The press might want to know when President Donald Trump intends to end the Iran “excursion.”
But Byron Donalds, the Congressman from Naples who Trump wants to be the next Governor, doesn’t think Trump owes them an answer.
In fact, he believes too much disclosure runs counter to national interest.
“A lot of the press are trying to ask these questions with bated breath. When is this over? What’s the next step? What’s the next step? But that’s not how you conduct these affairs. And I do think that the President is right with, frankly, being a little glib with you guys and not giving you a direct answer, because you cannot actually continue this conflict and manage it appropriately from America’s interest, being first and foremost, if you’re going to basically flag for the press, when you’re going to wind things down,” Donalds said on CNN’s “Laura Coates Live” Monday.
Trump has told reporters the military operation, which is not a war due to lack of Congressional declaration thereof, will end “soon” or when he “feels it in my bones” or “any time I want it to end, it will end.”
Donalds believes that indirectness is tactically essential.
“One thing that people need to understand is that you can’t really have the President negotiating the timelines of military conflict through the press. It’s bad strategy. You basically are putting our troops in further harm’s way, you limit the ability of his diplomatic team to actually negotiate the end of this conflict, whenever that may be,” Donalds said.
Donalds went on to say that a decision to “foreshadow those things through media … actually makes this conflict last longer as opposed to it ending more quickly.”
