Iran believes Trump is a coward
They seem prepared to wait for the next American president.
Donald Trump lost a war he started, the only president in history to accomplish such a feat. Perhaps worse is he continues to lose it in the absence of a hard stop. His challenge now seems to be preventing the American public from knowing the truth about what's happening.
I mean, everyone else seems to know.
According to Politico, Iran believes he "isn’t interested in a serious peace pact and can’t be trusted to uphold one anyway." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that Gulf allies accept the fact that Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. "Persian Gulf energy producers are concluding that Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz will become permanent, disrupting their oil and gas exports and global energy supplies indefinitely," the Journal said Monday.
Courtesy of PBS News.
Unconfirmed reports suggest the Iranians don't see a point in a ceasefire, saying they will wait until the president's term ends in January 2029 before reentering negotiations. "Trump will not reach an agreement with us," said Majid Shakeri, advisor to Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, reportedly. "We will accompany him until his term ends."
Until then, he reportedly said, the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
In a PBS interview, an adviser to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was asked if the plan is to drag out the war and wait until Trump is gone. Yes, Mohammad Reza Naqdi said. "We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so that we can live with security. One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost."
Yet the president lies about the state of the war. On Wednesday, he said:
Worse, the press corps whitewashes those lies. "President Trump is eager to declare success in Iran and Gaza, but he is struggling to impose his will in either conflict," the Times said this week in an effort to find 1,000 ways of saying Trump lost without being obvious about it.
Try as they might, they can't hide the cost of war from the American people. Heather Long reported this week that inflation, which is being driven by high gas prices, which are being driven by the Iran war, has been eating away at hourly wages for four months. Consumer spending is up, as evidenced by credit card transactions, the economist said, but that might be because people are running out of ready cash. "For middle-income and lower-income Americans, this is the key issue," Long said. "There will likely be some belt-tightening ahead."
Meanwhile, the president is planning to spend $900 million on White House renovations, according to the Post. Taxpayers will cover nearly all of it. "The records reveal in the greatest detail yet how the Trump administration has sidestepped Congress and shielded visibility into what would become the most expensive overhaul of the White House in more than 80 years," the Post said. While Donald Trump gets fancy new digs, everyone else gets a pay cut.
The lies would be laughable if they weren't so serious. As Phillips O'Brien wrote Tuesday: "Between 2016 and today, the US has spent almost $9 trillion on defense. It then ran dangerously low in many advanced munitions fighting a country with no air force and navy – after about two months of combat operations. This is an extraordinary scandal." For all those trillions, the US military was creamed by cheap Ukrainian drones during recent war games.
Iranian propaganda, courtesy of persiaboihemmat.
Will the truth about the president losing the war, and continuing to lose the war, break through to a wider consciousness? I'm skeptical but there was a glimmer of hope this week. It was learned that Trump switched planes after last month's NATO summit in Turkey. There were concerns about an assassination attempt, so instead of taking the plane he arrived on, he was taken by way of a catering cart to a different plane, which ferried him to Britain. His media entourage, not knowing of the swap, was left on the original Air Force One as a decoy.
If that wasn't embarrassing enough, the Post reported yesterday that intelligence about the assassination attempt came from Israel, and that the CIA had told the White House that it concluded that the intelligence was weak and not credible. The thinking was that Israel was trying to shape Trump's view of Iran, as well as of Turkey, by feeding him bad intel about a supposed attempt on his life. In any case, Trump took no chances and hid in a food truck. Not only did he once again cave to an Israeli pressure campaign, he looked like a coward.
Trump has always been a coward, but that has been a hard argument to maintain in the wake of his first assassination attempt, after which he raised his fist and shouted "fight, fight, fight!" But hype fades in direct sunlight. His decision to attack Iran has led to a pay cut and rising prices with no end in sight, not to mention an enemy that has concluded that he's a paper tiger so enervated that they can wait him out until the next president comes along.
'Government by organized money'
Independent journalist Leah McElrath reported yesterday that the Trump administration "has permanently removed the requirement for US companies to report who actually owns them — and deleted the existing database. The requirement existed to prevent money laundering and to keep hostile countries and criminal networks from hiding assets."
I have said Trump is a gangster president and the GOP is an organized criminal syndicate.
Well, there you go.
It brings to mind Franklin Roosevelt's speech at the 1936 Democratic convention in which he said "never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred."
But then there's what he said right before that. "We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," Roosevelt said. "They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob."
There you go.
