Over the course of three hours on Tuesday, President Trump scolded Israel and Iran with expletive-laced comments on the South Lawn of the White House. He told reporters he had just chastised the prime minister of Israel, and he shared a screenshot of a private text from the NATO secretary general on social media.
Most presidents deal with international crises in private — at most, they might release a carefully crafted statement.
That has never been Mr. Trump’s style. With this president, the entire world gets a view into his thoughts, gripes and whims in ways that are often reminiscent of a chronically online millennial. His posts come at all hours of the day and night — many self-congratulatory, some trivial, some angry — and his in-real-life appearances can sometimes echo his online persona.
All are windows into his psyche, a trove of insight into the intentions, moods and vulnerabilities of the commander in chief.
To Mr. Trump’s aides, his long-established proclivity for sharing makes him the “most transparent and accessible president” in American history.
“One of the many reasons the president was re-elected is because of his transparency and tell-it-like-it-is attitude,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “It’s refreshing to the American people to have a president who always speaks his mind and lets the country know exactly where he stands.”
Whether impulsive, canny or some combination, his openness has benefits, from rallying his base to keeping opponents off balance to simply dominating public attention.
But there are also complications. He can inadvertently set off diplomatic crises, leave aides and allies out of step with his messages and, as was the case with his open musing over the past two weeks about bombing Iran, make his posts and public statements a threat to operational security.
For more than a week, Mr. Trump publicly flirted with bombing Iran, giving the public a rare window into a president wrestling in real time with a major military action.
“Maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t,” he said at one point.
In the end, B-2 bombers and U.S. fighter planes flew in and out of Iran without a shot being fired at them. But by the time Mr. Trump ordered the strikes, officials say, the Iranians had already moved equipment from their nuclear sites and the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium remains publicly unaccounted for. A preliminary classified report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that the strikes set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to share his thoughts on any given topic at nearly any time has also made it easier for foreign governments, which invest immense resources to try to understand what the American president thinks and wants. These days, all they really need is a Truth Social account and a cable news subscription.
“With Nixon, you had to wait for the White House tapes to come out to hear what he was really thinking,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics at Princeton University and the author of “The Blood Telegram,” about Mr. Nixon. “Nixon could be full of rage in private but hold himself back in public. Now with Trump, there’s so much that he just says out loud in public or puts out on social media.”
And still, what the president says one day may not be his message later the day. The president’s penchant for changing his mind makes it especially challenging for aides who try to stay aligned on his message. After the U.S. strikes on Iran, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both said in interviews that the United States had no interest in orchestrating a change of government in Iran.
A few hours later, the president weighed in and seemed open to the prospect.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” he wrote on Truth Social.
Mr. Trump does not look fondly on aides who publicly disagree with him — even if unintentionally. And so for many of them, it is just easier to not speak publicly at all about the president’s policies or worldview.
This is far from a new phenomenon for Mr. Trump. During his first term, the president posted obsessively on Twitter, now called X, announcing policy decisions, firing aides and attacking opponents. He radically reshaped the way presidents communicate with the world, forcing anyone with a stake in American policy to set push notifications for whenever the president posts.
On Tuesday, those first alerts came early in the morning because the president woke up with a lot to say. He issued his first social media post before 6 a.m., which was an urgent warning to Israel: “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION.”
He then walked out of the White House and unloaded to reporters on both Israel and Iran as it appeared that his fragile cease-fire might fall apart.
Even after speaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and assuring the world — via his social media platform — that the truce was intact, Mr. Trump was not done talking. So he went to the press cabin at the back of Air Force One as he flew to Europe for a NATO summit and took more questions from reporters.
Mr. Trump then proceeded to post more than two dozen times on social media over the course of his six-hour-and-twenty-minute flight to the Netherlands. He shared a screenshot of the fawning message he received from Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO. He reposted multiple messages from people saying he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, an award he has long sought, and he slammed Democrats with derisive nicknames.
After landing, he had dinner with his fellow leaders of the NATO alliance. They, too, just wait for the latest social media post to figure out what he might do next.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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