There was a time when lying all the time was frowned upon, and when easily demonstrable lying all the time could get a fellow into trouble. If President Donald Trump has succeeded at anything, it is in proving that those days are over. Pathological, even felonious, lying did not impede his 2024 election and doesn't appear to have shaken his hold on his considerable base. The quaint idea that presidents were supposed to model decent, honest conduct lies in a shambles.

That isn't the only thing in a shambles, as the release, finally, of the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran that Trump kept secret for days has made clear. America's credibility, our allies' willingness to rely on a word we say and the expectation that an American president could be counted upon to enhance our national security rather than jeopardize it are also in tatters. This is the result of a schizophrenic, panicked reversal of course by Trump who, after months of boasting that he had stopped Iran's march toward nuclear weapons and obliterated its ability to threaten the Middle East, capitulated abjectly to Tehran, inking a deal which, while highlighting that he had done nothing of the sort, handed Iran hundreds of billions of dollars with which to continue doing what it has been doing for decades, only more so. "Unconditional surrender" is what Trump, with typical dishonesty, proclaimed he had obtained from Iran. But the only unconditional surrender to be found was ours

It fell to our Secretary of State, patently uncomfortable being associated with Trump's capitulation, to describe the regime to which we had capitulated. "Every single problem in the Middle East traces straight back to Iran," Marco Rubio said on a tarmac last week. "Hezbollah? Iran. Shia militias destroying and threatening Iraq? Iran. Hamas? Iran. The Houthis? Iran. Assad slaughtering people in Syria? Iran.

He might have added: The occupation and subjugation of Lebanon? Iran. The threats against our Gulf allies? Iran.

The "terms," so-called, of the humiliating document signed by Trump after months of threatening to "obliterate" Iran or proclaiming fraudulently that he had already done so were a stomach-turning display of national ignominy. There are no limits on Iran's ability to continue enriching uranium, putatively the principal rationale for the war in the first place. To punctuate the point, Iran's president publicly confirmed that it would enrich uranium as it pleased.

There are no restrictions on Iran's ability to expand its ballistic missile capacity as it wishes, to fund genocidal enterprises like Hamas and Hezbollah and to continue occupying Lebanon as it sees fit. And as an incomprehensible reward to Iran for entering into a deal which gives Iran everything it wanted and everyone else nothing, the United States agrees to provide Iran with tens of billions of dollars of sanctions relief and a $300 billion investment fund.

The Democrats, naturally, seized the opportunity to do a 180-degree reversal of their own. Democrats who derided warnings about Iran as the warmongering of forever warriors and the nefarious AIPAC lobby (New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani experimented with Nuremberg-style rhetoric, labeling Americans who supported the American-Israel relationship "monsters") camped out in front of television cameras to express their horror at how much Trump gave Iran in return for the goose egg America got in return. They're right to be horrified, but their newfound horror at the coddling of Iran would sound better coming from mouths that hadn't spent the last several years urging that Iran be coddled.

"I love this deal," Bill Maher quipped last week. "We got everything we wanted except for everything we asked for."

We're left thoroughly humiliated, our national security and the world economy permanently threatened, an Iranian population that deserves better consigned to continued brutalization, an Iranian regime justifiably giddy that the United States is too feckless to do anything but tweet impotently and that it can do what it wants without consequences. And that surely will include obtaining nuclear weapons.

So much winning, as the president says.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.

Photo credit: Pedro Farto at Unsplash