As Donald Trump’s Iran war drags into its eighth week with no end in sight, there is concernboth inside the White House and outside among outside presidential advisers that Trump’s haphazard and scattershot pronouncements are only making things more difficult.
And that is leaving White House officials “fatigued” and wondering what each day will bring.
According to reporting from MS NOW’s Jake Traylor, Jackie Alemany, and Laura Barrón-López, Trump’s messaging on the war has shifted consistently — at times, hour by hour. Within 48 hours last weekend, he went from saying Iran had “agreed to everything” toward a potential deal to warning that if Iran did not sign on the dotted line, the “whole country is getting blown up.” The whiplash continues relentlessly. He has extended the war’s timeline by weeks, offered Iran a handful of deal extensions after saying he likely would not, and most recently indicated there was “no time frame” for the war to conclude, swiftly followed by a threat that Iran has “a matter of days” to reach a deal. White House aides are essentially lying to the public, MS NOW is reporting. A former White House official exposed the dysfunction starkly: “Ninety percent of White House top aides that are speaking publicly right now don’t necessarily believe what they’re saying, but they know it’s satisfying what the president wants them to say. Ultimately, that’s their goal. They’re not communicators for the public; they are communicators for the president.” The result is an administration with no credibility, with that same ex-insider admitting, “From the outside looking in, it is very clear that the goalposts are moving all over the place. That doesn’t scream confidence, it doesn’t scream that we are anywhere close to a resolution.” The volume of Trump’s media appearances is also overwhelming staff. Two additional White House officials told MS NOW they are frustrated by the volume of calls the president takes from reporters — in some weeks totaling dozens — and noted the difficulty of keeping up with and defending each of his minute-by-minute pronouncements. The administration lacks even a coherent rationale for the war, the analysts say. “[The White House] hasn’t done a successful job of nailing down one reason why we’re there. They’ve sort of thrown every reason out there. If they could narrow it down to one message — clear ‘feel the threat, feel the urgency’ — I think they’d have better success,” a source hopefully suggested. “The president is going to dictate when the war ends,” one White House official said. “In the meantime, we planned to ramp up the messaging on everything else, but obviously now those are all tied to the war as well.”
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