S. B-2 bombers. Its leadership cadre has been decapitated—most notably military mastermind Qasem Soleimani—while the economy is supposedly bleeding hundreds of millions a day under a U.S.-controlled chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
He returned to Kaufman and fired shots at the Journal’s owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch. “But despite all of this, I have a MORON on the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal writing about me being taken for a ‘sucker.’ Iran certainly doesn’t think so! Neither does anyone else. I guess Rupert Murdoch told him to write it this way, because The Wall Street Journal has lost its way, no longer required reading, just another failing political ‘RAG!’”
Kaufman himself responded on X, sharing the screenshot and adding, “My wife: . . . you’re still going to do the dishes tonight, right?”
Kaufman argues in the piece that Trump fell for the same old bait-and-switch over the Strait of Hormuz. The “third swindle,” as he calls the latest instance of Iran duping Trump, comes in the form of Iran saying it won’t reopen the Strait at all unless the U.S. lifts its blockade. This comes after Iran already gained concessions in the form of Israeli restraint in Lebanon.
