Jen Psaki has a message for anyone falling for the White House’s promise that President Donald Trump will decide on potential United States military action on Iran within the next two weeks: Don’t.
“A number of the nation’s largest newspapers made an age-old mistake today,” Psaki said on Thursday’s show, before flashing images of headlines from various outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. “They took the words of the Trump administration at face value and spit them right back out to the American public — without context, without much of anything.”
The “very important context that is completely missing,” Psaki said, is that we’ve heard this exact phrase from Trump before:
‘I’ll get to it in two weeks’ is one of Donald Trump’s absolute favorite tactics. He literally uses it all the time. And most of the time, in fact almost every time, when two weeks rolls around, Trump has either completely forgotten about whatever it was he promised in the first place or, and I think this is more likely than the first one, he’s hoping people have just moved on.
Psaki backed up her comments by playing a video montage of Trump using the same two-week timeline while discussing other major issues in recent months, including trade deal talks and negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
“Maybe it’s a tic, maybe he read a marketing report that says people move on in the media [after two weeks], who knows, but the point is it’s a tactic that Trump has used on almost every issue.”
“It’s a bit maddening that this tactic can still spark headlines … because it’s not new,” she added. “He did the exact same thing throughout his first term in office.” Psaki then played a video montage of Trump from his first stint in the White House.
Psaki then told viewers what they should actually take away from Trump’s two-week deadline on Iran.
“One likely possibility is that Trump doesn’t want to have to make a decision about this at all,” Psaki said. “He just wants to keep punting it down the road. He doesn’t mind the speculation, the attention, but he doesn’t want to actually commit to a decision — and it’s not hard to see why.”
You can watch Psaki’s full comments in the clip above.