Trump’s Iran speech was just as useless as I thought it would be

If you didn’t see the 20 minute speech Trump gave yesterday in prime time, depriving Americans in several time zones of some actual quality television watching, congratulations. You saved yourself from 1/3 of an hour of what amounted to Trump reading from his recent Truth Social posts. I listened to the speech as I was driving home from my Tai Chi class, so I didn’t waste any time on the speech.

In short, Trump said nothing new, intelligent, or useful. He lied about all kinds of things (no big surprise). He didn’t articulate a clear reason for why he started his war with Iran. And he failed to describe what would constitute victory in the war.

I kept waiting for him to make some news that would justify every major network carrying the speech. But nope, Trump didn’t say that he was winding down the Iran war. He also didn’t say that he was continuing the Iran war. He did say that Iran would be struck harder than ever in the next few weeks. However, that statement could be just an attempt to get Iran to negotiate, something Iran has shown little interest in.

A piece by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic has an apt title: “Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech.”

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics (including me) have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

…If the president meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)

The president seems lost. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.

Trump said that if Iran doesn’t negotiate he would bomb the country “back to the Stone Age,” destroying civilian infrastructure such as electrical power plants and desalinization facilities that supply water to Iranians. This statement really bothered me.

Such an attack almost certainly would be a war crime. What Trump threatened to do is exactly what Russia’s dictator, Putin, has been doing to the Ukrainian people: leaving much of the country without heat or electricity with his missile and drone attacks, along with strikes on apartment buildings and other non-military targets.

It’s beyond embarrassing that the President of the United States is acting like Vladimir Putin in his desire to inflict maximum pain on the Iranian people.

In his first speech to the nation about Iran, Trump called for Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government. But leaving aside the inconvenient truth that Iranians have no ability to do this — no weapons, no internet, no organized resistance to Iran’s government — bombing Iran “back to the Stone Age” is no way for the United States to win the hearts and minds of the Iranian people.

A New York Times news analysis, “How Trump Boxed Himself In on Iran,” says:

Mr. Trump loves the Stone Age reference, which Beth Sanner, his C.I.A. briefer in the first administration, notes is often associated with Gen. Curtis LeMay, who argued for destroying all of North Vietnam’s infrastructure to force it into surrender. Mr. Trump’s line was immediately picked up by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who posted five words after the speech: “Back to the Stone Age.”

It sounds tough, and fits with Mr. Hegseth’s constant refrains about returning the U.S. military to “maximum lethality.” But it also underscored what was missing from the speech. Mr. Trump never described a new vision for Iran, or the prospect that its people, in their revulsion toward their own brutal government, might embrace democracy or seek to rekindle a long-ago partnership with the United States.

In fact, Mr. Trump never talked about diplomatic or economic inducements, such as sanctions relief or Western investment in the oil sector, for Iran to give up its nuclear program or to restrict the size and range of its missile arsenals. He never mentioned the idea of sending Vice President JD Vance to negotiate directly with the Iranians, though the administration has been working on the possibility for more than a week.

The speech was all about hammers, with no mention of incentives.