He started it. Now he needs to end it. And nobody in the West Wing quite knows how.
TIME’s new cover story lands at the worst possible moment for the White House. Reporter Eric Cortellessa spent weeks inside the administration’s deliberations and came out with a portrait of a president trapped by his own war, searching for an exit that does not make him look like he lost.
The situation is not subtle. Gas is above $4 a gallon. The S&P 500 just posted its worst quarterly performance since September 2022. Thirteen Americans are dead. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. And Trump, according to two advisers and two members of Congress who have spoken to him recently, wants out.
The problem is what getting out looks like.
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During the third week of the war, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio sat down with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and a small group of aides to deliver some unwelcome news. The surveys were brutal. The gas prices were real. The protests were building.
Susie Wiles anticipated it. According to two White House sources, she was worried that the people around Trump were softening the reality, feeding him battlefield highlight reels instead of the full picture. She pushed colleagues to be “more forthright with the boss” about what was actually happening at home.
The picture she was pushing back against was the one Trump had been constructing for himself each morning, watching battlefield success clips compiled by military officials.
The TIME story reveals that JD Vance pushed hardest against the operation before it launched. Trump acknowledged the pushback at the dinner table in Mar-a-Lago the night the bombs fell.
“J.D. really doesn’t like this,” he told the group gathered under the Palm Beach stars. “But when the decision is made, it’s a decision, right?” Vance was not present. He was in the Situation Room in Washington, following standard continuity-of-government protocol.
Netanyahu was the one who pushed hardest for it. At a private meeting in Washington on February 11 that stretched for hours, the Israeli Prime Minister told Trump: “We’ve come this far, Donald. We have to finish what we started.”
Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, got an unexpected reality check. He had used Iran’s muted response to previous U.S. strikes as evidence that calibrated force could work without triggering a broader war. Then Iran started hitting Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.
“He was expecting the Iranians to fight back in some form. When they started attacking virtually the entire region, it sort of hit him like, ‘Whoa, we’re really in this now,'” a person familiar with his thinking told TIME. The Pentagon disputes this account entirely.
Trump told TIME he is not worried. “Why wouldn’t they call? We just blew up their three big bridges last night. They’re getting decimated. They say Trump is not negotiating with Iran. I mean, it’s sort of an easy negotiation.” He also said of the Israelis: “They’ll do what I tell them. They’ll stop when I stop.”
The exit options, according to TIME, are narrow. Independent analysts say reopening the strait requires either a sustained military occupation with boots on the ground or a negotiated end to hostilities. Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince MBS both want to prolong the conflict. Iran’s conditions for ending the war include reparations, sanctions relief, and recognition of its authority over the Strait of Hormuz.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy and longtime friend, offered the optimistic frame. “Donald Trump always has multiple exit strategies,” he has told colleagues. “He keeps a lot of options, a lot of off-ramps, and then feels his way through the process.”
Wars, however, have a way of outrunning that logic.
Featured image via X screengrab
