The Question He Couldn't Answer

President Trump's attack on a basic question

David Sanger of the New York Times asked the president a basic question on the return from China. The president called it treason.

Sanger’s question: “What would be the use in repeating the bombing? You did it for 38 days and you did not get the political changes in Iran.”

The president threatened Iran. If they didn’t agree to terms-- or move in that direction-- he would start bombing again. Sanger was asking him to explain the reasoning behind the claim he had just made. Not only is this a basic journalistic question, it’s a basic human one. There is no more elementary response in the brain: you said something—why do you think that is so?

The president labeled the question treasonous, called it a “false question” and said Sanger was committing treason. (Full response in footnotes.)¹

Join me for a tour through the sub-basement. That’s how far down you have to go to find the bar the president was being asked to clear by this question—watch your head, the water lines run through here.

There are several possible answers the president could have given—all of which would have helped him. He could have said: the leadership is a mess and can’t get their act together . , we’re being patient, but another round of strikes might focus their attention. Or he could have said: their oil is stuck in tankers with nowhere to go, they’re shutting down rigs, their economy is crippled . , the IRGC is practicing riot control because they know the public won’t stand for it much longer. Another round of strikes might accelerate that implosion from within.

Those are spin, to one degree or another, but they are plausible. They advance his position. And the president chose the one answer that didn’t advance it—unless his position is no longer winning the war but winning the argument about the war. ²

Let’s look at what he actually said. He interpreted a question about how bombing is connected to objectives as the claim that “you sit there and say it didn’t work?” Sanger said no such thing. The president jumped to that conclusion. Studies have shown that people who are anxious about something often interpret questions to be more harsh than they are.

Psychologists call this hostile attribution bias—the tendency to interpret ambiguous cues as attacks. Research has found that people in heightened states of anxiety are significantly more likely to hear a neutral question as an accusation.³

The question is, what he’s anxious about. The answer is in the claim he chose to make. President Trump called the Iran war a “total military victory. Total victory.” He invites us to linger on this claim, which none of the competent answers would have. Is it useful to his goals to do so?

No.

First, it’s another version of the doth protest too much problem we’ve already addressed.

Second, it invites external validation of the claim. Robert Kagan—the neoconservative hawk who championed the Iraq invasion—wrote in The Atlantic that the U.S. has suffered “total defeat,” a loss that “can neither be repaired nor ignored.” Sir Alex Younger, who ran Britain’s MI6 from 2014 to 2020, told The Economist the U.S. has “lost the initiative to Iran” and that the regime has shown “greater resilience than anyone would have expected.” His predecessor Sir John Sawers called it “an unnecessary war” that “was not required.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a U.S. ally, said publicly that the United States is “being humiliated” by Iranian negotiating tactics. The Iranians proposed reparations among their demands. That is not the behavior of a nation that thinks it has experienced total defeat.

By Donald Trump’s lights he hasn’t achieved this kind of total victory either. Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group listed all the objectives Trump has cited for the war: rescuing the Iranian people, choosing the next Iranian leader, taking the oil, ending Iranian ballistic missile capabilities, ending Iran’s support for regional proxies, removing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, and ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities.

These things have not happened. In “total victory,” some or all of them would.

Total victory might look like this:

Iran surrenders, admits their Navy is gone and resting at the bottom of the sea, and their Air Force is no longer with us, and if their entire Military walks out of Tehran, weapons dropped and hands held high, each shouting ‘I surrender, I surrender’ while wildly waving the representative White Flag, and if their entire remaining Leadership signs all necessary ‘Documents of Surrender,’ and admit their defeat to the great power and force of the magnificent U.S.A.

That would indeed be total victory. It comes from a social media post by the president. He was being facetious, going on to say even if all of that did happen the New York Times wouldn’t give him credit. But it hasn’t happened. Not total victory.

What has happened is total military dominance. That’s been true for nearly as long as the war has been going on. Iran’s navy is at the bottom of the sea. Its air force is gone. Its former supreme leader is dead. And yet gas is $4.52 a gallon today. A year ago it was $3.18. The world economy is on edge. Why?

Because Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz—a crisis that didn’t exist before the war started. Iran charges tolls for safe passage, limits transit to nations it favors, and can close the strait entirely when it wants leverage. Military dominance destroyed Iran’s conventional forces. It did not give the United States control of the waterway that sets the price of energy for the planet. That is the distance between dominance and victory, and voters see it every time they look into that digital window at the gas pump.

You can bomb the hell out of people rhetorically by telling them we’ve achieved “total victory,” but the tonnage can’t make them believe it.

This is an uncomfortable fact for the president. He knows what dominance looks like and his irritation at Sanger possibly betrays that. No one would dispute the claim if he applied it to illegal border crossings.

Donald Trump won office claiming the Iraq⁴ war had been a mistake and now most voters think Trump made the wrong call in starting a war with Iran. Nearly two-thirds of voters in the NYT/Siena poll released today say that going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of politically crucial independents.

The president’s response to Sanger raises presidential-level questions. Was he purely being performative or is his temperament as threadbare as it appears? If it is, what does that mean about the decisions he has before him and how he will make them?

The Chinese are watching—they’re Iran’s biggest oil customer and investor. They could help out, or they could let the U.S. dangle as they did when they hosted its president for three days and sent him home with no breakthroughs. They’ve chosen the dangle. The Iranians are watching—they rejected his terms and proposed reparations. And the voters are watching. They just gave Trump a 37% approval rating.

David Sanger asked the president a simple question: why do you think this will work? The voters are asking the same one. They’re just not getting called treasonous for it.

1. “That is a totally false question by a fake guy. You are a fake guy, David. Your paper is fake, and your reporting is treasonous. It was a total military victory, okay? Total victory. We wiped out their navy, we wiped out their air force, we wiped out their infrastructure, we wiped out their leadership. They have nothing left. And you sit there and say it didn’t work? It worked perfectly. Your editors tell you what to write because they hate the country. It’s a total victory, and everybody knows it but you.”

2. One way the response might serve his goals: the president is preparing to take what he can get. It will not be close to what he set out to achieve, but he’s stuck in a war. What he would like to do is agree to something and then, when the New York Times or others point out that it cost a lot of money, death and missiles for a lesser prize than he’d set out to get, claim that their questions are the product of a crazed mindset rather than simple arithmetic created by his own actions.

3. Hostile attribution bias was first identified in developmental psychology by Kenneth Dodge in the 1980s, studying children who interpreted accidental bumps on the playground as deliberate aggression. The concept has since been extended to adults. A 2018 study in Frontiers in Psychology (Zheng et al.) found that hostile attribution bias mediates the relationship between anxiety-driven rumination and aggressive response. Boy does this feel familiar: the more someone ruminates anxiously, the more likely they are to read neutral interactions as hostile, and the more likely they are to respond with aggression. A University of Chicago study using neuroimaging found the bias is so deeply embedded it shows up in brain activity patterns: researchers could identify whether a participant had high or low levels of hostile attribution bias from neural scans alone with 75% accuracy, rising to 86% among the most biased subjects. The key variable across the literature is emotional state. When subjects are already anxious, angry, or threatened, ambiguous social cues get routed through what researchers call a “vigilance for threat” filter. (Also experienced by anyone who has spent more than ten minutes on Twitter). The person doesn’t decide the question is hostile. They perceive it that way before conscious evaluation begins. (i.e. they come loaded for bear). Dodge’s original framework called this a failure at the “intent attribution” stage of social information processing—the moment where the brain assigns motive to another person’s behavior. When that stage misfires, everything downstream follows: the neutral question becomes an attack, and the response escalates.

4. Correction: Originally said “Iran.” Thank you to Matt for the correction.