Donald Trump may be fumbling for a consistent line on why he struck Iran, but his biographer says the president’s underlying motive was never about policy clarity in the first place.
Since launching his war against Iran over the weekend, Trump has failed to keep the story straight about what his goals are in the military campaign, which has already claimed the lives of six U.S. troops and hundreds of civilians.
The war is all the more politically confounding because Trump, 79, has long railed against the very kind of regime-changing foreign interventions he is now waging.
Author Michael Wolff argued on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that Trump isn’t trying to pursue a coherent strategy at all, but that he’s acting on his instinctive need to declare victory.
“His entire foreign policy is focused on that question: ‘Can we get a win? What’s the win?’” Wolff said. “In Trump’s head, it’s always, ‘I can get a win.’”
Wolff said the former reality TV star “sees everything as essentially a stage set in television” and that he views his war against the Middle Eastern nation as a “mini series” that he gets to direct.
And while other wartime presidents have often preferred to let their generals take the lead publicly, the former Apprentice star doesn’t want that.
“The central casting, there’s only one central person. And that’s Donald Trump,” Wolff said. “It’s his war.”
As Trump’s contradictions about his long-term strategy for the war pile up, questions have mounted over whether he is stumbling into the same trap that ensnared past presidents who launched wars with no clear way out.
But Wolff argued that Trump is fully aware of the risk but believes he can cheat it by scoring a “win” and walking away before the U.S. slides into the kind of “forever war” he once denounced.
The author, who was granted access to the Trump White House to write his 2018 bestseller Fire and Fury, said that Trump often asks why then-President George W. Bush didn’t pull U.S. forces out of Iraq after capturing Baghdad in 2003, instead of staying put for what became a nearly decade-long war.
“Trump is like, ‘So why didn’t he go home?’” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “And very precisely then he says, ‘No one would have given a f--- about what happened after that if he had just gone home.’”
Wolff continued, “I think he very specifically has learned, or at least there is a good possibility, and he is certainly representing that, that he understands you’ve got to claim victory. There’s got to be that moment.”
That’s what Trump did in Venezuela in January, when U.S. forces abducted dictator Nicolás Maduro in a midnight raid, before letting the country’s more U.S.-friendly vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, take over.
But Saturday’s strikes, which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the Islamic Republic’s senior leadership, apparently did not deliver the moment of victory for Trump.
And a letter the commander-in-chief sent to Congress on Monday suggests he himself is unsure about when he’ll be ready to walk away from his new war.
“Although the United States desires a quick and enduring peace, it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary,” Trump said in the letter.
“These strikes were undertaken to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance vital United States national interests, including ensuring the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel,” he continued.
The letter was sent under the War Powers Act, a 1973 resolution requiring the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying U.S. forces if Congress has not declared war. The deployment cannot last more than 60 days without congressional approval.
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung provided the Daily Beast with a recycled statement.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--- and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” Cheung said.
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