Trump Downplays Iranian Threat to US Interests

After weeks of escalatory rhetoric coming out of his administration, President Trump spoke to reporters about Iran at the White House today, and greatly downplayed the possibility of a war with Iran.

Trump continued to call for Iran to call him if they are ready for talks, and dismissed the idea that Iran was posing any threats to US interests, saying there is “no indication that anything’s happened or will happen.”

So while he made the obligatory threat of “great force” if something did happen, President Trump, at least Monday’s President Trump, certainly intended to give the impression that nothing will happen, and that there is no reason to think otherwise.

That could be embarrassing for other members of the administration, since they’ve been talking up Iranian threats for weeks now, with suggestions that the intelligence community agrees with them. Clearly that’s not the same intelligence that would lead Trump to say there’s “no indication that anything’s happened or will happen.”

Which raises the likely possibility that those hawks, centered around John Bolton, have just been flat out lying about what Iran is doing, in the hopes that it would ultimately lead to a war that they’ve been seeking for years, or in the case of Bolton, decades.