WASHINGTON DC – When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2024, he and his top advisers believed they had hit upon a surefire way to ensure that, this time around, Trump would not be talked out of anything he wanted to do.
The plan: to surround himself with dyed-in-the-wool loyalists from within his Make America Great Again (Maga) and America First movements. There would be no voices of dissent, no moderating influences and – as the US President looks around his Cabinet table – definitely no Ed Milibands ready to challenge and dissuade him from wading blindly into geopolitical crises and military engagements.
Arguably, no single event has revealed the success of the President’s strategy more than the US’s ongoing “major combat operations” against Iran.
Without a single restraining voice in his ear, Trump has taken full advantage of his top lieutenants’ green light to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader, destabilise the Middle East, put the lives of US troops at risk, send the global price of oil soaring and leave the US at a greater risk of terror attacks at home.
A casual observer can see Trump’s strategy playing out on television daily. His “Cabinet meetings” are not proper Cabinet meetings – they are made-for-television spectacles in which the President goes around the table and invites praise and plaudits from sycophantic members of his inner circle who, at times, appear to be competing to massage his ego with ever-greater dollops of baby oil.
In the run-up to the recent US-Israeli air strikes on Iran, US Vice President JD Vance reportedly came the closest to warning Trump of the dangers inherent in pursuing a seemingly strategy-free war.
JD Vance (centre) told Trump to ‘Go big and go fast’ if he was to attack Iran (Photo: Yuki Iwamura/AP)Vance had assured the public back in October 2024 that it would be folly for the US to start bombing Tehran. “It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country,” he told podcaster Tim Dillon during the presidential campaign.
However, in White House discussions last month, Vance appeared to have folded the moment it became apparent that Trump’s mind was already set. “Go big and go fast,” was Vance’s reported advice to the President, which at least leaves him able to claim that he warned his boss about attacking with insufficient force or pace to get the job done.
In Trump’s second term, there are no experts within his National Security Council willing to present an alternative thesis to the President’s preconceived notions – they were all rooted out the moment Joe Biden left office.
This time around, there are not even any first-term figures like John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff or former national security advisers H.R. McMaster or John Bolton, who, with varying degrees of fealty, would prostrate themselves before Trump but also occasionally tell him he was wrong.
Trump and Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, during a Cabinet meeting at the White House (Photo: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg/Getty)Instead, the country is left with the cartoonish character of US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He is a former Fox News weekend anchorman who displays all the characteristics of a performing seal as he presents cocksure, tough-guy military briefings that appear designed primarily for the attention of his boss. At times, even the generals tapped by Trump to lead his war shuffle uncomfortably on their feet as Hegseth reaches for the high notes.
These are generals who survived Hegseth’s purges last year, which aimed to remove those whose views were seen as at odds with Trump’s own.
Not only does the Trump administration lack a Miliband, but it also lacks a Mark Milley. Milley was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during Trump’s first term and, according to journalist Bob Woodward, took secret action after the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill to limit the President’s ability to “go rogue” militarily.
In his book Peril, Woodward said that Milley “was certain that Trump had gone into serious mental decline” following his November 2020 election defeat. Today, former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once joined at the hip politically with Trump, is publicly questioning the President’s mental health.
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“What’s in his mind? What is his mental state?” Taylor Greene said on the Megyn Kelly Show last week. “A year in, and we’re in another f**king war,” she fumed. “What is happening to a man I supported… the man that denounced what happened in Iraq, the man who said: ‘no more foreign wars, no more regime change’?”
What has happened is arguably the decision to form an entire government built on one man’s ego, one man’s quixotic outlook – and to try to ensure that he never gets a reality-check by anyone who wanders into his Cabinet Room or the Oval Office.
Today, many lives, including American troops, are being lost in the Middle East as a direct result.
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