Why did we go to war with Iran? Ask any two people in Donald Trump’s administration and you probably won’t get the same answer. Explanations have ranged from claiming Israel was going to attack Iran anyway so we might as well join them, to insisting Iran was weeks away from obliterating the U.S. with a nuclear bomb.
As the conflict increases in complexity and decreases in popularity with the American public, Trump is trying a new tactic: throwing his Cabinet under the bus.
At a Monday roundtable event with national military and law enforcement leaders, Trump told the audience and reporters that his Secretary of Defense and self styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, was actually the person responsible for pushing him to go to war.
“Pete [Hegseth,] I think you were the first one to speak up and you said, ‘Let’s do it because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’”
The comments came hours after tried to claim that not only he, but his entire administration, was caught off guard by Iran striking other Gulf nations in response to the U.S. and Israel’s attacks. “Look at the way they attacked, unexpectedly, all of those countries,” he told reporters. “Nobody was even thinking about it.”
Reuters has reported, in fact, that Trump was warned internally that Iran could launch retaliatory attacks, and that Trump ignored the warnings.
Hegseth makes sense as a scapegoat, if Trump wants to pin blame on any one administration figure. The Defense Secretary has been one of the blundering faces of the war effort as it approaches its one-month milestone, spending much of his time delivering screeds about lethality and anti-rules of engagement warfighting to the Pentagon press corps, while also berating reporters for not producing enough positive coverage of the conflict that has so far killed 13 American service members and metastasized into a full-blown disaster throughout the Gulf region.
Trump also on Monday repeated dubious claims that the administration has begun negotiations with Iran to end hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The claims came as Trump reneged on his threat to bomb critical Iranian targets if they did not meet his demands by Monday afternoon, with the president pushing the ultimatum back by five days. Iranian officials say they are engaged in no such negotiations.
Trump, usually quite transparent about his conversations with world leaders, has been uncharacteristically cagey about the supposed people involved in these negotiations. When pressed by reporters on Monday, he claimed that a “top person” in the regime was speaking to his son-in-law Jared Kushner (who holds no official government position) and United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff.
“We’d like to make a deal,” Trump said. “If it goes well, we’re going to end up with settling this. Otherwise we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”ut.”
