What Trump REALLY Thinks About His Iran War
What’s (likely) going on in the president’s head.
If Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee went badly this week, her encore performance before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday was even worse. Noem repeatedly declined to deny her widely-reported sexual relationship with her shadow chief of staff Corey Lewandowski, twisting into all sorts of remarkable rhetorical shapes to avoid uttering the word “no” while under oath.
“I am shocked that we’re going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today,” Noem told Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), who pushed back: “You should be able to answer if someone asks if you or any federal official is sleeping with their subordinate. It’s the easiest—you should be wanting to answer that question.”
“I think the ridiculousness of this and the tabloids that you are quoting and referencing are insane,” Noem said later. “You say conservative women are stupid or sluts. I am neither.”
This morning, Punchbowl News reported that Trump has started asking congressional Republicans whether he ought to fire Noem. Happy Thursday.
Reading Trump’s Mind
by William Kristol
I did it. Goddamn it, only I could have done it. I killed that Ayatollah! We’ve hated that guy forever. And I was the one who took him out.
Oh, and I also destroyed Iran’s navy (who knew they even had one?). And I turned their nuclear program into rubble. And I’m wiping out their missiles. Yesterday I said that on a scale of 10, I rate this war a 15. Let’s be honest: I rate myself a 15. If only Melania felt the same way.
You know, I think I got that expression about a scale of 10 from Jeff. He But sometimes he would say, ‘That one was a 15.’ Man, those were the days . . .
Anyway, speaking of Jeff, our mutual friend Bill Clinton once said something I remember: To go down in history as a great president, you need to win a war. And, folks, I’m winning a war. Bigly.
But to win the war you’ve also got to end the war. And it’s getting to be time to end this, to pull the plug. Because it could all go south.
Lots of warning signs out there. Publicly, I pretend not to see them. But I see ‘em. American casualties. Gas prices going up. Scott’s worried about the economy if that Strait of Whatever stays closed.
And the whole thing could get out of control. Those lunatics at the CIA are messing around with the Kurds. Tulsi! Tulsi should have gotten the spooks under control. Anyway, I’m not listening to them.
And I’m not listening to Pete, either. He loves the war because it lets him talk tough. I saw him saying yesterday that “we’re just getting started” and that there’s gonna be a lot more death and destruction. I’m OK with the death and destruction part. But “we’re just getting started”? Jesus. He’s an idiot.
You gotta quit while you’re ahead!
It’s like those casinos I used to own. We made the most money off the people who thought they were on a hot streak and kept on betting. Eventually they lost it all. They didn’t get up from the table and cash their winnings.
Eventually I lost it all, too—those casinos went belly-up. But I learned that you gotta leave the table before you lose your money. So I’m cashing out.
I saw Comer, that guy from Kentucky, on TV. They asked him about boots on the ground. And he said, “Sometimes that’s unavoidable in a situation like this.” Well, you know what? I’m avoiding getting into “a situation like this.” I’m not getting sucked in like Bush.
Or LBJ.
It’s funny, I remember when I first met Roy (God, I miss him!). It was 1973. Vietnam had just ended. I asked him what he’d thought about the whole thing. I figured he’d be right-wing and pro-war, that he’d go on about hating the hippies and draft dodgers.
He did hate the hippies. But he surprised me. He said he would have taken the advice of some senator—I don’t remember his name—a Republican from Vermont of all places. This guy said, way back in 1966 or something, that LBJ should declare victory and get out. Roy told me he thought that was right, that’s what Johnson should have done.
So I’m declaring victory. I’ll get Caine to tell me that our mission’s been accomplished. “Mission Accomplished.” Ha, maybe we’ll try a different bit of branding than that dummy Bush. Then again, Bush’s mistake wasn’t saying that. It was saying it and then letting us get stuck there. He should have said “Mission Accomplished!” and gotten out. The place would have been a mess, but who cares? Not Americans. They have short attention spans.
Iran is going to be a mess, too. It would be easier if there were someone to just put in charge like in Venezuela. But I guess we killed all of them. So we just say it’s their mess, let them deal with it. No endless wars!
Gotta talk to Susie and Karoline about how to roll this out. Maybe a speech from the Oval Office Sunday night. Or maybe at a military base, with troops cheering behind me. A few more days of death and destruction. Then the surprise announcement. Prime time! The media will be impressed.
And the follow-up message for Fox and everyone else we control is simple: “This president knows how to fight wars. He knows how to win wars. And he knows how to end wars.” JD can come out of hiding and go on the shows and say this nonstop.
You know that lefty historian the libs all like? Dan showed me her latest newsletter. She quoted me saying to that ridiculous “Board of Peace” we invented, “We’ve done the biggest thing of all. We have peace in the Middle East right now.” She thought she was showing me up since we’re at war. But it’ll be the opposite. I’ll say I did what I had to do. I fought and won the war. And now we’re back at peace.
It will be the best of both worlds! And only I could have done it!
Your turn to imagine what Trump might be thinking. Do you think he’s as sanguine and calm as Bill does? Or do you think he’s maybe slightly panicked at the consequences of his actions? Share your thoughts with us.
The Negative-Space War
by Andrew Egger
Owning the libs, crushing wokeness, tearing down “elites”—the MAGA movement has always been defined more by what it’s against than by what it is for. But until the current war against Iran, we’d never really seen what it looked like to run a war strategically defined by what it is not.
What the Iran war isn’t, according to prominent Trump officials, is two things: It isn’t neoconservative, and it isn’t woke.
In yesterday’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laid out a remarkable laundry list of objectives for the conflict, amounting to little less than total, permanent victory over the Iranian regime and its regional proxies: America would “completely raze” Iran’s missile-production capacity, “annihilate” its navy, ensure its terrorist proxies “can no longer destabilize the region or the free world,” and “guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”
“After years of endless appeasement and empty statements from politicians on both sides,” Leavitt said, “President Trump is finally the man of action. . . . Future generations of Americans will look to this moment as the moment where the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran ended.”
Up until now, Leavitt suggests, everyone was simply too lily-livered to do what everyone knew must be done.
But to this they hasten to add: Don’t worry! This isn’t going to be like America’s last extended period of Middle East conflict, against which Trump and MAGA have defined themselves for years. Why? Because the White House is pledging to care very little about what happens after the bombs stop falling. “No nation-building quagmire,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday. “No democracy-building exercise.” No neocons here!
The combined result of this strategy hammered out through anti-incentives is a ludicrous war plan that could never be produced by a positive vision for what the conflict is meant to achieve. They had to go in, because not going in would be woke. But they can’t stay, because sticking around to shape what comes next is forever-war Liz Cheney behavior.
But pounding Iran into submission, creating the largest power vacuum in decades in one of the least stable parts of the world, and then simply pulling up stakes and heading home is, to put it mildly, a recipe for chaos—the same sort of chaos that birthed ISIS in a similar regional vacuum just over a decade ago. The White House has given us no reason to believe that this vacuum will result in a more pro-America Iran. They’ve merely pointed to the current regime, talked a lot about how bad they are, and implied: Hey, how much worse could it get?
For now, some of the isolationists in the coalition are at least pretending to be content with all this. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, echoing Hegseth, told Real Clear Politics yesterday that Trump and Vance won’t have run afoul of their campaign promises as long as they avoid “drawn-out conflict” and “rule out nation-building entirely.” Middle East wars, it turns out, are fine by them—just so long as nobody can make the “neocon” charge stick.
It’s Iran the White House is pulverizing—but when it comes to strategy, it’s still their domestic critics they’ve got foremost in mind.
AROUND THE BULWARK
In the Shadow of Fear, a Moment of Peace… An unexpected encounter by the federal building DHS has been using near Minneapolis, captured in a video and essay from RUPERT MANDERSTAM.
What you did for the people of Minnesota… SARAH LONGWELL with a report on how much the Bulwark community shows raised for Minnesotans in need and what you can do to help.
Congress Can Control Trump’s Iran War… And it has a better tool than the War Powers Act, suggests former Rep. JANE HARMAN.
‘Sirāt’ and Finding Community in the End of the World… Director ÓLIVER LAXE joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss rave culture and creating a society in an age of dislocation.
Command Post: Hegseth Press Event, Iran War Updates… TOM NICHOLS joins MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER to discuss the war with Iran, react to Pete Hegseth’s press conference, and answer audience questions about escalation, the point of no return, and how the United States and Israel actually coordinate in wartime.
Quick Hits
AFFORDABILITY AND WAR: Last year’s strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons program was the beau ideal of what Trump wants a U.S. military intervention to look like: sudden, overwhelming, targeted, and above all limited. Against all expectations, the operation targeting Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro seems to be turning out to be much the same: The regime plods on under Delcy Rodríguez, the United States sells some Venezuelan oil now, and things proceed much as they had before.
This war on Iran is different. By joining with Israel in decapitating and destabilizing the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration didn’t just invite Middle Eastern chaos in the future—it destabilized major portions of global commerce now, even as the administration was already facing widespread voter disenchantment about the sluggish economy and the cost of living at home. Low gas prices have been a bright spot for consumers, but prices had been ticking up even before the Iran attack—according to GasBuddy data, a gallon of gas is up more than 30 cents from a month ago—and disruptions to regional energy production threaten to push them still higher. Other energy costs are on the rise, too: Global natural gas prices soared this week after Qatar’s state-owned energy company announced it would temporarily halt production of liquid natural gas following Iranian attacks on its facilities. Reporting from Reuters suggests Qatar won’t be back to full production capacity for at least a month.
Maybe that’s what Trump meant when he said “affordability” is a hoax.
GONZALES FESSES UP: Rep. Tony Gonzales is finally coming clean—sort of. We’ve written before about the shocking story that has hung over the Texas Republican for months, a story so horrible it almost feels callous to summarize it: He’d seemingly pressured a staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, into an affair, then broken things off when her husband found out. She subsequently killed herself by lighting herself on fire. Gonzales had flatly denied it all, accusing various people, including Santos-Aviles’s widower, of various elaborate schemes to blackmail him.
Now, in the wake of a House Ethics Committee announcing an investigation into the affair, Gonzales has finally admitted to a “mistake,” a “lack of faith,” and a “lapse in judgment.”
“I take full responsibility for those actions,” Gonzales said of an affair he’s been lying about for months. “Since then, I’ve reconciled with my wife, Angel. I’ve asked God to forgive me, which he has, and my faith is as strong as ever.” Wow! Don’t you love it when a sad story has a happy ending?
Gonzales faces a primary runoff against gun-nut MAGA challenger Brandon Herrera in May.
AUTOPEN DOWN: Oh, look: Another attempt by Trump to retaliate against a political foe over absurd conspiracy theories spawned an investigation at the Justice Department that then blew up on the launchpad. The New York Times reported yesterday that the Justice Department looked into former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to sign presidential documents, which Trump has repeatedly invoked to claim without evidence that Biden was unaware of documents being signed in his name. But they were unable to assemble a criminal case, the Times reports:
The department’s failure to build a criminal case against Mr. Biden and his aides is the latest example of its increasing inability to follow through on Mr. Trump’s demands and bring indictments against those he wants to be criminally targeted. Some of those cases were rejected by grand juries, some were rejected by judges and some, like the autopen case, were abandoned by prosecutors.
But the fact that prosecutors even pursued the matter to begin with reflects the degree to which Mr. Trump has sought to use the levers of government to undermine Mr. Biden’s presidency by seizing on an unsubstantiated theory: that the pardons Mr. Biden issued in his final months in office were invalid because he did not have the mental capacity to consent to them.
BIG NEWS ON SMALL REACTORS: Here’s one from the pile of not-big-now-but-possibly-big-later stories: For the first time yesterday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved construction plans for a commercial-scale small modular nuclear reactor, an innovation in nuclear-plant technology that advocates hope may be the path to reestablishing nuclear power as a significant U.S. energy source in the future. The New York Times has more on the planned reactor, from the Bill Gates-funded startup TerraPower:
One of the big obstacles facing nuclear power . . . has been the time and enormous expense it takes to build new plants. The only two U.S. reactors built from scratch in the past three decades, at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, cost $35 billion, double the initial estimates, and arrived seven years behind schedule.
TerraPower is one of more than a dozen start-ups across the United States betting that new technology and designs can make it easier and cheaper to build reactors. . . . While the initial plant built in Wyoming is expected to be expensive—$4 billion or more—the company hopes to drive down the cost in the future by building more plants and learning from experience. (The Energy Department has agreed to pick up part of the cost of TerraPower’s first reactor.)
This administration may be absurdly hostile to most forms of renewable power, but we guess it’s good they’re not trying to squash nuclear energy too? Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
I love when Bill writes in Trump's voice. Just love it! The only problem is that Bill can't write incoherently enough to accurately portray Trump. You're just too good a writer, Bill!
There is much to be concerned about in our conduct of this war/non-war (whichever they are calling it today). But the lack of value for human life by our regime is increasingly appalling to me. Hegseth in particular talks like he is a teenager enthusiastically playing a video game, bragging about our ability to bomb and destroy and kill like a child with a new toy on Christmas Day. Leavitt is not far behind in her all-in paid endorsement of our conduct, entertaining no dissent and no deviation from the plan. The right side of Congress seems indifferent as long as one man is pleased. And That Man of course has never cared about anyone but himself anyway. The more they talk, the more impersonal this whole operation becomes and the less objective about loss of human life, destruction of property, and terrorizing of people having nothing to do with the described mission, whatever the mission really is -- again, whatever they are calling it today.
(By the way, did they ever account for that missile strike on a school that killed scores of little girls? I hear nothing about that, to the point that I wonder if I misheard it or it ever actually happened.)
Apparently all truly is fair in love and war, and loving war, with our current regime. Lobbing missiles is fun. Blowing things up is cool. If real human beings beyond the Iranian bad men are harmed, no matter which nation we are talking about now, well, that's their problem. We're good at the video game, so, hey, let's celebrate. Are we happy to be Americans with such non-empathetic people, of questionable competency, in charge of our weaponry and reveling in their capacity to kill and destroy at will, all day, every day, with a widening circle of impact?
I'm not feeling it. Your mileage may vary. But I hope not.