Donald Trump’s confidants are panicking as the president’s already weak grasp on his war with Iran slips more and more each day.
“We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” one source close to the White House told Politico. “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground.”
“It doesn’t seem to me there’s a way around that, if we want to save face,” the person added.
Trump has offered conflicting justifications and timeframes for the new conflict in the Middle East since he started it on Feb. 28.
He has said the attacks are designed to liberate the Iranian people, to secure a change in leadership, to put an end to the country’s nuclear program and, more confusingly, to preemptively offset retaliatory strikes by the regime.
He has also said the conflict is already over, and that it could equally last “forever.”
Sources told Politico on Tuesday they were initially hoping his campaign against the Islamic regime would prove short-lived, like his bombing attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities last year and his lightning invasion of Venezuela in January.
They say they felt “reassured by the belief that Trump’s open-ended objectives gave him the flexibility to declare victory whenever he saw fit.”
But as Iranian forces tighten their stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that transports roughly a fifth of global oil supplies each year, Trump’s allies fear any end to the conflict is likely to fall later, rather than sooner.
“The terms have changed,” one person told the outlet. “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”
“For the White House, now the only easy day was yesterday,” that source said. “They need to worry about an unraveling.”
A third source warned that Trump may well prove the victim of his own early success with the attacks, given the first wave of attacks killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“You’ve killed one guy, the next guy up is even more radical. You killed his dad and his wife,” the person said of Iran’s new leader, Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei. “Do you think he’s gonna be more—or less—reasonable?”
They added that any expansion of U.S. military action to include boots on the ground in Iran would almost certainly see Trump’s approval ratings, which have consistently hovered just below 40 percent, tank to levels not seen since Richard Nixon’s resignation in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
“He’s seen that story before,” the person said. “And I think he knows how that plays out politically.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
