Trump’s Top Aide Freaks Out About What Trump’s Being Told on Iran War

The White House’s “Ice Maiden” has been unnerved by the lack of information reaching the president regarding the reality of the Iran war.

Three weeks into the conflict—in mid-March—White House chief of staff Susie Wiles forced a meeting of Donald Trump’s most trusted advisers to deliver the bad news. Privately, Wiles had urged the president’s inner circle to stop feeding him a rose-tinted interpretation of the conflict, fearing that Trump was largely unaware of the domestic fallout of the war just months ahead of a contentious midterm season, Time magazine reported Thursday.

Up until that point, Trump had been spoon-fed daily video compilations of various battlefield successes, a senior administration official told the publication. Trump was under the impression that stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran could be one of his greatest legacies as America’s forty-seventh president.

In reality, Americans were irate that Trump was pushing the country into another complicated and seemingly inexplicable Middle East conflict. National surveys have almost unilaterally conveyed as much. When the war began, an NBC News poll indicated that 52 percent of registered voters did not think the U.S. should have taken military action against Iran. That sentiment has only grown more severe in recent weeks: A CNN poll published Wednesday (before Trump’s address) showed that 66 percent of respondents either “somewhat disapprove” or “strongly disapprove” of “the U.S. decision to take military action in Iran.”

In the meantime, attacks on Iran’s oil and gas reserves—and the country’s decision to seal off the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy transit point—have drastically ramped up the cost of gas around the globe.

The combination has struck fear in the Republican Party, whose lawmakers have taken to grumbling about the domestic ramifications of the war and the impact it will have at the ballot box come November.

Wiles urged her colleagues to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks of pushing U.S. troops into Iran, according to Time.

Trump has attempted to off-road the conflict in the weeks since the meeting, working to peel America’s presence out of the region while still claiming victory for some of his biggest goals in Iran, such as decapitating Iran’s nuclear capabilities, dismantling Tehran’s ballistic missile program, and replacing Iran’s government with a slew of more U.S.-friendly politicians. Unfortunately for the president, it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that he’ll be able to do any of that on the White House’s advertised four-to-six week timeline. (The war is already in its fifth week.)