Donald Trump ... remains a bundle of contradiction ... despite the Epic Fury War :::: US 'divided' and confused should they blame Israel or Iran for the war ... or it was .. "The president made a decision"

During war time, talking points and propaganda reflexively fly in every direction, but the Trump administration still hasn’t been able to land on one coherent answer.

Nothing succeeds like Gimmicks - as they could say. 

The successful Maduro operation clearly played a role in raising Donald Trump’s military aspirations. But events inside Iran were also factored in. 

The US did play up a spin. It launched a new justification that had not previously featured. “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh".

The remarks came from Pete Hegseth, Trump's Defence Secretary.   

Some contradict each other, and some contradict Donald Trump himself. Some – delivered hours apart by senior officials – are flatly incompatible.  

"In reality, the road Trump had to travel was shorter than it appeared. His opposition to war had only been partial. He was against large-scale infantry wars, but has shown himself ready to use the US military’s overwhelming superiority in air power to punish enemies," says journalist Julian Borger. 

**

On Feb 28, 2026, Trump invoked the 1979 hostage crisis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iranian-backed militias, and “47 years of Iranian aggression”. 

He was also fighting a largescale Iranian citizens' battle and urged Iranians to “seize this moment, to be brave, be bold, be heroic, and take back your country”. 

He called it a campaign to “eliminate the imminent nuclear threat”. 

The announcement by Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian that Iran will no longer attack Gulf and neighbouring states if they are not attacking Iran appears on the surface a significant change in tactics, reflecting the overpowering diplomatic pressure Iran was under to change course, or risk uniting the whole of the Arab world against Iran. 

However, the same day -- on 28th February, in the hours after the initial strikes began, he offered a breezy multiple-choice war:

"I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs].’

In any case, it will take them several years to recover from this attack."

What Trump has made out of himself ?  

The world recalls that when he ran for President ten years ago, Donald Trump had rejected the military adventurism of his predecessors.

On the campaign trail in 2024, he boasted that he had not started any new wars during his first term between 2016 and 2020. He promised to govern as a “Peace president”. 

But in Feb 2026, he unleashed the war in the Middle East. It would have long term fallout in more ways than one. One can say Trump has made a joke of his image and the election promises he made.

He failed to bag Nobel Peace Prize despite numerous fake claims. And now what we have is a war President.  

The Washington Post reported Trump told the newspaper on Feb 28th on phone that the goal of the war was “freedom” for the Iranian people. 

More to it.  

On 2nd March, 2026

At the first Pentagon press briefing after the strikes, Pete Hegseth took an aggressive posture to frame the war as both retaliation for decades of Iranian behavior and a laser-focused military operation with clearly bounded objectives.

"The mission of Operation Epic Fury is laser-focused. Destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production ...". 

Hegseth also insisted the campaign was nothing like Iraq or Afghanistan: “This is not Iraq. This is not endless … This is the opposite … This operation has a clear, devastating, decisive mission.” He urged Iranians to “take advantage of this incredible opportunity” – the regime-change language that officials insisted was not a war aim.

Joint chiefs chair general Dan Caine would add his own caveat. “This is not a single overnight operation,” he said. “The military objectives Centcom and the Joint Force have been tasked with will take some time to achieve, and in some cases will be difficult and gritty work.”

Hours after Hegseth’s briefing, secretary of state Marco Rubio offered reporters an entirely different explanation for the timing of the war.

Speaking on Capitol Hill before a classified congressional briefing, Rubio said Washington had known Israel was planning a unilateral strike on Iran, and that Tehran had pre-delegated authority to field commanders to automatically retaliate against US forces if attacked:

"We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

There absolutely was an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us."

Rubio was, in effect, saying the United States had gone to war because an ally was going to act.  

On 3 March, 2026

None other than Trump flatly rejected Rubio’s framing.

He insisted the decision was entirely his own and driven by Iranian – not Israeli – intentions.

"It was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn’t do it."

Asked whether Israel had forced his hand, Trump went further: “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

For those keeping score, there were now three incompatible explanations: Iran was an imminent nuclear threat, Iran would have retaliated against a coming Israeli strike, and Iran itself was about to attack.

Rubio attempted a partial retraction with reporters on the Hill. He insisted his remarks had been taken out of context and that the operation “had to happen anyway”:

"The president made a decision, and the decision he made was that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ballistic missile program."   

Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu played a leading role in bringing Trump around to the cause of regime change. The Israeli prime minister visited Trump in the “winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago in late December, reportedly asking for US approval for more Israeli strikes on Iranian missile sites.

Trump gave his support, but over the next few weeks that pledge ballooned into a commitment to a joint onslaught to bring down Iran’s Islamic Republic.