Donald Trump’s latest public appearance reveals a lot.
Here are four:
Inconsistency on discussions with Iranians
The US president has said several times in recent hours that negotiations with the Iranians are ongoing.
“They want to make a deal,” he said Sunday night on the plane back to Washington, D.C. “They want to make a deal,” he said again Monday.
But when asked the obvious questions—“Who are you talking to who wants to make a deal?” and “What does the deal look like?” – The President could not answer.
Instead, he said that all the people he had been talking to were now dead. He has said this before, strangely attributing it to the success of the military campaign.
He also considered whether they would really want to make a deal with the Iranians, even if they wanted to. These thoughts were full of “They want to make a deal.”
Trump looks at a model plane commemorating the US bombing against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Photo: Reuters
artificial intelligence
The President reveals that he has seen a video (possibly on social media) showing the American aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln, being attacked and set on fire.
He then revealed that he called his generals and asked, “What’s the matter with Abraham Lincoln? It looks like it’s on fire.”
Then he was told that it was fake.
The incident raises serious questions about what kind of content the President is absorbing and believing on social media.
The Starmer Call
The President and the Prime Minister spoke on the phone on Sunday. The “readout” of the call from Downing Street was thin and revealed little. A source later told me that the call went “excellent” and there was a “clear shared interest in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open.”
The call did not reflect any public frustration shown by the President, according to my sources.
The President has now revealed another window into that call.
“You know the UK – the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said to me yesterday, ‘I’m meeting with my team to make a determination.’
“I said, ‘You don’t need to meet the team. You’re the Prime Minister. You can make your own… Why do you need to meet your team to find out if you send us some minesweepers…?'”
Trump: ‘Britain was considered the Rolls Royce of allies.’
learning about lebanon
In another moment of conscious thought, he revealed that he had recently been briefed about the geographic power structure in Lebanon – something that is important to understand, given the Israeli military operations the US is supporting there right now. In the same sentence he also expressed surprise that people even live in Ukraine or Lebanon.
This passage is a verbatim transcript of that moment: “…an important man, a wealthy man, whose parents live in Lebanon. I said, ‘Actually, how do you live in Lebanon? Your parents? Oh, yes, they live there. And over the years, they have become accustomed to the fact that it is being bombed here.’
“But they explained to me that it’s actually a different section of Lebanon. This is the section where Hezbollah is, and they’ve got used to it, I think… I mean, people live in Ukraine.
“You would think they wouldn’t live in Ukraine, but they live in Ukraine. I don’t know if I would, but they live in Ukraine. They live in Lebanon.”
