Hours before the announcement of a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran, The New York Times published a story titled, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran.” The piece, written by longtime Trump chroniclers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, described in unusually precise detail the private meetings between Trump, Israeli leaders, and his own advisers in the run-up to the war. According to the piece, almost all of the president’s top advisers, including Vice President JD Vance, privately had misgivings about the war.
I call bullshit. The war has failed to achieve most of its goals, from installing a new regime in Iran to permanently ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapons program. Trump was left basically begging Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And polls suggest the conflict is the latest anchor on Trump’s already plunging poll numbers. So of course his aides want to distance themselves from the war in America’s most influential news outlet. But they want to do so anonymously to preserve deniability and avoid annoying the president or his base.
But we can’t let Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and other senior Trump administration officials off so easily. They have at every turn aided, abetted, and enabled a dictatorial president who constantly ignores national and international laws and casually decides to (try to) overthrow the leaders of other countries. They want the spoils of serving in the Trump administration, from prestigious posts now to potentially even bigger and more lucrative jobs in the future, including the presidency in the cases of Rubio and Vance. So they also need to own and accept the costs of serving with Trump. And right now, that includes being the architects of a stupid, unnecessary war.
The Times article is long, in part because it is trying to explain a very important and complicated decision. But it’s also long because it takes a lot of words to list all the misgivings about the war that Trump’s advisers supposedly had. Ratcliffe reportedly said in a White House meeting that included the president that Israel’s hopes of a less anti-Israel regime taking power in Iran are “farcical.” In that same session, Rubio said that Israel’s hopes of regime change were “bullshit.” Vance expressed similar doubts. The article depicts Wiles as worrying that the war could cause a big hike in gas prices, hurting Trump and Republicans in the midterm elections. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, reportedly said in a meeting of Trump and senior aides that attacking Iran would violate the president’s campaign trail rhetoric about keeping the United States out of new wars abroad.
The article includes several paragraphs about the private misgivings of three officials, in particular: Vance, Rubio, and Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vance was reportedly concerned about irritating the MAGA base and Iran taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. Caine outright predicted Iran would block the strait. Rubio is portrayed as having been broadly skeptical about the war and thinking that sanctions and other pressure tactics against Iran may be more effective.
Haberman and Swan are solid reporters, so I trust that some of Trump’s advisers had these doubts about the war and at times expressed them to one another and the president. But people should read this kind of piece with skepticism. From my years in journalism, including as a reporter at The Washington Post, I can tell you that these kinds of behind-the-scenes political stories usually don’t just emerge from reporters’ digging. Often, presidential advisers and those advisers’ various aides and underlings want to tell their side of the story, particularly if they aren’t quoted directly, meaning they can later claim the reporter got some detail wrong. Almost none of the Trump advisers in this piece did on-the-record interviews with the Times. So I read this story as both a historical account and an attempt at spinning.
We are now more than a month into the war. Trump’s advisers can see exactly what went wrong, such as the Strait of Hormuz being blocked. So these advisers (and their aides) can tell reporters, “I anticipated this problem,” and seem wise and prescient. Somehow, these advisers predicted exactly how the war could go wrong, but the president ignored them!
What we can’t tell is how emphatically they expressed those concerns, and how often. Or what concerns they expressed that didn’t turn out to be big problems. Broadly, since the war is going poorly, these advisers have a strong incentive to leak their prewar misgivings and downplay any pro-war comments they expressed privately. If a more America-friendly regime were now in power in Iran, this article would likely have been written differently (or would not have been published at all), because Trump’s advisers would have been less eager to distance themselves from the policy.
This piece is titled, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran,” but in truth it’s essentially, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran Over the Objections of His Top Advisers.” Wittingly or unwittingly, Swan, Haberman, and the Times have provided a massive platform for Rubio, Vance, and others to point the finger solely at Trump for a misguided war. This piece reads like the first draft of Caine’s memoirs, or how Vance will sound on the campaign trail if he is running in 2028 and trying to distance himself from this war.
But Trump advisers shouldn’t get to pass the buck so easily. Even if they expressed some private doubts about this war, they presented intelligence and military plans that moved it forward. None of them expressed public opposition. Even in a piece allowing them to spin their own narratives, only Vance told Trump directly in private that he opposed the war. And Vance of course has the most freedom to disagree—he is the one person in the administration Trump can’t fire.
The piece reads like a lot of the accounts of President Biden’s decisions to initially run for a second term and allow Israel to kill Palestinians on a mass scale after the October 7, 2023 attacks. A president can’t run for reelection or involve the U.S. deeply in a war without some of his advisers going along. But some of the books written about the Biden administration feature his advisers expressing doubts about his decisions that the president supposedly single-handedly overrode.
In all these cases, what these aides want to do is associate themselves with the successes of a president and pin all the problems on the commander in chief himself. But journalists and members of the public shouldn’t go along with that. No one is required to serve in a presidential administration. If they strongly disagree with a decision, they should quit. They can also express their doubts publicly and live with the consequences: a likely dismissal.
What they shouldn’t do is join an administration, willingly implement its policies, and then privately bash the president to reporters when something goes wrong. That’s not governing, it’s reputation laundering. It’s weak and gutless.
Usually, aides wait until after the president’s term or after they have left their posts to distance themselves from key decisions. It’s possible that Haberman and Swan are such excellent reporters that they simply unearthed these objections earlier than usual. But my guess is that Trump’s aides already know this war is a debacle and want to essentially announce, “It wasn’t me” as loudly and quickly as possible. But JD, Susie, and Marco—it was you. This is the Trump administration. You own all of his decisions, good, bad, and, in the case of this Iran war, catastrophic. Take responsibility for your actions.
