President Donald Trump has continued to escalate his deeply unpopular war against Iran despite repeated warnings from his top military adviser, according to an analysis that argues the president’s “failed” approach is driven by his fear of admitting “one thing.”

Trump has said that Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed the U.S. war against Iran would be “something easily won.” However, The New York Times has reported that Caine has privately expressed the opposite view. Even so, Trump has continued to intensify the conflict.

The contrast between Trump’s public account and the reported private warnings from the nation’s top military officer is central to journalist Alissa Valdes-Rodriguez’s criticism. Her op-ed frames the dispute not as a tactical disagreement alone, but as a question of whether the president is willing to acknowledge that the strategy is not producing the results he promised.

“He got told the plan failed and his response was to order more of the plan and lie,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote in an op-ed published Saturday on her Substack. “That’s not strategy. That’s a man who heard 'you’re going the wrong way' and pressed harder on the gas so he wouldn’t have to feel the unbearable sensation of pulling over because he f----- up.”

Valdes-Rodriguez argued that Trump has remained committed to what she described as a “failed” strategy of escalation, even though it has done little to reduce the war’s economic impact or prevent U.S. casualties. In her view, the president’s determination to continue the conflict comes down to his effort to avoid doing “one thing.”

“The war is not continuing because it can be won,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote. “Everybody who would know says it can’t.”

She then addressed why Trump, in her view, refuses to reverse course.

“The war is continuing because stopping it would require Donald Trump to admit to Donald Trump that it didn’t work, and admitting it didn’t work would require him to admit that he didn’t work, and that – that little sentence, ‘I was wrong’ — is the one thing this man has spent seventy-some years of his life building an entire personality to avoid ever having to say.”

Valdes-Rodriguez continued, “He would genuinely rather do this. Destroy the global economy. Ruin your life. Kill your daughters and sons. He would rather do all of this than feel that for four seconds.”