I Like It That Trump Doesn’t Want To Know Anything About The Missile Strike On The Iranian School

I don’t want America bombing schools. I want someone to investigate the February 28 strike on the Minab school, but I don’t want the president spending time on it. Every minute Trump thinks about it makes him look weaker. That is the lesson of Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis. Every word the Carter administration said about those hostages reminded the world that America had no leverage. Every press conference handed the captors a small victory. The crisis defined his presidency because he let it.
Trump’s claim that he doesn’t know enough about the school strike, or that Tomahawk missiles are generic weapons used by many nations, might look like evasion. It is something closer to discipline. By refusing to engage with the specifics, he avoids validating a narrative that Iran wants to dominate. The Iranian government has already labeled the strike a war crime and flooded social media with drone footage of the casualties. A president who holds daily briefings on the incident gives that footage a larger stage. One who doesn’t know shifts the burden of proof and lets the news cycle move.
This is not dishonesty. It is a strategy of selective ignorance, and it works beyond politics.
I have experienced pain and humiliation I will only discuss with a small number of people, and never in writing. Most of us carry something like that. Trauma counselors often push people to relive what hurt them, on the theory that exposure reduces its power. Sometimes that is true. More often, forcing a person back into a distressing memory produces retraumatization rather than resolution. The mind works better when pointed toward something constructive. When I feel strong and confident, I am more useful to the people around me.
Choosing what to think about is a form of boundary-setting. A leader who refuses to engage with a tactical failure to preserve his position of strength is doing something structurally similar to a person who refuses to rehearse an old humiliation. Both are choosing the present self over a past version that felt weak. The new and the strong push out the old and the weak, not by denial exactly, but by displacement. You build a life full enough of new experience that the old wound loses its central importance.
Carter could not do that. He kept returning to the wound, holding it up for the cameras, measuring it daily. The hostages came home the day Reagan was inaugurated, which tells you something about what silence, or at least the credible threat of it, can accomplish.