January 16, 2020
BETTING IT ALL ON HIS LOW OPINION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:
Did Trump bet 2020 on Iran? (Edward Morrissey, January 16, 2020, The Week)
For a man who owned casinos -- with a famously rocky track record on them -- President Trump doesn't evince much interest in safe bets. Most presidents with a booming economy look to consolidate their winnings ahead of a re-election campaign and dial down risks that could upend their electoral standing. But with the strike on Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Trump has rolled the dice in his biggest foreign-policy gamble yet -- and might end up paying the price for it in November.What makes this gamble particularly remarkable is that Trump won over the right-leaning populists in the GOP by explicitly rejecting the interventionist "neo-conservatism" of the Bush administrations. He ran against the liberal-democracy interventionism of the Clinton and Obama administrations. Trump not only promised to stop starting new wars, especially in the Middle East, he pledged to end the wars in which we found ourselves.Why take this risk at the start of an election year? With near-unanimous backing in the GOP, Trump had kept both foreign-policy wings of the party in the same tent. His need was not to consolidate Republicans but to attract new voters without losing old ones.In this sense, the drone strike has already taken its toll. The more popular leaders of the GOP's non-interventionist wing have joined Democrats in publicly scolding Trump for overstepping his authority by killing an official of a foreign government, and without any consultation with Congress. Those include usual allies, like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), normally an enthusiastic supporter of Trump. They are not alone in their unhappiness; as many as 10 Senate Republicans may vote for a Democrat-initiated resolution rebuking Trump for overstepping his authority, limiting him to 30 days of action against Iran regardless of imminence without congressional approval. That's not enough to survive a veto, but it's enough to demonstrate the serious split the Soleimani strike has created within the GOP.
It's just a function of his ignorance and narcissism: he thinks everyone hates Muslims, Latinos, Asians, women, blacks and Jews as much as he does. He doesn't see any downside to attacking them so he always does when he's trying to drum up support. To be fair, his hardcore supporters--the 15% who oppose even DACA--worship him for it.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 16, 2020 7:49 AM