For Passover: 4 Questions Trump’s Iran War Speech Didn’t Answer

As America is no stranger to war, it’s also no stranger to presidential addresses that justify and report on the wars then ongoing. No matter whether we’re winning or losing, first-strikers or get-struck-firsters, advancing or just holding the line, every previous wartime president has managed to stay on topic.

But not Donald Trump. His Wednesday night speech was notable only in that he repeatedly strayed off topic. That he began with saluting the success of the moon launch several hours earlier was a justifiable digression. Not so his then turning to Venezuela, so he could hail what he termed the success of our operation there, or his repeated shout-outs to the stock market for its year of 51 S&P record highs. Even granting that the topic of every Trump speech is Trump, that theme plays least well in an address supposedly intended to convince his fellow citizens that the course on which he’s set the nation is worth the sacrifices of combat and the travails (in this case, economic) of the home front. Calling his war of choice “brilliant,” as he did last night, doesn’t really make the case for this war’s initiation or continuation, or inspire confidence that it will meet even Trump’s hazy and shifting objectives.

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There was nothing in Wednesday night’s address that Trump hadn’t said before. There were wild misstatements of the threat Iran poses to the U.S., such as his claim that its missiles could soon reach American soil. There were claims that the new Iranian leaders aren’t nearly as dangerous as the old ones, though he didn’t specify who those leaders are and said nothing at all about the talks he says we’ve been having with these less dangerous leaders, or offer any proof that these talks actually exist. All he really said was that it was up to other unnamed nations (European, presumably) to clear the Strait of Hormuz (which we, armed with the world’s most powerful military, haven’t been able to do), that the level of radioactivity around Iran’s uranium enrichment sites was such that they couldn’t go near them for many months, and that unless Iran quickly comes to terms (though he failed to specify what those terms were), we’d bomb them “back to the Stone Age” (resurrecting a line from Gen. Curtis LeMay, the most hawkish supporter of our war on Vietnam, which, of course, Trump sat out).

Cognizant that sending in ground troops is overwhelmingly unpopular with the American public, Trump elected not to mention ground troops at all. Everything could be wrapped up, he did assure us, in two or three weeks, though if Iran has still not come to terms with him, or persists in attacking our forces, he failed to explain how or whether we’d then disengage.

In short, he failed to lay a clear basis for the war’s endgame, even as he’d failed to lay a clear basis for the war’s beginning.

He did try to assure the public that gas prices would come down shortly after the war ended, repeating several times that the U.S., thanks to his “drill, baby, drill” policies, really didn’t need that nasty foreign oil anyway; we had plenty right here at home. Of course, if U.S. gas prices were truly detached from the price of oil on the world market, they wouldn’t have risen abruptly to more than $4 a gallon (and well above $6 in California) in just the 33 days since his war began. And even if Iran, once the dust has settled, permits oil tankers of all nations to flow again through the Strait of Hormuz, it will almost surely, as my colleague David Dayen writes today, install a tollbooth for ships bound for nations they don’t like, which will both raise the price of oil on the world market and net Iran enough money so it can rebuild its arsenal. However “brilliant” Trump may term his war, that’s the kind of brilliance that will boost the price of oil for years to come and correspondingly depress Republican electoral prospects.

To say that Trump’s speech left many questions about his war unanswered leaves it to us to pose and try to answer them. And as Trump delivered his speech on the first night of Passover, even as many thousands of families were in the midst of their seders, please indulge me to pose them in the form of the seder’s Four Questions:

Why is this war different from all our other wars? (Because Trump changes its raison d’être daily.)

Why does the reason for the war change daily? (Because Trump doesn’t really care about policy; he just wants credit for another regime decapitation.)

Why are we causing a global price hike and semi-global shortages of oil and gas? (Because Trump cannot foresee either substantial pushback to or adverse consequences from his actions.)

Why is Trump unable to foresee even perfectly obvious consequences of his actions?

Answering this fourth question compels us to pose one further question, in a multiple-choice format you won’t find in any Passover Haggadah:

Is President Trump

(a) A sociopathic megalomaniacal narcissist?

(b) A narcissistic sociopathic megalomaniac?

(c) A megalomaniacal narcissistic sociopath?

(d) A and B but not C?

(e) B and C but not A?

(f) A and C but not B?

Your answer here: _____.