Welcome to Monday’s edition of Washington Secrets. The news is dominated by Iran, so we have a look at President Donald Trump’s unique approach to big decisions, which revolves around his extraordinary belief in his own ability. There is the moment Trump almost gave away his plan on Friday, and Gavin Newsom tells all about last year’s infamous phone call …
Donald Trump has told people around him that public opinion will turn against him for launching strikes on Iran but will rally decisively behind him once a quick victory proves him right.
Multiple sources, including current and former advisers, say the impact of the raid to capture Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and strikes on Iran in his first term emboldened him to act now, secure in the knowledge that everything else will fall into place.
It is a confidence not shared by advisers. Reuters reports that he shrugged off advice that strikes would cause political problems for Republicans in November’s midterm elections.
But sources who understand Trump’s thinking told Secrets he has no doubts that it will work out.
“I’ve seen him get to a place where his feeling is, ‘F*** it, these guys are unreal,'” said a former Iran adviser, describing Trump’s approach to negotiating with Tehran. “There’s an element where if he’s frustrated enough, then he’s like, ‘The politics will be OK.'”
It is a bold gamble, a bet that he can use air power and decisive military might to achieve U.S. objectives in an abbreviated time frame.
The first half of his thinking has already come to pass. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday found that only 1 in 4 people supported strikes, and about half concluded the president was too willing to use military force.
Now he has to seal the deal and get the job done before the U.S. casualty list grows longer and public sentiment sours further.
Last week, with the decision to strike Iran taken, Trump hosted TV anchors and select journalists at the White House for lunch ahead of the State of the Union.
One of those present explained the thinking.
Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of Breitbart, said the lunch was off-the-record, so he had to be careful in what he said.
But he still told The Charlie Kirk Show that “his perspective, from what I’m able to glean from my conversations with him, is that people tend to be very negative when things happen initially, and then if they’re successful, they all of a sudden get on board.
“It’s kind of like people remembering they were at Woodstock when they weren’t … that sort of thing.”
One of the episodes that had a big impact on Trump was his 2020 strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for spreading Tehran’s unconventional warfare through the Middle East.
Simone Ledeen, who was principal director for special operations at the Pentagon at the time, said the president had heard all the concerns before.
“Initially, everyone freaked out about that, and were calling it World War III, which never materialized,” she said. “And by the way, the president was confident, at that time, that that would not materialize.”
Alex Gray, who was on the National Security Council, said voices even inside the administration warned that it would plunge the U.S. into an Iraq-style quagmire.
“The result is I think it has given people a sense that if the United States is smart in how it engages, and if the United States is surgical and has limited objectives, you know, we’re not trying to reshape a country and install freedom and democracy,” he said, “but if relatively bounded and grounded and what we’re trying to accomplish, we have a lot more agency in these situations than the post Iraq conventional wisdom.”
Team Trump is confident that public opinion will come around.
Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz told Secrets: “President Trump is the greatest foreign policy president of my lifetime, and he has proven that time and again. The so-called TV ‘experts’ always panic, but Trump is always proven right in the end. I trust him fully.”
Trump has also kept an ace up his sleeve. He has been coy about the objectives of the strikes, which means he can define what counts as the end and what counts as a win, said Richard Fontaine, who was on George W. Bush’s NSC.
“Instead Trump has preserved the flexibility to adapt based on how things unfold,” Fontaine wrote in a thread discussing the strategy. “He could stop in a couple of days and say the nuke and missile threat is taken care of and it’s now over to the Iranian people.
“He could instead continue for weeks, aiming at decisive regime change. It’s a different approach to war.”
It is the opposite of the old Colin Powell doctrine, Fontaine added, first building a national consensus behind the war, deploying a ground component as part of an overwhelming force, and communicating a clear objective.
Which of course comes with Powell’s Iraq-era Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.
Secrets sees a new version when it comes to Trump’s approach to managing public opinion and staying out of foreign quagmires: You win it, then you own it.
How Trump almost went public with the decision
During a Pentagon briefing Monday morning, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed that Trump gave the order to launch strikes at 3:38 p.m. on Friday.
The president was aboard Air Force One at the time. No wonder it was one of the rare occasions that he didn’t head to the press cabin at the back of the plane to answer questions.
After landing in Texas less than an hour later, a member of the travelling press pool shouted a question. “How close are you to launching strikes?” he asked.
“I’d rather not tell you,” the response came. “You would have had the greatest scoop in history, right?”
That response, and its unusual tenses, looks rather different in hindsight.
The time Trump ran the ‘Newscum’ nickname past Newsom
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has described how last year he telephoned Trump in the early hours of the morning to discuss plans to send thousands of troops into Los Angeles. He told the British Rest is Politics podcast how he had a missed call from an unknown Palm Beach number late at night on the West Coast and then called him back.
“And it begins with the following, as God is my witness, he goes, ‘Hey, hey, yeah,'” according to Newsom’s account.
“I mean, this is 10 o’clock my time, p.m. He goes, ‘What do you think of Newscum?'”
“The nickname Newscum. He calls me Newscum, worst governor. He goes, ‘Pretty original, right?'”
They talked for 19 minutes, he said, including going over the Trump versus Kamala Harris presidential debate, and the number of MAGA hats the president had sold. Los Angeles is not mentioned in Newsom’s telling.
He says this was the moment he decided to take a more confrontational approach. And the call later became infamous, when Newsom sued Fox News for allegedly misrepresenting its timing and accusing him of lying about it.
You can hear the whole interview by clicking here.
Lunchtime reading
Justice arrives for Tehran’s terrorism: Former Vice President Mike Pence writes for the Washington Examiner. “Excessive restraint applied before victory is secured will be mistaken for weakness, which will only invite further aggression,” he says. “History has shown that peace is preserved not by wishful thinking, but by American strength.”
You know what? Maybe the time is right for an AOC presidential bid: There is growing chatter that there is no better time for the liberal Left to propel one of its own to the Democratic presidential nomination. Victory in New York and a cost-of-living crisis mean a populist Democrat may be ideally placed to win in 2028. If Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is too old at 84, maybe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 36, is the best bet. You may have missed this piece, but it offers a decent take on debate on the Left.
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