https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/trump_had_soleimani_in_his_crosshairs_for_a_long_time.html
Following the terrorist Qassem Soleimani’s death on President Trump’s orders, the media and the Democrat party have been like trapped rats, desperately rushing around to show that Trump is the bad guy in all this. They’ve played up WWIII, shared the Mullahs’ grief over the loss of their pet terrorist, and blamed Trump for the Iranian decision to shoot down a passenger plane that had left Tehran minutes before and only four hours after Iran sent 15 ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases housing American troops. With all those stories falling flat (and with Iranians in an uproar against their government for shooting down the plane), the media narrative is shifting to denigrating Trump’s decision-making.
One of the first lies the media told was that Trump totally flummoxed his national security team when he elected to order a strike against Soleimani:
When President Donald Trump’s national security team came to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, they weren’t expecting him to approve an operation to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had gone to Palm Beach, Fla., to brief Trump on airstrikes the Pentagon had just carried out in Iraq and Syria against Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia groups.
One briefing slide shown to Trump listed several follow-up steps the U.S. could take, among them targeting Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to talk about the meeting on the record.