Cromwell

For some completely inexplicable reason, Leo doesn’t think highly of our bombing for Jesus campaign. He even had the temerity to suggest that there was irony in the name of Trump’s social media platform. Trump snapped back, accusing Leo of being soft on crime.

Trump probably misses Benedict. In the meantime, J.D. is in the process of releasing a book about his conversion to Catholicism. How will he deal with this latest conflict between his secular and spiritual bosses? Probably by keeping quiet and praying it blows over.

Negotiations having failed, Trump has decided to seek more leverage by blockading Iranian ports. On its face, depriving the Iranians of the oil revenues they need to run their regime makes perfect sense. But is there a down side?

Of course there is! Gas prices will shoot even higher. The regime’s ability to adapt may well exceed our tolerance for even more expensive gas. And Trump is doing nothing to even acknowledge the hardships he is imposing on us, let alone to justify them.

Hitler destroyed his country. Mussolini didn’t actually make the trains run on time. Stalin, Lenin, and Mao killed millions just because of their supposed class identity. Putin invaded Ukraine and thereby caused hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian casualties without accomplishing much. Orban’s Hungary is poor and corrupt. Oh, and Trump started a war against Iran because his golden gut told him it was a good idea.

That’s what you get when you give uncontrolled power to people who are only too inclined to misuse it.

Not to be confused with Viktor, who just suffered a crushing defeat in the Hungarian election. J.D., Rod Dreher, and the rest of the national conservative crowd will be devastated.

The message here is that an illiberal government can lose an election if it is inept and corrupt enough even if the rules are skewed heavily in its favor. Will Trump take note? If he does, what lessons will he draw from it? TBD.

Notwithstanding the points of commonality discussed in my last post, the Iran war is unique in two respects. First, Trump made no effort to obtain public support in America prior to the war, and he has done just about everything possible to alienate everyone outside of Israel since then. This is a war started by an autocrat for autocracy, just like Putin in Ukraine. Second, Trump never came close to committing the forces necessary to accomplish regime change. This, presumably, is because he thinks he is omnipotent, so nothing could possibly go wrong.

Ross Douthat sees a basic continuity running from our previous Middle East excursions to Iran. In many respects, he is right. How does Iran stack up against Iraq and Libya?

Iraq was a war of choice designed to create regime change that was dishonestly sold to the American public as a war to stop a nuclear weapons program. George W. Bush threw enormous resources, including ground troops, into the war to guarantee that the desired regime change would occur. It did, but the Iraqi public fought back, and the new regime was predictably closer to Iran than the US. It was a massive strategic blunder.

In Libya, a tyrannical regime threatened to wipe out an armed resistance. Obama provided air support to the resistance in an effort to create regime change. He succeeded, but the result was civil war and anarchy that continues to this day. It is debatable whether the intervention was worth it.

Like Iraq, the Iran war is an attempt at regime change that is being sold primarily as a campaign to stop an Iranian bomb. Unlike Iraq, the war has been given inadequate resources to bring about regime change, and it has failed. Like Libya, this war is being fought from the air. Unlike Libya, there is no Iranian resistance that can bring about regime change.

In short, what we have now is an unsuccessful and more expensive Libya campaign that is having negative spillover effects all over the world.

Assume that the war concludes on the following terms: the regime remains in place; it agrees to reopen the strait without imposing tolls, but retains the practical ability to close it at any time; its ability to project military power is diminished in the short run; and its nuclear program still exists. Trump attempts to sell this as a victory for the rest of the world. How does the public react?

Iran hawks consider it a job half done that piles up problems for the future. Doves think the war was a mistake from the beginning. Both sides consequently agree that it was a strategic failure, albeit for different reasons.

An important segment of the right believes that America was settled by WASPs, whose culture made us great. Everyone else who lives here, even if they are citizens, should accept their subordinate status, be grateful, and shut up.

J.D. clearly accepts this line of reasoning. He was born a WASP, and his family apparently was here before the Civil War, which for some reason appears to be the cutoff date, even for other WASPs. But Vance is now a Catholic—historically, the political and cultural adversary of the WASP—and he married an Indian woman.

Has Vance consequently forfeited his right to be considered a first class American? Someone should ask him.

Five years ago, I would have predicted that the GOP would ram a nationwide abortion ban through Congress in the absence of the filibuster. Events and Trump’s singular sensitivity to the politics of the issue have made a ban implausible. Without the filibuster, however, the welfare state would be in tatters today, and we would be marching towards federal election legislation that would make Viktor Orban proud. In short, you can argue that only the filibuster stands between us and the illiberal state.

On the other hand, the combination of the filibuster and the major questions doctrine makes it virtually impossible for a blue team majority to accomplish anything meaningful in office, so there will be pressure to get rid of it in 2028. Which of these bad choices will prevail in 2028? That decision will be made during the primaries.

You can’t discredit your opponents; they can only discredit themselves. That was my hope for authoritarian populism during Trump 1.0, but it didn’t happen in spite of the man on golf cart’s best efforts during the pandemic and after the election. Trump’s reputation survived for three reasons: the adults in the room saved him from some of his worst impulses; the voters decided he couldn’t be blamed for his chaotic response to the virus; and his economic program, a souped-up version of Abenomics, worked well in its time. When Biden tried it under different conditions, inflation was the result, and the rest is history.

Trump 2.0 gives us a much better shot at permanently discrediting MAGA. Trump’s worst impulses are becoming policy. No one else can be blamed for tariffs and the war. AI is a threat to everyone, including the base. Only a handful of investors are better off than they were in 2024.

We’ll see what the public really thinks in November.

Years ago, I created a graph with belief in Christian ethics as one axis and belief in Christian metaphysics as the other. I concluded that Christian Democrats were in the yes/yes quadrant, right-wing pagans like Trump were in the no/no quadrant, and that liberals typically believed in Christian ethics, but not Christian metaphysics. I did not pay much attention to the remaining quadrant, because I thought combining a belief in Christian metaphysics with an adherence to pagan ethics was implausible.

Pete Hegseth convinced me I was wrong. Anyone who threatens to rain death and destruction on people who don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus fits perfectly in the fourth quadrant. He is a cartoon Christian.

Are you a Trump enabler or a restrainer? Are you willing to take any steps necessary to keep Trump from blowing up the world and imposing autocracy at home, or will you sit on the sidelines and just grumble quietly in private?

I’m not sure there are any Republicans who meet that test. Susan Collins doesn’t. Murkowski probably comes closest.

J.D. is being loyal to Trump on the war in public, but someone keeps leaking about the reservations he has expressed in private. He’s clearly trying to have it both ways in order to keep the base united behind him in 2028. Is that likely to work?

No. Someone is going to run against him either as a more principled anti-war proponent of America First or as a more abject follower of the Trump line on Iran. Of the two, the former is more likely, particularly if the war turns into an even more painful failure.

Add the war to A.I. as an issue that will divide the base in 2028.

Yesterday’s NYT story confirmed what everyone suspected about the origins of the war. Bibi was given unusual access and sold Trump a bill of goods; Trump was eager to go along; the people around Trump told him that most of the Israeli sales talk was rubbish, but they ultimately deferred to the great man’s golden gut; and the rest is history.

Two observations are pertinent here. First, this information was leaked by one or more (probably more) prominent members of our security apparatus, probably in an effort to avoid responsibility for the ongoing fiasco. Second, there is plenty of ammo here for critics of Israel who think the war was a mistake. We will be hearing plenty from them in the days to come.

In the end, it was TACO Tuesday. Trump and the Iranian regime agreed to a two-week ceasefire. The Iranians will permit unrestricted use of the Strait of Hormuz for that period, and Trump will stop bombing. The Israeli campaign in Lebanon will continue. What should we make of this?

The brief ceasefire just kicks the can down the road. The war, as of now, has accomplished less than nothing. The Iranians still control the strait, the enriched uranium is still there, the regime is still in place, and the Gulf states are still vulnerable.

Trump will spend the next two weeks searching for more leverage to bend the Iranians to his will. If, as I expect, he can’t find any, we’ll just go back to fire and fury.