You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible
Donald Trump addressed the country Wednesday night to provide an update on his war/not-war with Iran. In Trump’s view, what he’s dubbed an excursion (that’s incursion) is “nearing completion.” Yet he repeated threats to destroy Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, to hit Iran “extremely hard,” and to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” if it did not make a deal on ending the war/not-war. Except Trump presented no details of any proposed “deal.”
“Trump only repeated “the same statements he has been circulating for weeks,” Al Jazeera commented. “The US president did not provide details on how the war would actually end or what kind of deal he is seeking with Iran.”
David Rothkopf lambasted the address in the Daily Beast:
The U.S. president, looking addled and unsure of himself, unleashed a torrent of lies, untruths, misrepresentations, deceptions, and distilled nuggets of crapola so vast that it may well live up to the most Trumpian of descriptive phrases: “nobody has ever seen anything like it before.”
Compounding the fact that he managed to speak for almost 20 minutes without uttering nearly a single truth was the equally mind-numbing reality that, despite the White House having advertised his national TV appearance as a major address on the Iran war, nothing newsworthy crossed his thin, ever-so-lightly glossed lips.
His address was not so much a speech as it was a greatest hits compilation from his Truth Social account since the beginning of the current war in Iran, known to those who know as Operation Epic Fiasco.
With nothing new to say, Rothkopf writes, “the reason for this speech is that the opposite of everything Trump was saying was true and it is bad news and he wants to hide it.”
Iran’s fissile material is still there. The world is less safe than it was before Feb. 28. The world’s economy is shaken. Iran’s leadership is more hardline than ever and determined to wait out Trump’s shrinking attention span. As a Taliban leader reportedly said to the U.S. in Afghanistan, “You have the watches, but we have the time.”
Trump appears ready to abandon his effort and leave others to clean up his mess:
And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.
“Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” Trump advises in what sounds unnervingly like echolalia. Because Not. My. Problem. says the Great Deal Maker. U.S. adversaries including China and Russia are gleeful.
It would all be humorous if not for the death, destruction, and worldwide economic disruption. Again, not Trump’s problem. It’s never Trump’s problem.
The BBC’s “Friday Night Comedy” last week found some humor nevertheless, and made more sense of Trump than Trump. “What the fake is going on?” You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible.
(Trump’s address came after his morning glare-a-thon at the Supreme Court — I got that wrong; he actually did attend, but only for Solicitor General John Sauer’s arguments that fell flat with most justices.)