Thirty-two days after US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, Trump chose Passover to make his first public appeal to the nation, in the face of an unpopular war whose objectives have been opaque, and confused, at every juncture, and that has widened and escalated beyond his control.
At 19 minutes, his speech yesterday was rushed, even as it struggled to reframe the destruction and havoc that has been unleashed across West Asia, and the deepening economic disruption at home in US, casting these as a price worth paying for future generations. Americans should be proud, Trump claimed, to support a war that would remove the threat of Iran for their children and their grandchildren. He used his speech to press energy-dependent nations to solve the Hormuz problem, although he offered no road map for achieving this.