Murdoch Paper Calls Out Trump’s ‘Signals of Weakness’
Rupert Murdoch’s flagship paper has eviscerated Donald Trump over his “signals of weakness” after his latest flip-flop in his war with Iran.
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“By now it’s clear that this up and down, back and forth, from war of annihilation to peace in our time is Mr. Trump’s chaotic way of war,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote on Sunday. “No wonder the polls show voters have soured on the war.”
After a week of ratcheting up threats against Iran, Trump suddenly hit the brakes late Saturday, announcing on Truth Social, “We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.”
It was the latest whiplash-inducing about-face in Trump’s more than five-month-old war, with the president repeatedly declaring breakthroughs only for new escalations to follow.
The Journal opened its piece with a biting jab about Trump’s Iran flip-flops, writing, “A friend quipped the other day that President Trump truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already ended the Iran war eight times.”
The paper suggested that Iran has gained “escalation dominance in this conflict,” pointing to reports that Saudi Arabia asked Trump to call off the attacks over fears that Iran would target its oil infrastructure.
Iran has seen through Trump’s brinkmanship, realizing that he is wary of a prolonged conflict and surrounded by advisers who “want the conflict over on nearly any available terms,” the paper argued.
“Iran’s regime knows signals of weakness when it hears them,” the Journal wrote. “It interpreted the poorly drafted MOU as an opening to let it control the Strait and has kept taunting Mr. Trump with attacks on U.S. allies and bases. Mr. Trump lashes out with a tit-for-tat bombing response that so far hasn’t caused Iran to bend.”
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The paper argued that Trump effectively tipped his hand when he signed the ultimately futile memorandum of understanding with Iran in June and subsequently conceded that he had struck the deal in order to avoid becoming “the next Herbert Hoover”—the U.S president widely blamed for the Great Depression in the aftermath of the 1929 crash.
“Has Iran now finally agreed to terms that can plausibly be called a U.S. victory, as Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post suggested?” the Journal wrote, before closing with a stinging reminder of Trump’s repeated false dawns. “Recall that when the MOU was signed, Mr. Trump’s negotiators hailed the result, and claimed the regime had turned a ‘new leaf,’ as Vice President JD Vance put it, and wanted to become a ‘normal country,’ despite 47 years of promoting terror and regional revolution.
“As ever, it pays to watch what Iran does, not what the regime and Mr. Trump say it will do.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump on Sunday told reporters aboard Air Force One that the strikes he called off would have been “the biggest attack since World War II,” and that he was “all set to go,” before Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran convinced him to stand down.
“They said we’d like to make a deal now. You know, I don’t know what they say because a lot of times they’ll say that to me and then they’ll go out and say we don’t know what he’s talking about,” he said.
He refused to impose a deadline on Iran to make a deal, saying, “We’ll just see.”
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