LAT: Trump’s war rhetoric is coarse. It’s also heard differently, depending on the audience

The Los Angeles Times piece reads Trump’s Iran rhetoric through a framework built on traditional presidential norms. That framework assumes wartime rhetoric must do three things: justify the war on moral grounds, show some respect for casualties and the enemy, and center national ideals rather than raw dominance. Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, Bush, and Obama largely spoke that way. The war gets framed as tragic but necessary. The president presents himself as a sober steward of violence.
Trump operates under a different incentive structure, and David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory helps explain why.
The first audience is his domestic populist coalition. His base does not reward solemnity. It rewards dominance displays. When Trump says “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” the tone of humiliation and mockery is not a rhetorical accident. It is a status signal telling supporters he refuses to be constrained by elite norms. The language also reassures voters who fear another Iraq. If the war sounds easy and one-sided, the political cost drops. “We’ve already won” reduces anxiety about an open-ended conflict.
The second audience is the Iranian leadership itself. Psychological warfare works by attacking morale. “This was never meant to be a fair fight” communicates hopelessness to Iranian elites and tells them that resistance will be met with overwhelming, humiliating force. Classic deterrence rhetoric is legalistic and restrained. Trump’s approach is closer to street intimidation, designed to shift the Iranian perception of what escalation will cost them.
The third audience is the American elite coalition, and this is where the conflict arises. Journalists, diplomatic professionals, and academic experts belong to a different alliance system. Their norms reward restraint, legality, and moral framing. When Trump speaks in coarse language, he violates those norms deliberately, and for that coalition the rhetoric reads as recklessness and moral illegitimacy.
The same message gets decoded differently depending on which coalition you belong to. The populist base hears strength. Iranian leadership hears intimidation. Elite institutions hear barbarism.
The rhetoric experts quoted in the piece call this tone “unprecedented,” and that claim itself reflects professional incentives. Their field studies presidential language that reinforces liberal internationalist legitimacy. When a president abandons that style entirely, it looks aberrant from inside that framework. But the historical record is broader than the post-World War II order. World War II propaganda used humiliation and dehumanization routinely. Truman called Japan a “beast.” Andrew Jackson spoke about enemies in openly violent terms. The “tragic but necessary” mask was often discarded when leaders wanted to frame a conflict as total domination rather than reluctant defense. Trump pushes that approach further and strips away the polite packaging, but the impulse is not new.
The piece also misses what might be the most consequential aspect of Trump’s approach: the coalition-splitting effect. His rhetoric forces observers to choose sides. To condemn the tone is to implicitly join the elite coalition that values restraint. To applaud it is to join the populist coalition that values dominance. That polarization is politically useful. The more the press describes his rhetoric as unprecedented and immoral, the more his supporters read that condemnation as proof that he defies the establishment. The media fulfills its assigned role in the drama without realizing it.
The coarse tone also functions as a barrier to entry. To support Trump publicly, a follower must accept the social stigma of being associated with what Robert Rowland calls “performative cruelty.” That cost builds a tighter, more loyal coalition precisely because it burns bridges with elite institutions. Supporters who accept the stigma have skin in the game. They cannot quietly defect without cost.
The distinction between street intimidation and standard deterrence logic matters here. Classic deterrence depends on predictable, legalistic responses. Intimidation depends on unpredictability and the threat of disproportionate humiliation. When Hegseth dismisses rules of engagement as “stupid,” the administration signals that American behavior will not be predictable or constrained by the norms an adversary might calculate around. That unpredictability might be a feature rather than a flaw.
The article sees a communication failure and a president who might pay a political price for triumphalism. Alliance Theory suggests a different reading. The rhetoric is not random or merely coarse. It is a coordination signal that tells allies who he fights for and tells opponents that the old rules no longer bind him. The question is not whether this is right or wrong by the standards of liberal internationalism. The question is who it helps and which coalition it strengthens. By that measure, the rhetoric appears to be working exactly as designed.