During the past month, Trump has variously claimed that the war was about regime change, that it was about obliterating the nuclear program that he said he had already obliterated, and that it was about stopping the threat from Iranian ballistic missiles to the U.S. homeland, even though, according to America’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, Iran does not have the ability, nor would it anytime soon, to threaten the U.S. homeland with ballistic missiles. In his address on Wednesday night, he repeated much of this, except he denied that regime change had ever been the goal of the operation, while also claiming, as in his early-morning social-media post that same day, that regime change had, in effect, already occurred.
At times, Trump’s many false statements raise almost existential questions: If, as he said a couple of weeks ago, Iran’s military was a hundred per cent destroyed, then how is it still firing missiles, such as the barrage launched at Israel on Wednesday, sending millions of people to bomb shelters and safe rooms across the country as they were preparing to begin their Passover Seders? More broadly, can everything be going according to the plan if there is no actual plan? Is a President required to articulate a clear strategy in order to claim that he has brilliantly executed it?
You will not be surprised to know that Trump, in his speech, did not mention these complicated matters. He did, however, announce that America, in this war as in so many things, is “winning bigger than ever before.”
No doubt Trump’s political advisers had genuinely pressing reasons for wanting him to make the case to the American people now that he should have made at the outset of the war. The latest CNN poll, released hours earlier, found that just thirty-one per cent of Americans currently approve of his handling of the economy; his over-all disapproval rating has risen to sixty-four per cent, which is about as bad as it has ever got for a President, at least since the start of modern polling. Before the speech, one of those anonymous “people familiar” with the Trump White House’s plans, who are always being quoted, told Politico that, although it would be a tough assignment, Trump would hopefully manage to be both nonconfrontational and “reassuring” in the address.
Well, it’s hard to see how threatening to destroy every single one of Iran’s electrical plants was nonconfrontational. (To be clear, bombing a nation of ninety-three million people back to the Stone Ages would also be an international war crime, given the effect this would have on the civilian population.) As for reassuring, it took Trump eleven minutes to mention the economic disruption that the war has generated. His main argument to Americans about skyrocketing gas prices was not to worry about it, because once hostilities end, whenever that is, they will just “naturally” go back down. I can’t be the only person who thought that sounded a lot like Trump circa 2020, when he told us that the coronavirus would magically go away.
A few hours before his address to the nation, Trump previewed his plans for it: “Tonight, I’m giving a little speech at nine o’clock, and basically I’m going to tell everybody how great I am.” For once, he wasn’t lying. When he got to the part where he gave himself credit for doing “what no other President was willing to do,” in attacking Iran’s nuclear program, Trump looked like a happy warrior indeed. “They made mistakes and I am correcting them,” he said of his White House predecessors. This was his essential point: not how he planned to succeed in the war but why all those who came before him had failed.
The political boost from the speech may well be as nonexistent as the clarity it failed to deliver about the aims of a conflict whose stakes could not be higher. But the ego boost for a man who plans to place a giant golden statue of himself in the amphitheatre of his Presidential library—now, that was priceless. ♦
