Why Trump keeps flipping on Iran: A president who sees the world as he wants it to be
Why does Donald Trump love inflation?
Why does Donald Trump keep saying the Iran war is about to end – and then tell a Fox reporter he’s going to "bomb the s—- out of them"?
Why does Donald Trump try to revive the controversial slush fund after saying it’s dead?
Why does he insist on putting an unqualified housing hack in charge of national intelligence despite an outcry from his own party?
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Something strange is happening here–but what?
Is Trump "increasingly frustrated with everyone," as Politico quotes a MAGA operative close to the White House? "He’s pissed and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is."
If there is connecting tissue here, it’s that Trump and his far-reaching agenda are running smack into reality.
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He even got blamed for his presence causing the Knicks to lose Game 3 of the NBA Finals (while Taylor Swift’s T-shirt got credit for Wednesday’s miracle comeback).
The opposition, led by the courts, has blocked much of what the president wants to do. His name is coming off the Kennedy Center. His prized ballroom is tied up, as is his proposed 250-foot arch.
Republicans were so upset with his temporary appointment of Bill Pulte, who launched mortgage fraud investigations of Trump’s enemies, as director of national intelligence that they refused to renew an expiring domestic surveillance law. After digging in, the president bowed to political reality yesterday and nominated Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.
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Publicly, Trump dismissed the Jeffrey Epstein uproar as a "hoax" perpetrated by the Democrats and a few renegade Republicans. But he and his team were privately obsessed with the scandal, according to a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
Trump refused to do what most advisers were urging him to do, which was to get ahead of the Epstein disclosures before Congress made the files public. He insisted his MAGA base was behind him, when in fact many of its members were angry over his past ties to the late pedophile and complaining of a coverup.
Trump accused California of running a rigged election on Tuesday. But when late ballots boosted his candidate, former Fox host Steve Hilton, into one of two November slots, he took credit for it.
In fact, Trump’s insistence, a half-dozen years later, that he actually won the 2020 election, despite never providing a shred of evidence in court, remains a classic example of him seeing the world as he wants it to be. The same goes for the Jan. 6 rioters that he is trying to recast as patriots. That was the impetus for the $1.8-billion "anti-weaponization" fund, to get money into their pockets, although we all watched on live television as many of them attacked police officers and threatened lawmakers.
Now, why would the president make the politically clunky comment that "I love the inflation"? Especially when the annual rate just surged to 4.2 percent, the highest in three years?
Trump’s explanation: "Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil? Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran — until right now."
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Yet this was no secret. The New York Times reported it last month.
The war offers the most vivid illustration of Trump’s fierce tendency to see a foggy picture through blurry glasses. For more than two months, the president has declared again and again that he was close to making a deal with Iran, that they were desperate for an agreement, that he was giving the mullahs a few more days. And yet no deal emerged.
Instead, the administration and Tehran wound up trading bombing attacks in the wake of the downing of a U.S. helicopter, with the crew quite fortunately rescued. Yet Trump clung to the fiction of an ongoing ceasefire.
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In a call to "Fox & Friends" yesterday, he took aim at one of his favorite targets.
The problem was "fake news," he said. The media are "crooked," he said. "The New York Times writes stories like they’re doing great, and they’re not," he said of Iran. He included CNN and MSNOW in that indictment.
"The press just covers it so crazily."
While media hostility toward Trump has influenced some war coverage, what I’ve seen most recently is an attempt to reflect the zig-zag nature of Trump’s actions and pronouncements on Iran. If Iran’s defenses are so depleted, as Trump says virtually every day, how did the terror state manage to shoot down an Army helicopter?
He also said he plans to take over Kharg Island, the epicenter of Iran’s oil infrastructure.
And then came the ultimate in blame-shifting…to his fellow countrymen.
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"I don’t know that America has the stomach for it…I think they’d like to see us come home," he told Fox. "I’m not sure the country has the appetite for it."
That may well be true, but it’s not something a leader would generally say out loud.
Still, Trump posted that Iran would be "HIT VERY HARD TONIGHT."
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And then, yesterday afternoon, as I was finishing this column, Trump flipped again, canceling the threatened airstrikes.
He said the negotiations had been "brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved." The stock market "likes the deal." There would be a signing "very soon," maybe in the next few days.
I never believed that Trump would actually attempt to destroy Iranian civilization. His heart wasn’t in it. That’s not how he wants to be remembered by history. It’s always been a pressure tactic.
Now I’m not one of those people who writes off Trump, having spent decades watching him bounce back from a thousand different investigations and controversies. He’s the Houdini of politics.
None of this is exactly helping the Republicans keep control of the House in the midterms. But if Trump gets out of Iran, even with an arrangement that is sharply criticized for not definitively ruling out nuclear weapons, the country may move on and the environment may feel very different in November.
The overriding question is whether the president will see his preferred vision of the world or recognize the actual landscape with all its roadblocks and frustrations.