President Donald Trump has ignited a freakout within his MAGA base by publicly musing about bombing Iran, but a conservative commentator think he's already revealed his intentions.
The president set a two-week deadline for Iran to agree to end its nuclear enrichment program or face U.S. military action, which The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes argued was evidence that no strike is coming.
"In order to make sense of what’s happening, we need to dive into the tangled mess of Donald Trump’s cognitive dissonance," Sykes wrote. "This is what we need to understand about that fetid stew."
Trump loves to play "generalissimo," Sykes said, but he argued that he's "not a warrior president."
"He revels in the trappings and parade of power; but if he wages war, he wants it to be here in America, not abroad," Sykes wrote. "He would love Day One of the the War. Not so much the Days After. He wants the show, but not the mess."
The president seems fascinated by dropping a so-called bunker buster bomb on Iran's nuclear facilities, which Sykes noted seems to be at odds with his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize.
"Trump enjoys the attention he’s getting now; and craves being in control," Sykes wrote. "But the fallout from war is uncontrollable. There are 40,000 American troops in harm’s way; Iran could blockade the Strait of Hormuz."
The president knows his base won't likely desert him, no matter what he ends up deciding, but Sykes said he already signaled the likely outcome by declaring he'll make the decision "within the next two weeks."
"Yeah, that was a tell," he wrote. "In TrumpWorld, 'two weeks' is a punchline — an eye-rolling cliche that Trump rolls out with absurd regularity whenever he wants to dodge an issue or fudge a decision. It’s 'where promises go to die.'"