“Within the next two weeks.”
That is when President Trump now says he will be ready to make his decision about bombing Iran or not. This new timeline was offered by the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at her briefing Thursday afternoon. But as she read the president’s statement aloud, some in the room couldn’t help but feel that this new time frame sounded a little … familiar.
As almost everyone in Washington is by now aware, “two weeks” is one of Mr. Trump’s favorite units of time.
Asked eight weeks ago if he could trust Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump replied, “I’ll let you know in about two weeks.”
Tax plans, health care policies, evidence of conspiracy theories he claimed were true, the fight against ISIS, the opening of some coal mines, infrastructure plans — all were at one point or another riddles he promised to solve for the public in about two weeks.
It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes.
Is the United States going to bomb Iran? We don’t know. Will we actually find out the answer to that question within two weeks? We don’t know that either.
A reporter in the briefing room tried to bring Mr. Trump’s timeline into our shared space time continuum but the White House didn’t seem ready for that voyage.
“President Trump has said previously, in regard to Russia, he’s used the phrase ‘about two weeks’ several times, in terms of, like, ‘We expect a two week deadline,’ and then he’ll give another two week deadline,” the reporter said to Ms. Leavitt. “How can we be sure he’s going to stick to this one on making a decision on Iran?”
Ms. Leavitt basically replied that one thing can’t be compared with another.
This was really a question of metaphysics more than anything else.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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