When President Trump speaks of the Iran war, there are echoes of how he addressed COVID-19, during the last year of his first term. He displayed, in 2020, a remarkable inability to handle, straightforwardly and coherently, a tremendous crisis.
In 2024, I wrote the following, in this space:
On March 11, 2020, four years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic.
Two days later, the Trump administration declared the virus to be a national emergency.
On March 15th, shutdowns began in states across the country.
The first COVID death in the United States had been reported on February 29th.
Near the end of May, the number of deaths, in the country, passed 100,000. This, despite President Trump's assurances that the virus would soon "go away." The virus, he had said on April 3rd--three weeks after his administration announced the national emergency--"is going to go away. It is going away." On June 18th, he said that the virus "is dying out. The numbers are starting to get very good." In July, he said: "I’ll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again. It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right." In August, he said that "it’s gonna be gone soon."
On November 2, 2020--the day before the presidential election--I wrote this:
One hopes...that the Trump ride will soon be over: that we'll be done with the President's endless divisiveness, his endless lies, his cruelties, the racial dog whistles, the conspiracy theories, the contempt, the self-pity, the self-glorification. And, of course, there have been his stunning failures regarding COVID--and what has become his disinterest in, dismissal of, minimizing of (and his preference for falsehoods about) the virus...
The President has said, many times, that the country is "rounding the corner," concerning the pandemic. On October 23rd, he added one word to the phrase: "We're rounding the corner beautifully." On that day, in the U.S., there were over 900 deaths, due to the virus. There were also more than 83,000 new COVID cases that day--a record, at the time, which has since been surpassed.
As of today [November 2nd], there have been more than 9 1/4 million COVID cases in the U.S.--and more than 231,000 deaths.
By the end of 2020, the disease, still out of control, was responsible for the deaths of some 350,000 people in the U.S. There would be another 50,000 deaths by the time Joe Biden took office three weeks later, in January of 2021.
And now, there is the Iran war.
Today, in The Atlantic online, a piece by the excellent staff writer Tom Nichols appeared, titled "The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War"; the piece is subtitled "The president and the Pentagon are not being up front about what has happened in more than 20 weeks of hostilities."
Mr. Nichols was, for twenty-five years, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
In today's piece, he writes, at one point:
Consider the number of times Trump has said that the war is over or almost over, such as his April 17 declaration to USA Today that the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “over, it’s a great victory.” (He has made other claims of imminent victory at least 30 times, by one count.) He has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.
The full piece can be read at this link:
link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/trump-iran-conflict-pentagon/688026/?gift=Tcay7nmVziC9n3Jf9Qllm7qBd5ZHcYHKCxEshldllTU&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
