President Donald Trump appeared to explain the U.S. military’s renewed strikes on Iran by invoking a scene from the hit television drama “The West Wing.”
The Republican president shared the clip on Truth Social on Tuesday, the same day U.S. forces carried out a fresh round of strikes targeting Iranian air defense systems, ground control facilities and radar sites. U.S. Central Command described the operation as “a proportional response” after a U.S. Apache helicopter was downed in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday.
The 90-second clip, taken from Season 1 of “The West Wing,” shows a fictional president, portrayed by Martin Sheen, meeting with military advisers to discuss how to respond after Middle Eastern forces shot down an American aircraft.
In the scene, Sheen’s character challenges the logic of proportional retaliation, arguing that adversaries anticipate such measured responses.
“What is the virtue of a proportionate response?” Sheen questions after his advisors offer up a list of enemy targets. “If it’s what we do and it’s what we’ve always done, don’t they know we’re gonna do it?”
Instead, he offers an alternative: a disproportionate response.
“You kill an American, any American, we don’t come back with a proportionate response,” he says, striking the table. “We come back with total disaster.”
Trump himself has appeared to take a page from this playbook in the past, threatening in April to wipe out “a whole civilization” if Iran did not open the Strait of Hormuz.
After invoking the popular TV drama about a Democratic presidency, the 79-year-old president wrote on Truth Social that Iran will “have to pay the price” for taking “too long to negotiate a deal,” referring to multiple rounds of failed negotiations amid the tenuous ceasefire.
After the renewed U.S. strikes, Iran responded by firing on U.S. bases in Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait. Iran also threatened to carry out “severe and widespread attacks” if the U.S. continues attacking the Middle East nation. And the foreign ministry warned that peace talks could not move forward since the ceasefire has been violated.
These latest escalations cast doubt on the possibility, touted by Trump, that a peace deal could be reached this week.
The war, now in its fifth month, is broadly unpopular with Americans, multiple polls indicate. In a Reuters survey released on Monday, 60 percent of respondents said they disapproved of U.S. strikes on Iran.
