Trump Uses Scene From Iconic TV Show to Justify New Strikes

President Donald Trump shared a clip from a popular 2000s TV show in an attempt to justify his decision to authorize military strikes on Iran.

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U.S. Central Command confirmed on Tuesday that “self-defense” strikes on Iran had begun at Trump’s direction in response to the downing of a U.S. helicopter on Monday.

Shortly after, the 79-year-old president posted a clip from The West Wing on Truth Social.

In the clip, taken from the first-season episode “A Proportional Response,” President Jed Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, asks his military advisers what the virtue of a proportional response is after a plane carrying a friend of his is shot down by the Syrian government.

After one of his advisers asks him what other kind of response the U.S. government could possibly make, Bartlet says, “A disproportional response. Let the word ring forth from this time and this place, you kill an American, any American, we don’t come back with a proportional response, we come back with total disaster!”

Without context, Bartlet’s tirade reads as an endorsement of an aggressive approach to dealing with perceived enemies. In reality, that was not the message that show creator Aaron Sorkin, himself a vocal critic of Donald Trump, was seeking to communicate.

Bartlet returns to the subject later in the episode in a conversation with his chief of staff Leo McGarry, played by John Spencer. In that conversation, McGarry asks Bartlet if he truly thinks that “ratcheting up the body count” will be enough to deter America’s enemies from attacking its citizens.

After Bartlet says that he does, McGarry is quick to shut him down, telling the president, “Then you are just as dumb as these guys who think that capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins.”

“As if drug kingpins didn’t live their day-to-day lives under the possibility of execution. And their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process.”

McGarry continues, cautioning Bartlet against pursuing a more aggressive and reactive approach, telling him, “So my friend, if you want to start using American military strength as the arm of the Lord, you can do that. We’re the only superpower left.“

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“You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne, but you better be prepared to kill everyone, and you better start with me, ‘cause I will raise up an army against you and I will beat you!”

When Bartlet laments what he considers to be an insufficient response to the killing of his friend, McGarry agrees that while the proportional response is not good, “it’s what there is.”

“It’s how you behave if you’re the most powerful nation in the world. It’s proportional, it’s reasonable, it’s responsible, it’s merciful.”

The president’s decision to use a clip from The West Wing to justify his decision is an unusual one, considering the show’s clear liberal idealism and creator Aaron Sorkin’s own politics.

In a letter addressed to his wife and daughter following Trump’s election in 2016, Sorkin described Trump as “a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn,” adding that his election represented a “horrible” time for the U.S.

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.

Trump’s decision to launch retaliatory strikes against Iran comes just one day after he claimed that a deal to end the war was only days away.

“Two or three days,” Trump told a reporter on Monday night following Game 3 of the NBA Finals when asked when a peace deal would be finalized.

“We have a good chance of doing it. We should be able to do it in one hour, if you want to know the truth.”

“We’re, uh—we’re very close to having a very, very, good, strong, powerful deal,” he added. “If we go and bomb, which we can do very easily if we want, and we spend another two or three weeks bombing, they’ll have nothing left whatsoever. But you won’t have the Strait [of Hormuz] open for months.”