Jacob Heilbrunn
One day President Trump wants to dial down hostilities with Iran. ‘We’re low-keying’ the conflict, he said on Sunday. A day later, though, he was keyed up. After Tehran demanded reparations from Washington as part of its attempt to resurrect June’s Memorandum of Understanding, Trump said on Truth Social that it was the Iranians who should:
Compensate America for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole, and thousands of others killed in combat.
Now it is Trump who has become a hostage of Tehran
The problem is simple. For all his bluster about staring down the mad mullahs, Trump is on the run. It isn’t simply that the American military has almost exhausted its store of offensive munitions or that Iran is installing a fresh bunch of hardliners in its leadership. It is that, as an exposé in the Washington Post revealed last night, Trump, for fear of being targeted by Iran, felt compelled to adopt deceptive manoeuvres as he departed from Ankara at the conclusion of the Nato summit in early July. He hid in a Turkish catering container and secretly boarded a conventional military aircraft rather than fly on his shiny new Qatari jet – which is masquerading as the new Air Force One – or on the original Air Force One. So much for Trump’s claim that the world would no longer mock America during his presidency. If anything, he has inadvertently provided a sustained laugh track.
