President Trump is doing everything in his power to remain Commander in Chief for the next four years, but as it stands the prospects are grim due to the state of the 2020 election.
Even if Trump does lose the race, he is still the President of the United States for another couple of weeks, and before he steps down he has to tie up some loose ends.
Never being one to waste any time, the president wanted to take care of that unfinished business sooner rather than later.
President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.
A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
Any strike — whether by missile or cyber — would almost certainly be focused on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018. The agency also noted that Iran had not allowed it access to another suspected site where there was evidence of past nuclear activity.
You may recall back in January that the U.S. and Iran had a massive rise in tensions after President Trump ordered the assassination of one of their most terroristic generals, Qasem Soleimani. Iran responded by launching ballistic missiles at unsuspecting American troops stationed in Iraq.
