Reporters photographing a display for “Midnight Hammer,” the name of the American operation to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites, during a news conference on Sunday.
Before asserting that Iran and Israel had agreed to a cease-fire, President Trump spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Iranian officials, with Qatar helping to mediate.
Over the past week, President Trump claimed he would make a decision about Iran in “two weeks” and repeatedly pressed it to come to the negotiating table. But the swiftness of the attack on Saturday night suggests that plans were underway after Israel began its bombing campaign against Iran a little more than a week ago.
When Israel began its assault on Iran, President Trump kept his distance. But within days he was on a path that led to an extensive bombing mission aided by political and military ruses.
Vice President JD Vance earlier this month. “I think we set that program back substantially,” he said on Sunday, “and we did it without endangering the lives of the American pilots.”
A B-2 stealth bomber assigned to Whiteman Air Force Base in 2020. It is not unusual to shift military assets into position to provide options to the president and military commanders even if they are not ultimately deployed.
The war in Iran is exactly the kind of Middle East entanglement that President Trump’s anti-interventionist base believed he was bitterly opposed to, because he said he was.
President Trump spent the first months of his term holding back Israel’s push for an assault on Iran’s nuclear program. With the war underway, his posture has gyrated as he weighs sending in the U.S. military.
President Trump spent the first months of his term holding back Israel’s push for an assault on Iran’s nuclear program. With the war underway, his posture has gyrated as he weighs sending in the U.S. military.
The president is still the attention-loving, payback-obsessed main character that he was in 2015. But his four years out of office drove him to turn grievance into vengeance.
President Trump, with the backing of a Supreme Court decision last year that granted him broad immunity for official acts, is doing some of the things he wanted to during his first term.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, President Trump made no distinction between the right to peacefully assemble that is guaranteed by the First Amendment and engaging in violence and vandalism.
Connexion
