An Iran war as a method of maintaining power sounds to me like Underpants Gnomes:

1. War with Iran
2. ??????
3. Profit!

The time to start a war for political reasons is before the election.

Right but you don't need a coup if you win the election.

I think if Trump thought he could lose, we would have had a war with Iran in October.

3 seems right to me too.

Of course, Trump was probably out of his mind with covid when that should have been planned.

Trump was never as interested in war as I would have guessed he'd be. I think he meant it when he said he'd withdraw from Afghanistan, and I read somewhere that he publicly praised Biden for following through. This is one area where Trump pretty clearly exceeds what you'd expect from your baseline national Republican.

And Trump understood the possibility of losing the election long before election day -- hence his advance discussion of the impending unfair election, and his refusal to guarantee a peaceful transition.

Based on how many Republicans are saying Biden has dementia, I'm assuming part of Trump's poor planning is his own mental fuckededness.

6 may be right, but I think the "unfair" charge was just a repeat of his rebuttal for when people say he lost the popular vote even when he won.

Nah - Trump was really straightforward about the fact that he was planning ahead for his potential election defeat.

Peaceful transition? "Well, we're going to have to see what happens." His prediction for the election? "I think this will end up in the Supreme Court."

O.K. You convinced me.

That makes heebie wrong.

I guess we could infer from my comments that Trump was right about something and heebie was wrong, but since we know that both ends of that must be wrong, we must seek a different explanation.

I finally got around to reading the link, and while it mentions the possibility of bombing Iran -- and the risk of escalation from there -- it doesn't really back up the discussion of using Iran as a method of staying in office.

When the aides talk about bombing after the election, it seems pretty clear that their concern is to bomb while they still have a chance to do so. In fact, we see Trump's aides (and Netanyahu) pushing for action, but Trump isn't interested.

A running concern for Milley was the prospect of Trump pushing the nation into a military conflict with Iran. He saw this as a real threat, in part because of a meeting with the President in the early months of 2020, at which one of Trump's advisers raised the prospect of taking military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons if Trump were to lose the election. At another meeting, at which Trump was not present, some of the President's foreign-policy advisers again pushed military action against Iran. Milley later said that, when he asked why they were so intent on attacking Iran, Vice-President Mike Pence replied, "Because they are evil."

In the months after the election, with Trump seemingly willing to do anything to stay in power, the subject of Iran was repeatedly raised in White House meetings with the President, and Milley repeatedly argued against a strike. Trump did not want a war, the chairman believed, but he kept pushing for a missile strike in response to various provocations against U.S. interests in the region. Milley, by statute the senior military adviser to the President, was worried that Trump might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified. Trump had a circle of Iran hawks around him and was close with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was also urging the Administration to act against Iran after it was clear that Trump had lost the election. "If you do this, you're gonna have a fucking war," Milley would say.

This bit at the beginning of the piece seems to get little support from the actual description of events (plus, a New Yorker copy editor should have caught the insure/ensure error):

Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power.

My guess is that Trump entirely buys into the neocon line that bombing people is worth the expense because it helps people -- except Trump is opposed to helping foreigners.

He probably figured why repay Bibi when Bibi couldn't get the Jewish vote brought to heel.

As I understood it, Milley was saying that if the Iranians took bombing them as a declaration of war -- and what kind of crazy fanatics would take a bomb on one of their major cities as an excuse to declare war? -- it wouldn't matter whether Trump thought he was starting one or not. He would have done so.

The conventional USian take on Iran (and news coverage) is so bonkers that to me anything Trump did or did not do barely made a ripple after getting out of the deal. I thought JCPOA to be one of the few nearly unalloyed good FP initiatives that the US was involved in during my lifetime (and surprising). Mildly constructive things will not be allowed.