Imagine you’re a college student, visiting your family during the holidays, and your Great Aunt Agnes has wonderful news to share: She’s set you up on a date with her neighbor’s daughter! In fact, you’ll be taking her out tonight!
“Oh. Do you have a picture of her?” you ask.
“Um… no.”
Question: How excited are you gonna be?
I’m guessing you’d feign a sudden illness and/or stage a kidnapping, because the logical inference is, if a photo would help close the deal, Great Aunt Agnes would’ve led with it. (Especially since she knows how shallow you are.) Not showing a photo is an ominous sign!
Right now, millions of Americans are making a similar inference over President Donald Trump’s still-unseen memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran: If the deal was a great one, you’d expect a PR-savvy administration to lead with it.
Instead, Team Trump is keeping it a secret. They’ll tell us about it — but they won’t let us see it with our own two eyes.
No wonder our Spidey Sense is tingling.
This is a precarious PR position for the Trump administration because ambiguity invites media scrutiny — and the media doesn’t scrutinize fairly. Until the MOU is published, EVERYTHING will be overanalyzed, overexamined, overhyped, and overblown. And since the mainstream media already assumes the worst about the president, every unfavorable inference will be accepted as Gospel.
This isn’t a PR fight Trump can win.
Team Trump has appointed JD Vance to make the media rounds and set the record straight. Our VP’s been everywhere this week, selling the Iran deal to the American people — and doing his best to counter the media’s nonstop caterwauling. One of the outlets he’s chosen to speak to — Megyn Kelly’s podcast — has raised plenty of eyebrows because not too long ago, Vance’s boss blasted Kelly (along with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones) as “stupid,” “nut jobs,” “losers,” and “troublemakers.”
Yet today, Vance will be visiting Megyn Kelly for a one-on-one interview — giving her show his implied endorsement.
I’m guessing that Vance is simply trying to get the word out on as many different media platforms as possible. (He’s also appearing on The View, for crying out loud.) But if he appears on Kelly’s show and snubs Ben Shapiro/The Daily Wire, Mark Levine, and other podcasters who’ve loyally supported the administration, it won’t go unnoticed.
Uncomfortable inferences will be drawn. Republican in-fighting will escalate.
Right now, the clues ARE the story: Without the MOU to look at, the media is dissecting all the words, actions, and associations of Trump and his staff. Every Truth Social post is reexamined. Each scrap of minutiae is put under a microscope.
Ambiguity makes false inferences not just plausible, but believable.
That’s a bad spot for any politician, but it’s disastrous for President Trump — and even worse for public approval of his Iran deal. The media was already absurdly biased against the president, but during the Iran War, President Trump used his Truth Social platform as a negotiating tool. He’d threaten, cajole, flatter, and try to influence Iran’s leaders. That was one of his wartime tactics.
It’s why Trump’s Truth Social account is filled with contradictory statements: Sometimes he negotiated with carrots, other times with sticks.
But now the mainstream media is using his posts to sow mistrust in the MOU. (That’s in addition to its institutional anti-Trump bias, plus a tsunami of Iranian PR disinformation.) Throw in all the noise of the Groyper Right (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Nick Fuentes), and you realize that JD Vance’s PR blitz won’t be anywhere close to enough. We can’t win this argument via assurances.
There’s too much noise — and not enough goodwill.
That’s a shame, because Trump’s PR tactics were legitimate. And it’s entirely possible that, when we read the MOU and reach a final peace deal, we’ll see that these tactics led to an outcome that minimized the loss of life and “Made America Great Again.” (Be stupid to discount the possibility simply because Tucker Carlson, the New York Times, and Iranian media bots say otherwise.) Maybe this is exactly what Trump says it is: a transformational American victory.
In fact, Trump’s tactics are eerily similar to those of another successful American president — someone who also battled our neighbors to the north and south — and also led our nation during war.
I’m talking about our 11th president, James K. Polk.
President Polk led us to victory in the Mexican-American War, annexed Texas, and helped establish our southern border. Roughly 13,000 Americans died (along with hundreds of Texans). It was one of the deadliest border disputes in U.S. history
Intriguingly, President Polk also established our northern border — and he did so not with a gun but with a threatening slogan — and that time, ZERO Americans died.
From the Bill of Rights Institute:
In his first annual address to Congress, Polk announced his intention to obtain the whole of the Pacific Northwest, as far north as the boundary of Russian Alaska at 54°40′ latitude. Although the United States had no clear grounds for such an expansive claim, the most militant Democrats adopted the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” John L. O’Sullivan, the editor of New York’s Democratic Review, expressed their view when he declared, “The American claim is by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.” [emphasis added]
“Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” was their rallying cry. If social media had been around in the 1840s, it would’ve been the top trending hashtag.
We demanded ALL that territory between America and Alaska!
Spoiler alert: There was no fight. And we didn’t get all that territory.
President Polk negotiated a compromise agreement instead, which is why our northern border is at the 49th parallel — not the 54th.
On this day in 1846, the United States and Britain quietly decided who would own the Pacific Northwest, and they did it without firing a single shot. Just a year earlier the slogan was “Fifty Four Forty or Fight,” demanding everything up to the Alaska line. Then reality set in.… pic.twitter.com/kWdZQNZ5Sw
— Echoes of War (@EchoesofWarYT) June 16, 2026
President Trump didn’t get the “unconditional surrender” he demanded. If that was your expectation, he overpromised and underdelivered. But what we’ve already accomplished is historic:
- The Supreme Leader — and his closest advisors — are all dead.
- Iran’s new leader is a closeted, one-legged nepo-baby who’s too scared (or too disfigured) to be seen in public.
- The Iranian economy is in abject ruins.
- Iran’s navy, air force, and air defenses have all been obliterated.
- Iran’s nuclear program is buried beneath a mountain of dirt.
- Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Iranian missiles, military equipment, and nuclear technology were destroyed.
- Iran’s enemies — which include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and more — have unified against it.
- Iran’s terrorist proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, have all been weakened.
- The mullahs are fractured and divided, and Iranian leaders are resigning.
- Regionally and beyond, Iran’s capacity to project power is at a generational low. Finally, perhaps, there’s an opportunity for peace in the Middle East.
Maybe Donald Trump will stick the landing, too. Maybe he won’t. (And maybe your Great Aunt Agnes’ neighbor’s daughter is actually Sydney Sweeney! I mean, it’s possible.)
But either way, we won’t know ‘til we read it.
(Like the Zoomers put it, “Pics or it didn’t happen.”)
Trump needs to get out of the “trust me bro” phase and into the “see, I told you so” phase ASAP. And the only way to get there is to release the MOU, explain the benefits, and tie it to the MAGA mission.
Because that’s a fight he can win.
Related: Was the Iran War Worth It? (Or Is That the Wrong Question?)
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First. It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battle lines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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