Reading pieces on Trump and Iran - even the more realistic and skeptical ones - still pretend that Trump has "goals" or "objectives" other than "look like a cool character on TV and get praise from people for it."
This is from a NYT email:
President Trump said in a speech that the “core strategic objectives in Iran are nearing completion.” In a 19-minute address, he offered no timeline for ending the conflict, but said the U.S. would hit Iran “extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”
What are those strategic objectives, anyway? Over the course of the war, Trump’s statements about America’s goals have been wildly inconsistent.
His speech didn’t contain much new, but it seemed to set the stage for Trump to declare an end to the war. Today’s newsletter is about what the U.S. would leave behind in Iran and the Middle East if that happens.
I get that reporters aren't going to write like shitposters, but political journalists have a lot of freedom, generally, in how they cover things. It is a choice not to paint an accurate portrait of the man.
They will argue various things about why critics like me just want them to do Resistance Journalism but take this from David Sanger:
For more than a decade President Trump has been intently focused on making sure Iran never had the nuclear fuel in hand to build a nuclear weapon. Until this morning, when he told Reuters in an interview, that he didn’t really care because it is “so far underground.”
Is that first sentence even remotely true? You could at least qualify it with a "President Trump has claimed...". We know he ripped up the agreement in his first term because the black president made the agreement, and that doing so made it more likely, not less, that Iran would make more potential fuel.
That's even before we get to the hilarious notion that Trump could possibly be intently focused on much of anything aside from his personal wealth and his TV watching.
If journalistic NORMS let you write that first sentence, which attributes motives to Trump's actions that are at best barely in evidence, you can write a much truer version of it, which would be more like "Trump started a war in Iran so the Trump character gets praised by Fox News hosts."