President Donald Trump is now applying the unpredictable style that built his business empire and political brand to a far more complex and sensitive role as a wartime leader.
Supporters love it when Trump breaks things — like the Republican establishment. He tends to preserve room for maneuver by avoiding definitive positions. And while he’s often thin on details and historical context, his personality projects certainty.
Trump’s flair for decisive action yielded success in a daring US raid that spirited Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from his compound to a New York jail cell in January. But in many of his public statements over the Iran war, he’s yet to project the gravity and clarity of a more traditional wartime president.
Trump is now facing intersecting crises in the conflict. Tehran’s fierce resistance is in danger of creating a lengthy stalemate. An economic crunch is worsening as oil prices soar after Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Domestically, Trump faces a political revolt highlighted Tuesday when a top MAGA-oriented national security official quit.
Trump was surprised by the intensity of Tehran’s reprisal attacks on US allies in the Gulf. He also seemed unprepared for the closure of the Strait — which many experts expected.
And the president’s attempt to bully allies into sending ships to the Strait of Hormuz hit a dead end when they balked at joining a war they’d not been consulted about.
When wartime presidents can’t clearly provide a clear rationale and endgame strategy, they risk strategic drift and losing the public.
Still, it is too early to properly assess a war in which US and Israeli raids appear to have inflicted devastating damage on Iran’s ability to threaten its region and the United States with its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs. No one can yet forecast how its political future will unfold following the deaths of so many senior regime figures, including that of longtime de facto political leader Ali Larijani on Tuesday. Time might show some of Trump’s instincts were shrewd and that his tolerance for risk produced results other presidents failed to achieve.
But it will be hard for him to claim a win if the conflict ends with the Strait of Hormuz jammed, the world economy held hostage and Iranians facing even harsher repression under a recalibrated regime. The same will be true if Iran retains highly enriched uranium it could use in a future nuclear program.
Unpicking these dilemmas may require riskier operations — probably involving ground troops — than have been attempted so far.
Such missions would benefit from meticulous presidential planning, clear goals and careful management of the aftermath and public expectations.
The resignation on Tuesday of Joe Kent, the MAGA-oriented former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, rocked Washington. It both suggested that Trump is losing control of his own political coalition and highlighted an important issue over the president’s justification for the war.
Kent, a special forces veteran who lost his wife to an ISIS attack in Syria, told Trump in a letter that he’d been misled by an Israeli misinformation campaign into believing a swift victory over Iran was within reach. He also argued that the Islamic Republic had posed no “imminent” threat to US national security, contrary to the assurances of Trump and senior administration officials.
“You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos,” Kent wrote. “You hold the cards.”
Some GOP lawmakers said the views Kent expressed in his resignation letter were antisemitic, with Rep. Don Bacon writing on social media, “Good riddance. Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell echoed a similar sentiment as he criticized the “virulent anti-Semitism of his resignation letter.”
Kent has little in common with the prominent Democrats who’ve voiced opposition to the war. He has faced criticism in the past for associations with far-right figures, including White nationalists and a Nazi sympathizer. But his resignation — against the backdrop of fierce tumult over the war in the MAGA movement and among conservative media figures — shows that if the president has to fear a political revolt over the war, it could come from his right. This is potentially an important factor for a president who traditionally tries to avoid breaks with his base.
Kent’s resignation also points to the lasting impact of a comment by Secretary of State Marco Rubio this month that the US preemptively went to war because it believed Israel was about to attack and Iran would respond by attacking American forces. Trump denied he was rushed into war and insists he was more gung-ho than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While polls show many Republican voters retain faith in Trump, signs of base dissent are important because the war is already unpopular with a majority of voters. And many past American wars have been undermined by the country turning against them.
Trump on Tuesday gave critics more grounds to question his justification for the war, his unwillingness to say when it might end and the inconsistency of his positions.
Days after demanding US allies send ships to help open the Strait of Hormuz, he insisted he’d never wanted them. “I didn’t do a full-court press because I think if I did, they probably would be, but we don’t need help,” he said.
Asked whether he was worried that Iran could become another Vietnam War-style debacle if he puts troops on the ground, Trump replied “No, I’m not afraid … I’m really not afraid of anything.”
Another reporter asked Trump if he had a plan for the day after military action ends. “We have a lot,” he said, although he’s never specified any. “If we left right now, it would take 10 years for them to rebuild. But we’re not ready to leave yet, but we’ll be leaving in the near future.”
Trump has offered sometimes contradictory reasons for waging war. He’s suggested Iran was an imminent threat to the US without offering evidence. He implied he was after regime change when he launched the assault, but has since played down the possibility of a popular revolt in Iran.
On Monday, the president fueled new concerns that he was not fully convinced in his own mind why he went to war. He denied his rationale was over oil, but added the following elliptical comment. “We don’t need it, but we did it. It’s almost — you could say we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do. But we did it because we have some good allies there.”
Trump has created further confusion by repeatedly claiming the war is already won, while simultaneously arguing that it’s too soon to bring American troops home. He’s said he will know when it’s time in his “bones.”
His trust in his own almost mystical intuition has carried him through no end of personal, business and political scrapes. But it represents another risky bet as consequential and potentially painful moments loom in the war.
