A clip of Donald Trump ripping into Barack Obama and accusing him of wanting a war with Iran to get re-elected has come back to haunt him after he bombed three nuclear sites in the country over the weekend.
The November 2011 clip awkwardly resurfaced in the hours after Trump confirmed the US had ‘completely obliterated’ three nuclear facilities in Iran. Concerns have now been growing over how the country will retaliate to the shock attack including fears of skyrocketing oil prices and sleeper-cell terror in the US.
The move to launch strikes on Iran has been met with both concern and support among some of the US’ key allies across the globe, while fears around WW3 have ramped up as the world continues to hold its breath in fears of further escalation.
But it looks like Trump hasn’t always favoured the idea of attacking Iran, as a clip resurfaced of him slamming former president Barack Obama, claiming he wanted to initiate conflict with the nation in order to boost his poll numbers.
Another of Donald Trump’s posts have come back to haunt him (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In the clip, the president labels Obama as ‘weak’ with ‘absolutely no ability to negotiate’.
“He’s weak and he’s ineffective,” Trump says in the video. “So the only way he figures he’s going to get re-elected is to start a war with Iran.”
He continued: “Now, I’m more militant and more militaristic than the president. I believe in strength.
“But, to start a war in order to get elected – and I believe that’s going to happen – would be an outrage.”
During his two terms in the Oval Office, Obama signed a nuclear deal with Iran’s capital Tehran to put the brakes on its nuclear program, with the nations signing on the dotted line in 2015.
Just three years after the deal during his first term, Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, terminating the US’ involvement and reimposing economic sanctions on Iran.
The resurfaced clip is not the only post in which Trump accused former president Obama of planning a war with Iran to cover up diplomatic failure, with a string of tweets between 2011 and 2013 calling Obama ‘desperate’ and ‘not skilled’, among other things.
“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin – watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate,” Trump wrote in one tweet back in October 2012.
Meanwhile, a 2013 tweet from Trump read: “Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly – not skilled!”
And another tweet from the same year said: “I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!”
But, more than a decade on, it looks like it’s Trump who is the one to have ignited conflict between the US and Iran, as 14 powerful ‘buster bunker bombs’ rained down on the country’s Fordow, Natanz and Isfaha sites.
Obama has recently spoken out against Trump, warning that the US is ‘dangerously close’ to becoming an autocracy (a form of government in which one individual has absolute decision-making power).
Trump pulled out of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in 2018 (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Speaking on June 17 in Hartford, Connecticut, he said: “If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood — and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work.
“What we’re seeing right now … is not consistent with American democracy.
“It is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under Orbán. It’s consistent with places that hold elections but do not otherwise observe what we think of [as] a fair system in which everybody’s voice matters, and people have a seat at the table, and there are checks and balances, and nobody’s above the law.
“We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that.”
