Here is what someone should tell the President, because it bears on his own political survival.
A well-armed tyranny ruling an unarmed population is remarkably durable under economic pain. The Iranian regime can starve its people and shoot the ones who object. It has done so for decades. It will absorb two-hundred-dollar oil and call it resistance.
A republic founded not on theocratic rule, but on rule of the people, by the people, and for the people is different. It answers to voters and these voters elected a President on a promise to crush the inflation Joe Biden left behind. Instead, they have watched costs climb under tariffs, trade wars, and now an actual war that has sent energy prices soaring with no end in sight. The mullahs can outlast their economic misery. The coalition that put this President in office cannot. Mr. Trump is betting the American voter has the patience of a captive Iranian. That is a bet he will lose.
The honorable path is also the sound one: finish what we started, or get out of the way of the ally willing to. Reopen Hormuz by force if Iran will not do it by agreement. Stop calling a war a ceasefire and stop dignifying a rout as diplomacy.
Otherwise, the verdict will be brief and brutal. We had Iran beaten. We talked ourselves out of the win. And we let a regime that shoots its own citizens lecture us on what a ceasefire means while we nodded along, shooting, as the President put it, "in a more moderate manner."