Trump Continues to Rebrand America As Weird and Flaky
By Heather Hurlburt
May 8, 2018
4:13 pm
Staged like the finale of The Apprentice, President Trump’s media appearance announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program was intended to be a Big Deal.
The president provided all the television staples of national-security seriousness. He described the threat posed by Iran with headline-worthy hyperbole. No one thinks Iran is close to having a missile that can “threaten American cities” (that would be North Korea). He said Israel had provided new information about Iran’s nuclear intentions — all of which dated from before the agreement was signed and implemented, but never mind. And, with a flourish, he signed a national-security directive that would, he said, institute “the highest level of economic sanction.”
But wait. Insiders had told reporters an hour before that sanctions would not be reimposed for six months. Statements from the White House and other agencies provided no details on when sanctions would come, or what they would include. In the prose of the White House fact sheet, “Those doing business in Iran will be provided a period of time to allow them to wind down operations in or business involving Iran.”
There is an argument to be made that the announcement was another spectacle of Trump being Trump, designed for his supporters’ consumption and not necessarily closely related to what policy developments would follow. After all, NAFTA is still in force, and most of the steel and aluminum tariffs the president announced in similarly showy public forums are still “suspended.”
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