TRUMP’S VERY PUBLIC INNER DIALOGUE ON IRAN. On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States would attack Iran that evening. “The United States will be hitting Iran … VERY HARD TONIGHT,” Trump wrote. The president added that the U.S. might also take over the critical oil facility on Kharg Island “at some point in the not too distant future.”
Within half an hour, Trump was speaking to the hosts of Fox & Friends. He complained that much news coverage has downplayed the U.S.’s accomplishments in the war, specifically the enormous damage that has been inflicted on Iran. “They’re finished,” he said of the country’s leaders. But he also expressed a reluctance to escalate the fighting. When he was asked about attacking bridges and power plants in Iran, he said, “I’d rather not do it, because once you do that, the people suffer.”
Trump noted that a host had earlier brought up attacking the water supply. “I heard you mentioning water,” he said. “Water is really a devastating loss for them. I could do that in one minute, but the problem is the people won’t be able to drink water. What are they going to do? I don’t want to do that.”
Then there was the problem of American public opinion, which has settled roughly 60% to 40% disapproval of the war. “My preference has always been to take Kharg Island,” Trump said. “I don’t know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest with you. I think they’d like to see us come home.”
It’s hard to think of another wartime leader who so publicly carried on a deliberation with himself about what to do next. On Fox & Friends, Trump was responding to the hosts’ questions, but he was really debating with himself. He was essentially conducting an inner dialogue in the most public way possible, on live television.
That is not really a surprise. Trump is always exquisitely aware of his audience. At rallies and public appearances, he tests ideas and phrases and carefully notes how people react. He loves polls — although never the ones that are negative for him — and he views the testing of ideas as polling that he can conduct for himself at no cost. Testing his options in wartime — that is, revealing the inner debate he is having about them — would be entirely consistent with his lifelong practice.
In any event, by late morning on Thursday, everyone expected that there would be another U.S. attack on Iran in the evening hours. But by early afternoon, everything had changed. Trump abruptly called off the planned attack for that evening, saying there had been a breakthrough in the peace talks.
“President Donald Trump said Thursday that the U.S. has ‘just made a great settlement of the war with Iran’ and that a deal is nearing completion,” Fox News reported. Trump added, “We have a signing soon.”
The Associated Press reported that Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, “said that the text of a deal with the United States to end the conflict is ‘mostly finalized.’” Even though the foreign ministry said that nothing had been fully finalized, it still seemed like significant progress had been made.
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So what happens now? By Friday morning, a senior administration official said there was a “75% chance” that a U.S.-Iran agreement would be signed. The official said U.S. efforts to move some traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, plus Trump’s latest threats to launch new attacks, had shown Iran that its leverage was weakening, leading it to make concessions it had been unwilling to make two weeks ago.
But if this episode is like many others in the last three months, the deal won’t happen. The talk and the excitement will have been for naught, and the situation will go back to the not-war-not-peace “ceasefire” that existed before. But even if that happens, the world will have gotten a valuable glimpse inside an American president’s head amid the wartime deliberations he is conducting with himself.