On July 21, 2021, after Donald Trump had finished his first term as president, he gave an interview at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey to a ghost writer and a publisher who were working on the memoirs of his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. He let them see the secret and still classified plan of a putative American attack on Iran: “It’s so cool…it’s incredible, right?”
Trump was showing off, but he was also trying to get back at his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser had just published a report under the headline “‘You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War’: Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran.” Glasser wrote that Milley had met with Trump on January 3, 2021, when the defeated president was still trying to defy the result of the previous November’s election and stay in power. The subject of the meeting was “Iran’s nuclear program.”
According to Glasser, Milley had two “nightmare scenarios” playing in his head. One was that Trump would try “to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power.” The other was that he would manufacture an external crisis by launching a missile attack on Iran: “It was not public at the time, but Milley believed that the nation had come close—‘very close’—to conflict with the Islamic Republic.”
Trump was sufficiently enraged by the article to shred all his obligations to national security and disclose a top-secret plan to people who had no clearance to see it. At the Bedminster briefing he planted a rebuff that duly appeared in Meadows’s memoir, The Chief’s Chief: “The president recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency. President Trump denied those requests every time.”
The implication was clear: attacking Iran was a terrible idea and only Trump had stood between the US and the consequences of this madness. This was the version of history Trump was so recklessly determined to see published after his first term. No reputable source suggests that Milley repeatedly urged Trump to attack Iran, but that in itself is unremarkable. What matters, in trying to understand Trump’s motivation for finally launching such an attack this past weekend, is that the story he wanted to tell about his first term was one in which he stoutly resisted all pressure to go to war with Iran.
This was part of a larger narrative: Trump the pacific president. “I had no wars,” he told a Fox News town hall broadcast in January 2024. “I’m the only president in seventy-two years, I didn’t have any wars.” This was not true—Jimmy Carter never took America to war and no US soldier died in combat during his presidency, while Trump did escalate military action in Syria and Iraq. (In the same town hall he boasted, “We beat ISIS, knocked them out.”)
But it is part of his desired image. It’s not that he is reluctant to inflict violence on foreign people—his public rhetoric relies on the evocation of carnage and the promise of countercarnage. It is that he does not wish to be seen to do so. In the Trump show, viewer discretion is advised: his violence is to be feared but never witnessed directly. His eventual attack on Iran was visible only as a blur on satellite images of a damaged desert landscape. Unlike Israel’s attacks on Tehran, and its daily mass killings in Gaza, Trump’s strikes on three nuclear sites seem to have caused no fatalities. In the midst of terrible bloodshed, they conjured a peculiarly bloodless kind of war.
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We know from two Iran-related incidents in his first term that Trump is hugely interested in how the aftermath of violence there might look. In August 2019 he tweeted an apparently classified satellite image of what he called a “catastrophic accident” at an Iranian rocket launch site. According to Maggie Haberman in her biography Confidence Man (2022), he did this before officials could occlude classified details, “because he liked how the image looked. ‘If you take out the classification, that’s the sexy part,’ he protested as they tried to make changes.”
In June 2019 Iran shot down an unmanned US Global Hawk surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump authorized a retaliatory missile strike on Iran. But he then suddenly called it off. He did so, it seems, because he was worried about what might appear on TV. According to his then–national security adviser, John Bolton, in his memoir The Room Where It Happened,
Trump said he had been told by someone unnamed there might be a hundred fifty Iranian casualties. “Too many body bags,” said Trump…. I tried to explain that the purported “casualty” figures were almost entirely conjectural, but Trump wasn’t listening. He had in mind pictures of a hundred fifty body bags, and there was no explaining to be done. He offered no other justification, simply repeating his worry about television pictures of dead Iranians.
Pictures of shattered buildings (like those of the Iranian space facility) are sexy. Those of dead Iranians are not. (Bolton, for his part, comes off in his own account as less than fully concerned about any actual casualties the strikes might have caused.) This anxiety about images helps explain Trump’s constant changes of mind about whether to attack Iran. As Bob Woodward and Robert Costa summarize the record of his first term:
He wouldn’t say “do it,” he wouldn’t say “don’t do it.” The decision was left hanging, a maddening and inconclusive pattern.… As Milley once said to an adviser, “The whole Iran thing comes and goes and comes and goes and comes and goes.”
Why then did it finally come? Not, of course, because the essential facts had changed. On March 25 Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, speaking under oath to members of Congress, said that the US Intelligence Community, made up of eighteen different organizations, “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khameini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” As Secretary of State Marco Rubio later blustered to Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation, these facts were “irrelevant” to the American decision to go to war with Iran.
Rather, this can be thought of as a FOMO war, triggered by Trump’s fear of missing out. In a development that may be without parallel in US history, a president entered a foreign war as a follower, not a leader. The attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was Benjamin Netanyahu’s war, the fulfillment of a desire he has nurtured for decades. When it started the official White House position, articulated by Rubio on June 12, was that “Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran.”
It quickly became clear, however, that Netanyahu had scored, in more senses than one, a palpable hit. The extraordinary efficiency of Israel’s attack—its intelligence-led assassinations of Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists and above all its rapid destruction of Iran’s air defenses—made it an almost immediate triumph. Trump was the equivalent of the guy who rushes into a barroom fight to deliver a kick in the ribs to an opponent who is already writhing on the ground. He knew that Netanyahu would be smart enough to raise Trump’s arm and declare him the great victor.
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As well as being easy, the US attack was also visually correct. It had sexy destruction without the body bags. Since June 12 hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed and thousands injured by Israeli missiles and drones, but the US could present itself as “not involved” in those awful realities. Trump was able to present his assault as a discrete and almost sterile operation—a mighty blow without apparent victims—within the wider maelstrom of extreme violence in the Middle East, in which the US has had such a central part. It could thus be both war and not war.
On the one hand, it mattered deeply to Trump that his claims to have achieved “total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear facilities be taken as literal truth—whatever the reality might be. On the other hand, he was equally anxious to reconfigure this violence as a sick joke. On the evening of June 24 he posted on Truth Social a video of B-2 stealth fighter jets dropping bombs with a soundtrack of Vince Vance & the Valiants’ 1980 song “Bomb Iran,” itself a parody of the 1961 Regents record “Barbara Ann.” The lyrics include the couplet: “Ol’ Uncle Sam’s gettin’ pretty hot/Time to turn Iran into a parking lot.” The idea of obliteration was at once deadly serious and a grimly comic burlesque.
Trump has maintained a “maddening and inconclusive pattern” of behavior toward Iran because it has allowed him to keep his monopoly on unpredictability. Making war in an autocracy is a matter of instinct, of gut feeling. It comes from a place only he can access—his own impulses and intuitions. When Trump left the G-7 summit in Canada on June 16, having sent out his equivalent of a TV trailer (“Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”), he told the world to “Stay tuned.” The job of all courtiers in a monarchy is to tune in to the king’s wavering wavelengths. The pleasure for the audience (at least for the one safe in America) lies in the suspense: Trump announced that he could make a decision on Iran “one second before it’s due, because things change, especially with war.” It goes without saying that in this despotic style of warmaking, consultation with, let alone approval by, Congress is impossible.
The generation of this suspense was as much the point of the exercise as the attack itself. The need for the world to stay tuned, for everyone to be sucked into his vortex of uncertainty gave Trump a thrilling ego trip. Matters of life and death, instruments of awesome power—sci-fi stealth bombers! thirty-thousand-pound bunker busters!—waited on his unknowable hunch. The actual attack was merely the necessary coda to a drawn-out drama of nervous trepidation. His need to sustain the idea of warmaking as a switch he can flick on and off at will, as the mood takes him, helps account for why he declared a cease-fire so suddenly after the attack and why he was so enraged that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing” when they seemed slow to obey his commands.
They were encroaching on his prerogative: the governing imperative is for no one to know what the fuck Trump is doing. His war was not intended as the answer to any question about Iran or the Middle East. On the contrary, it deepens the deliberately maddening pattern of inconclusiveness. It was a will-he-won’t-he war that was not a war in which Iran’s enriched uranium may or may not have been destroyed and which may or may not have been intended to create regime change.
The day after the American strikes J.D. Vance declared that the US was “not at war with Iran.” A day later, in declaring his cease-fire, Trump not only confirmed that it was a war but decreed that it “should be called, ‘THE 12 DAY WAR.’” He also defined it as both potentially apocalyptic and a mere momentary upheaval: “This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will!” Meanwhile he both suggested that toppling the government of the Islamic Republic might be in the cards (“Why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???”) and that it would be a big mistake (“I don’t want it…. Regime change takes chaos, and ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos”).
This war was actually about a different regime: Trump’s own. Its purpose was to reinforce and make manifest the principle that even when it comes to the most serious way a president can use his power, he will do whatever produces the images he likes, whatever presents the best opportunity for self-aggrandizement, and whatever allows him to keep eluding the demands for definition that apply to pettily rational politics. In the pursuit of those desires there will be no cease-fire.
English (US) · 