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Trump has no idea what he's doing on Iran

Chris Brennan   Paste BN

Memo to MAGA: Starting now, your previous 'Merica First isolationism plan has transitioned to the classic GOP-Neocon package. Your Favorite President™, duped by a dusty but politically irresistible “WMD" ruse, is now a foreign interventionist. Time to root-root-root for war.

You might be remembering right about now how Donald Trump campaigned last year for a second shot at the presidency on a promise of easy-peasy peace in the Middle East that required no American military involvement and no more “endless wars.”

And here we are now, with Trump sounding so much like the old-school conservative neocons he once derided for their enthusiastic misadventures in foreign interventionism.

What changed? Well, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been periodically warning for more than a decade that Iran was just weeks away from creating a nuclear weapon, is beating that war drum once again.

Do you think Trump cares that Netanyahu pushes that panic button when it is politically convenient? Of course not. As the New York Times captured this week, Trump now sees a chance to score some credit for bringing Iran to heel. Think he’d miss an opportunity like that?

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Trump had been talking for months about diplomacy with Iran, with an eye toward striking some sort of deal (which a majority of Americans favor.) Those talks were going on while America’s intelligence community said Iran was not seeking a nuclear weapon.

Trump said this week he doesn’t care about the intelligence. Boy, does that ring true. Now he is suggesting that America could annihilate Iran’s leadership unless that country offers an “unconditional surrender.”

And Trump is floating the possibility of air strikes on Iran like some sort of reality television show cliffhanger, because that’s the only framework in which the world makes sense to him.

Does all this make Trump look like a dupe, like Netanyahu’s presidential puppet, like an overeager foreign affairs amateur with no real grasp of what he’s engaged in? The answer depends on which part of the MAGA-verse you talk to.

Trump’s flip-flop on foreign misadventures has fractured his coalition, with former Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson now accusing his former employer of pushing pro-war propaganda while tussling with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on such critical issues as “What’s the population of Iran?” 

At least we get to revisit the should-be-settled Constitutional question of whether a president needs Congressional approval to declare war. Civics hint: He does. 

As if Trump cares about following the Constitution. 

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