Are Donald Trump’s Statements And Social Media Posts Prolonging The Iran War?

The truly ironic thing about President Donald Trump’s war on Iran is that, as much as the president posts about the conflict around the clock on social media, those of us who are on the outside looking in can’t possibly know anything about what’s actually going on in the Middle East, and where we are in negotiating an end to the war, because all we have to go on is the word of a compulsive liar whose cognitive decline is becoming more and more evident by the day.

We’ve seen it over and over again: Trump says negotiations are going well, that Iran is capitulating to all of his demands, and that the war will be over soon, only for the Iranian government to turn right around and say nothing our president claims is true, which then leads to Trump doubling down on his threats to bring Iran’s civilian infrastructure to rubble by bombing its power plants and bridges — in two weeks, or maybe two weeks from then, or maybe some other time.

In fact, it’s now being reported that members of Trump’s administration are beginning to fear that the president is shooting himself in the foot by constantly posting about victories that haven’t happened, productive negotiations that only seem to exist in his mind, and his threats to unleash “Hell” on Iran, which, again, tend to come up every time the illusion of “winning” he tires to present to the world gets shattered in real-time.

From CNN:

Some of Trump’s officials privately acknowledged to CNN’s Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak that his public commentary has been detrimental to talks, noting that prior sense of deep distrust. The president’s false claims last week that the Iran had agreed to almost all US demands — including on handing over enriched uranium — were not appreciated by negotiators who are on thin ice at home.

The sense that Trump might be getting in the way of his own aspirations was also raised by a Wall Street Journal article over the weekend. The paper said he was kept out of a room where aides were getting updates on the daring rescue of a US airman in Iran because “they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful.”

Peace negotiations, especially those involving the complex issues of enrichment, centrifuges and monitoring, are deeply sensitive. They often require back-channeling and months or even years of discussions. Each side needs to feel they have claimed vindication to get over the line. Bullying rarely works. Blaring about the process on social media makes it even harder. Trump on Monday said that he was unlikely to extend a ceasefire with Iran due to expire this week. This might have been an attempt to turn the screws, but it also risked giving the Iranian side an excuse not to show. Still, given Trump’s wildly gyrating social media record, he might post the complete opposite next.

To be clear, what WSJ reported is that senior Trump officials told the outlet that Trump threw a monumental temper tantrum, shouting at his aides for hours about the rescue mission, to the point where those aides felt the very presence of the president of the United States in the White House briefing room would be counterproductive, so they just stopped telling him about the briefs.

Apparently, our commander in chief is such an infantile man-child that top White House officials are essentially sitting him in front of a TV with a coloring book while the adults discuss important grown-up business in the next room.

Mind you, we still don’t even really know why we got into this war in the first place. If it’s about preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, we already had the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, when former President Barack Obama joined China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union (EU) in reaching an agreement with Iran, which had agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to more extensive international inspections. Then Trump nuked that deal in 2018, during his first term. Now, it seems our best case scenario is that we negotiate our way back into that deal, which Trump recently called “one of the Worst Deals ever made having to do with the Security of our Country,” which he seems to think is the case simply because it was “penned by Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden,” who, as we know, both continue to live in his head rent-free nearly a year and a half into his second term in office.

Or maybe Trump’s big, beautiful bombing adventure in the Middle East is about reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which was already open before the war started, but whatever. Well, how is that going? Trump isn’t managing to talk his way out of the progress made in that area as well, is he?

From The American Prospect:

On Thursday and Friday, there seemed to be progress toward a war-ending deal. President Trump went along with an Iranian demand that Israel must cease bombing Lebanon as a precondition to talks. On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complied, validating those critics who have argued Israel’s aggressive moves have all been done with Trump’s tacit consent or approval. Then on Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open.” Trump claimed that a deal was at hand, leading the stock market to jump and the price of oil to fall.

In ordinary diplomacy, this is how a deal unfolds. Each side offers the other something constructive, a process that builds confidence and trust, until eventually a firm agreement can be signed.

But Trump is not a ordinary diplomat. Only a few hours after Araghchi proclaimed the strait open, Trump closed it again, announcing that the U.S. would continue its own blockade of the strait “until such time as our transaction with Iran is 100% complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. This confused all parties, including European leaders who had been gathering in Paris to push for progress on reopening the strait. On Saturday, Iran announced that it would not be reopening the strait after all, and several ships were turned back.

Maybe this is why Trump hates Obama so much, because the former president brought so many nations together to make a deal, and all the current president can seem to do is get all of our international allies to ignore his calls and wish the U.S. had someone in charge whose hamster wasn’t asleep at the spinning wheel that is his decaying mind.

Look, last week, when congressional Democrats were pushing a bill to create a commission to assess whether the 25th Amendment should be invoked to remove Trump from office — a call that would ultimately still have to be made by Trump’s Cabinet and VP, which is why it will never happen — I wrote that our president “is a babbling, bumbling, emotionally stunted, probably demented man-child, who appears to be cognitively deteriorating before our eyes, as his public appearances, Truth Social posts and general reasoning and decision making become increasingly erratic, unhinged and detached from reality.”

Now, it appears that very condition is what is doing the most to prevent this bone-headed war of choice from drawing to a close.

Sad.

SEE ALSO:

Trump Iran ‘Update’ Was All Lies, Self-Gratification With No Substance

Iranian President’s Letter To US Asks ‘Is Trump Putting America 1st?’