Exactly six years ago this week, as Americans were starting to come to terms with the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump said he didn’t believe the World Health Organization’s assessment on fatality rates. To support his contention, the president pointed to nothing in particular.
“This is just my hunch,” he said.
A few weeks later, Trump touted ineffective COVID treatments that had no scientific merit. Asked about his rationale, the president told reporters, “I feel good about it. That’s all it is. Just a feeling. You know, I’m a smart guy.”
His “feelings” proved wrong, of course, but the rhetoric offered a peek into a ridiculous perspective: Trump, a former television personality and the least experienced president in American history, not only has a great many hunches, he also has an unnerving habit of assuming his hunches are true and acting on them.
All of this came to mind anew on Wednesday. NOTUS reported:
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that President Donald Trump made the decision to strike Iran because he ‘had a good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike’ U.S. assets and personnel in the region.
The Trump administration has said that the U.S. faced imminent threats from Iran, which necessitated the strikes that began early Saturday. But it has not communicated specific intelligence or information beyond the fact that Iran possesses ballistic missile capabilities, as it has for years.
Pressed further, Leavitt suggested the president acted on his feelings.
“This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America, and the president’s feeling, based on fact, that Iran does pose an imminent, direct threat to the United States of America,” she told reporters.
The press secretary’s comments are unlikely to inspire greater confidence in the unpopular conflict, but they were part of a bigger picture. As an analysis in The New York Times explained:
Sitting beside Germany’s chancellor in the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Trump offered a brief moment of insight into the decision-making process in the White House on the most consequential of matters: Whether to take the country to war.
His decision to order the attack on Iran, he said, was mostly a matter of gut instinct about Iranian intentions.
“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” Trump said, adding, “I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen.”
A normal American president, before launching a war, might consult with the National Security Council, among others. The incumbent president, however, appears to prefer his gut, which wouldn’t be quite so terrifying if (a) he had some idea what he was talking about; and (b) we weren’t talking about matters of life and death.
