THE SPEECH: President Donald Trump’s address to the nation at the one-month mark of the Iran war was not his trademark high-energy stemwinder. Instead, the 18-and-a-half-minute speech, largely read from a teleprompter, was a measured recitation of many of the talking points Trump made over the past weeks, including passages he read almost verbatim from his social media posts on Truth Social.

It was a tossed salad of contradictions. On the one hand, Trump said of Iran, “Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed.” At the same time, he blamed the high price of gas on Iran “launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers and neighboring countries.”