Trump is crass, but knows what he’s doing

Donald Trump is no fool.

The U.S. president created the Iran crisis to divert attention from his impeachment.

And then he defused it by exercising uncharacteristic restraint.

As a result, he has once again absorbed all the public’s attention by managing to redefine the issues of the day in his own terms.

At the heart of the Iran crisis is Trump’s decision to renege on the nuclear deal hammered out by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

People can legitimately debate the pros and cons of that deal. But Trump’s decision to unilaterally reimpose brutal economic sanctions on Iran set the stage for everything that has happened since.

As both sides upped the pressure, it was only a matter of time until one of them went too far. That line was crossed last week, when Trump ordered the assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

It was a reckless decision. But, like much of Trump’s actions, it was also politically canny.

He instinctively understands what makes Americans tick. This week, he has used this understanding to divert public attention away from impeachment, which threatens his political future, to war, which ironically does not.

Before Trump had Soleimani assassinated last week, debate in Washington centred on the president’s upcoming trial in the Senate.

Would witnesses be called to provide evidence of his alleged high crimes and misdemeanours? Would the trial hurt Trump’s chances in November’s presidential election?

Now, debate focuses on war with Iran. Was Trump’s order to kill Soleimani justified? Did the senior Iranian official pose an “imminent” threat to the U.S. or merely, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it, an “inevitable” one?

The president has kept the pot boiling by threatening, out of the blue, to bomb Iranian cultural sites should hostilities escalate. Given that wanton destruction of cultural sites is banned by the Hague Convention of 1954, this has led critics to accuse him of contemplating war crimes. And that, in turn, has allowed Trump to focus on hypothetical issues (if he did bomb cultural sites would that be more criminal than, say, Iran’s possible use of roadside bombs to kill U.S. soldiers?).

The Iran diversion came to a boil Tuesday night. Would Trump retaliate against Iran for its missile strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq? Or, with a wink and a nudge, would he accept the strikes for what they were — a form of theatre designed to let the Iranian regime save face.

As it turned out, Trump — an old showman himself — chose to take it as theatre. Some analysts argue that Trump’s reckless warmongering is yet another reason to remove the impeached president from office.

Logically, they are correct. There are few crimes worse than risking unnecessary war. But politically, this is a difficult case to make in the U.S.

When war threatens, Americans tend to rally behind their president — at least in the beginning.

Until the body bags start coming home, Americans approve of tough-guy presidents. Trump knows this. He also knows that fevered attacks from the usual suspects only enhance his stature in middle America.

And so he rants and rages. He vows to destroy 52 sites in Iran, should that country dare retaliate for the murder of Soleimani.

But when it does retaliate, he shrugs and says things could have been worse. He is a warmonger who, at the crucial moment, declines to pull the trigger. In this, he is the kind of president many Americans want.

Forgotten is the fact he murdered a senior official of a country with which the U.S. is not at war. Forgotten is the fact that Soleimani’s militias were important U.S. allies in the war against ISIS.

And so, the world lurches in and out of crisis. Can the reason really be, as would-be Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren suggested this week, that such a crisis suits Trump’s political agenda? Could his motives be that crass?

You bet they could be.