I really believe Trump is wagging the dog with Iran to distract from Epstein.
The timing is the first red flag. Trump’s war with Iran began on February 28. Three days earlier, Reuters reported that a top Democrat accused DOJ of withholding FBI interview records involving a woman who said Trump sexually abused her as a minor. On March 6, Reuters reported that DOJ released additional FBI summaries tied to that allegation. This was not just the old, muddy “Trump knew Epstein” story. It was becoming more specific, more radioactive, and more politically catastrophic. At the same time, the broader outrage over the Epstein files was intensifying, with AP reporting a 3 million-page document release and continued scrutiny over what still had not been produced. A majority of likely voters in a March 11 Data for Progress poll, reported by The Daily Beast, said they believed the Iran strikes were at least partly meant to distract from the Epstein scandal. SNL hit at it too.
The second red flag is that the administration could not keep its own story straight about why the war began. Marco Rubio said the U.S. acted because Israel was about to strike and Washington wanted to preempt Iranian retaliation against American forces. Trump then contradicted him and said, in effect, no, Israel did not force his hand — he might have forced theirs. Reuters described the two men as offering conflicting reasons for U.S. entry into the war, and AP quoted Trump explicitly disputing the “Israel forced our hand” line. That matters. When the public cannot get a coherent explanation at the beginning of a war, it is reasonable to suspect that the stated rationale is not the real one. Sometimes the fog of war is just fog. Sometimes it is a smoke machine. And when officials begin to prevaricate from the outset, suspicion is not paranoia; it is basic pattern recognition.
The third red flag is the sheer obviousness of the underplanning. If this was a sober strategic decision, where was the preparation for the most obvious consequences? Reuters reported that the U.S. Navy had refused near-daily requests from the shipping industry for escorts through the Strait of Hormuz because the risk was too high. Days later Trump was publicly begging allies to send warships, only to have key partners refuse and complain they had not been properly consulted beforehand. Reuters also reported that Trump had in fact been warned that Iran might retaliate against Gulf allies and might move to shut down the Strait — the very outcome he later acted shocked by in public. So the claim that nobody could have seen this coming is nonsense. Everyone could see it coming. The administration’s response was not merely sloppy; it was improvident, as though the political timing mattered more than the strategic aftermath.
The same sloppiness shows up in the regime-change and nuclear-material questions. AP reported that a prewar U.S. intelligence assessment concluded intervention was unlikely to produce regime change and that no strong, unified opposition was ready to take over. Reuters reported on March 9 that Trump was still “nowhere near” deciding whether to send troops to secure Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. That is grotesque. If nuclear danger was the rationale, then securing nuclear material should not be an afterthought. And if regime change was the fantasy, then launching without a credible successor structure is not strategy. It is vandalism with briefing slides. Reuters’ reporting on Syrian Kurds warning Iranian Kurds not to trust Washington without firm commitments only reinforces the impression that proxy planning and internal-pressure strategy were thin, dissembling, or simply absent.
None of this proves motive in a courtroom sense. But politics is not chemistry-lab purity; it is inference under conditions of strategic deceit. And the inference here is ugly but straightforward: Trump had a scandal problem that was getting worse, he needed a bigger story, the war narrative arrived exactly on time, the rationale was incoherent from day one, and the operation bears the marks of haste rather than discipline. That is what a wag-the-dog war would look like. The truly sinister part is that it may not even require a master plan. Just a desperate president, a real adversary, and a media system always ready to swap sex scandal for missiles while laundering duplicitous improvisation into the pageantry of statecraft. If that reading is correct, then the public was not witnessing necessity but a perfidious act of narrative substitution.
