Donald Trump made it clear over the weekend: he wants to be the most powerful president in modern history.
He may already be.
Saturday evening’s announcement of U.S. strikes on three Iranian targets tied to the country’s nuclear program triggered angry statements from Democrats who accused the president of drawing the country into another Middle East war with potentially no end in sight.
Now directly involved, U.S. participation in the Iran-Israel conflict quickly became an opportunity for Trump to both push the boundaries of the Executive Branch’s power and continue a trend he began in January: the centralization of the Executive Branch’s policy and power within the Oval Office.
Driving that effort is the president’s willingness to contradict his own deputies and top advisors, sometimes within just hours of their own public assessments.
On Iran, Trump accelerated this dynamic to the point where the buildup to three American strikes against Iranian targets Saturday resembled a cartoonish version of the Bush administration’s justification of war with Iraq in 2002.
But where Republican officials with George W. Bush’s administration presented what they claimed at the time was evidence of Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction an analysis that lrgelty proved to be false — Trump used the the opposite tactic: the public denial of his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.
“My intelligence community is wrong,” Trump told reporters in a gaggle on Friday, asked about Gabbard’s previous public assessment. “Who in the intelligence community said that?”
“Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard,” a reporter replied.
“She’s wrong,” Trump repeated.
That echoed comments he made earlier in the week, on his way back from a G7 summit in Canada.
“I don’t care what she said,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One. “I think they were very close to having one.”
His belief versus the DNI’s intel. Guess which won.
The latest example of that dynamic occurred on Sunday, when Vice President J.D. Vance assured Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press in a sit-down interview presumably planned out by the White House in the wake of Saturday’s attacks that the U.S. was not seeking “regime change” in Iran.
