EMPTY-HANDED

Trump’s Secret Nuclear Admission to Aides Is Leaked

The president is telling advisers he may have to abandon the key rationale for his war on Iran.

Donald Trump has privately admitted that he may be forced to end his war on Iran without achieving his main objective, according to a bombshell report.

The conflict began on Feb. 28 when Trump joined Israel in launching massive air strikes that decapitated the leadership of the Islamic regime. The president cycled through several rationales for the war before hitting on keeping Tehran from building a nuclear bomb—and has stuck to that line in the five months since.

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His administration has repeatedly tried to fold the nuclear question into a wider settlement with Tehran. But The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Trump now privately concedes, in meetings with senior aides, that those demands are unachievable and is now just focused on getting ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz again.

That reported retreat would make it harder for the White House to paint any end to the conflict as a victory. Iran’s closure of the waterway, through which a fifth of global oil supply passes, has sent gas prices in the U.S. soaring ahead of midterm elections likely to be dominated by cost-of-living concerns. Democrats hold an almost 8-point lead in the polls, which means the GOP could lose control of both the House and the Senate.

Trump has tried to smooth over any panic among his aides, the Journal reports. He’s told them Iran is unlikely to restart its nuclear program while he’s in office, pointing to American strikes that wrecked three of the country’s main nuclear sites last year, according to the Journal. He also brushed off uranium still buried in the country during July’s NATO summit. “We’ve already got the nuclear material, because it’s so far underground,” he said then.

The president sounded unhurried about the peace negotiations in an interview with Axios on Sunday. “We are low-keying it,” he told the outlet by phone. He made no threats of further bombing, as he often has during even quieter periods of the conflict, and voiced no anger over Tehran’s resistance to talks over the past several weeks.

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He instead framed the dynamic now as Washington allowing Iran’s own finances to do the work of pushing them back to the table. “We are only semi-negotiating with them,” the president told Axios, in a nod to soaring inflation across the Middle Eastern country and its depleted state funds. Iran is in “very bad shape” and cannot pay its soldiers to keep fighting, he said.

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