The symbolism was hard to miss. Tens of millions of people on the streets in cities across Iran and Iraq trying to catch a sight of Ali Khamenei’s coffin during his weeklong funeral. Khamenei had been Iran’s supreme leader for almost four decades until his February 28 assassination by Israel on the first day of the US-led war. In the run-up to America’s and Israel’s war on Iran, Donald Trump, sounding very much like George W. Bush, suggested that his bombing campaign would be welcomed by the Iranian people.

But the very crowds the Trump administration had expected to overthrow the regime instead turned out to honor it. Meanwhile, Trump, unpopular and neurotic about crowd sizes at his own events, spent the week pressuring FIFA to reverse a US player’s red card, branding Iranians as “scum,” and launching a fresh and ongoing bombing campaign in southern Iran.

“I think it’s over,” Trump told reporters on July 8, referring to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), a document that he had signed along with Iran as the basis for a lasting peace accord. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore, they’re scum. They’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people.” Trump was responding to cruise missile attacks by Tehran the previous day against three ships attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point that Tehran weaponized against the US-led economic order in the early days of the war, and through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas and a third of its fertilizer passes. The attacks preceded several skirmishes, which appear to have resulted in the death of US naval Commander Gabriel Edwards following a helicopter crash near Iran on July 1. In response, Trump removed the waivers on sanctions on Iranian oil and notified Congress that he was launching a new war in Iran.