“Let me say, we’ve won,” he told a rally in Kentucky on 11 March. “I think we’ve won,” he said on the White House south lawn on 20 March. “We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” he said in the Oval Office on 24 March. “We are winning so big,” he promised a fundraising dinner on 25 March.

Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so. While the US president insists that his military campaign in the Middle East is a historic success, the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy.

The war is turning into the ultimate test of an operating principle that has guided Trump for decades: construct a narrative, declare it to be true and relentlessly force the world to submit to it. It has proved effective in Manhattan boardrooms, on reality television and even at the heart of power in Washington.

But in Iran, Trump’s unique brand of “truthful hyperbole” has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into a brick wall.

“This is war and you can’t just will a win into existence in war,” said Tara Setmayer, cofounder of the Seneca Project, a women-led political action committee. “The American people are not on board with what’s going on because he cannot articulate an argument for why we’re there or what victory actually looks like.”