Trump Erupts in Fury as Damning New Leaks on His War Blunders Hit Hard

[vanessa_ca]

Trump Erupts in Fury as Damning New Leaks on His War Blunders Hit Hard
As media scrutiny intensifies on Trump’s Iran war blunders, an international relations expert explains the extraordinary depths of failure here—and why Trump may now attempt a domestic information crackdown.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump unleashed two crazed tirades at the media over Iran. In one, he angrily accused news organizations of rooting for the United States to “lose the war.” In another, he openly urged his Federal Communications Commission chair to deploy state power against media outlets that displease him. And in a weird rant to reporters, he angrily rebuked other countries for refusing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. All this comes as a New York Times exposé reveals shocking details about Trump’s failings: In internal conversations, he appeared disconnected from basic realities about the strait and unable to grasp why his alienating of our allies is working against him. He also apparently got badly played by Benjamin Netanyahu. We talked to international relations expert Molly McKew, author of a good piece on the stakes of the moment. She explains how Trump’s treatment of allies is backfiring on him, why Trump might attempt a domestic press crackdown, and what to expect next in the war. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/39bB7ap7275oJsA1b0BEO4
Listen on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-blast-with-greg-sargent/id1728152109

https://newrepublic.com/article/207837/trump-erupts-fury-damning-leaks-botching-war-hit-hard

Excerpt of transcript

McKew: I definitely think part of the problem is he has already decided whatever he thinks is reality is reality—that’s a challenge for anyone in charge of anything. We know for sure that the people around him don’t give him the information. They give him the three bullet points written in crayon, or whatever, that he wants to see.

-snip-

McKew: He even sort of says it in that block of text. It’s, Well, I’m just trying to prove the point I’ve always made that absolutely no one is going to show up and help us. Obviously, this is a false narrative, which he presents constantly. He has campaigned on it three times now, and it does resonate with a number of Americans who do believe that the American defense budget and other support outweighs those of our allies. I think that is a misrepresentation of history and the purpose of the alliance and the ways that our allies have responded to our calls for help over the past 30 years.

That aside, this notion that no one’s going to come—and it will prove that they were never going to come and we don’t need anybody anyway—is absolutely ridiculous and juvenile, but also so dangerous and fraught. Everything that we have learned from Russia’s war in Ukraine—what we should have learned from that on what the future of warfare is, on what the current state of warfare is, on how we will need to prepare to fight wars, is that we need allies. We need supply lines. We need integrated systems of interoperability and control. Anybody who walks away from what we should be learning—but clearly aren’t—with we’re just going to go it alone is absolutely missing the point.

And Trump knows this, because not just from the current phase of conflict—whatever we want to call it—in Iran, where we and our allies are shooting incredibly expensive missiles and interceptors at crap Iranian drones and much cheaper Iranian missiles to try to defend our people and facilities from attacks by them. We had this previous year of the same kinds of asymmetric warfare in the Red Sea, where the Houthis are shooting barrels of fireworks at us and we’re using a $4 million missile to stop one from blowing up a NATO ship.

https://newrepublic.com/article/207842/transcript-trump-erupts-damning-leaks-war-blunders-hit-hard

Who would have thunk winging it would be so hard?