In a functioning American democracy, the president would deliver an Oval Office address at the start of a new military conflict. Donald Trump, however, decided to wait until a month into his war with Iran to give a speech about it to a skeptical public.
In the run-up to his address, experts speculated about what he was going to announce. A ground invasion? De-escalation? A petulant withdrawal from NATO because no one wants to help him open the Strait of Hormuz? It was none of these. Instead, a slurring Trump rehashed a bunch of his Truth Social posts, alternately boasting about America’s military progress while threatening war crimes. His speech told us very little, at least explicitly, but revealed quite a lot.
First, he showed us that he has no plan to get out of the mess he created. One way to judge how the war is going is to look at which side is trying to wrap it up. On Wednesday, Axios reported that JD Vance has made overtures to Iran, via mediators, about a possible cease-fire. Iran, however, may not be willing to negotiate. American intelligence agencies, according to The New York Times, have assessed that “the Iranian government believes it is in a strong position in the war and does not have to accede to America’s diplomatic demands.”
Perhaps hoping to get Iran to the table, Trump on Wednesday repeated ultimatums he’s already made. “Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” he said. Absent a deal, he threatened to destroy Iran’s electric plants and, perhaps, its oil, which would be illegal under international law, not that the president cares.
By Thursday, American and Israeli strikes had already severely damaged the Pasteur Institute in Tehran, a major medical research center. Vali Nasr, an Iranian American political scientist and a former State Department adviser, saw the attack as part of Trump’s promised campaign to destroy Iran as a modern society. As a child, Nasr recalled, he got his vaccinations at the Pasteur Institute. His grandfather, a doctor, worked there. It is, he told me, “the gold standard of international-level health care in Iran.”
The bombing of the institute, he pointed out, comes just days after airstrikes on two pharmaceutical production facilities, which are particularly important to Iran given how expensive foreign medicines have become, thanks to international sanctions. The United States and Israel may claim that these were dual-use facilities, but Iranians, said Nasr, sense that “this is no longer a war on the Islamic republic or its missiles or its nuclear facility. This is a war on the country. This is about turning Iran into a failed state.”
That, in turns, strengthens the regime’s hand domestically. Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, pointed out that every night since the beginning of the war, the regime has been turning out its supporters in public squares throughout the country. “Those crowds are actually growing bigger and bigger,” he said. Even Iranians who dislike their rulers have come to oppose the war “because of the damage to their infrastructure, because of the civilian casualties, because of the targeting of historic sites and Trump’s rhetoric.”
Meanwhile, Iran’s leaders can surely see that Trump’s domestic position is weakening. The war has dragged his approval ratings close to career lows: 35 percent, in a recent YouGov/The Economist poll. That’s not far from where George W. Bush was when he left office in disgrace amid a failed war and economic collapse. Most likely, one reason Trump gave his Oval Office speech in the first place was to try to convince Americans that his Iran adventure is going better than they think. For an inveterate liar, Trump can be surprisingly transparent about his motives, and on Wednesday afternoon he said, “Tonight I’m making a little speech at 9 o’clock, and basically I’m going to tell everybody how great I am.”
His desperation is obvious. The speech, said Nasr, is a signal to Iran that “he’s not doing really well with his own public and that he’s under pressure.” It’s in Iran’s interest to ratchet that pressure up, which is why Vaez believes that the regime currently has little interest in ending the war.
Trump does seem to want to end it, but he doesn’t know how. We still don’t know whether he’ll send soldiers into Iran to try to score a decisive blow, whether he’ll declare victory and leave or if he’ll finally finagle some type of deal. All we know is that he has managed to give Iran the upper hand in this conflict while tanking the global economy and shredding America’s most important alliances. Trump may not have pulled out of NATO on Wednesday, but European leaders understand that the pact is increasingly meaningless. “If you create doubt every day about your commitment, you hollow it out,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters on Thursday.
Think back to the rambling briefings Trump gave during the Covid pandemic, when he suggested injecting bleach, boasted about the “great job” he was doing and repeatedly promised that the virus would disappear naturally. It was a seasick feeling, to realize our country was in a cascading crisis with a bumbling narcissist at the helm. “When this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally,” Trump said yesterday of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran is currently using to choke global energy supplies while increasing its own oil exports. “It will just open up naturally.” Sounds familiar.
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