Bullseye?

Let's say you had a bingo card for the Trump presidency with a chip for every expected item he has tackled since entering office. Crack down on immigration? Check. Use tariffs to upend the global economy? Check. Confront universities, law firms and the media in a broad effort to take down perceived political enemies? Check, check and check.  

What about bombing Iran? Would that be on the card at all? For many people – including Trump's own supporters – it would not have been. But it happened last weekend, and the ramifications are still reverberating around the world. 

President Donald Trump is known more for criticizing U.S. involvement in foreign wars than for joining them, so it created an uproar in his "Make America Great Again" movement last week when the man who has portrayed himself as an ambassador of peace started flirting openly with dropping bombs on Iran. 

The result, once he gave the order for B-2 bombers carrying 30,000-pound "bunker busters" to target Iran's nuclear facilities, was an attack undetected by the Middle Eastern oil producer and welcomed by Israel, which was already in the middle of a multi-day war with its arch enemy. 

Trump portrayed the strike as a massive success. The United States had obliterated Iran's nuclear program, he said, and now it was time for Iran to return to talks. When he announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Monday, it appeared he had essentially bombed Iran back to the negotiating table. 

But blips were to come. The ceasefire didn't last at first, sparking anger from Trump, who told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call off Israeli planes heading to Iran. And more damaging to Trump's message, a preliminary U.S. intelligence report from the Defense Intelligence Agency undercut his claims of having destroyed nuclear capabilities. 

That annoyed the president, whose trip to The Hague for a NATO summit was overshadowed by Iran and questions about how effective the U.S. strike had been.  

The president and his top lieutenants, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, downplayed the report and took aim at the media. But when I asked Trump specifically if the intelligence was wrong, he said it was simply inconclusive. More importantly, he said, the strikes had stopped the Israeli-Iranian conflict, much like U.S. atomic bombs in Japan ended World War Two. 

Trump did have cause for celebration at the summit, however. NATO leaders backed a big increase in defense spending that he had called for, and the president, in turn, reiterated U.S. support for a mutual defense pact, which he had cast doubt on only a day before. Flattery by the top brass helped; world leaders certainly have learned how best to deal with a mercurial U.S. leader. 

Still, Trump ended his less-than-24-hour stop in the Netherlands in what seemed like a sour mood. He criticized or mocked journalists, including yours truly, at a closing press conference and jettisoned his usual habit of bringing reporters in for meetings with major foreign leaders, leaving us out of his tete-a-tete with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. For a president who had chalked up some legitimate wins, the victory lap did not seem like a victory lap at all. 

Follow Reuters/Ipsos polling on the president's approval ratings here.

Though European leaders rushed to support Trump's push to double what they spend on defense, most cannot afford to meet the new 5% of GDP target, which will lead to some budget sacrifices and creative accounting.

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