At an event in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump took a moment to publicly praise Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. military leaders, at which point the president briefly added a five-word phrase, in apparent reference to the war in Iran.
“It’s a perfect, amazing thing,” Trump said.
A variety of words come to mind when describing the latest U.S. military offensive in the Middle East, but “perfect” isn’t one of them. We are, after all, talking about a war that has included, among other things, an apparent American missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed 175 civilians, most of whom were children.
Nearly a month into the war, U.S. service members have been killed and injured, the world has struggled to respond to a predictable energy crisis, violence has spread well beyond Iranian borders and Iran’s leadership remains largely intact.
Marveling at the White House’s lack of planning and apparent inability to think strategically, The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie noted, “Neither Trump nor his aides, according to recent reporting, planned for Iran to target shipping and close the Strait of Hormuz. They also do not seem to have planned for serious and sustained retaliation against America’s Gulf state allies. They did not plan for an energy crisis and the potential disruption to the global economy, and they did not plan for America’s European allies to, by and large, reject their call for support.”
By all appearances, Trump expected a replay of Venezuela: Target a foe quickly and overwhelmingly, declare victory and move on. When Iran proved to be a very different kind of adversary, the Republican administration apparently had no idea what to do next.
But hearing the president use the word “perfect” in reference to the war generated obvious questions about why he would say such a thing, but there are also some less obvious questions, including about whether Trump actually knows and understands what’s happening in the war he started for reasons he’s struggled to explain.
Two weeks into the conflict, The Times reported that some administration officials were feeling pessimism about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war, “but they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”
In other words, Trump was in a bubble that those around him were reluctant to pierce. A new NBC News report reinforced those concerns:
Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.
The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of ‘stuff blowing up.’
While the White House has insisted that the president has received a full range of information, NBC News’ report (which has not been independently verified by MS NOW) added that the video montages are “fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war.”
It would help explain why the president has routinely appeared clueless in recent weeks. Maybe he sees a perfectly executed war because that’s what his team tells him to believe, and he lacks the wherewithal to comprehend the possibility that his policy isn’t working.
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