LEFT: U.S. President Donald Trump walks towards the Marine One to travel to Iowa, from the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 27, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
RIGHT: U.S. President Barack Obama before the inauguration at the White House in Washington, U.S. January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
As President Donald Trump appears poised to “pull the trigger” on launching a full-scale war with Iran at any moment, some of his top officials have been working behind the scenes to push the president into launching an attack by drawing comparisons to former President Barack Obama, Zeteo reported Monday.
The Trump administration has mobilized a colossal military force near Iran, the largest since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, all in the hopes of pressuring its leaders into making a deal on reducing its weapon capabilities. According to Vice President JD Vance, however, peace talks have reached an impasse over Iranian leadership’s refusal to "acknowledge" some of Trump’s “red lines.”
Now, as U.S. aircraft carriers and fighter jets swarm the Middle East, “warmongers” around Trump are hoping to manipulate the president by stoking fears that he may be inferior to Obama, Rolling Stone reporter Asawin ‘Swin’ Suebsaeng told Zeteo, based on his discussions with a Trump advisor.
“Trump advisers who want a war with Iran have been stressing to the president that Tehran has made a mockery of Trump’s ‘red lines’ for weeks now,” wrote Zeteo reporter Andrew Perez in the outlet’s report Monday.
“They’ve been playing to his ego by comparing the situation to when President Barack Obama refused to use the military in Syria, despite stating the murderous Assad regime would be crossing a ‘red line’ if it used chemical weapons on its own people. The warmongers are making the case to Trump – as one Trump adviser paraphrased it to Swin – ‘you gotta have bigger balls than Barack Hussein Obama.’”