Trump assured Musk and Carlson he wouldn’t go to war with Iran, new book claims | donald trump
Donald Trump declared he wouldn’t go to war with Iran final yr, in accordance to a new book, which claims he informed Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk: “We’re not doing that.”
The US president is claimed to have offered the reassurance throughout an Oval Office assembly with rightwing commentator Carlson and SpaceX CEO Musk – the world’s richest individual, who not too long ago grew to become his first trillionaire – early final yr.
According to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, although Carlson had criticized Trump from his perch as an influential rightwing media voice, Trump “requested[ed] Carlson’s advice, believing he still had sway over a significant portion of the base.”
“Carlson had criticized Trump for refusing to knock [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu over the Gaza carnage; “Now he would make clear to the president that a broader war would be his ruin,” Haberman and Swan write. “‘They want you to go to war with Iran,’ Carlson said. ‘We’re not doing that,’ Trump responded.”
Trump is also said to have told Carlson: “I don’t think there’s ever been an American president as powerful as I am.”
“Struck by this hubris,” Haberman and Swan write, “Carlson replied: ‘Certainly not since FDR. Really, the one factor that would wreck it’s war with Iran.'”
This year, on February 28, Trump attacked Iran. An agreement ending the war was signed earlier this week.
Haberman and Swan’s reporting appears in a book, Regime Change, that will be published in the US on Tuesday. Excerpts have included accounts of Trump’s resolution to go to war with IranSituation Room discussions in regards to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and makes an attempt to suspend legal rights amid an immigration crackdown.
Trump is also said to have “regarded” Musk and Carlson with “lingering” descriptions of injuries including “mutilated genitals and missing hands” caused by Israel’s 2024 “exploding pagers” attack on Hezbollah.
The US president told “horror stories of the destruction that the explosions had wrought” in the Oval Office, Haberman and Swan wrote.
“He had seen photos, he mentioned. Mutilated genitals and lacking arms. He was horrified by the accidents, however fascinated as effectively, lingering on the scenes and the small print,” according to the book. “One survivor, he mentioned, ‘regarded like an important white shark got here and simply took a bit out of him. It was like a shark chew. It was horrible.’
“He grew volatile, repeating, ‘It’s horrible, horrible!’”
The Oval Office scene with Musk and Carlson is an instance of in depth reporting in regards to the growing older president’s more and more erratic habits.
Israel carried out its pager assault on leaders of Hezbollahan Iranian proxy group, in Lebanon in September 2024.
Haberman and Swan’s depiction of Trump’s fascination with accidents attributable to the pagers seems to have been reported by Carlson, a critic of Israel and the Iran war. Musk, who was then main the “department of government efficiency” assault on the federal authorities on the time of the alternate, is depicted as “transfixed” by a golden pager offered to Trump by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Carlson’s phrases and these of Trump are offered in quotes, which the authors say signifies private information of phrases and conditions.
“There was something else that captivated” Trump, the authors write. “Many of the devices had detonated in public, and it was hard to know who was holding a pager when it exploded. The indiscriminate nature of the killing and maiming had shocked Trump, and while he was taken by the ingenuity, he showed a measure of disbelief at his recklessness.
“He seemed at once enthralled and horrified.”
