Trump vows to keep bombing Iran in prime-time address that added nothing new

There was something about President Trump’s prime-time speech that didn’t add up.

Several things, actually.

But what caught my attention immediately was his low-energy way of expressing himself. He backtracked, talking first about the Artemis lunar mission and then about the oil we are seizing from Venezuela. After that, I was simply reading words from the prompter.

No one could argue with the president’s central message. Iran is the world’s leading terrorist state. Something should have been done during its 47-year history of violence and murderous proxies like Hamas. Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Dictators killed 45,000 of their own people (although Trump downplayed this when trying to negotiate a deal).

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But the 19-minute speech was a jumble of contradictions. Trump kept saying that we have won, that we have decimated Iran’s military, which is true. And yet, he said the United States will intensify its bombing campaign over the next two to three weeks, targeting Tehran’s energy facilities.

Why is that necessary, if the United States already won? And will it really last less than a month?

As the speech began, it was clear that Trump knows how unpopular the war is. He knows that rising gas prices are hurting him at home. He knows that he is going down like a rock with the young people who bought his rhetoric of no foreign wars.

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You know – and this is critical – that the stock market has plummeted since American and Israeli warplanes attacked Iran on the last day of February. Trump is extremely sensitive to the market, as we saw when the Dow Jones hit 50,000 points, and that often prompts him to act.

Having painted himself into a corner with an Iranian regime that refuses to negotiate seriously, the public expectation was that he would declare victory and get out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Trump declared that he will bomb Iran to return it to the “Stone Age.”

What about the president’s own goals?

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He said the goal of the war was never regime change. But he spoke of a regime change the morning after the initial attack. In any case, Trump now claims that it has been achieved because several levels of leadership, starting with the ayatollah, have been assassinated.

But the city’s new sheriff, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Ghalibaf, lashed out yesterday.

“When it comes to defending our homeland,” he said in a message, “each and every one of us will become soldiers of this country. If you look askance at our mother’s house… you are facing the entire family, all of us. Armed, ready and standing. Come in, we are waiting for you.”

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So much for the regime change.

Time and time again, Trump said the war could not end until Iran stopped blocking a fifth of the world’s oil traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. But in Wednesday night’s speech he washed his hands of the matter. We don’t depend on the strait, who cares? It will “open naturally” on its own.

The president then scolded our former European allies, saying they should show some “retarded courage” and “just take” Hormuz, as if it were that easy.

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As for Trump’s statement that our country is now “free from the specter of nuclear blackmail,” Iran still has nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium, and further enrichment could lead to a nuclear weapon.

In a CNN poll released just before the speech, 66 percent of respondents said they strongly or somewhat disapproved of the decision to attack Iran, a 7-point jump since the conflict began.

Most network pundits criticized the speech as a repetition of things Trump has said before.

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“There was nothing new in that speech,” said ABC’s Jonathan Karl, adding: “There’s not a lot of optimism.”

His colleague Martha Raddatz: “This added to the confusion about why we are there.”

European leaders were blindsided by the war. “When we are serious,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, “we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before every day, and maybe we shouldn’t talk every day.”

Austria and Switzerland yesterday joined Italy, Spain and France in banning US warplanes heading to Iran from their skies. They want nothing to do with this war. The British prime minister followed suit, but backed down after Iran retaliated.

In the first sign of intensified bombing yesterday, Iranian authorities said an airstrike had destroyed a Tehran research center called the Pasteur Institute.

I don’t know if the timing was deliberate, the day after the speech, but yesterday the president drastically changed the subject.

The media is already moving on to Trump’s decision yesterday to fire Pam Bondi as attorney general, because she has not been aggressive enough in prosecuting his political enemies, and for her mishandling of the Epstein files.

In the end, the speech may matter less than what happens during the rest of April.

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If Trump ends the attack on the timeline he has suggested, voters could breathe a sigh of relief and move on. They will remember that Trump went after Middle East terrorists and will relent if gas prices start to fall.

The problem is that the damage to the global economy could be much more painful and lasting than if the president had not launched the war he preferred. And no speech alone could change that.