Donald Trump was steamed. He was miffed. The Orange One’s face had gone deep red, twice as red as a MAGA baseball cap.
He was so peeved that he felt the need to drop the F-bomb — nearly as powerful, he must have guessed, as the series of 30,000-pound bunker busters he had dropped on Fordo, Iran’s deep-mountain nuclear enrichment site — when scolding Israel and Iran, but mostly Israel, for violating the big, beautiful ceasefire he had negotiated.
How dare they?
When asked by reporters about Iran’s apparent post-ceasefire launch of missiles on Israel, Trump said he wasn’t upset just with Iran, but also with Israel. And the more he spoke to reporters before boarding Marine One on his way to a NATO summit in the Netherlands, the angrier he got.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” Trump said.
Leaving some to ask: How did peace through strength morph so quickly into peace through profanity?
Trump had already proclaimed a forever ceasefire that would bring a forever peace — as opposed to the forever war that we’ve seen too often — to the notoriously volatile Middle East. He had already named the Israel-Iran war the 12-Day War. Was it going to be 13 now or 15 or what? The guys at the White House T-shirt shops must be frazzled.
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SUBSCRIBETrump had done so much for Iran and Israel. Now, what the f—- were they doing to him?
Suddenly, it seemed that the ceasefire was shaky, or was it?
Suddenly, it seemed that Trump’s latest bid for the Nobel Peace Prize was the thing under assault.
Suddenly, well, who knows?
(Note to self: Whatever you might hear from Trump and his incompetent foreign policy team, it’s too soon to know anything.)
I’m among those who said Trump made a mistake in deciding to drop bombs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites. The gamble, I thought, was a risk too far. But now that it’s happened, I hope the ceasefire does work and can, if nothing else, calm the situation between Israel and Iran. It’s a helluva lot better than war.
And maybe — it’s possible, I guess — Trump will now strongly encourage Israel to stop its inhumane war on Gaza’s civilian population. Or would that get in the way of Trump’s previously announced plan to ethnically cleanse the place and turn it into a Trump-emblazoned, Riviera-like resort?
And yet, I read with some astonishment — OK, not exactly astonishment, but with deep interest — The New York Times’ deeply reported piece on just how Trump came to drop the big one (not the F-word, but the bunker-busters and other bombs hitting three Iranian sites).
You won’t be surprised, I’m sure, that Trump’s decision was influenced by his binge-watching of Fox News, which was throwing nonstop love at Israel for its war with Iran. And at same time, it was also encouraging Trump, while praising his courage, of course, to join in the fray.
If you were watching closely — not Fox, but a reliable news source — you saw Trump’s language change. After the first day of bombing, Trump said the United States had nothing to do with it. But suddenly, and days before the bunker blasters were dropped, Trump was using the “we” word to describe the U.S. role in the war. Didn’t Trump, who was suddenly all in, deserve some credit?
”We now have complete and total control over the skies over Iran,” Trump said, noting that Iran’s defenses, while good, couldn’t compare to “American made, conceived and manufactured ‘stuff.’ Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”
And so as Trump announced his two-week pause to consider next steps, you had to know that he was already planning to drop the bombs and claim that he — and we — won the war. That he was no TACO. He even let Iran get away with a weak, but face-saving, attack on a U.S. military installation in Qatar. All’s well that ends well?
Look, I hope the ceasefire holds. Even knowing that it probably won’t last forever — which ceasefires do? — I hope it lasts as long as possible. And that maybe Trump will even get Iran back to the table to agree to something like the Barack Obama nuclear treaty that Trump had unilaterally scotched because, you know, Obama.
But which Iran are we talking about? There are competing groups, we’re told, in the country hoping to topple the obviously weakened 87-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. If Trump read his intelligence briefings, he might understand that the situation is, let us say, fluid. Hardliners could take over. Moderates could take over. There’s no way to know.
But does anyone remember the “Death to America,” “Death to Israel” version of Iran? The Hezbollah, Hamas version of Iran?
And who really thinks — other than Trump — that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu will look at what his intelligence tells him about the limited damage to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and say that he trusts Trump’s declaration that Iran is out of the nuclear game?
Of course, Trump could rely on his U.S. intelligence team for help here. But, as you may recall, when DNI director Tulsi Gabbard said U.S. intelligence indicated that Iran was nowhere near developing a nuclear bomb, Trump said he didn’t believe her or care what she said.
And now we have to wonder how much to believe whatever Trump says about the glorious forever conclusion to hostilities.
The first thing Trump said after B-2 stealth bombers had dropped the bunker busters was that “Iran’s key nuclear-enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
When he announced the ceasefire — without apparently telling much of his intelligence team first — he posted, “This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will!”
Later, he told NBC News, “The ceasefire is unlimited. It’s going to be forever … I don’t believe they’ll ever be shooting at each other again.”
Still later, he announced on Truth Social — where Trump has been giving us a blow-by-blow account of the bombing and aftermath — “IRAN WILL NEVER REBUILD THEIR NUCLEAR FACILITIES!”
If the assessments seemed a little premature, that’s because they were. Even as U.S. military officials were saying it was too early to know the extent of the damage, Pete Hegseth was going on the Sunday shows to defend Trump’s “obliteration” assessment. As for JD Vance, he said he didn’t see much difference between “heavily damaged” and “obliteration,” which makes you wonder about the value of a Yale law school degree.
And by Tuesday afternoon, CNN was reporting that the Pentagon’s intelligence team had found, in its early assessment, the bombings did not destroy “core components” of Iran’s nuclear program and likely “only set it back by months.”
So now Trump is heavily into the peace-by-embellishment phase of the war. How do we assess anything he says? Once Trump was railing against regime change in Iran, then he was apparently for it, and now he’s against it again. Because he now loves Iran’s leaders (who, by any account, are hardly lovable)?
Now he insists Israel, which violated the ceasefire hours after Trump announced it, will still stick with the negotiation route over raw power, even as history tells us that that is not Israel’s — or for that matter, Iran’s — go-to strategy.
Do you know what to make of it all?
If you believe Trump, are you ready to invest in a real estate opportunity in suburban Tehran?
Or if you’re confused, do you think the Nobel committee might be, too?
My guess is that Trump has already set the bar too high for either Iran or Israel to meet. And I can’t say whether Trump would ever drop another bunker buster, but I would be shocked if, soon enough, he wasn’t very publicly launching another F-bomb.
On either Iran or Israel or both.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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