Why Trump’s war speech failed: Declaring victory but still bombing Iran back to the ‘Stone Ages’
There was something about President Trump’s prime-time address that didn’t add up.
Several things, actually.
But what struck me immediately was his low-energy delivery. He backed into it, first talking about the Artemis moon mission and then the oil we’re seizing from Venezuela. After that he was just reading words off the prompter.
No one could argue with the president’s core message. Iran is the world’s leading terror state. Something should have been done during its 47-year history of violence and murderous proxies like Hamas. Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. The dictators killed 45,000 of their own people (though Trump played this down when he was trying to negotiate a deal).
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But the 19-minute speech was a jumble of contradictions. Trump kept saying we’ve won, we’ve decimated Iran’s military, which is true. And yet he said the U.S. will intensify its bombing campaign for the next two to three weeks, targeting Tehran’s energy facilities.
Why is that necessary, if America has already won? And will it really last less than a month?
It was clear heading into the speech that Trump knows how unpopular the war is. He knows that soaring gas prices are hurting him at home. He knows he is dropping like a rock with young men who bought his no-foreign-wars rhetoric.
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He knows – and this is critical – the stock market has tanked since U.S. and Israeli warplanes attacked Iran on the last day of February. Trump is extremely sensitive to the market, as we saw when the Dow hit 50,000, and that often spurs him into action.
Having boxed himself into a corner with an Iranian regime that refuses to seriously negotiate, the public expectation was that he would declare victory and get out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Trump declared he’ll be bombing Iran back to the "Stone Ages."
What about the president’s own goals?
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He said the war’s goal was never regime change. But he spoke about regime change the morning after the initial attack. In any event, Trump now claims it’s been achieved because several levels of leadership, starting with the Ayatollah, have been killed,
But the new sheriff in town, the Iranian parliament speaker, Mohammad Ghalibaf, lashed out yesterday.
"When it comes to defending our homeland," he said in a posting, "each and every one of us will become a soldier of this country. If you look askance at our mother’s house … you’re up against the whole family, all of us. Armed, ready, and standing. Come on in, we’re waiting."
So much for regime change.
Again and again, Trump said the war could not end until Iran stopped blockading a fifth of the world’s oil traffic at the Strait of Hormuz. But in Wednesday night’s speech, he washed his hands of the matter. We don’t rely on the strait, so who cares? It will "open up naturally," on its own.
The president then scolded our onetime European allies, saying they should show some "delayed courage" and "just take" Hormuz–as if it were that easy.
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As for Trump’s declaration that our country is now "free of the specter of nuclear blackmail," Iran still has nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium–and further enrichment could lead to a nuclear weapon.
In a CNN poll released just before the speech, 66 percent of those surveyed said they strongly or somewhat disapprove of the decision to attack Iran, a 7-point jump since the conflict began.
Most network pundits criticized the address as a rehash of things that Trump has said before.
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"There was nothing new in that speech," said ABC’s Jonathan Karl, adding: "Not a lot of optimism."
His colleague Martha Raddatz: "It added to the confusion of why we are there."
European leaders felt blindsided by the war. "When we’re serious," said French President Emmanuel Macron, "we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before every day, and maybe one shouldn’t speak every day,"
Austria and Switzerland yesterday joined Italy, Spain and France in banning U.S. warplanes headed for Iran from their skies. They don’t want any part of this war. Britain’s prime minister had done the same but reversed himself after Iran retaliated.
In the first sign of intensified bombing yesterday, Iranian authorities said an airstrike had destroyed a Tehran research facility called the Pasteur Institute.
I don’t know if the timing was deliberate, the day after the speech, but the president dramatically changed the subject yesterday.
The media are already moving on to Trump’s decision yesterday to fire Pam Bondi as attorney general, because she hasn’t been aggressive enough in prosecuting his political enemies, and for her mishandling of the Epstein files.
In the end, the speech may matter less than what happens for the rest of April.
If Trump ends the assault on the timeline he’s suggested, voters may breathe a sigh of relief and move on. They’ll remember that Trump went after the Mideast terrorists and be mollified if gas prices start declining.
The problem is that the damage to the world economy may be far more painful, and much longer lasting, than if the president had not launched his war of choice. And no single speech could change that.