CBS EVENING NEWS PLUS
6/19/25
7:26 PM
JOHN DICKERSON: Donald Trump may be facing the highest-stakes decision of his presidency: Whether to attack Iran. And we're all involved in the process. In the Oval Office, on the South Lawn, aboard Air Force One. Today, he says he'll decide whether to bomb within two weeks. This pause could be the beginning of great success, or a sign of confusion. In either event, the deliberations ahead will be televised. These presidential improvisations represent a different vision of the job than the one in 1948 that Washington Post editorial writers applied to Harry Truman. They scolded Truman for speaking off the cuff: the term for an unscripted comment. “Mr. Truman cannot get away from the fact that his words become those of the President of the United States. We cannot suppress the hope that when he speaks for the whole nation, the advantage of weighing his words will not be overlooked.” President Trump operates the way he does to stay at the center of events, to buy time to keep his opponents guessing. Some of it is tactical trial balloons, but it may also reveal how he actually makes decisions through echolocation. He says something, gauges reaction, then maneuvers. We've seen this with his cabinet appointments. Instead of carefully vetting nominees, Trump announces a pick and gauges the reaction. “I want to see how it plays”, he said. “I want to see how people react.” On Iran, it feels like the president is workshopping his choices in front of a live audience. “You don't know. I may do it. I may not do it”, Trump said of bombing Iran, “nobody knows what I'm going to do.” It's a method that maximizes flexibility, but it also risks keeping allies off balance. Invites overreaction and discourages the kind of slow, thorough process that is usually involved in decisions where so many lives are at stake. But it is central to Donald Trump's way. “I play it very loose,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal. “I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.” That’s what the world will have to do, too.
