Following last week’s Capitol Hill insurrection, the effort to evict President Donald Trump from the White House has started up again in earnest. Apart from the threat that he’ll stoke more violence at home, one of the most compelling reasons to remove him before Inauguration Day is the fear that, if left in charge, he’ll use his time left to launch a last-minute strike on Iran.
This idea isn’t far-fetched. The Trump administration—what’s left of it—remains stocked with ultra-Iran hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump himself has publicly flirted with the idea of attacking Iran, and, after losing the election, reportedly asked aides about options for striking its nuclear facilities. Since November, the United States has sent B-52s to buzz the Iranian coast four times. Washington is thought to have participated in the Nov. 27 assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist just two months before the anniversary of the U.S. killing of Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian general. And in a bizarre episode on Jan. 3, Trump personally sent the USS Nimitz—an aircraft carrier that acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller ordered home four days earlier—steaming back to the Middle East.
