Donald Trump has launched airstrikes against the terrorist regime in Iran, and we keep hearing the same thing from his haters: the man won’t stop changing his mind.
You’ve probably seen those videos they keep sharing on social media. Trump opposes wars in the Middle East then he bombs the ayatollahs. Trump says U.S. allies should help reopen the Strait of Hormuz then he states that we don’t need anyone’s help.
The latest version is: Trump threatens to bomb Iran’s power plants only to delay attacks after negotiating with the Iranian regime.
Whatever you think of Trump’s positioning, one thing has remained consistent: his willingness to adapt as circumstances change.
Trump, more than any other politician in Washington, is fine changing course when he decides it’s needed. That’s not a bad thing; it’s what strong leadership looks like in a dynamic world.
Take, for example, Trump’s statements on Israel. The president supports the Israeli nation, viewing it as a valuable U.S. ally and rare democracy in the Middle East. When Israel warned that Iran needed to be hit because it had an active nuclear program and was funding terrorists, Trump agreed and took the reins.
But that doesn’t mean everything Israel does deserves a rubber stamp. So when Israel bombed a key natural gas production plant at South Pars in Iran, Trump took to Truth Social and told them not to do it again.
He was right: the South Pars bombing threatened to spike natural gas prices and even throw the globe into an energy crisis. The legacy media predictably spun it as a flip-flop, but Trump was reacting sensibly to what had happened.
Something similar happened last year after Houthi rebels began attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea. The Trump administration responded by bombing Houthi targets in Yemen.
Two months later, Trump declared, “We’re going to stop the bombing of the Houthis, effective immediately.” Aha, the mainstream media taunted, he changed his mind again! Never mind that Trump had brokered a ceasefire with the Houthis to keep U.S. ships safe, one that’s held to this day even as he wages war against the Houthis’ sugar daddies in Iran.
Had Trump continued attacking the Houthis, it would have cost American taxpayers money and placed U.S. service members at risk—all while the Houthis were willing to negotiate. What good would that have done?
Or take another principled Trump administration change of course. At the beginning of Trump’s second term, his Justice Department worked to block a proposed merger between two technology companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks. He was worried that the resulting bigger company would be too big.
Five months later, the DOJ suddenly settled the lawsuit. Why? Because, after communicating with the CIA and national intelligence community, the administration had come to understand that the HPE-Juniper merger was vital for U.S. national security, creating a viable competitor to Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that dominates the global marketplace that doubles as an espionage agent for Beijing.
Washington elites are forever claiming they want a thoughtful and pragmatic president. Yet the minute they get someone who’s willing to change his mind, they trash him.
You could argue that Joe Biden was more consistent than Donald Trump. He consistently spent enormous sums of borrowed money that fueled inflation. He consistently pushed radical gender ideology. He consistently attacked his own countrymen.
It’s not a virtue for a president to be consistently wrong. And all presidents, being human, make mistakes from time to time—or just run into new information that updates their thinking.
A president can send too many mixed signals, of course, but on the whole it’s good to have a leader who’s not so stubborn that he can’t switch up policy when it’s needed.
That’s especially important in matters of war and national security when circumstances are fluid and tactics—even entire strategies—sometimes change on the fly.
Trump needs to be able to wage this war in Iran without being attacked for every adjustment he makes. Let’s stop playing “gotcha”—and playing right into the left’s hands.
Fred Fleitz is a former Chief of Staff to President Trump’s National Security Council.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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