If you comb the stockyards of Chicago and search all the cattlelands of America’s great prairies, if you go from the hillsides on which attentive Japanese farmers cultivate Wagyu beef to the ranches of Argentina’s famed gauchos, you will find less bulls--t than uttered by President Donald J. Trump in 18 minutes and 39 seconds on Wednesday night.
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.
If you’ve been following his posts, the whole embarrassing performance was like an episode of déjà vu filtered through a post-traumatic stress flashback. We’ve been here before. We’ve heard this baloney already. Why do we have to listen to it again?
My guess is, with the war going as badly as it is, with virtually every ostensible major rationale for the war floated by the administration since its inception being unfulfilled, and with the president not having addressed the public directly to explain why we are involved in this madness, some White House communications genius said, “Mr. President, we need your magic.”
The problem is this empty husk of a president has no magic left anymore.
The problem is we have no strategy for this war.
The problem is they had nothing constructive to say.
But this is the Trump administration, so they said it anyway.
The speech was not just rife with lies. It was also so profoundly incoherent that I defy anyone to have made sense of it without periodically hitting themselves in the head with a mallet. (I tried this and the best parts were when the hammer blows made my ears ring and for a brief moment I could no longer hear the gusher of effluvium emanating from America’s First Maw.)
Take, for example, his regular return to his alleged concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. (I say “alleged” because earlier today he indicated he didn’t care what happened to the nearly 1,000 pounds of enriched nuclear materials they possess.)
Early on, he said he would never let Iran have nuclear weapons. Then he said that is why he pulled out of the nuclear deal we had with Iran, struck by the Obama administration—even though that’s what kept them from having a nuclear weapon. But Trump said it would have guaranteed them having a nuclear weapon. And he said Obama gave them cash.
In any event, once he pulled out of the deal, somehow they got very close to having a weapon again. So we attacked them and obliterated their weapons. But then they were weeks away from having a weapon again. So then we launched this war. So now they don’t have such a weapon. But, oh, by the way, Trump lifted sanctions on them so they made much, much, much more money than Obama did. But the program is gone.
But if it’s not, and they start moving around their fissile material, then we’re really going to get mad and attack.
“Iran, we’re counting to 3. If you don’t put your nuclear weapons away by the time we get to 3, you’re going to be in big trouble. 1…2… I’m not kidding Iran!... 2…”
But other elements of the address were just as nuts: claiming that we had taken over Venezuela, claiming Trump was responsible for America becoming energy-independent (it had nothing to do with him), repeating over and over again that Iran was “decimated” (I do not think that word means what he thinks it means), and telling our allies that we don’t need the oil or gas through the Strait of Hormuz so they should go get it for themselves.
One other especially nutty bit was when he said, à la his comments long ago about COVID, that the Strait would ultimately open up “naturally” and oil would flow again to the world. Naturally. Just like that. So don’t worry about all the miscalculations and destruction associated with this war that has sent world energy markets and our allies into a frenzy of concern.
Countries just open up for Trump that way, you know. Because he’s a star.
Of course, when a president spews sewage on national television, there has to be a reason for it if you’re willing to dive down deep into the sludge to find it. And 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.
Our attacks on their leaders have left in place leaders who are even more hardline than those who existed before. While we have devastated their navy and air force, they still possess a very large army, a global network of proxies, and large enough stockpiles of munitions to threaten their neighbors for years to come and to render global energy markets—and, by extension, the entire global economy—a big mess for years.
The fissile material is still there, too. The nuclear scientists are still there. We can’t impose our will without putting boots on the ground, which would be risky at best. And if it were anything like other such forays into the region during the past few decades, it would likely be unsuccessful.
Rather than making the region or the world safer, we have done the opposite. We have alienated our allies and Trump continues to threaten the NATO alliance because they wouldn’t go along with his harebrained scheme. And most of our major rivals are happy as clams. (The current cover of The Economist, referring to the war, shows a picture of Xi Jinping with the headline, “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”)
Had Trump given a more honest speech, while it might have had the same braggadocious tone, the meaning would have been very different.
That’s because, were the ugly truth to have been told, Trump would have to admit that by having strengthened Iran’s hardliners while actively undermining NATO, by having pushed up the price of oil, by having removed sanctions on Russia and Iran to “ensure oil flows more freely,” and by having, at the same time, depleted precious U.S. military resources, he has achieved a big triumph.
For Russia.
And that’s one topic that always brings out the liar in Donald J. Trump.
