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Trump, Iran, And The Biting Of Reality
There aren't many hot stoves inside the MAGA cinematic universe. But Trump has found one, and grabbed it with both hands.
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Donald Trump can pump the gas and brakes on his mass deportation regime at will. He can move aggressively in opportune moments, then hang back amid scrutiny, without much impact on his political standing.
He can do the same vis-a-vis his efforts to destroy science-based public health in the U.S.: acts of wanton destruction, followed by a period of calm, until scrutiny passes. Progress is herky-jerky, but the cranks and fanatics who staff his administration understand that it’s still progress.
This bears some resemblance to the Trump Always Chickens Out dynamic, in that Trump will overreach and then retrench, in a manner that—on net—leaves us closer to his objectives than we were at the outset.
One gets the sense that he wishes to apply the same approach to the debacle he created in Iran. He’d clearly love to pull back long enough to drive the war out of the news, at least for a while. Why else would his loyal goons threaten to revoke broadcast licenses? But he can’t TACO here. The war is different. It’s different because his targets are sovereign actors, of geopolitical significance, who can respond as they please. And it’s different because it breaks faith more fully with the ambitious zealots in his administration.
These structural differences are suddenly quite apparent on the surface. Trump’s nativist appointees and health cranks have hunkered down, waiting for backlash to quiet. But the skeptics of regime-change wars in his administration are growing restive.
On Tuesday, Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser—a bigoted extremist named Joe Kent—resigned from the administration on principle. Ambition played a role, too. But so did principle. To be clear, the principle in Kent’s mind is antisemitism—he stipulates that Trump has fallen under the manipulative spell of Israel. And his ambition is to surf a rising tide of right-wing antisemitism to a higher profile than director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent is not an admirable man. But the conflict in values is real. And it underlines the contrast between Trump’s misadventure in Iran and all of his other personalist flights of fancy.
George W. Bush probably sealed his fate as a failed president when he justified his invasion of Iraq on national security grounds, citing Iraq’s supposed stockpile of, and capacity to produce, weapons of mass destruction. He won re-election. But he’d committed the country to indefinite war, and war fatigue was bound to throw the WMD deception into sharp relief. How could a president who’d taken the country to war on false pretenses leave office widely admired?
By the mid aughts, this kind of thinking was already alien to Republican officials. Bush and his advisers didn’t plan around the assumption that reality would eventually assert itself. They simply changed justifications for the war, and then hoped victory—redefined as a free and democratic Iraq—would redeem him.
As a senior Bush adviser, believed to be Karl Rove, famously told the journalist Ron Suskind, “You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality... We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. While you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too.”
In other words, the Republican Party was pretty far down the road of postmodern politics before Donald Trump took it over. The GOP’s indifference to empirical reality surely attracted Trump. It surely also helped him recognize how ripe the party was for a takeover. But once he took over, the transformation accelerated.
It’s a testament to the GOP’s success siloing right-wing Americans into postmodern information environments that Trump has managed to fuck up so much, across two non-consecutive presidencies, without most of their voters noticing that he only ever abuses civic trust, and only to make things worse for the vast majority of citizens.
Things have become clearer to some over the past year. There’s a reason Trump’s approval has fallen. But we should assume that most of his lost support has come from marginal voters, who were never siloed, along with an accumulation of scattered, individual Trump supporters who have learned about his faithlessness the hard way. Trump voters whose family members have been deported. Trump voters whose farms or small businesses have been repossessed. Trump voters struggling with the new, Trump-imposed price of gasoline.
