President Trump has made his case on Iran plainly, and he made it knowing the political price: he says he had to act, that history will judge the decision a great one, and that the short-term politics being tougher is a cost he saw coming and accepted. He set out the argument in a sit-down interview with Stephen A. Smith at the White House, recorded for Smith's show Straight Shooter and released Thursday evening.
The interview pressed him on the fallout of the Iran war for Republicans after the midterm elections. Trump's answer went straight to the decision itself.
"I feel I had to do what I did in Iran," the President said. "I think historically that's going to be a great decision, I hope. But short term, I guess it is tougher politically. I knew that. I mean, I had this thing going so perfectly, and it's still going. Look, we have the highest stock market we've ever had."
That is the heart of his case: the action was necessary, its vindication will be historical rather than immediate, and the political difficulty in the meantime was priced in from the start — not a surprise that caught him off guard. The programme he was running, he argued, has not been knocked off course by the decision: it is still going, with the highest stock market the country has ever had underneath it.
He himself raised the market's sharpest one-day fall — and placed it on the election, not on Iran. "Now, it's interesting that the day after the election, the stock market lost $3 trillion in value," he said, in the same breath as his claim that the market now stands at its highest level ever.
The sharpest exchange came on approval ratings. Smith put it to him that his approval rating was lower than the Democrats'. Trump answered with the standing he says he holds among his own party's voters: "Well, I have an approval rating on CNN of 99% in the Republican Party." And he cited a comparison drawn against two predecessors: "They compared myself, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan. And Lincoln was at 8%, Reagan was at 14%, and I was at 56% or something like that."
Underneath it sits his simplest point about the midterms themselves: "I wasn't on the ballot," he said. "When you're not on the ballot, you don't pull them in. Don't forget, I was on the ballot three times, and every time I was on the ballot, we won."
The interview, taped in the White House's Roosevelt Room on Thursday in a conversation of about 40 minutes, ranged across the midterms, gas and grocery prices, tariffs and the turmoil at Nvidia — the same visit on which Smith, asked outside the White House whether he might become press secretary, answered: "No way in hell." But it was the Iran exchange that laid out the President's thinking in full: necessity first, history as the judge, and no retreat from a decision he says he would make again.
For American families, what is at stake in that judgement is concrete. A confrontation with Iran touches the price of fuel at the pump, the safety of American service members in the region, and the value of the market holdings inside workers' retirement accounts — the very measures the President reached for in making his defence. His argument to those families is that a harder decision taken now, at a political cost he accepts, is what protects them over the long term.
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