First Draft: 🇮🇷🇺🇸 Is Iran Trying to 'Jimmy Carter' Donald Trump?
US officials tell Zeteo Tehran isn’t close to breaking and wants to damage Trump by holding out till the midterms. Plus: Louisiana leads the new GOP charge to racially gerrymander its districts.
On this day in 2003, George W. Bush gave his now-notorious “Mission Accomplished” speech, declaring “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. Spoiler alert: they hadn’t ended! Still, wouldn’t it be great if Donald Trump did his own “Mission Accomplished” speech now as a way of ending his endless war in Iran?
Happy Friday, all. It’s Swin and Andrew again. If you’re living in America right now and you still doubt you’re living in an empire in decline, remind yourself that our disastrously unpopular, mentally decayed leader is still very badly losing a horrifying foreign war that he started, and yet all he seems to want to talk about is his “ballroom” and punishing a former host of ‘The Man Show.’ Now, let’s talk more about that war, and the lies that President Donald Trump continues to peddle to the American people about his negotiating position, even as his own intelligence officials quietly warn of a much grimmer truth.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Iran prepares a familiar fate for Trump, Louisiana leads the way for the GOP after the death of the Voting Rights Act, and the public doesn’t believe Donald should get his White House ballroom in order to feel safe.
‘They Know They Can Carter Him’
Donald Trump likes to claim he holds all the “cards” and is in “no rush” to make a deal to end the illegal war in Iran he started earlier this year. He claims the Iranian government is “begging” him to end the war and that the US has “all” the leverage in negotiations.
That would be news to various US officials, some of whom have told the president and other senior administration personnel that the Iranians, in fact, have a ton of leverage – to a degree that could be disastrous for Trump and Republicans in the looming midterm elections.
In recent weeks, US officials have privately discussed classified intelligence assessments suggesting that the government in Tehran isn’t close to breaking, even after two months of war and a sustained economic assault, two administration officials and two other sources briefed on the matter tell us. Administration officials, citing US intel, have also warned that senior Iranian officials are keenly aware that if the war drags on much longer, it could further damage Trump and the Republican Party’s chances at the polls in November.
“They know they can Carter him,” a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence and internal deliberations says, referring to how the Iranian hostage crisis helped tank Jimmy Carter’s presidency by the time of the 1980 US election.
And if Tehran doesn’t get a deal to end the conflict that it sees as sufficiently favorable – a scenario that would invariably include concessions that the White House has said cross Trump’s “red lines” – US intelligence officials believe the Iranians would likely be able to keep fighting into the end of the year at least, the sources add.