Alone in the dead of night, a man can fall into bleak thoughts. In the wee, small hours of the morning, he might think about lost loves, mull over great regrets, or wrestle with the inevitability of his own mortality. But Donald Trump, awake and restless in the Florida darkness, apparently consoles himself by imagining a war of liberation in a Middle Eastern nation of 92 million people.
At 2:58 a.m. EST (according to the time stamp on his Truth Social post), the president of the United States wrote: “If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” And then, of course: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
[Arash Azizi: Iranians have had enough]
A man pushing 80, fighting sleeplessness as older people sometimes do, should be expected now and then to send some weird messages on his Jitterbug. He is also entitled to make some typos, as we all do. But this particular senior citizen is the leader of the most powerful country in the world, and he’s implying he’ll use force against a country he has attacked once already. At the least, Americans might expect that when threatening military action, the commander in chief would give his post a quick proofread. (True to sycophantic form, the official White House account transcribed Trump’s warning while also repeating the typo—as if his mistake was intentional.)
For an America Firster, Trump seems to have quite a global military agenda: In the first year of his second term, he has used force in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Congress used to debate authorizing such things, but with the GOP House and Senate now reduced to glorified White House staff offices, Trump need not trifle with such annoyances. Only in Europe and the Pacific does he seem shy about flexing American muscle; after all, those places have genuinely tough customers—China and Russia—that scare him. Fishing boats in the Caribbean and small villages in Nigeria are easier pickings. Now, however, he’s threatening something a lot bigger than lobbing a few cruise missiles.
What’s going on here? The answer is probably: Not much. Trump might be considering another showy round of B-2 strikes, which wouldn’t be much help to people demonstrating in the streets of Tehran. Or he might have just outed some sort of intelligence operation in Iran. Or maybe he just couldn’t sleep. Trump claims “we” are locked and loaded, but America is not ready for a war of national liberation in Iran.
One possibility is that Trump is mulling over his meeting last Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After that meeting, Trump said Iran “may be behaving badly” and warned that if “it” is confirmed—presumably, he means evidence that Iran is rebuilding its nuclear program—the “consequences will be very powerful, maybe more powerful than last time.” Although Netanyahu recently insisted that political transformation in Iran must “come from within” and is “up to the Iranian people,” he has in the past pushed for regime change in Tehran. Perhaps he was selling Trump on being remembered as a great liberator, a world-historical role that would be catnip to a narcissist like the president.
One painful irony here is that Iran needs regime change, and nothing would be better for that nation than its people driving the mullahs from power. Another is that the United States used to support the Iranians with efforts such as the Voice of America Persian service, a low-cost program that brought real news and information to them. But Trump, along with his pick to run VOA, Kari Lake, shut down VOA’s Persian broadcasts last March, an idiotic decision that led to the panicky rehiring of Persian speakers just before the U.S. strikes on Iran last June. (Mass firings since then have effectively shut down VOA.)
Trump’s nocturnal ravings are dangerous. The world may be more or less accustomed to Trump’s bizarre threats, but it is still a big deal when the president of the United States menaces another nation. Intelligence analysts, friend and enemy alike, do not have the luxury to presume that the American commander in chief is just having a bad night. They will ask, as they should, whether something is happening behind the scenes, and whether Trump has blurted out something that might be classified.
The United States and Israel are unlikely to be planning some misbegotten war of liberation in Iran, even if Netanyahu and Trump make ruling out such an adventure impossible. Another danger, however, is that ordinary Iranian citizens might see the president’s message and take it seriously. People protesting for their freedom in various parts of the world, especially during the Cold War, have made the deadly mistake of believing that the American cavalry was just about to come over the top of the hill and save them—in Budapest and Prague, and later in Georgia and Ukraine—and faith in Trump’s faithless promises could lead to serious miscalculations by desperate people.
One of the most powerful statements about the dangers of such false promises and the risks of military intervention came not so long ago from an American leader who resolutely objected to both feckless red lines and the use of force abroad: the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. On October 23, 2019, Trump announced a cease-fire in Syria that he argued averted the need for more comprehensive American military involvement in the region. “We’ve saved a lot of lives,” he said.
And then he took a potshot at his predecessor, Barack Obama, for making a promise that America, in Trump’s view, could never have kept.
Most importantly, we have avoided another costly military intervention that could’ve led to disastrous, far-reaching consequences. Many thousands of people could’ve been killed. The last administration said, “Assad must go.” They could’ve easily produced that outcome, but they didn’t. In fact, they drew a very powerful red line in the sand—you all remember, the red line in the sand—when children were gassed and killed, but then did not honor their commitment as other children died in the same horrible manner.
Gassing children in Syria? A poorly drawn red line that did not merit U.S. action and could lead only to a messy war. Killing peaceful protesters in Tehran? “Locked and loaded!” (The president had few such compunctions in 2020 about hurting peaceful protesters in America, whom he wanted to shoot in the legs.)
[Thomas Wright: What if ‘America first’ appears to work?]
A lot of places on this planet—hellscapes where people are warring, starving, and living under terrifying repression—might benefit from forceful intervention. Few of them will get it, because Americans know that military action, especially to overthrow a regime, is a risky business, and certainly not something to ruminate about in the middle of the night.
In a better time, the leaders of Trump’s own party would do their constitutional duty and constrain the president from speaking—and acting—so recklessly. But the one truth in Trump’s unhinged messages, as in so many of his statements, is that the United States is now led by someone who cannot contain his thoughts or emotions, and who still thinks of the men and women of the U.S. military as little more than his own toy soldiers.
