Even for a speech on April Fool’s Day, Donald Trump’s address to the nation about the Iran war felt like a bad joke.
In his first prime time speech since the war began 33 days ago, the US President failed to meet the moment amid crumbling support at home for the conflict.
It was billed as an important update on the war amid spiralling petrol prices with analysts claiming the worst oil shock in history is unfolding.
Instead Trump’s 20 minute address felt like a stump speech during his last election campaign only with a slight Middle Eastern flavour.
Speaking from the White House, the President sounded croaky, tired and looked like he didn’t want to be explaining yet again how well the war was supposedly going.
For a man who made his living selling real estate, this was one pitch that even Donald Trump couldn’t make sound convincing.
It felt like the same tired, unbelievable talking points we’ve been hearing for a month now from senior White House officials and cabinet members.
Trump said that America’s core objectives were “nearing completion” and repeated that he expected the fighting would go on for another two to three weeks.
In an absurdly simplistic comparison, Trump reeled off the lengths of time America had been involved in other wars such as WWII and the Korean War.
“We are in this military operation for 32 days and the country (Iran) has been eviscerated and is no longer a threat,” Trump said.
Lest we forget, former President George W Bush made his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech six weeks after the invasion of Iraq, a war that would go on for more than eight years.
At least Trump stuck to the script on the objectives of the war: making sure Iran never gets nuclear weapons, destroying the Iranian navy, degrading its missile capabilities and stopping it from being able to support terrorist allies in the region.
The problem was that earlier in the day he told Reuters that he wasn’t bothered about getting hold of Iran’s supplies of enriched uranium.
Trump had said: “That’s so far underground, I don’t care about that”.
When the President turned to the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage which carries 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and has been shut down by Iran, he went from optimistic to absurd.
According to Trump, the strait will “open up naturally” once the war ends because the Iranians need money from oil too.
In other words, Iran will magically give up its Trump card without anything in return.
What Americans were crying out for was some empathy about gas prices, which have hit $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 when the Ukraine war began.
At a time when the cost of living was already the no.1 concern of voters, paying higher prices for petrol is proving crippling to many.
Instead the President glossed over the economic damage and made no mention of the fallout around the world which has led some Asian nations to take drastic measures because of shortages of petrol.
Trump said the higher gas prices were a “short term increase” which, in his fantastical reading of the tea leaves, would come down soon.
The only good point to come out of the address was that Trump didn’t attack Nato as strongly as had been expected.
Trump has been furious about the refusal of Western nations, the UK in particular, to help the military campaign and re-open the Strait of Hormuz.
In the speech urged Britain and the EU to buy oil from the US and go to the Strait and “just take it”, referring to the oil.
You might be forgiven for thinking why Trump bothered with the speech at all, but the tell may be in how badly the war is actually going.
With the US midterm elections just seven months away, the polling has been brutal for Trump and is getting worse by the day.
Hours before Trump spoke, a new CNN poll found that just one in three Americans believe the President has a “clear plan to handle the situation in Iran”.
Two separate surveys released last week by The Associated Press and Quinnipiac University put Trump’s overall approval at just 38 percent, a new low for him.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst survey put it even lower, at 33 percent.
In the speech Trump tried to portray the bombing of Iran as an “investment in your children and grandchildren’s future”.
“The whole world is watching and they can’t believe what they are seeing”, Trump said.
Very true, but just not in the way he thinks.
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