I assume he's just off-grid so hackers cannot find his location, like the Ayatollah during the last war.

Max Blumenthal published a report on March 6 titled "How Israel and the FBI manipulated assassination plots to goad Trump into Iran war"

https://thegrayzone.com/2026/03/06/israel-fbi-assassination-plots-trump-iran-war/

Then there's the reports from the last war that Trump was getting cooked intelligence from the Israelis via John Ratcliffe.

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/06/21/trump-cia-director-ratcliffe-and-centcoms-kurilla-mossad-stenographers-iran/

...Are they Truman Showing Trump?

Amazing to see how disconnected from reality the various dads in the comments are. Like they're watching a football game.

I wonder how many of them can point to Iran on a map or give even a one-sentence reason for why this war should happen.

What happens if a missile city is imaged with SAR while it is firing? What is the most damaging intel the US and Israel get from that?

You need both.

Indirect communication is absorbed subconsciously. When you look at cinematography, for example, the same scene can fall flat or move you depending on how it's visually presented. There are layers of structure and communication that your subconscious picks up on, which someone had to put thought into. The aim is not to hide the point but to reinforce it, the direct and indirect work in concert.

Yeah, if all the communication is indirect, that can be a hallmark of elitism or deliberate opaqueness. But pretty much any effective work of art will have layers of structure that are not consciously registered. And this isn't surprising, because it's also how we process real life; your first impression of a person or place is synthesized subconsciously from the little details you observe during the encounter, it's not a galaxy-brained conscious analysis.

Art communicates through experience, and subconscious pattern recognition is a big part of how we perceive and organize experience. Even when the artist goes by feel, what they're feeling is those layers; they feel them the same way we feel them, and it guides their decisions. Some of the best artists can also retroactively explain or rationalize their intuitive decisions, and develop their own theories to augment that intuition.

I hope I'm not explaining the obvious or missing the point, I'm just trying to say that direct and indirect are not mutually exclusive, it's a false choice. You have to make detailed decisions either way, in the execution of the work, so you might as well be intentional about them. It will only strengthen the impact of your overt communication.