US war on Iran: A tale of two Trump interviews

As he continues to attack Iran, Donald Trump is babbling in public, working out what he thinks as he goes along. And there are journalists willing to help him with that.

Previously: ‘The Green Menace’ – The Daily Mail’s newest scary stories for Middle England

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On Sunday, the day after the US and Israel began their strikes against Iran and killed the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Donald Trump gave a six-minute interview to The New York Times. The NYT is a title that Trump has railed against time and time again over the years, but he chose the newspaper as a venue for explaining his rationale — such as it is — for attacking Iran. Today, he’s given another interview to the Daily Telegraph, a more more ideologically aligned outlet, using it as a chance to bash Sir Keir Starmer.

In today’s edition, I want to look at these two Trump interviews to see what they tell us about the President’s relationship to the press and how he’s selling his latest war. I’ll also look at how both outlets try to impose order onto the chaos of Trump’s thinking.

Under one a typically dry headline (Trump Says War Could Last Weeks and Offers Contradictory Visions of New Regime), a trio of New York Times White House correspondents Zolan Kanno-Youngs, David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager — the former actually conducting the phone interview, the latter pair reporting around it — write:

In a brief telephone interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.

That paragraph is typical of the NYT’s usual surprised tone that Trump is wayward and disorganised in his thinking, even this long into his political career, and shows the newspaper’s stubborn desire to present him as though he’s a more usual politician. Offering “several seemingly contradicatory visions” is not surprising when it comes to Donald Trump, it’s entirely in keeping.

In contrast to it reporting of comments by Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks ago, where the NYT took great pains to transcibe her pauses and when she said “um”, the interview with Trump, despite being so short, does not include many examples of directly quoting his speech. Instead, as it usually does, the paper tidies up and summarises his remarks to make them sound far more sane:

Among the options he suggested was an outcome similar to what he engineered in Venezuela, in which only the top leader was removed during an American military strike and much of the rest of the government remained in place, but newly willing to work pragmatically with the United States.

This santisation job is even clearer in a paragraph that follows soon after:

The interview with Mr. Trump seemed to reflect the degree to which his administration remains uncertain about how the next few weeks will unfold, both on the battlefield and in the creation of a replacement government in Tehran.

Translated into human being that means: The Trump administration has been utterly reckless in its actions towards Iran and the wider Middle East and it has no idea what it’s going to do next. It’s just violence and vibes coming from the White House.

The inherent softness of the NYT’s approach to dealing with Trump (and retaining the chance of getting further phone chats with the President) is illustrated here:

Asked how long the United States and Israel could keep up this level of attacks, he responded: “Well, we intended four to five weeks.”

“It won’t be difficult,” Mr. Trump added. “We have tremendous amounts of ammunition. You know, we have ammunition stored all over the world in different countries.”

He made no mention of the Pentagon’s concerns that the conflict could further deplete reserves that military strategists have said are critical to retain in scenarios like a conflict over Taiwan or Russian incursions into Europe.

He “made no mention of the Pentagon’s concerns” and wasn’t pressed on them by the interviewer. Trump doesn’t care about such petty practicalities.

The newspaper’s sandpapering efforts at the edges of Trump’s insanity show again when the reporters write:

The president offered a variety of often inconsistent visions of how a new government could take shape after the targeted killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled the country for more than three decades until he was killed by an airstrike on Saturday.

When pressed on his plans for a transition of power, Mr. Trump said he hoped Iran’s elite military forces — including hardened officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who have held substantial influence and profited from the existing regime — would simply turn over their weapons to the Iranian populace.

This is another example where direct quotations detailing those “inconsistent visions” would give the reader a properly stark sense of the unhinged nature of the Trump strategy on Iran. What’s behind the polite framing of “a variety of often inconsistent visions” is a man babbling about a complex situation that he doesn’t understand nor care to understand. Anyone who has seen Trump speak knows that’s the case.

Where the NYT does make it clear that Trump is talking rubbish, it does so with a wry dryness rather than the kind of directness it applies when critiquing anyone vaguely on the left:

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Mr. Trump said.

His answer implied that what worked in Venezuela would work in Iran, a nation with about three times the population and a military and clerical leadership that has ruled with increasing repression since the 1979 revolution. Over the past several weeks, Mr. Trump has repeatedly brought up Venezuela as the model of a successful operation and hoped to replicate aspects of it in Iran, identifying leadership that would be more cooperative and friendly to the United States.

But he has been told by his advisers that the vast differences in cultures and history made it virtually impossible to apply the strategy used in Venezuela — in which the existing government was kept in place, after it agreed to take instructions from Washington — and try to replicate it in Tehran.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump appears enamored of using a Venezuela-like model in Iran.

The piece ends:

After about six minutes, Mr. Trump said he had to end the interview.

Later Sunday afternoon, he returned to Washington.

Indulging Trump in these little chats and polishing them up to give them a vaguely Presidential tone only plays to his advantage.

For the Daily Telegraph, of course, a chance to talk to Trump is an opportunity to indulge in one of its favourite pasttimes — slagging off the UK while pretending to be Britain’s most patriotic paper. Under the headline Exclusive: Trump – I’m ‘very disappointed’ in Starmer over Iran, the Telegraph’s Washington Correspondent, Connor Stringer, writes:

Donald Trump has told The Telegraph he is “very disappointed” in Sir Keir Starmer for blocking him from using Diego Garcia to carry out strikes on Iran.

In an exclusive interview, the US president said that the Prime Minister’s initial refusal to let US forces use the Chagos Islands base was unlike anything that had “happened between our countries before”.

This is a dream for the Telegraph as the US President is effectively parroting its own editorial line right back to it.

Unlike The New York Times, the Telegraph is happy to directly quote Trump at length:

Mr Trump told The Telegraph: “All of a sudden [Mauritius] was claiming ownership. He should have fought it out and owned it or make him take it, if you want to know the truth. But no, we were very disappointed in Keir.”

… Mr Trump suggested Sir Keir should have always approved American use of Diego Garcia, because Iran was responsible for killing “a lot of people from your country”.

“[There are] people without arms and legs and faces that have been blown up. Iran is 95 per cent of those. Those horrible events were caused by Iran,” Mr Trump said, without referring to specific cases.

The fact that Trump is engaged in his trademark improvisational bullshit routine is not an issue for the Telegraph. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t “[refer] to specific cases” because the tone suits the Telegraph. Facts aren’t just inconvenient here, they are entirely inconsequential.

The key line for the Telegraph is Trump calling the Chagos deal “a very woke thing”. It’s four words that will fuel at least twenty more angry Telegraph opinion pieces.

In The New York Times interview Trump said he intended the war on Iran to continue for a further “four or five weeks” and he repeats a similar line to the Telegraph:

“We always anticipated four weeks,” he told The Telegraph. “We also anticipated two to three weeks to take out some of the leadership, but we’ve taken out all of it in one day. So that was well ahead of schedule. We always viewed it as a four-week operation.

“They want to make a deal badly. I said you should have made it a week ago.”

That’s how the Telegraph piece ends. It’s less an interview and more a press release transcribed by a reporter. There’s no sense that Stringer pushed back on any of the assertions made by Trump and why would he? Everything Trump said accords with the Telegraph’s established editorial world view.

For Trump, the interview with the New York Times was an opportunity to put out his talking points on Iran, knowing that they would be polished up for him and presented in a decidedly dry manner. Talking to the Telegraph served a different purpose: It was a way to give Keir Starmer a kick in his own domestic press, a little bit of punishment for not getting in line quick enough. In both cases, the papers present Trump as far more considered and coherent than he ever appears on camera.

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