Trump’s White House is not ‘savvy enough’ to pull off a ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario: CNN analyst

Several analysts and columnists have suspected that President Donald Trump's recent decision to bomb Iran is politically motivated. The president said in 2011 that former President Barack Obama would wage a war with Iran so that he could get reelected. While that never happened with Obama, it may be what is behind Trump's motivations.

“Donald Trump has always been very good at projecting. Could we call this future projection?” MSNBC's Katy Tur asked the “Meet the Press” panel Friday.

CNN's Anderson Cooper asked his political panel the same question.

"Last year he contradicted the sworn testimony of several of his top intelligence people --  saying also Iran was developing nuclear missiles," Cooper said. "Years ago before he became president he repeatedly suggested President Obama would gin up a war with Iran to win a re-election."

After playing the clip of Trump's remarks, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin explained why that probably isn't true.

"Covering the Trump administration for three years, I can say with confidence they're not savvy enough to pull it off," Rogin said. "There's not that up strategy going on. He does not want a war with Iran and we have a set of policies that are clearly leading us up in escalation to that war. That's not design. That's just policy chaos we've seen overall this time. Remember, President Trump is driven by two foreign policy instinct, right, to get out of the Middle East and also to be really tough on Iran and those two things are completely in contradiction with each other. And that's why you have what we see here today, which is an incoherent policy leading us down a road we can't see the end of, that's the most dangerous thing of all."

Watch the panel discussion below: