In the wake of new reporting showing that Iran was plotting another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, a leading conservative voice is questioning whether he still has “all his marbles.”
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“Whether or not you believe our 80-year-old president retains all his marbles,” senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty wrote Friday for the conservative National Review ,“our commander-in-chief did not help himself when, at the G7 summit in France, he emphasized how rational, nice, strong and smart and ‘not radicalized’ the current leadership of the Iranian government is.”
Geraghty makes this assertion in the context of the assassination plot, noting, “There is a good chance that, while Trump was telling the international press about how great the Iranian mullahs were, they were plotting to kill him.”
As Geraghty writes, “This is at least the third time the Iranian government has been tied to a plot to assassinate Trump. The first was Pakistani national Asif Merchant in July 2024; the second was alleged IRGC operative Farhad Shakeri in November 2024; and now, this one…The plots to kill Trump are separate from the Iranian plots to assassinate former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Special Envoy for Iran Brian Hook, former CENTCOM commander General Frank McKenzie and former Secretary of Defense Mike Esper.“
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With all this in mind, Geraghty says Trump ends up sounding “naive and foolish” with his tendency to slingshot between over-the-top praise for the Iranian leadership and calling them “scum.”
“A few days ago,” writes Geraghty, “the often-sharp Logan Dobson asked why people were surprised that Trump is hyperbolic and exaggerates: ‘When he’s negotiating with someone and trying to get to a deal, he says over-the-top nice things about them, and when he feels someone has wronged him/America, he says over-the-top mean things about them.’”
But according to Geraghty, it’s not that “people are surprised that Trump says things like this. They’re saying it’s not good for Trump or the country for him to say things that are objectively not true with the whole world watching. He sounds naïve and foolish when he sings the praises of the Iranians one week, then later comes back and says everyone who doubted their trustworthiness was right all along.”
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