CNN
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By most accounts, President Donald Trump’s attention last week was consumed by the spiral crisis unfolding between Israel and Iran. In between Monday’s meeting in Canada, he was constantly assisted in seeking updates. He spent more time this week in the cellar situation room than in his new presidency.
So, Wednesday, when the president came out of South Portico, was somewhat jarring, not providing an update on the crisis talks, but overseeing the installation of two almost 100 feet of flagpole.
“These are the best poles in the country or in the world. In fact, they’re tapering. They have a nice top,” the president told reporters and workers’ clutches. “It’s a very exciting project for me.”
His break from the Iranian meeting lasted about an hour. This was the moment when the president literally touched the grass on the Southern Lawn in the most important period of his term decision to date.
A day later, the president decided not to decide.
He dictated a statement to his spokesman Karoline Lewitt, who announced he had announced he would refrain from ordering a strike against Iran for up to two weeks to see if a diplomatic resolution was possible.
The decision came to light after another meeting in the situation room where the president reviewed most of this week into attack plans and quizzed staff about each potential outcome.
After steadily ratcheting his martial arts rhetoric, including issuing urgent warnings to evacuate 10 million residents of Iran’s capital, Trump’s postponement will provide the president with several breathing chambers as he continues to work through options presented by military officials over the past few days.
They have also been urgent since it was revealed that Trump is seriously considering dropping bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities, allowing him to increase the time he has been in the face of his own party’s divergent fact insisting that he is directly in favor of the president.
The president refused to choose his side in public, alternating between militaristic threats published last week on social media and private concerns that the military strike he ordered could drag the United States over a long period of time.
Around the table in the situation room, he relied primarily on his CIA director, John Ratcliffe and the co-chief chairman to discuss his options. His foreign envoy, Steve Witkov, is responding to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragut, to determine whether there is a room for Israel to resume deadlocked diplomacy before it began its campaign last week.
Other officials are publicly on the sidelines. Twice this week, Trump rejected an assessment previously provided by the National Intelligence Director on Iran’s programme for developing nuclear weapons. Gabbard testified in March that the US intelligence community evaluated Iran as not building such weapons. Trump publicly objected that Friday.
“Well, my intelligence news community is wrong,” Trump told reporters in New Jersey, telling anyone in the intelligence news community. He said it was Gabbard, Trump replied, “She’s wrong.”
However, when he takes actions that could potentially bring about consequences for years to come, it appears that Trump is largely dependent on his own instincts.
That wasn’t necessarily a surprise when top national security officials told Trump at a meeting at Camp David earlier this month that Israel was ready to face impending attacks within Iran. Trump’s advisers had been preparing for months for the possibility that Israel could grab a moment of Iran’s debilitating decline – the proxies in the area have been broken over the past year, launching a direct attack.
Trump’s team has arrived at Camp David, who has already created options for potential US involvement. According to those familiar with the issue, his advisor resolved his own differences in advance before presenting possible plans to the president.
From the president’s hiding place in Mountainside, Trump also spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ten days later, as Israel’s campaign is in full swing, Trump was meeting with a group of seven top American allies in Canada.
At the closing door meeting, European leaders were trying to see if Trump tended to order a US strike at Fordor, an underground nuclear facility that is a hot focus for American war planners, Western officials said. They also tried to convince Trump that it was difficult for him to sign the joint statement. It urged that “resolution of the Iranian crisis will lead to a broader breakdown of hostility in the Middle East.”
Trump did not reveal his hands either during private sessions with individual leaders or dinner at Kananaskis Country Golf Course, Western officials said. Instead, he left the summit early, leaving his counterpart to the Rockies in Canada, returning to Washington to deal with the issues himself.
By the middle of the week, Trump’s patience seemed to be wearing thinly to find a diplomatic solution, as only vague signs from Iran were about to resume his speech. And many of his allies believed he was on the verge of ordering a strike against Iran.
“It’s so late, right?” he said at Wednesday’s flagpole event that the fever would make his forehead shine. “It’s very slow to talk.”
Those familiar with the conversation said that during the private meeting that day, Trump seemed convinced of the need to take away the Fordow facility. And he said that in public, the US is the only one with the firepower to do it.
“We’re the only ones who have the ability to do that, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do it,” Trump said after he returned to his flag. “Everyone asked me about it, but I haven’t made a decision.”
He was speaking from an oval office. There he gathered players from the Italian soccer club Juventus and stood behind him. They acted primarily as fidgety background to Trump’s sessions of questions and answers regarding his Iranian decision-making.
At one point, Trump turned his eyes to the players during the discussion of the B-2 stealth bomber. This is the only jet that can carry bombs that destroy bunkers to destroy Iran’s underground enrichment facilities.
“You can be stealth – you’ll never lose, right?” he asked the team members, but no one responded.
“It was a bit strange. When he started talking about politics with Iran, it was just… I just want to play football, I’m just a guy,” said one of the players, Timothy Weir.
Amidst the series of events, Trump continued to weigh his previous choices and worried about the long-term war. And he continued to receive messages from all sides of his political coalition. It has been divided into wisdom to launch a strike that could spark the United States in war for years to come.
He repeatedly called after a call Tuesday night from Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent voice in support of hitting Iran, who described the president as “very focused and very calm.”
“When he says he won’t say nuclear weapons for Iran, he means that,” Graham said the next day. “He gave them the opportunity to diplomacy. I think they miscalculated about President Trump.”
One of the most prominent voices against the strike, his former top strategist Steve Bannon was there at the White House on Thursday for lunch with the president, which had been rescheduled weeks ago.
He made no mention of his conversation with Trump on his “War Room” show later Thursday. But a day ago, he told the Round Table that engaging in a led conflict with Iran would be a historic mistake.
“My mantra now: the Israelites must finish what they started,” he said at the breakfast at the Christian Science Monitor. “We can’t do this again. We’re tearing the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq.”
For Trump, the swirl of options, opinions and advice is nothing new. He is very faced with Iran’s decision as he has almost all the major choices of his presidency by seeking advice and trying to arrive at a solution that pleases the widest range of his supporters.
The answer this time may not be that simple, and Trump doesn’t hold every card in conflicts that are playing around the world. Israel’s decision to launch a strike a week ago was no surprise to the president, but he was still opposed to his public pleading. And in Iran, he stands up against an enemy with a long history of strengthening its position under pressure from the US.
As he arrived at his New Jersey home on Friday, Trump said it would be difficult to ask Netanyahu to ask him to ease the Iranian strike in pursuit of diplomacy, given Israel’s success in previous conflicts. And he said the two-week window he set a day ago was the maximum period that allows diplomacy to work, ensuring the option to order a strike before the time comes.
The president could not say whether his previous decision was the biggest thing he would face as a president. However, as he attempted to find a balance between ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions and protecting the United States from war, he provided an assessment of what he hoped his legacy would be on the other side.
“I’m always a peace manager,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it. Sometimes it takes some toughness to create peace.