Robert Tait, writing in The Guardian under the headline “Bluster and backdown have turned Iran war into Trump’s own Groundhog Day”:

Being the subject of mockery may be the most intense of all Donald Trump’s known aversions.

Yet more than five months after embarking on a war of choice against Iran, the US president risks attracting ridicule as he struggles to secure a military victory – while repeatedly threatening devastating bombardment against the Tehran regime, only to back down on the pretext of renewed negotiations.

Critics suggest the ultimatum-climbdown sequence has acquired a Groundhog Day quality. By one count, he has adopted the same tactic seven times since launching the war in tandem with Israel on 28 February.

There are two important differences between Donald Trump, stuck in his Iran loop, and Bill Murray’s weatherman Phil Connors, caught in his Punxsutawney loop.

First, in Groundhog Day, only Connors is forced to repeat his cycle. The people around him experience their day for the first time, each time. Unlike us with Trump, they don’t have to watch Connors fail again and again and again.

Second, and more importantly, Connors eventually uses his loop to improve himself—learning the piano, ice sculpting, French—while Trump seems both incapable of and uninterested in personal growth.

There is one striking similarity, however: Phil Connors and Donald Trump are both brutish, insincere people who act like there are no consequences to their actions—only to be repeatedly proven wrong. Connors eventually overcomes his nature. Trump cannot. By the end of the movie, Connors is redeemed. Trump’s fate isn’t eventual redemption. It’s eternal damnation.