President Donald Trump hosted 130 small business owners at the White House Monday in honor of National Small Business Week, but what was supposed to celebrate entrepreneurs quickly derailed into a lengthy diatribe about the U.S. war against Iran, one that journalist Prem Thakker suggested undermined the president’s position.
Trump has repeatedly called his war against Iran a military “excursion” – a potential mix-up with the word “incursion” – and has avoided, in some cases, labeling the conflict as a war.
“I don’t call it a war,” Trump said recently in the Oval Office.
And on Friday, Trump claimed in a letter to congressional leaders that hostilities with Iran had been “terminated.” The president’s remarks on Monday, however, suggest otherwise, Thakker argued in an analysis published Tuesday in Zeteo.
“In White House remarks meant to honor Small Business Week, Trump got his words in a twist. First, he called the US-Israel war on Iran a ‘military operation,’ a ‘little detour’ he claimed was ‘working out very nicely,’” Thakker wrote.
"Seconds later, he called it a ‘war.’ A few minutes later, he complained: ‘We have a war right now and we’re to what, six weeks?’ (Actually, it’s more like nine.) 'They said, 'What’s taking so long!' We were in Vietnam 19 years. We were in Iraq for many years, 10 years, 12 years.’ Trump concluded: ‘We’re in – I call it a mini-war.’”
Trump’s remarks, Thakker argued, not only bolstered the Democrat-led effort to check the president’s war powers, but undermined his claim that hostilities with Iran had been “terminated,” a claim the president made just days before the U.S. military claimed to have sunk seven Iranian boats.
“So much for ‘terminated’ hostilities,” Thakker wrote. “And in case you were wondering about that 60-day deadline for congressional approval of military action… Congress is in recess. Again.”