Playing the Victim

Speaking to journalists at the White House today, where he was hosting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, US President Donald Trump announced that he had decided to start a war to prevent Iranian attacks.

“We were negotiating with these lunatics, and I thought they were going to attack. They were going to attack if we hadn’t done it.“

When asked if Israel had forced him to do this, Trump remarked, “Maybe I forced Israel to do this.”

It’s quite obvious that Iran wasn’t going to attack — no country, faced with significantly superior forces, would strike first unless it had a trump card in its hand, namely nuclear weapons. So in this case, Trump is deliberately misleading the world, but that’s not surprising — it would be much more unexpected if he had said, “I just wanted to bomb them.”

But the most interesting thing, of course, is Trump’s statement that it wasn’t Israel that forced him to go to war with Iran, but the other way around — he forced Israel. This most likely serves as a crisis management measure designed to mitigate the sharply negative reaction of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement that Israel actually forced the US to go to war.

“We knew there would be actions by Israel” against Iran, Rubio told journalists on Monday. “We knew that this would provoke an attack on American forces” by the Iranian regime. And we knew that if we didn’t strike preemptively before they started these attacks, we would suffer heavy losses… And then we would all have to answer questions about why we knew about this and didn’t act.”

Most media outlets interpreted these words as follows: The US failed to prevent its ally — a much smaller country that America arms, funds, and protects — from attacking Iran on Saturday. Therefore, the US also had to strike Iran.

Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire wrote on X social media:

“So he’s basically telling us that we’re at war with Iran because Israel forced us to do it. That’s essentially the worst thing he could have said.”