Who’s Donald Trump listening to?

‘This never would have happened if I had been president,’ says Donald Trump, whenever the international news goes from bad to worse. It’s a line he uses a lot in relation to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which began in the interregnum between his first administration and his second. Yet the latest war, between Israel and Iran, is a different matter.

Trump of course blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, who ‘made Iran rich’ with $300 billion for the evil regime’s dreaded nuclear weapons programme. It was Trump, though, who in 2018 tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and in 2020 killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. Those actions may have weakened or strengthened Ayatollah Khamenei’s grip on power (it depends who you ask). Yet there’s no denying that the latest hostilities have broken out on Trump’s watch. So this one’s on him.

What, then, is he thinking? That’s the $100 trillion question – to which there may not be an answer. We can turn, in vain, to Trump’s posts on Truth Social. From that platform, he has this week ordered everyone to ‘immediately evacuate Tehran!’ and demanded ‘UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!’. On Tuesday, he even posted a screenshot of a text message from Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel and a fervent Christian, who told him that God had spared him from assassination last year for this moment. ‘There is only ONE voice that matters,’ wrote Huckabee. ‘HIS voice… No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.’

Does that mean Trump is considering doing to Tehran what Truman did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Has he succumbed to Huckabee’s premillenarian dispensationalist theology and now thinks of himself, as the radical evangelical Zionists do, as a sort of handmaiden to the End Times?

In recent days, Trump has turned on the peaceniks in his orbit, who have been issuing grave warnings about the start of a third world war. Trump called Tucker Carlson, the broadcaster previously thought to be his most trusted anti-war confidant, ‘kooky’. And he’s ignoring Tulsi Gabbard, his dovish Director of National Intelligence, who has been trying to debunk Israeli assessments that Iran is perilously close to being a nuclear-armed power. On 8 June, Gabbard was left out of a crunch meeting about Iran at Camp David. ‘I don’t care what she says,’ said Trump on Air Force One on Monday night, which is a pretty extraordinary statement to make about the woman he’s put in charge of the CIA.

Trump is always improvising, leveraging all options, and using the world stage to appeal to different sections of his domestic audience

The mystery, then, is who Trump has been listening to. Even if polls suggest strong support for Israel from the MAGA base, nobody in his cabinet wants to be exposed as the Bush-era warmonger on the inside. Vice-President J.D. Vance has been publicly supportive of Trump’s maximalist position this week. But Vance is unlikely to push Trump towards an intervention which could turn off the voters he hopes will elect him as Commander-in-Chief in 2028. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is thought to have neoconservative inclinations, but his latest public statements have been less robustly pro-Israel than Trump’s. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a passionate supporter of Israel in the past, also been circumspect.

Carlson and Steve Bannon, the godfather of MAGA, are adamant that Trump has been persuaded by Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. America’s most popular news channel has quickly defaulted to its familiar war-on-terror setting. The channel’s hosts are once again talking about good vs evil and conjuring up fanciful notions of beneficent regime change in the Islamic Republic.

But Israel vs Iran is not a rerun of George Bush’s invasion in Iraq, no matter how much the pro- and anti-war ideologues want it to be so. Trump’s great trick is convincing opposing forces within his coalition that he is on their side and that a master plan will soon be revealed to settle matters in their favor.

For months, the America Firsters, Trump’s supporters and staff who are opposed to all foreign entanglements, had convinced themselves that he had been gulling the hawks in service of the doves. Trump had frustrated Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu behind the scenes and dispatched his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to strike a new grand bargain for the region.

Then last week Israel attacked Iran and Trump appeared to take credit. ‘Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up,’ he said last week, when asked about the level of his advanced knowledge of Israel’s plan. It was ‘we know what’s going on’. Washington’s war lobbyists instantly claimed that Trump’s peace agenda had been a ruse all along to give Tel Aviv time to prepare for action.

At the same time, however, sources suggest Trump also spoke to the Emir of Qatar and the Emir then reached out to Tehran in another bid to stop the war. ‘There is still a middle ground for a cessation of fire,’ said one insider. ‘But the window is closing fast.’

The truth, then, is that the Commander-in-Chief is bluffing and not bluffing. Trump is always improvising, leveraging all options, and using the world stage to appeal to different sections of his domestic audience. Throughout both his presidencies, he has played hawkish Republicans and the anti-war MAGA elements off against each other.

The danger for him now is that, in the nightmarish context of Iran vs Israel, his hyper-transactional approach has brought him closer than ever to pushing America into a new conflict in the Middle East.

‘If there’s one guiding rule about Trump,’ says Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, ‘it’s his self-conception. He thinks of himself as a winner, a dealmaker and a peacemaker.’ The problem with Iran is that, having failed to pull off a deal, Donald the winner is in conflict with Donald the peacemaker.

Trump sees no contradictions, however. It’s ‘peace through strength’. He seems increasingly confident that he can hurl the Mother of All Bombs at Iran’s mountain nuclear-development lair in Fordo, claim ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!’ and let the Israelis and the Iranians settle the rest. Such an exercise could prove to be the greatest test of his ability to bend reality to his will.