Trump and the Iran War: perhaps the most openly telegraphed event of all time

Donald Trump speaks at a rally against the Iran Nuclear Deal in September 2015. Photo via Getty Images

Some events are unforeseeable. The current conflagration with Iran wasn’t one of them. Donald Trump first tried to ingratiate himself into the Republican Party by fixating on the purported threat of Iran; you can find tweets to this effect dating all the way back to 2011, when he toyed with running for president during the 2012 primary cycle. To inject himself into the Republican bloodstream, Trump adopted the twofold strategy of harping on Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and fulminating about Iran.

Then he ran for president in 2016 and continued fulminating about Iran. He co-organized a rally with Ted Cruz in September 2015 to rail against the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), which he said was the worst deal of all time, in part because it allowed Iran to maintain low-levels of uranium enrichment. He pledged to withdraw from the deal. Then he was elected president and promptly initiated the process of withdrawing from the deal, despite his own Secretary of State certifying that Iran was in compliance. By 2018, he officially withdrew from the deal, warning that it had somehow empowered Iran to “threaten American cities with nuclear destruction.” He proceeded to institute a policy of “Maximum Pressure” on Iran, with the intent of crippling its government and impoverishing its population, so as to destabilize the society and eventually bring about regime change. The sanctions continued to intensify even during COVID, when they hindered Iran’s ability to import medical supplies.

In June 2019, Trump said he was minutes away from bombing Iran. By December 2019, Trump, along with Mike Pompeo, manufactured a crisis whereby they connived to assassinate Iran’s top general Qasem Soleimani by drone strike. The administration invoked the 2002 Authorization for Use of Force Against Iraq as their legal justification. So, the same legal architecture to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was resuscitated by Trump to justify a drone-strike assassination of Iran’s top general in 2020 — supposedly because Soleimani was on a diplomatic mission to Iraq. But the precise logic never really had to make sense. Republican senators such as Mike Lee, who has since become much more “based” and therefore less concerned with Constitutional limits on presidential war-making powers, said at the time that the Administration’s intelligence briefing on the strike was so bad as to be “insulting.” Trump threatened to bomb 52 Iranian cultural sites — the legacy of ancient Persian civilization. Iran fired ballistic missiles at a US military installation in Iraq, inflicting at least 109 troops with traumatic brain injuries.

Tulsi Gabbard, who denounced the assassination and more broadly denounced what she called Trump’s policy of “regime change war” against Iran, subsequently repudiated her position and endorsed Trump’s Iran policy when she was nominated for Director of National Intelligence.

In the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump maintained that his first-term policy of “Maximum Pressure” and escalating bellicosity toward Iran was a tremendous success, and pledged that he would accelerate this bellicosity in a second term. He claimed that Iran was trying to assassinate him. John Ratcliffe, whom Trump would later name CIA Director, publicly called for joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran as revenge for the alleged assassination attempts, and also because Iran had allegedly hacked Trump campaign emails. Now, Ratcliffe is reportedly recycling sports metaphors to convince Trump that Iran is on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon. Akin to how one of his predecessors as CIA Director, George Tenet, infamously peddled the metaphor that Iraq having WMDs was a “slam dunk.”

It was oddly under-covered that during the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly called for enabling Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. He threatened to blow the whole of Iran into “smithereens.” Meanwhile, a large number of people were apparently under the impression that by voting for Trump, they were not voting for a platform of heightened bellicosity with Iran. It’s a testament to the power of self-deception, selective absorption of information, the distortions of partisan thinking, and other phenomena of mass psychology that will be rich for further study. It’s also a testament to the power of the incredible propaganda spewed by Trump surrogates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, whom many people — especially in the self-proclaimed “anti-establishment” online media ecosystem — took their cues from.

RFK Jr. spoke at the Trump campaign’s grand-finale Madison Square Garden rally and had the temerity to proclaim, “Don’t you think we deserve a president who’s gonna end the warfare state and rebuild the Middle Class?” while assuring that Trump would “end the wars” — a series of comforting abstractions that had virtually zero connection to any tangible policy. This as Trump was literally advocating a new war with Iran. At the Vice Presidential debate, JD Vance even explicitly endorsed a “pre-emptive strike” by Israel against Iran, and demanded that the US loyally support Israel in this. Anyone who knows the first thing about the US-Israeli relationship would know that such an audacious bombing campaign by Israel would inevitably require robust US logistical, intelligence, and arms support. It would be a joint US-Israeli mission — which is exactly how Trump is now referring to it, using the pronoun “we” to describe the air superiority that “we” (the US and Israel) have currently obtained over Iran. All the while, he’s ordering mass evacuations from Iran’s capital, threatening to assassinate the Supreme Leader, and demanding “unconditional surrender” — the same demand that Franklin D. Roosevelt made of the Axis Powers during World War II, and was achieved only after extirpating the German state and dropping two atomic bombs on Japan.

After the 2024 election, Israeli media reported that Trump had conveyed to Netanyahu that upon assuming office in January, he would remove whatever minor constraints the Biden Administration had imposed on arms supplies to Israel. Trump subsequently did this, rushing 2,000 pound munitions to Israel, as well as PATRIOT and THAAD systems now being employed to shoot down Iranian missiles. Trump’s first major foreign policy proposal, announced alongside Netanyahu, was that the US would “take over” Gaza and turn it into a US military protectorate. The ceasefire arrangement that his envoy Steve Witkoff brokered for Gaza was systematically undermined at Israel’s behest, and by March, Trump green-lit the resumption of the Israeli annihilation campaign there. Witkoff was nonetheless treated to many hagiographical profiles and interviews touting him as an oracle of peace who was bringing fresh thinking to US diplomacy.

Shortly after he entered office in January 2025, Trump started threatening that he would bomb Iran if they didn’t make a satisfactory “deal.” He placed Witkoff in charge of securing this “deal.” Witkoff said the “red line” for Iran would be zero enrichment of uranium and dismantlement of its nuclear facilities. Iran has been adamant for decades that they would never accept this, as it would be seen as an enormous self-inflicted national humiliation and forfeiture of sovereignty. Witkoff’s use of the phrase “red line” was notable in that Trump and Republicans still like to chastise Obama for drawing a hazy “red line” with respect to Syria in 2012 — the idea being that Obama showed weakness by not bombing Syria promptly enough. Trump has now followed through on the “red line” threat, which is apparently supposed to convey his toughness.

As the Iran “negotiations” got underway, Netanyahu declared that he and Trump were in full agreement on how they would be structured. The only viable resolution would be Iran agreeing to blow up its own nuclear facilities under American supervision, and acceding to the “Libyan model” — which famously resulted in the leader of Libya getting regime-changed anyway after agreeing to disable his nuclear capacity. Trump repeatedly affirmed that this was in fact the core condition for the Iran “negotiations.” It was further reinforced by Marco Rubio. Any astute observer would have thus realized that the negotiations were pretextual — predicated on obtaining an outcome that could never be obtained — and thus engineered to serve as a justification for the eventual launch of a bombing campaign, which is exactly what happened.

Trump now says Iran should have “taken the deal,” meaning fully capitulated to American dictates in advance. Perhaps there was some flicker of genuine belief bouncing around inside Trump’s brain that through the sheer force of his personality and threats, he could berate Iran into submission, and thus achieve a “deal” that would avoid military force. He probably also had some comparable belief about his ability to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours. Regardless of what precisely is going on inside Trump’s cranium, the Iran “negotiations” were manifestly structured in such a way that no non-violent “deal” was ever going to be brokered. Thus, the inference that they were effectively a ruse to lull Iran into complacency is the only tenable one. Indeed, it was this complacency which led to Iranian officials getting assassinated in their beds in the US-Israeli sneak attack. The night before the offensive was launched, Witkoff spoke to a “pro-Israel” gala alongside Miriam Adelson and proclaimed that a “nuclear Iran” was an “existential threat” to Israel, the US, and the entire world — and the US and Israel needed to join together to conclusively neutralize this alleged threat, “no matter what the cost.” That was the chief “negotiator” who was supposedly “negotiating” with Iran for two months on behalf of Trump. Then the arbitrary two month deadline passed, and the bombs Trump openly promised began to drop.

Whatever happens next, it should be emphasized for historical posterity that absolutely none of this was unforeseeable. I documented it all, contemporaneously, and did what I could to explain the plainly evident implications. Few wanted to listen.

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