Why Donald Trump Doesn’t Want to Talk About the War in Iran

There are several possible explanations for this: perhaps Trump is already tired of the war and finds weeks-old interviews from the book tour of the Democratic governor of California more interesting. Or perhaps he’s worried that, after years of promising to avoid the stupid and unnecessary entanglements of past American leaders in the Middle East, the conflict with Iran is simply not popular among his most hard-core supporters. It’s also possible that Trump is concerned about how the war is going, and he doesn’t want to call attention to the spiking gas prices, plunging stock market, and chaotic geopolitical situation which the conflict has so far unleashed. Or maybe he just thinks that people who look at his social-media feed would prefer to see memes of Democratic congressional leaders dressed up in red devil suits, such as the one he posted on Monday morning. The answer, of course, could be all of the above.

The official White House social-media account, meanwhile, has begun posting footage of Operation Epic Fury as if it were a video game. In a video from Wednesday evening, images of missiles hitting targets were interspersed with stock footage of a man bowling a strike; the next shot shows animated bowling pins representing “Iranian Regime Officials” being knocked out by a red-white-and-blue U.S.A. bowling ball. Another video, posted on Thursday, even more explicitly gamifies the war, which has thus far killed seven American service members and more than a thousand Iranians. There’s bowling in this one, too, but also archery, baseball, basketball, boxing, golf, and tennis. Thus does the world’s leading superpower celebrate its killing power.

It’s true that, in his many comments to reporters in recent days, the President has been far more voluble about the war, if not exactly clear about its objectives, progress, or likely duration. He’s called it a war, a major combat operation, and, on Wednesday, “an excursion, a little excursion.” He has suggested that the United States would take over the Strait of Hormuz in order to secure safe passage for oil tankers, and also that there was no problem at all with the Strait of Hormuz as it is. He made news by claiming that it was not the U.S. but possibly Iran itself which had sent an American-made Tomahawk missile to kill at least a hundred and seventy-five people at a girls’ school on the first day of the war. Never mind that Iran does not possess Tomahawk missiles.

Perhaps his most closely scrutinized statements have been those concerning when and how the war might end. These, too, have been confounding to the point of nonsensical. This week, Trump has said that “we won,” but also that “we’re not finished yet.” He has demanded unconditional surrender and regime change, and also denied that victory would require either of those things. At his rally in Kentucky, he spoke of staying the course, whatever that course is, almost as though trying to convince himself. “We don’t want to leave early, do we?” he asked the audience. “We got to finish the job, right?”

In the past, perhaps the only reassuring thing that could be said about Trump was that he was not so reckless and unhinged as to take the United States into a major new war. Avoiding armed conflict was, after all, one fixed principle—besides the magically transformative powers of tariffs—that he truly seemed to believe. As he ran for reëlection in 2src24, his two key campaign promises, aside from mass deportations, were that he would fix the economy and not start any wars. Even his voters might have thought twice about granting Trump unchecked life-and-death power over millions if they thought he might actually use it.