Washington Examiner investigations editor Sarah Bedford said there is a reason behind President Donald Trump’s social media posts about Iran. She explained that his messages are all part of a broader plan to “achieve strategic goals.”
She said, “Trump very frequently makes big hyperbolic threats to achieve his strategic goals,” Bedford said on the Hugh Hewitt Show on Wednesday.
“It’s not really surprising that Trump would use hyperbole when we now know he was on the brink of some sort of acceptable ceasefire deal.”
They discussed the two-week ceasefire deal that was reached Tuesday night. “This all seems to be part of a way for Trump to buy some time to finalize a deal that would achieve his goals in a sort of lasting way without the sort of massive strike that he was promising,” she said.
The Republican Party has faced internal friction over the war in Iran and Trump’s threats on social media, which could affect the midterm elections.
“People are having more skepticism that this won’t be a limited engagement with a quick, clear victory like Trump promised at the outset,” Bedford said. “He might lose the support of some Republicans who could get nervous if this looks like it might turn into some sort of protracted conflict.”
Trump announced that he would be sending Vice President JD Vance to lead the negotiations team in Pakistan this weekend. Vance has long appealed to his political base as a skeptic of foreign intervention. Bedford said this points to how serious the Trump administration is about the negotiations.
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“Notably, Vance is reported to be one of the leading anti-war voices in the administration, but he’s also the second-highest-ranking official behind Trump himself, which shows the seriousness with which Trump is taking this,” Bedford said.
“He’s staked his credibility to being opposed to this kind of conflict, and he’s not exactly tamped down the speculation and reports that he’s been opposed to this the whole time,” she said. “He’s got plausible deniability right now about the war, that goes away the deeper that he is more publicly involved in whatever happens next.”