By Steve Levy
President Donald Trump has exhibited tremendous leadership and great courage in risking all of his political capital by taking the fight to Iran to protect America and the free world from an insane theocracy hellbent on obtaining nuclear weapons.
It would’ve been easier for him to just sit back and pass it off to the next administration, as numerous presidents before him had.
But someone had to be the grown-up and take out Iran’s capacity to build nukes. As stated in prior columns, once they get a nuke, they will use it and we will be their target.
So while Trump may be on the right side of history regarding his bold action, he is losing on the political front in large part because he is so undisciplined, rambling and contradictory in his messaging.
He should learn the lessons regarding the damage he inflicted upon himself prior to the 2020 election with his very poor handling of Covid.
Trump deserved accolades for Operation Warp Speed, which got us a vaccine in an unthinkably short period of time.
But the goodwill that could’ve come from that was superseded by the lack of confidence he gave to the public regarding his daily press conferences.
Trump is a leader by nature — the alpha male — and always wants to be at the microphone. His biggest fault is that he doesn’t know when to turn the mic off. He will sit at a news conference and wear out the most eager reporters. He will go on and on and on, to the point where he will at some juncture say something out of left field that will monopolize the coverage and cloud out the main message he and his administration were trying to portray.
During Covid, the president would just shout out things that came into his head, such as the possibility of using bleach to combat Covid, or that the virus was going to naturally disappear in a couple of months. He lost so much credibility that he made Andrew Cuomo look like a beacon of sobriety, truth and information via his daily briefings that everyone was eager to tune into.
And he’s following the same pattern with his Iran ramblings. His stated goals have included regime change, but then, not regime change. Ensuring that the Strait of Hormuz stays open, but then saying it doesn’t matter. Claiming the war would last only a few weeks, then saying it would last as long as it takes. We won’t have ground troops, but then he deployed potential ground troops to the area.
There certainly is a smart strategy in staying ambiguous from time to time to keep the enemy guessing. But you can’t be so contradictory and all over the place that you lose your own credibility.
The president has to stop making statements simply to move the markets or a short-term poll. Wall Street and polls will reflect positively if, in the end, the United States’ mission is a success.
Trump needs to stay clearly with the one and only ultimate goal there is. That is to deny these crazy religious radicals accessibility to a nuclear weapon that they will use on Americans. Regime change may be a means to that end, but it is not the ultimate end. It may take a few weeks. It may take a few years. It should take as long as it takes, because this is the ultimate existential threat. Bailing out early just to get lower short-term oil prices, or a bump in the polls, or even a win in the midterms will ultimately be seen as a failure if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon.
The American people will understand this threat and what must be done to stop it if we are straightforward and consistent with our messaging.
The president has shown strength and courage in being the one president willing to tackle this issue to protect the free world. If the president wants to win this war, as he must, he needs to become more disciplined with his rhetoric. Stop the 3 a.m. tweets that make you look like you’re in a drunken stupor.
Winston Churchill was one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century because he had the courage to take on our evil opposition, but also had messages of clarity and consistency that rallied his people around his venture.
It’s time for President Trump to embrace those attributes.