President Donald Trump is a “practical primitive” as he wages war against Iran, a veteran journalist warned on Saturday — and the world is not catching up to that fact.
“All of the many textbook reasons for war—historical, military, political, economic, defensive or aggressive—are less than relevant because he has only limited awareness of them,” journalist Michael Wolff wrote in The Daily Beast regarding Trump’s foreign policy.
“What any world leader, ally, enemy, diplomatic expert, pundit, or political pro thinks about war is absent—because it’s Trump. Sometimes he even seems to have an amount of self-awareness about this strange vacuum, proudly proclaiming that nobody knows what he’s going to do because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, which gives him quite an advantage over everybody else.”
He added, “Beware the crazy man.”
Wolff pointed out that, although foreign policy commentators keep trying to analyze Trump’s motives, “the world has simply never faced this kind of situation. All the mandarins, bureaucrats, and consultants in it, who have made their careers on greater and greater spreadsheets of complexity, are face-to-face with a practical primitive.”
Within this context, the only consistent theme in Trump’s foreign policy is that he wishes to financially profit from it. To illustrate this point, Wolff pointed to the growing influence of Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
“Jared was the guy to whom Trump farmed out most of the details, deal-making, and general foreign-policy mindshare—all things that bore the president—during the first administration,” Wolff wrote. “It was Kushner’s invitation that made MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Trump’s first foreign visitor to the White House. After that, Persian Gulf wealth became a consistent focus. The UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, were the crescent of opportunity.
Wolff added, “And while Trump was personally p------ off that his son-in-law snagged a $2 billion payoff from the Saudis without him benefiting, it also fortified his acumen in Trump’s eyes.”
Even though Trump describes Kushner’s and investment partner Steve Witkoff’s involvement in the Middle East as a “portfolio,” Wolff speculated that in Trump’s mind this is as much a financial portfolio as a diplomatic one.
“‘Jared can really work the Arabs. They like Jews to handle the money,’” Wolff quoted Trump as saying, adding that he was “likely unaware of his head-smacking antisemitism.”
Wolff concluded, “Always, the best way to understand Trump is to focus on what’s in it for him. In any endeavor, however misguided and seemingly inexplicable, there will be an eye-on-the prize calculation of how he personally can come out ahead. His world, random, disorganized, undisciplined, mercurial, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, has, over decades, always had a consistent focus on his piece of the pie.”
Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a conversation in which two subjects named Kushner as the Trump administration’s made decision-maker for Iran and helping Trump develop Middle Eastern policy. It also found that Trump worked closely with Kushner and Witkoff on other foreign policy issues; Witkoff, for example, was put in charge of dealing with the Russia-Ukraine war. Yet outsiders in the Republican Party are worried that the Iran war, as pushed by an erratic Trump and his advisers, will ultimately hurt the party politically.
“The longer this goes on, the worse it is politically, full stop,” Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett, who worked for Trump during his first term, told The Wall Street Journal.