CNN
—
By most accounts, President Donald Trump’s attention for the past week has been consumed by the spiraling crisis playing out between Israel and Iran. In between meetings in Canada on Monday, he peppered aides for constant updates. He has spent more time in the basement Situation Room this week than at any point so far in his new presidency.
So it was somewhat jarring Wednesday when the president emerged from the South Portico — not to provide an update on his crisis consultations, but to oversee the installation of two nearly 100-foot flagpoles.
“These are the best poles anywhere in the country, or in the world, actually. They’re tapered. They have the nice top,” the president told a clutch of reporters and workmen. “It’s a very exciting project to me.”
The break from his Iran meetings lasted about an hour, a moment for the president to literally touch grass on the South Lawn amid the most consequential period of decision-making of his term so far.
A day later, the president decided not to decide.
He dictated a statement to his press secretary Karoline Leavitt announcing he would hold off ordering a strike on Iran for up to two weeks to see if a diplomatic resolution was possible.
The decision was revealed after another meeting in the Situation Room, where the president has spent much of this week reviewing attack plans and quizzing officials about the potential consequences of each.
After steadily ratcheting up his martial rhetoric – including issuing an urgent warning to evacuate the 10 million residents of Iran’s capital – Trump’s deferment provides the president some breathing room as he continues to work through options presented by his military officials over the past several days.
It also allows more time for the divergent factions of his own party to make their case directly to the president for and against a strike, as they have been urgently doing since it became clear Trump was seriously considering dropping bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The president has refused to pick a side in public and spent the last week alternating between militaristic threats issued on social media and private concerns that a military strike he orders could drag the US into prolonged war.
Around the Situation Room table, he has relied principally on his CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine to discuss his options, according to people familiar with the matter. His foreign envoy Steve Witkoff has been corresponding with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to determine if room exists to restart the diplomacy that had been deadlocked before Israel began its campaign last week.
Other officials have been publicly sidelined. Twice this week, Trump has dismissed assessments previously offered by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the state of Iran’s program to develop a nuclear weapon. Gabbard testified in March that the US intelligence community had assessed Iran was not building such a weapon; Trump flatly and publicly disputed that Friday.
“Well then, my intelligence community is wrong,” Trump told reporters in New Jersey, asking the reporter who in the intelligence community had said that. Told that it was Gabbard, Trump responded, “She’s wrong.”
Yet as he weighs taking action that could have consequences for years to come, Trump appears to be relying mostly on his own instincts, which this week told him to hit pause on ordering a strike that could alter global geopolitics for years to come.
When top national security officials told Trump during a meeting at Camp David earlier this month that Israel was prepared to imminently strike inside Iran, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise. Trump’s advisers had been preparing for months for the possibility Israel could seize upon a moment of Iranian weakness — its regional proxies have been decimated over the past year — to launch a direct assault.
Trump’s team arrived at Camp David having already drawn up options for potential US involvement. According to people familiar with the matter, his advisers resolved differences between themselves in advance before presenting possible plans to the president.
From the mountainside presidential retreat, Trump also spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the president he intended to begin a campaign in Iran imminently.
Ten days later, with the Israeli campaign now in full swing, Trump was meeting in Canada with top American allies from the Group of 7, who hoped to decipher from him what the American plan was going forward.
In closed-door meetings, leaders from Europe tried to ascertain whether Trump was inclined to order up a US strike on Fordow, the underground nuclear facility that has been the focus of attention for American war planners, western officials said. They also tried to convince a begrudging Trump to sign on to a joint statement, which urged that “the resolution of the Iranian crisis leads to a broader de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East.”
Trump did not reveal his hand, either in private sessions with individual leaders or over dinner at the Kananaskis Country Golf Course, the western officials said. Instead, he left the summit early, leaving his counterparts in the Canadian Rockies and returning to Washington to deal with the matter himself.
By midweek, with only vague signs from Iran that it was willing to restart talks, Trump’s patience appeared to wearing thin for finding a diplomatic solution. And many of his allies believed he was on the verge of ordering a strike on Iran.
“It’s very late, you know?” he said at Wednesday’s flagpole event, the heat causing his forehead to glisten. “It’s very late to be talking.”
In private meetings that day, Trump appeared convinced of the necessity of taking out the Fordow facility, according to people familiar with the conversations. And he said in public only the United States has the firepower to do it.
“We are the only ones who have the capability to do it, but that doesn’t mean I am going to do it,” Trump said after coming back inside from his flag raising. “I have been asked about it by everybody but I haven’t made a decision.”
He was speaking from the Oval Office, where he’d gathered players from the Italian soccer club Juventus to stand behind him. They mostly acted as a fidgeting backdrop to Trump’s question-and-answer session on his Iran decision-making.
At one point, Trump turned to the players amid a discussion of the B-2 stealth bomber — the only jet that could carry a bunker-busting bomb to destroy Iran’s underground enrichment facility.
“You can be stealthy — you’ll never lose, right?” he asked the team members, none of whom responded.
“It was a bit weird. When he started talking about the politics with Iran and everything, it’s kind of, like… I just want to play football, man,” one of the players, Timothy Weah, said afterward.
Amid the string of events, Trump continued to weigh the choices in front of him, and remained worried about a longer-term war. And he continued to receive messages from all sides of his political coalition, which has been divided over the wisdom of launching a strike that could embroil the US in a war for years to come.
He’s taken repeated calls from GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prominent voice in support of striking Iran who described the president as “very focused, very calm” after a Tuesday night phone call.
“I feel like when he says no nukes for Iran, he means it,” Graham said the next day. “He gave them a chance for diplomacy. I think they made a miscalculation when it comes to President Trump.”
One of the most prominent voices opposing a strike, his onetime top strategist Steve Bannon, was at the White House midday Thursday for a lunch with the president that had been rescheduled from several weeks ago.
He revealed nothing of his conversation with Trump on his “War Room” show later Thursday. But a day earlier, he told a roundtable that getting involved in a drawn-out conflict with Iran would amount to repeating a historic mistake.
“My mantra right now: The Israelis have to finish what they started,” he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. “We can’t do this again. We’ll tear the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq.”
For Trump, the swirl of options, opinions and advice is nothing new. He has faced the Iran decision much as he has most every other major choice of his presidency, by soliciting advice and trying to arrive at a solution that will please the widest swath of his supporters.
The answer this time may not be as simple, nor does Trump hold all the cards in a conflict that is playing out across the world. Israel’s decision to launch strikes a week ago — while not a surprise to the president — still came against his public entreaties to hold off. And in Iran, he is confronting an adversary with a long history of hardening its positions under pressure from the United States.
As he was arriving Friday at his home in New Jersey, Trump said it would be hard to ask Netanyahu to ease up on strikes on Iran in order to pursue diplomacy, given Israel’s success in the conflict so far. And he said the two-week window he set a day earlier was the maximum period of time he would allow for diplomacy to work, reserving the option of ordering a strike before that time is up.
The president couldn’t say whether the decision now in front of him is the biggest he’d face as president. But as he tries to find the balance between ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions and keeping the US from war, he did offer an evaluation of what he wanted his legacy to be on the other side.
“Always a peacemaker,” he said. “That doesn’t mean — sometimes, you need some toughness to make peace. But always a peacemaker.”
