What Was Trump Thinking? His Confidant Explains

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I know that you are close to the president, you are close to many of his senior officials, you were all at West Point together, and you have a sort of camaraderie, and you’ve been in touch with him. Can you walk us through, if you can, the sort of thinking before President Trump made his statement, which the world is taking now as calming tensions, as not furthering a tit-for-tat military escalation for now? Are we reading it correctly and how did he come to this?

DAVID URBAN, MEMBER OF DONALD TRUMP’S 2020 ADVISORY COMMITTEE: Yes. Christiane, I think you’re exactly correct. I think this administration, this president, in previous interactions with Iraq had exercised a great deal of restraint on numerous occasions.

AMANPOUR: You mean with Iran, right?

URBAN: Yes, with Iran. I’m sorry. Excuse me. Yes, with Iran, in terms of, you know, we had the attacks on the oil tankers, you had the attacks on the Saudi oil fields and then, most notably, direct attack on a U.S. drone by the Iranians, and the president and the administration did not respond at all. And so, what I think — you know, you saw in this instance, is the use of flexible deterrents, right. You know, there was a direct attack, direct assault on the U.S. embassy, U.S. sovereign soil by Iranian proxies, and this president, unlike presidents in the past, decided to say, no longer will the U.S. will allow Iran to attack the U.S. via proxies. Look, in 1983 the attack on the U.S. marine corps barracks in Lebanon and on and on, the world and the U.S. has turned a blind eye to Iran, you know, with the use of proxies. And this president has said, it’s no longer going to be the case. So, I think today was an off-ramp for further escalation. I think, it’s a very positive thing. I think that you will see, hopefully, the world, you know, de-escalates, tensions kind of ease and things get back to relative, you know, “normal” there in the region.