At an event in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump took a moment to publicly praise Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. military leaders, at which point the president briefly added a five-word phrase, in apparent reference to the war in Iran.
“It’s a perfect, amazing thing,” Trump said.
A variety of words come to mind when describing the latest U.S. military offensive in the Middle East, but “perfect” isn’t one of them. We are, after all, talking about a war that has included, among other things, an apparent American missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed 175 civilians, most of whom were children.
Nearly a month into the war, U.S. service members have been killed and injured, the world has struggled to respond to a predictable energy crisis, violence has spread well beyond Iranian borders and Iran’s leadership remains largely intact.
Marveling at the White House’s lack of planning and apparent inability to think strategically, The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie noted, “Neither Trump nor his aides, according to recent reporting, planned for Iran to target shipping and close the Strait of Hormuz. They also do not seem to have planned for serious and sustained retaliation against America’s Gulf state allies. They did not plan for an energy crisis and the potential disruption to the global economy, and they did not plan for America’s European allies to, by and large, reject their call for support.”
By all appearances, Trump expected a replay of Venezuela: Target a foe quickly and overwhelmingly, declare victory and move on. When Iran proved to be a very different kind of adversary, the Republican administration apparently had no idea what to do next.
But hearing the president use the word “perfect” in reference to the war generated obvious questions about why he would say such a thing, but there are also some less obvious questions, including about whether Trump actually knows and understands what’s happening in the war he started for reasons he’s struggled to explain.
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Steve Benen
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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