President Donald Trump’s Thursday press conference began the way many of his press conferences do these days: with a predictable jab at former President Barack Obama. “Barack Hussein Obama gave Iran a nuclear deal,” Trump said, emphasizing, as he often does, Obama’s middle name. “Basically he chose Iran over Israel and others that didn’t want him to do it.”
After railing briefly against the Democrats, Trump turned the conference over to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who explained that the United States negotiates “with bombs,” as Trump nodded in and out of sleep beside him. It was a fitting scene for an administration helmed by a president nearing 80, who has effectively handed control of the Iran war to a former Fox News co-host previously accused by colleagues of habitual drunkenness, sexism, and financial mismanagement.
The claim that Obama “chose Iran over Israel” is, by every metric, as absurd as Trump’s second term has itself become. Obama certainly had his flaws. He failed to adequately punish the financial institutions that enabled the 2008 financial crisis. His authorization of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen resulted in civilian casualties and raised questions about presidential authority. And Obama’s ill-conceived intervention in Libya, which toppled Muammar Gaddafi, led to a power vacuum that only further escalated tensions in the Middle East.
Arriving in Washington boasting the familiar, righteous dogmas of progressive liberalism, Obama was no saint. But what he lacked as a unifier, he more than made up for by keeping the U.S. out of another unnecessary war in the Middle East. Obama correctly recognized that military strikes against Iran would result in regional escalation and only delay Iran’s nuclear program by a few years, a sober analysis that the Trump administration appears to have disregarded. While Iran is firing fewer missiles than at any point during the four-week war, their strikes are hitting with greater accuracy than ever.
More concerning is the reality on the ground in Iran. A new report published by Reuters Friday morning suggests that U.S. intelligence can only confirm that a third of Iran’s missile arsenal has been destroyed. And news out of Washington isn’t encouraging. Trump is reportedly considering deploying another 10,000 troops to the Middle East after already ordering 5,000 Marines to the region in March. More worrying yet is the fact that senior aides inside the White House are now admitting the president has grown “a little bored with Iran.”
Trump has continually argued that the war is a necessary “excursion” to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb while extinguishing the threat that radical Islam poses to the West. When asked how bombing Iran helps young voters entering the worst job market in years, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump “is doing it for young people so we are no longer threatened by a rogue, terrorist regime in the Middle East.”
But contrary to Leavitt’s statement, it is young people who appear most skeptical of efforts to dismantle the Iranian regime. In an interview at CPAC on Thursday, one Gen Z voter predicted the Republican Party is going to lose big in the midterms. “A lot of people I knew who just voted for Trump because they thought it was cool… are just now being like, ‘I can’t stand the guy,’” Michael Reaud, a youthful CPAC attendee, told CNN during the GOP’s premier conference in Dallas this week.
Polling backs up Reaud’s claims. In new data released by the Pew Research Center this week, 84 percent of Republicans aged 65 and older approve of how Trump is handling the Iran war. But among Republicans aged 18 to 29, that number drops to 49 percent. It shows a widening gap between the interventionist maxims of the Boomer generation and the antiwar attitudes of Millennials and Zoomers who grew up during the fallout from 9/11, the Iraq War, and the 2008 financial crisis.
Though the administration presents a united front during press appearances, senior White House officials are quietly expressing their disapproval not only of the war but the way it has been propagandized. “The war videos are cringe and disrespectful and gross,” a senior White House official said of memes that combine films such as Top Gun and cartoons such as SpongeBob Squarepants with unclassified videos of bombs striking Iranian targets. “It makes me feel embarrassed.”
Even more bizarre are a series of pixelated posts published by the White House X account over the last 48 hours. The cryptic, blurred images come at a particularly difficult time for Trump, who has seen his approval numbers tank to term lows amid soaring energy prices and a housing market on life support. (In the end, it turned out the posts were teasers for a new White House app.) The war has only exacerbated the PR issues. But when speaking to the press, Trump simply dismisses the polls as fake before promptly attacking journalistic organizations that have served the American public for more than a century.
One place Trump has found favor is on Fox News, where Trump joined The Five on Thursday night by phone. Trump critic Jessica Tarlov was unsurprisingly absent from her usual spot in the cast on Thursday night. That didn’t stop Trump from lobbing a jab at the 42-year-old political strategist, stating “the show would be better without her.” Trump’s comment revealed what many of us already know about the man; he lives to be celebrated and objects to anyone who dares question his decisions, either political and personal.
The quip about Tarlov is indicative of a presidency insulated from reality. On Wednesday, NBC reported that Trump is being shown daily video montages produced by U.S. military officials that act as a distilled highlight reel of explosions. That imagery is striking not just for its content, but for how it reveals a presidency consumed by spectacle. While everyday Americans struggle to finance housing, fill the tank, and pay off long-term debt, Trump continues his regular weekends at Mar-a-Lago, where the distance between his top-heavy political decision-making and its everyday consequences appears especially stark.
Such concerns rarely appear to rank as a priority when Trump speaks publicly. On Thursday, instead of detailing the objectives of the war or explaining how it directly helps the working-class coalition that helped propel him to power, Trump pivoted to more criticism of Obama. “President Obama, he wasn’t a smart man,” Trump said after bragging to reporters that he “aced” a recent cognitive test. “I know all about him. He wasn’t a smart man. Highly overrated.”
And though there is merit to the claim that Obama was “highly overrated,” Trump appears to be vastly overrated himself by the sycophants leading his administration. He has bungled this war and made a mess of our standing among allies near and far. He has constantly shifted the goalposts on the objectives of the war and the timeline for a potential ceasefire deal. And now the latest reports trickling out of the “new” Iranian regime—which by all measurable standards is more radical and hardline than the one he bombed to oblivion—suggest that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has yet to agree to negotiations.
In truth, Trump’s war in Iran has led America down an extremely narrow path, without the sort of easy off-ramps that would provide relief for the tens of millions of families seeking the bare bones of an American dream once promised. And though Trump often assigns blame to former President Joe Biden for every issue occurring during Trump’s second term, it was Obama who was handed an America in deep, sudden trauma brought on by feckless, unnecessary wars in the Middle East.
Trump promised to end such foreign policy mistakes. Instead, he allowed himself to be coaxed into a conflict that even the “highly overrated” Obama knew better than to engage in. Trump’s second term has not just fallen short of his promises, it has made the restraint of Barack Obama look, by comparison, distinctly presidential.
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