Trump’s F-Bomb Over Iran

Of all the charges Donald Trump has released over the last week, perhaps the most explosive one was the F-bomb he dropped in an impromptu press conference on the White House lawn. Expressing frustration over Israel and Iran breaking the ceasefire he had negotiated, the U.S. president fumed, “We basically have two countries who have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.”

Never has an American president spoken so crudely in public. Trump was mad, bigly. Could it be because he had received the preliminary analysis from his own Defense Intelligence Agency, which found that the heavy U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities had likely not set that country’s atomic bomb program back by much? 

The rest of the world got the news hours later, in a leak that seemed designed to undermine Trump as he headed to the NATO summit in The Hague. After all, Trump had boasted earlier that the US bunker busters and other bombs had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities. If Trump’s own intelligence services were telling him otherwise, no wonder he had a short fuse. 

On American social media, loyal MAGA troopers attacked those who took the leaked DIA report seriously, insinuating that they were media dupes, disloyal, or idiots. Funny, but this is the same tack taken back in 2002 by George W. Bush backers, angry at others for doubting the president’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I should know, because I was among the conservative pundits attacking the doubters … who, in the end, were right. 

After the Iraq debacle, neither Donald Trump nor any other U.S. president gets the benefit of the doubt. I hope Trump is right in his maximalist assessment of the bombing’s impact on Iran. But he’s got to show some evidence. 

If, however, Iran’s A-bomb manufacturing facilities survived the bunker-busters—the strongest conventional bombs in the world—then America faces a terrible choice. The U.S.-Israel attack has made it clear to Iran that the only way to defend itself successfully is by acquiring nuclear weapons, and getting them fast. If it can still build the things, it must do so rapidly. Therefore, the only sure way the U.S. can make sure Iran cannot and will not do so is by dismantling the facilities from within—with boots on the ground.

The American people, wearied from two decades of failed wars in the Middle East, will not stand for that. In fact, Trump’s Iran hawkishness threatens to tear apart his MAGA coalition, given that many of them supported Trump because they judged him less likely to continue America’s forever wars. 

On Wednesday, the president posted to his Truth Social account a comedy video showing B-2 Stealth bombers flying, set to a parody version of a famous Beach Boys’ hit. “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” the song went. In 2007, on the presidential campaign trail, Republican uber-hawk John McCain made the same Beach Boys joke. Trump used to criticize McCain, who died in 2018, as an example of unwise American internationalist aggression. Plus ça change…

In fairness, Iran arguably left the president no choice. The last few U.S. presidents, of both parties, have explicitly said that the Islamic Republic cannot be permitted to develop nuclear weapons. Unlike Iraq, which posed no real threat to America, its allies, and its interests, Iran does, and long has. The successful Israeli strikes on Iran gave the U.S. its best opportunity ever to end Iran’s nuclear program—and Trump took it. Given that Europe would be within target range of Iranian nuclear missiles, it’s no surprise that German chancellor Friedrich Merz and NATO chief Mark Rutte expressed support for Trump’s bombing the Iranians. 

If Trump is forced to consider ground action to disarm the ayatollahs, he will be inserting the United States into its third major Mideastern conflict so far this century. The first one—in Afghanistan—ended at last with the U.S. withdrawing and the Taliban back in power. The second succeeded in turning Iraq not into a liberal democracy, but into a Shia-led de facto Iranian ally. A real war against Iran would pit an already-overstretched United States against a country of 92 million that has a large army. 

As frustrated as the Iranian people might be with their Islamist dictators, nobody should count on them welcoming Western invaders. In 2002, rallying support for the coming Iraq invasion, neoconservative Washington defense insider Kenneth Adelman said that the operation would be a “cakewalk” for the United States—meaning, it would be easy. In 2003, on the eve of war, Vice President Dick Cheney predicted in an NBC News interview that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops as “liberators”. 

In this clip from a Joe Rogan interview during last fall’s campaign, JD Vance denounced Dick Cheney and the entire Iraq War project, the latter of which he called “the biggest world-historical catastrophe in the history of the United States of America.” Now Vance, whose own military service in Iraq turned him from neocon to realist, sits in Cheney’s seat, serving a president whose decision to bomb Iran stands to draw a weakened America back into the region militarily. Unlike Iraq, which Vance correctly described as an “unforced” error, Iran really is a threat. Nevertheless, as the street-talking Commander-in-Chief from Queens might put it, history is a bitch.

The bitch has many faces. Tuesday, New York City voters gave Zohran Mamdani a decisive victory in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary—a result that means Mamdani is all but guaranteed to win the leadership of America’s largest city in November. Mamdani is a socialist Muslim immigrant cheerleader for the Palestinians who wants to “globalize the intifada.” Think about it: almost a quarter-century after Muslim terrorists brought down the World Trade Center, slaughtering over 2,000 New Yorkers, the city’s voters have set on a course to mayoral victory a radical left-wing Muslim who openly supports disruptive violence in the service of an Islamic cause. Indeed, intifada-globalizers at the city’s Columbia University created a horrifying climate of fear, intimidation, and antisemitism there.

The 9/11 attacks led directly to the devastating Iraq war and the costly (between $1 trillion and $2 trillion) folly of nation-building in Afghanistan. After all that American blood and treasure spent to avenge the attacks and to prevent them from happening again, New Yorkers chose a radical leftist Muslim cheerleader for intifada to lead them.

Is there any wonder that a sizable portion of MAGA wants nothing to do with the Middle East now? The greatest risk Trump runs is that these people would come to believe that Trump himself has betrayed them. If that happens, the polarization and radicalization of American politics would enter febrile territory unseen since the 1860s, when the U.S. embarked on a civil war. 

No wonder Donald Trump dropped the F-bomb over the Israel-Iran situation. One has to hope and pray that it’s the last American bomb dropped over Iran. That doesn’t seem likely.