President Donald Trump can’t quite seem to make up his mind on a plan of action for attacking Iran, and it’s wreaking havoc at the Defense Department.
“One defense official told me there have been multiple times just in the last few weeks or couple of months that they’ve left the building thinking they were going to come back at three in the morning because something was going to happen,” Politico’s Dasha Burns told the outlet’s Playbook newsletter Monday.
“And then you wake up to the regular alarm being like—‘oh, I guess we decided not to go through with that,’” she added. “And that is the story of the Trump approach to war and peace.”
Since taking office for the second time, the president has already once ordered attacks against the country’s authoritarian Islamist regime, targeting several nuclear facilities in a series of strikes amid a flare-up in the simmering conflict between Israel and Iran last June.
Following his lightning invasion of Venezuela to capture President Nicolas Maduro last month, Trump’s attention has now turned again to Iran amid reports of a brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters that’s estimated to have seen up to 30,000 people killed.
The president says he’s weighing further strikes against the Islamic Republic to protect demonstrators and further deter the autocratic theocracy’s nuclear program.
Critics have framed his threats, along with other high-profile White House controversies over the past several weeks, as part of a wider effort to deflect scrutiny of Trump’s historic relationship with Jeffrey Epstein amid the release of new Justice Department documents on the late sex trafficker’s crimes.
Politico notes the White House is now forging ahead with a large-scale military buildup. The USS Gerald R. Ford entered the Mediterranean on Friday, with the aircraft carrier likely to be within striking distance in a matter of days.
Plane-tracking sites have also registered a number of flights headed for Diego Garcia, a U.S. military base in the Chagos Islands, south of Iran, across the Arabian Sea.
Trump last week warned the Iranian regime he plans “to get a deal one way or another” on its nuclear program. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News over the weekend the administration is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”
It remains unclear whether the president plans on waiting until Thursday, when diplomatic talks are scheduled in Geneva, before making a move.
His former commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday that the president’s recent tariff defeat in the Supreme Court only makes strikes against Iran more likely.
“I don’t think he can take this loss and then be seen as backing down on Iran,” Ross said.
Amid confusion at the Pentagon over what course of action the president may take, the The New York Times reported Sunday that several options are currently on the table.
“Targets under consideration range from the headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the country’s nuclear sites to the ballistic missile program,” the newspaper writes.
Trump has reportedly further told advisers that unless Tehran meets his demands, “he would leave open the possibility of a military assault later this year intended to help topple Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.”
The Daily Beast contacted the White House and Defense Department for comment on this story.
“The media may continue to speculate on the President’s thinking all they want, but only President Trump knows what he may or may not do,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said.
