Last night, April 1, President Trump made a roughly 15-minute televised speech to the nation in which he purportedly outlined the progress of America’s war with Iran. While the speech itself was a tangled mess of lies, distortions, and outright inventions, the following four main points could, with some effort, be extricated from the verbiage:
– Iran has lost the war in every conceivable respect. Nevertheless, the war will continue for another 2-3 weeks.
– The point of the entire affair has been to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which it would have inevitably and invariably launched at the US. This mission has now been accomplished.
– Notwithstanding its obvious loss, it is now up to the Iranians to come to the negotiating table and duly surrender. Failing that, Iran’s electricity generating plants, all of them, will be destroyed, and Iran in general will be bombed “back into the Stone Age”, though not its oil infrastructure, so that it could continue to supply oil to the global markets.
– The Strait of Hormuz will “open up” by itself the moment the war ends. In any event, it should be other nations, not the US, who should undertake any operations to force or keep it open.
This is drivel. As some have pointed out, it simply recycles Trump’s recent spate of social media postings, and not in an especially artful fashion.
So why the speech? Why the primetime address? What did the White House hope to accomplish with this?
In principle, it could be a White House gambit to keep the financial and oil markets relatively calm, by repeating the same slogans in their general direction but from a much more visible bully pulpit. Alternatively, it could be that in Trump’s mind, the trouble isn’t with the message, but that it isn’t being heard widely or loudly enough.
What struck me several hours later, however, is how much this address resembles in general form Trump’s election speeches. The latter are almost universally characterised by a laser-like focus on a relatively narrow constituency – his supporters, who will believe anything he says irrespective of the objective reality; an attempt to paint a complete alternate reality for said constituency, one in which they, through Trump, are constantly “winning” at every conceivable thing; a vague promise of even more “winning” – “soon”, just beyond the hypothetical horizon; and absolutely nothing concrete in terms of policy actions or proposals. Throw in a little ad-lib and assorted mannerisms that would not have looked out of place on a 1960s Borscht Belt stand-up comedian, as well as a rhetorical style emphasizing repetition of simple, easy to remember words and slogans1, and that is the sum total of all of Trump’s electioneering.
How is last night’s address any different?
And given that throughout his entire political career Trump has never, in my memory, deviated from the principle of speaking only to his direct constituency, while ignoring all other voter blocks – was last night’s speech really directed at the nation, or even at the financial markets? Or was it Trump’s attempt to prop up the morale of his voter base, which he might view as his only means of political survival as the war goes pear-shaped and the US economy begins to visibly suffer? Feeding the echo chamber, as it were, because of course after Trump was finished a whole slew of commentators, bloggers et al. took up his message.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I suspect that Trump is really thinking not so much about Iran, but rather about the November Midterm elections, and about the possibility of war-related impeachment afterwards, or even before. To survive as president, he needs the Republicans in the Senate to toe the line, at least most of them; and for that to happen, they need to fear a MAGA voter backlash should they voice their opposition. And this, in turn, requires Trump’s supporters to remain as firmly as possible ensconced in his illusionary world of “winning”, while the rest of us…simply do not matter to him one way or the other.
Footnotes:- Joseph Goebbels would have approved…[↩]