There's never been a more historic manly surrender than Trump's manly surrender to Iran. Good job buddy.

It's not often we see a single question flummoxing all of humanity at once, but it feels like something that we'll be reckoning with more and more often as Donald Trump continues his slow decay. Today's conundrum is over the Trump-Iran "peace deal," the one that is not actually a peace deal but is a memorandum of understanding about how negotiations towards a future peace deal should move forward—but which Trump has already declared to be the greatest victory in the history of victories. Also, we don't actually know what the almost-peace almost-deal is, because even though Trump says the deal is both already signed and will be extra-double-signed on Friday, Trump and his negotiators are conspicuously withholding the actual text of the thing.

The best we can do is crib from the vague assurances we're given, nearly all of which have been responses to an Iranian summary of the deal that appears to give Iran everything it's been asking for and then some. U.S. sources ... aren't really disputing that. They're spinning it, they're making arguments about the timing of steps, but they aren't disputing the key points of the deal.

• The United States agrees to unfreeze $24 billion of frozen Iranian assets, and to coordinate a whopping $300 billion in Iranian "reconstruction" costs.

• The suspension of world sanctions against Iran and the cessation of the American "blockade."

• "Permanent" end to Israel's military actions in Lebanon (Israel's government has already denounced this one as a non-starter, with Bibi Netanyahu apparently informing Trump directly that Israel plans on ignoring this edict.

• No new restrictions on Iranian proxies or on Iran's missile programs.

• The opening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian "arrangements"—that is, with new tolling in place.

• The same Iranian promise to abide by the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that was already in place.

• The same Iranian agreement to negotiate for the disposal of its enriched uranium stockpile, a stockpile that had been previously eliminated under an Obama-era agreement but which was reconstituted after Trump unilaterally nullified that agreement during his first term.

To give just one example of how favorable this "deal" is to the now even-more-hardline Iranian government, Trump and hawkish Republicans pretended at apoplexy over the unfreezing of $1.7 billion worth of Iranian assets under the Obama-era agreement. Now Trump, a super genius, has agreed to unfreeze $24 billion of funds and coordinate over a quarter trillion dollars in reparations for his strikes.

$327 billion and a new status quo in which Iran and Oman gain the power to impose tolls on 20% of the world's oil supply. That's what Trump and his crack team of negotiators are willing to hand out in order to pretend that they're very clever and none of this ever happened.

World governments, media mouthpieces, and you and I and our pets now have to grapple between the only two possible responses to this deal:

1. We can mock Trump mercilessly. This "deal" amounts to a complete surrender, the most consequential U.S. military defeat since the Korean War(?); in any normal democracy there would be Consequences for unleashing such an unequivocal disaster. Trump murdered an as of yet unknown number of human beings, pissed away unknown billions in an impotent display of compulsive violence, and managed to leave America and the world in a much worse place than if he had simply sat in the Oval Office and done not a damn thing. It is a historic act of incompetence, and that it was all finalized while Trump celebrated his birthday with cage fights on the White House lawn makes it all the grosser.
2. We can praise Trump as a special genius boy, one who is oh so special and oh so clever and who has made an agreement so bigly and special that no other world leader could possibly have managed it. One that quite possibly deserves a Nobel Peace Prize to go along with his FIFA version. One that President Obama could not possibly have managed, no sir, definitely not, you will definitely go down in history as the most specialist boy ever Mr. President sir.

The reasons for choosing #2 are obvious: It may be the only damn way to get the war over with. Trump has dawdled and blustered for months now, trying to come up with some final outcome that didn't make him look like an incompetent failure who accomplished nothing. He was never going to find that outcome: It doesn't exist. The best he could aim for was producing a "deal" that he could quickly run away from, declaring false victory, in the hope that every Republican in America is too stupid to read through the details and too invested in his fake persona to doubt him.

It's a good bet, on his part, but the vast majority of the world does not live to kiss his decaying ass. We can't all be Lindsey Graham. We can't all pucker with the vigor of a JD Vance, or maintain the goofy rictus grin of a Kevin Hassett. Those of us who aren't hopelessly enamored by shit-talking cage fighters prancing around under the stone-faced protection of a military honor guard do have a say in this, and the odds that Donald is going to be able to put a polish on this Mother Of All Turds already look low.

And that means this supposed "deal" may not even make it until Friday. Not if Trump thinks the world thinks he lost the war he so obviously lost.

You and I ought to be thankful. We're nobodies. We can point out that Donald Trump didn't just surrender to Iran, he stacked a surrender on top of the surrender, slathered another surrender over both of them, and then sprinkled $327 billion of gold-leafed surrender on top of that before tossing it out the door like a failed dementia test and demanding world praise for it.

More important people than us, though, they've got some uncomfortable decisions to make. Does the world pretend Donald Trump did not lose the war he started, and did not just surrender away everything Iran demanded as compensation? If the only way to save the whole of the world economy is for everyone everywhere to agree that Donald is a big smart special boy who everyone admires, will everyone be able to maintain that lie long enough for Donald to actually sign the papers?

And what happens in two or three months, when—like clockwork—Trump forgets that he signed anything, tears up whatever proto-agreement he previously called a great victory, and starts bombing again as if none of it ever happened?