Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan has a message for Donald Trump: You took America to war without ever explaining why.
In a column published Thursday, the Reagan speechwriter and longtime conservative voice delivered a pointed rebuke of Trump’s failure to make a serious public case for the war in Iran — and didn’t spare his vice president either.
“We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?” Noonan wrote.
Drawing on two of the most prominent examples of presidential war communication — JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis address in 1962 and Reagan’s Grenada announcement in 1983 — Noonan argued that both men shared a quality conspicuously absent from Trump: disciplined, evidence-based, morally serious rhetoric that brought the public along.
“You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate,” she wrote. “Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.”
Noonan suggested that someone in the administration needs to intervene and make the case.
“If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?”
Noonan concluded that Trump’s failure to communicate is “part of why the president’s popularity is falling.”
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