President Donald Trump says the United States is winning the war with Iran even as thousands of additional American troops deploy to the Middle East.
He has pilloried other countries for not helping the US, only to say later he does not need their assistance. He has twice delayed deadlines for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has both threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s energy plants if the vital waterway remains largely shuttered and said the U.S. was “not affected” by the closure.
At one point this month, Trump said one of his predecessors — who, he strongly suggested, was a Democrat — privately told him he wished he had taken similar action against Iran. Representatives for every living former president quickly denied that such a conversation happened.
As the war entered its second month on Saturday, Trump’s penchant for embellishments, exaggerations and falsehoods is being tested in an environment where the stakes are much higher than an isolated political fight.
A president who has long embraced bluster and salesmanship to shape narratives and focus attention is confronting the unpredictability of war.
Leon Panetta, who served Democratic presidents as defense secretary, CIA director and White House chief of staff, said he has “seen enough wars where truth becomes the first casualty.”
“It’s not the first administration that has not told the truth about war,” he said. “But the president has made it kind of a very standard approach to almost any question to in one way or another kind of lie about what’s really happening and basically describe everything as fine and that we’re winning the war.”
Michael Rubin, a historian at the American Enterprise Institute who worked as a staff adviser on Iran and Iraq at the Pentagon from 2002 to 2004, said Trump is “the first president of any party in recent history that hasn’t self-constrained to live within rhetorical boundaries.”
“So of course it creates a great deal of confusion,” he said.
