WASHINGTON — President Trump dismissed the notion that he employed the “Madman Theory” to negotiate a cease-fire with Iran by claiming that he was poised to order civilization-destroying strikes.
Asked about the “madman” concept by The Post, Trump offered a counter assessment that the US military is strong and he was willing to use it.
“I think that we have a phenomenal military that I rebuilt during my first term and I used in my second term, and I was willing to use it. I was willing to do it,” Trump said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
“I think we have just a phenomenal group of people, just phenomenal. And we have a phenomenal, unparalleled in history military. And you see that, you know, we only use 8% of our military to do this.”
The president sparked widespread panic Tuesday with his jaw-dropping ultimatum to Iran that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Tehran failed to cut a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 pm ET that evening.
Prior to his fiery threat, Trump voiced concerns that Iran was “not being serious.”
Shortly before the deadline, Iran agreed to a conditional reopening of the strait in exchange for a two-week cease-fire, during which time in-person talks are expected in Pakistan to work on a final deal.
The terrifying threat prompted Democrats to clamor for Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to boot him out of office or for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings. But allies of the president saw the seemingly maniacal negotiating style as critical to his success.
“President Trump’s unpredictability has led to wins with the Abraham Accords, North Korea, Venezuela, and eventually Iran – not to mention the countless wars he’s deterred altogether,” the president’s former senior adviser, Jason Miller, told The Post.
“[It] will prove him to be the greatest negotiator we’ve ever had in the Oval Office.”
Ahead of the cease-fire, even some supporters of the president worried he might overplay his hand; one second-term former official expressed concern the gambit might appear too “desperate.”
Bone-chilling war rhetoric is nothing new from Trump, who threatened North Korea with “fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen” in 2017 — before he and nuclear-armed dictator Kim Jong Un later struck up a friendly relationship including three in-person meetings and what Trump called love letters.
Trump was caught on audio in 2024 musing about threatening to “bomb the sh— out of Moscow” to prevent the war in Ukraine.
“The fact is, we need unpredictability,” Trump told Bloomberg in March 2016. “The enemy is watching, and I have a very good chance of winning, and I frankly don’t want the enemy to know how I’m thinking.”
“With that being said, I don’t rule out anything.”
Trump’s fondness for unpredictability and volatility on the world’s stage against foreign adversaries has led some analysts to describe his negotiating strategy as “Madman Theory,” a term popularized by former President Richard Nixon.
Nixon wanted the Vietcong to believe that he had grown mentally unstable and so desperate to end the Vietnam War that he would do anything to achieve that objective, even taking deeply depraved actions.
“We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace,” Nixon’s former chief of staff claimed the 37th president told him.
While Trump’s penchant for hot rhetoric and belligerent negotiating antics has long been known, many top politicos were anxious that he was deadly serious and might do something rash or morally egregious in Iran.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blasted Trump as “an extremely sick person,” and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) derided him as “completely unhinged” for his threats to wipe out Iran’s bridges, infrastructure — and civilization.
“The madman strategy tends to be quite unpopular among the domestic public. If your citizens think that you are crazy, then they are less likely to support you,” Joshua Schwartz, an assistant professor of International Relations at Carnegie Mellon University, who has researched “Madman Theory,” told The Post.
Schwartz’s study on the foreign policy strategy found that “there are some limited benefits” to it, but there are downsides, such as locking leaders into a tough position due to fear of backing down and looking weak, as well as concerns about escalation.
Roseanne McManus, a professor of political science and international affairs at Pennsylvania State University, who has also studied “Madman Theory,” argued that its “effectiveness is uncertain at best.”
“If you make a really crazy threat, and you fail to follow through, then that will seriously damage the credibility of other threats,” McManus said. “In Trump’s case, he has followed through a couple of times recently in the Maduro case [and] in starting this war with Iran.”
“Perhaps backing down once wouldn’t necessarily totally erode his madman reputation.”
Trump, who is famous for the book “The Art of the Deal,” has long made clear his love for negotiating.
In 2017, it leaked that Trump told staffers he wanted to be perceived as crazy, coaching then US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to make South Korea think he could pull out of a trade deal at any minute.
“No, no, no,” Trump told Lighthizer at the time, per Axios. “That’s not how you negotiate. You don’t tell them they’ve got 30 days. You tell them, ‘This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute.'”
Last year, after having dinner with Trump, comedian Bill Maher pronounced that “a crazy person doesn’t live in the White House.”
“A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there.”
