Trump Can’t Decide Whether We’ve Destroyed Iran’s “Military” or “Left It Alone”

One of the most stunning things about Donald Trump as an individual is the way he can so perfectly and so shamelessly contradict himself, even when the thing he’s saying is the opposite of a prior pronouncement he’s made dozens or hundreds of times before. Case in point: Every time Donald Trump has spoken publicly on the still ongoing Iran War in the last two months, he’s almost invariably led off with proclamations of how easily the United States opening blitz and bombing campaign destroyed the Iranian armed forces. He can’t make it through any discussion on any topic even tangentially related to Iran without stressing that their air force and navy are “destroyed” or “totally gone.” But apparently the air force and navy don’t count as “military” in the mind of Donald Trump, because while giving an interview to his own daughter in law on Fox News this weekend–the kind of thing that certainly doesn’t evoke a totalitarian regime even a little–the President stunningly pivoted to saying that the United States had “actually left their military alone.” Wait, what?

“Their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate … we’ve actually left their military alone,” said the President with a straight face. “People would be surprised to hear that, because mistakes have been made in wars where you wipe out everybody, and then you have a country that’s for 40 years can never rebuild. You look at what happened with Iraq; we did so badly, that as such a foolish thing.”

First of all, let’s all reserve space for ourselves to have a small, rueful chuckle at the idea of the Iranian military, and its Revolutionary Guard corps, as being “somewhat moderate.” Sure, alright. I guess we chose not to destroy them because they’re really swell folks?

Regardless, Trump then managed to top himself, by proclaiming the following, literally minutes later in the same conversation with Lara Trump on Fox: “Iran is in a very bad position. They have no military, all they have is good talk and a fake press.” You’d better believe that a media savvy member of Congress like California’s Ted Lieu was ready to jump all over that one. Lieu doesn’t tend to bring much in the way of useful action to Congress beyond Twitter posturing and rhetorical combat, but he certainly gets off a good one here.

Really, is there any more perfect encapsulation of the deadly limbo we’ve been caught in vis-à-vis the Iran War than Donald Trump saying within minutes of each other that we’ve left the Iranian “military” alone, and also that they have no military, after months of saying that it had been entirely destroyed? It must be deeply confusing to be dyed-in-the-wool MAGA, when this is the guy whose proclamations you’re supposed to amplify. Which Donald Trump do you even listen to? Do they feel the cognitive dissonance at all, or do they just accept that everything he says is correct, even when he voices two opposing views in the space of minutes?

As has become the standard for this particular conflict, the latest phase has dragged on interminably–it was more than a week ago when I was joking about drinking a boilermaker for Memorial Day in honor of its supposed conclusion, and yet here we are with nothing having changed. Trump declared over Memorial Day weekend that a deal was “largely finalized,” and yet how did we spend this weekend? Ah yes, we spent it exchanging fire with Iran yet again, after they reportedly shot down a U.S. drone over international waters. Because, as they say, nothing helps the path to permanent peace along like the occasional ballistic missile.

The two sides, by all accounts, still seem to be far apart on the very same sticking points that have prevented a deal from the very beginning, such as how the U.S. would supposedly come into possession of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, with the country insisting that the details of its nuclear program will not be part of a peace deal but will rather be worked out in separate talks at a future date. Iran has very successfully managed to focus the center of the war on the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, using “a return to exactly how things were before the war” as a carrot that Trump has been perpetually unable to reach. It seems likely that whenever the deal does get done, it will return us more or less to a pre-war status quo, except one where the United States has spent $30 billion or so for no reason, for no gain, while devastating the entire global economy in the process. It should go without saying that “regime change” has not happened.

You know, perhaps I was more right than I knew when I was advocating beer and whiskey as a response to this situation? When even the President of the United States can’t decide whether or not a country’s military exists, what are the rest of us to do?