The Dow Jones is up 1,000 points today on news that Iran is willing to make a deal, President Donald Trump might terminate Operation Epic Fury prematurely, and yet War Secretary Pete Hegseth insists that the U.S. will “negotiate with bombs” until the regime cries uncle.
It’s chaos in the White House! Again! More seriously, before anybody gets all panicky, I’m certain that only two of those things are true. Can you guess which ones?
Yeah, don’t believe that Trump is about to quit Epic Fury, and please read on to learn why.
Markets are way up, and oil is down a bit, even as Hegseth said that the “upcoming days will be decisive,” with strikes continuing against a “fragmenting” regime. Meanwhile, Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday that he’s in “serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran.”
Caps in original because Trump.
I’m putting my marker down on this one: Trump’s Truth Social comments were all about widening existing divisions within Tehran and do not indicate that he’s considering a halt to Epic Fury.
That’s because Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has no authority to negotiate anything, and neither does any other civilian figure. Indications are that the radical Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) calls the shots, and the civilian government is basically powerless.
Pezeshkian is supposed to have said in an intercepted phone call: “I want to be involved in the negotiations with the U.S. Without a quick deal, our entire economy will collapse in 3 weeks,” only to have IRGC chief Ahmad Vahidi tell him, “That’s exactly why you can’t be involved. You’ll give up everything for a deal.”
So Trump blusters about some “new and more reasonable regime,” and suddenly Vahidi wonders how many potential rivals in the civilian government he needs to round up and shoot. Sowing similar divisions worked brilliantly for the Israelis last year during the 12-Day War, if you’ll recall.
Nevertheless, if you read the mainstream media — which I’m paid to do, so what’s your excuse? — you’d think it was the Trump administration that’s in chaos.
I have never, not in 45 years of watching politics (I was a weird kid), seen an administration that moves more smoothly and all in the same direction than Trump 47. Yet second-guessing Trump remains all the rage.
So here’s the thing about that. Trump says a lot of stuff — always has — sometimes seemingly contradictory. But that’s all part of the game. Trump might say one thing to keep the markets from totally panicking, another to keep the regime in Tehran guessing*, and another to try and drag our so-called allies into protecting their own interests for a change.
*Whoever the regime might consist of today.
During the run-up to a big negotiation or during a war — when Winston Churchill said that “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies” — taking what Trump says at face value shows a deep resistance to learning.
That’s why our friends on the Left wet their knotted panties every time Trump says anything. Or as Salena Zito put it a decade ago, “When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
In Tehran, whoever is in charge might want to take Trump both seriously and literally. My friend and Hot Air colleague Ed Morrissey wrote earlier today that Trump’s “ambiguity may be accelerating internal divisions in the regime’s top ranks, with everyone sensing the music’s about to end and that chairs will be in short supply when it does.”
But there’s no music playing in Tehran these days — only the sound of incoming bombs and missiles, followed by lovely secondary explosions of IRGC munitions going off.
Vahidi knows how to make the bombs and missiles stop, but he and the IRGC seem like Hitler in his bunker, determined to fight until the bitterest of ends.
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