25 Thoughts On The Humiliation Of Donald Trump

Donald Trump, and the many Republicans who backed him through this latest disgrace, have spent decades pretending to believe the Iranian government is uniquely evil because it threatens (idly) to wipe its enemies off the map.

It must be clear to everyone credible in U.S. discourse now that Trump-era Republicans—the U.S. regime—and the Iranian Mullahs are degenerates of the same species. Anyone who can’t acknowledge that is not credible.

In this conflict, which Trump began, Iran has kicked Trump’s ass. And as much as we don’t gotta hand it to them, that’s better than any alternative.

It’s critical that Iran has conceded nothing, because the last thing the world needs at the moment is for Trump to conclude that explicitly genocidal, implicitly nuclear threats will yield concessions.

We know he caved in part because the basis of peace negotiations undergirding the two-week ceasefire point to a post-war settlement that leaves Iran much stronger than it was before the U.S. and Israel attacked it unilaterally.

The “funnier” tell is this cut-and-paste error by the prime minister of Pakistan, which strongly suggests the U.S. drafted a statement for him designed not to announce any diplomatic breakthrough or triumph, but to give Trump weak cover for backing down.

Think for a moment about this writing assignment from the perspective of a foreign service officer. The time and mental effort of America’s career diplomats (to say nothing of your tax dollars) must now routinely be wasted generating propaganda to thinly veil Trump’s defeats, and spare him as much domestic political humiliation as possible.

Why do I say propaganda? Because the point of everything that happened tonight is to give Trump something to point to when he announces that his Powerful Threats resulted in a Historic Breakthrough for his True Passion of World Peace.

This will not—literally cannot—fool the leaders of Pakistan or Iran or Israel or the Gulf States or Russia or China or our western allies. Some of them know what happened because they were cut in on the internal deliberations. Others can infer it easily because they’ve followed this fiasco closely and know how diplomacy works.

But it might fool people who identify as MAGA Republicans, and a subset of American swing voters, who might have experienced cognitive dissonance if Trump had simply withdrawn from the war without receiving any concessions, and without committing any further war crimes.

Still, Democrats should not withdraw this growing demand for Trump’s removal. (Off Message readers, take a bow.)

First, because Trump chickening out does not obligate the rest of us to unsee what we all saw.

Second, because it’s correct to insist on a debate over Trump’s fitness for office in light of everything that’s happened in the past month. Particularly the past week...