Hello, greetings, and all that. Today is Monday, Aug. 10, 2026 — the 222nd day of the year, and the calendar's telling you to do absolutely nothing about it.
My calendar says it's Lazy Day, S'mores Day, Agent Orange Awareness Day, Connecticut Day, and Shapewear Day. Do as little as humanly possible, roast a marshmallow, and if the shapewear doesn't fit right, blame the s'mores — Sturgis riders are still rolling through South Dakota all week, if you need an excuse to go for a drive instead.
Today In History:
30 B.C.: Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, takes her own life following her forces' defeat at the hands of Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome.
1680: Pueblo Indians launch a successful revolt against Spanish colonists in present-day New Mexico, driving Spain out of the region for over a decade.
1792: Mobs storm the Tuileries Palace in Paris during the French Revolution, forcing King Louis XVI to flee; he's later arrested, tried for treason, and executed.
1821: Missouri becomes the 24th state, on land acquired 18 years earlier as part of the Louisiana Purchase.
1846: President James K. Polk signs the measure establishing the Smithsonian Institution, which a peculiar bequest from English scientist James Smithson, who never once set foot in America, funded.
1874: Herbert Hoover, the 31st president, is born in West Branch, Iowa.
1912: Virginia Stephen marries Leonard Woolf at a London registry office; she goes on to write as Virginia Woolf.
1921: Franklin D. Roosevelt is stricken with polio at his summer home on Campobello Island, the illness that eventually confines him to a wheelchair.
1927: President Calvin Coolidge, arriving cowboy-hatted and on horseback, dedicates Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, two months before carving even begins.
1944: American forces overcome the last Japanese resistance on Guam during World War II.
1969: Members of Charles Manson's cult murder Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their Los Angeles home, one night after the Tate murders.
1977: Postal employee David Berkowitz is arrested in Yonkers, New York, and accused of being the "Son of Sam" gunman responsible for six killings.
1990: The Magellan space probe enters orbit around Venus, beginning an eight-month mission to map the planet's surface.
1993: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Birthdays Today include Antonio Banderas, actor (Desperado, Puss in Boots); Jimmy Dean, singer, businessman ("Big Bad John"); Eddie Fisher, singer, actor; Isaac Hayes, singer, songwriter ("Theme from Shaft").
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday — consider yourself listed. Have a great one!
* * *
It's a real kick to see someone I admire come to the same conclusions I did a few days ago.
The always-great Victor Davis Hanson has written a column that, unsurprisingly, doesn't just back up the case I made the other day in "Trump Has Already Won in Iran, by Any Definition That Matters" — it lays out that exact same case, better than I did, with numbers I didn't have in front of me. It’s so nice when someone supports an argument you’ve already made, particularly someone as credible as VDH.
Hanson opens by naming the whiplash everyone's feeling watching this thing unfold:
"One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators."
OK, that's fair. But he doesn't stop at the confusion — he pushes straight through it to the numbers nobody in the mainstream press seems interested in running. Start with the money, which Hanson says the headlines have completely buried:
"The confusion obscures the continuing effects of the embargoes, sanctions, blockade, and financial isolation imposed on Iran. Together, they are costing the theocracy more than $400 million a day in lost revenue, money that it can ill afford to lose. By haggling, Iran believes it can run out the clock until the midterms, but it may be only prolonging its own miserable situation."
Four hundred million dollars a day. Every single day this drags on, that's the number ticking against Tehran, not against us.
Then there's the airpower math, which is where Hanson's column really earns its photons:
In sum, the United States and its allies have some 1,300 late-model combat aircraft in the region. They should therefore be able to hit Iran hard for years to come if it resumes drone and missile attacks against its rivals.
He goes on from there.
Iran's problems will not end when the United States declares victory and sends most of its forces home. The regime has lost a half-century and half a trillion dollars in military and nuclear investment. Until the United States lifts its sanctions and embargoes, Iran cannot rearm. And if it eventually does rearm and again tries to supply its Arab terrorist clients in its "ring of fire" around Israel, its destitute people will grow furious at a disgraced and humiliated regime for diverting the nation's wealth abroad.
Sit with that 1,300 figure for a second, because Hanson breaks down exactly where it comes from: the Gulf states alone can field more than 700 combat aircraft — F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Rafales, Mirages, Tornados. Israel adds another 300, including late-model F-35s. U.S. bases in the region hold roughly 300 more, F-22s and F-35s among them, and that's before you count a single carrier air wing.
Iran, by comparison, currently has no effective combat aircraft, and no functioning air defenses left to speak of. That's not a fair fight. That's not even a fight — that's a permanent ceiling on Iran's ability to project power, regardless of who's negotiating what this week.
Hanson correctly points out that Hormuz may only need about a year, maybe two, of continued naval support before other avenues of oil delivery come fully online and existing pipelines finish their expansion, bypassing whatever leverage Iran imagines it still holds over the strait. In Hanson's own words: Iran's blockade attempts have "already accelerated the expansion of existing pipelines and the construction of new ones that will bypass the strait and connect the oil fields directly to the Gulf of Oman, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean."
Read that twice. Iran tried to weaponize a chokepoint, and the practical result is the rest of the region building its way around that chokepoint, permanently. That's not a threat Iran is managing. That's a threat Iran is actively engineering itself out of, even if it steadfastly refuses to see it.
"Iran is losing whether it is being bombed, sanctioned, or embargoed—or all three." Its ultimate fate, he adds, now rests entirely with an administration that hasn't yet decided exactly how far to push the advantage it's already sitting on.
I said the same thing a few days ago with prose that I unashamedly admit had less horsepower behind it. Glad to see a man who's spent a career studying how wars actually end backing the math up. In short, "See, I told ya so."
One more thing worth adding, since it came up in the comments on my original piece, and I think it's worth pulling into this column instead of leaving it buried down there. A reader's exchange got me thinking about the 1978 war film Force 10 From Navarone, and I'd suggest it's a better model for what Trump's actually doing than anyone's given him credit for.
Without spoiling the whole plot for anyone who hasn't seen it: The mission at the center of that film doesn't rely on brute-force demolition. It relies on identifying exactly where a massive structure is already under unbearable strain, then applying one small, precisely placed charge to a load-bearing point — letting the structure's own weight finish the job the explosives merely started.
That's the strategy playing out against Iran right now, whether the administration ever says so out loud or not. Much as it would make some folks feel good to crush the mullahs instantly. Much as a formal surrender with all the trimmings would be desirable, the fact is, it's simply superfluous.
In the simplest of terms, you don't need to flatten a regime that's already buckling under half a trillion dollars in squandered investment, a devastated air force, a strait it can't actually hold closed, and $400 million a day bleeding out of its own treasury. You just need to find the load-bearing point and apply pressure precisely there. The conditions for collapse are already built into the structure. The small explosion — a strike here, a sanction there, an embargo tightened at exactly the right moment — is just the trigger. Everything after that is physics, and time, not politics. You just need to sit back and await developments.
So, as I said a couple days ago, Trump has already won.
Thought for the Day: Coolidge showed up on horseback to dedicate a mountain nobody had started carving yet — proof that sometimes leadership just means standing in front of the vision before the work catches up to it.
VIP members, let's hear from you. Your voice matters, and it's your turn.
Be careful today. If you're not, who's going to read my column tomorrow?
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