'Epic Fury is approved' The story of how Trump went to war

Donald Trump ordered the launch of the war on Iran last Friday afternoon while onboard Air Force One, as the presidential plane made its descent towards Corpus Christi, Texas.

- Julian Borger London Andrew Roth Washington

He was on his way to the port city to give a speech titled “American Energy Dominance” and had spent the three-hour flight chatting to Texan Republican politicians, including the state’s two hawkish senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, about his options in Iran.

Also present on the plane in the countdown to Operation Epic Fury was a veteran film star, Dennis Quaid. At some point in the flight, Cruz filmed Quaid sitting next to Trump, and persuaded the actor to reprise his role as Ronald Reagan in a 2024 reverential biopic, so that Cruz could frame the encounter as “two great American Presidents”.

Speaking as Reagan, Quaid declared Trump was “like me on steroids”. It was a highly stylised passing of the flame from the patron saint of Republican hawks to their current hero.

Not mentioned was the fact that Quaid had also played a slapstick version of George W Bush in a 2006 film, American Dreamz, as a clueless Good Ol' Boy president manipulated by war-hungry and oil-thirsty aides into invading Iraq, unaware there were more than “two kinds of Iraqistanis”.

The shadow of Bush and the regional conflagration he ignited have loomed over the events of the past week, though the inevitable comparisons have gone unacknowledged or been angrily rejected by the White House.

Trump had campaigned as a leader who would end America’s “forever wars” begun by Bush in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. His Maga movement was built on antipathy to foreign entanglement, and the president himself spent much of 2025 lobbying to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Yet in the space of a few months, the “peace president” has become the first US leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary.