'Ignorant' Trump just blew up one of his reasons for 'reckless' Iran strikes: expert
President Donald Trump appears to have just blown up one of the reasons he gave for coordinating strikes against Iran with Israel over the weekend, according to one expert.
The Trump administration has offered shifting reasons for the strikes, ranging from protecting protesters from the brutal regime to overthrowing the regime itself. If regime change was a true aim, then the administration has a lot of explaining to do, argued David Rothkopf, former editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, on Monday's episode of "The Daily Beast Podcast" with Joanna Coles.
Rothkopf read a tweet from ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl that he described as "stunning." In it, Karl said Trump told him that the administration's candidates to take over the country after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died were also killed in the strikes. "The strikes were so successful they took out some of the candidates," he read.
"How incompetent is this?" Rothkopf asked.
U.S. and Israeli forces coordinated strikes against several targets in Iran on early Sunday morning that took out the nation's political and military leadership, and further damaged its ballistic and nuclear missile infrastructure.
Rothkopf described the strikes in Iran as the most "reckless" war he has ever seen.
"This president is so ignorant and so ill of good advice that he lurches into these things," Rothkopf said. "For the two weeks before this, he was shopping for a reason to do this."