Donald Trump’s f-bomb outburst Tuesday morning over the botched Iran-Israel ceasefire was due to the two embattled countries “ruining” the president’s “perfect war,” journalist Michael Wolff argued on The Daily Beast Podcast.
Wolff also told host Joanna Coles that the context behind Trump’s comment—“You basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing!”—was that the president, unlike his predecessors, doesn’t intend on shepherding the conflict through to its end.
“The difference between all those other people getting sucked into these extended and incredibly damaging commitments is that they have the attention span to do that,“ Wolff said. ”He does not. So in a sense, that’s the weird silver lining. He’s not going to go forward with this.”
“And I don’t see him going down and becoming a wartime president and seeing this as something that he has to see to the end,” Wolff explained. “Trump’s whole impulse is exactly the opposite of that.”
Trump’s motivations are flipped when compared with other armed engagements, Wolff added.
“Many wars are provoked by headlines, by propaganda, by people advocating for their position, trying to push people into wars. That’s certainly what the neocons did for so long,” he said. “But this is kind of the opposite; this is war to create a headline, and the headline is, ‘We won.’”
But the lack of a firm ceasefire threw a wrench into Trump’s plans.
“[When] he announced the ceasefire, that was the perfect war,” Wolff said. “And so suddenly, with both Israel and Iran not cooperating in his staging of this in the headline, he gets annoyed, of course. And also I think he stepped into the role that this is his war.”
Another problem complicating the administration’s narrative, Wolff said, was how a Defense Department intelligence assessment revealed that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites were not nearly as effective as Trump has been saying. In fact, they likely only set Iran’s nuclear program back months, the a CNN report said.
“Iran’s enemies do not at this time know exactly where things stand. And Donald Trump doesn’t know where things stand. He just has to, but he doesn’t really care. That’s not his issue. His issue is it’s a perfect war,” Wolff said.
“And the perfect war means we have destroyed everything, and it’s over, and we go on from there.”
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