Who knows how, but Donald Trump has gotten out of every tight spot he’s fallen into. From the bone spurs that saved him from the draft to the bail outs from a rich daddy; from the sex scandal that his current wife helped him frame as locker room talk to the “Epstein files,” even, nothing has ever quite stuck to take him down.
Not even the Martha Stewart-fronted spin-off of The Apprentice.
He was impeached twice and came back from the dead to win reelection. Now he’s relying on his good fortune to execute a script any reality star would write with himself as the impresario. “Operation Epic Fury” is aptly named. Waging war against Iran is Trump’s biggest gamble, and he expects to win.
Defying the lessons of history about the futility of regime change in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, to name just a few, Trump is working to decapitate Iran’s brutal theocracy and is daring the people to rise up and take back their government.
Granted, an evil regime has been largely taken down—but why now? And what now? There do not appear to be any coherent plans for the days ahead.
Concocted intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons led us into a long and deadly war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio now wants us to believe that Iran was working towards nukes, too, but also that the Trump team had to act preemptively because Israel was about to launch its own strikes, and Iran would surely have retaliated on U.S. bases.
(According to an inside account in The New York Times, Trump felt he had “no choice” but to align himself with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has long sought military action against Tehran.)
This is a war of choice, and early polls show tepid support. Half the country doesn’t trust Trump to put country first. And that’s a problem, because in large part this was a war undertaken to improve Trump’s standing with the electorate. Shock and awe and glory. A week ago, he was already in political peril, his approval rating was down ten points since he took office. He has lost ground on immigration and the economy, his two best issues; with analysts predicting a blue wave to take the House and potentially the Senate, a panicked urgency took root at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
What better time for the “Peace President” to flip the script and launch a war? Trump is pursuing what he thinks is greatness, initiating a fight that no other U.S. president has dared to. But he has little regard for the chaos that he is letting loose, and the risk for the region and the world is considerable.
Everything is about him, his strongest-of-the-strongmen artifice and his legacy. The rest of us will be tested as we watch this performance play out, with real life-and-death repercussions.
I’ve asked myself, as a U.S. citizen, do I have an obligation to support the commander in chief? Even knowing that American lives are at stake and six servicemen have died already in a war that is just days old, should I temper my criticism?
I put the question to Jonah Blank, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Blank opposed military action at the time—“If you read the intelligence, it was a series of lies” he said of the claims regarding Saddam’s arsenal—and noted that many of our elected officials regretted their vote to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq on a false premise.
He was emphatic that this is no time to give Trump deference either: “It will cost an enormous amount of money and a certain number of American lives for a goal that doesn’t necessarily help any Americans at all,” Blank told the Daily Beast. “Americans don’t get anything out of this except it makes Trump feel like a big man.”
“It is far more patriotic in my view to oppose a president who is doing terrible damage to the country than to assist him in doing that damage,” he continued.
Of course, Senator Mark Kelly, a former fighter pilot and astronaut, faced prosecution by Trump’s Department of Justice for saying much the same thing. (Kelly and several other lawmakers with military backgrounds released a video late last year reminding service members that they have not only the right but the duty to refuse to follow illegal orders.)
A federal judge blocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ensuing order to downgrade Kelly’s pension and rank, an act of petty persecution. Hegseth is appealing the decision.
Now, Hegseth says this war will be quick. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” But pressed on whether there will be American boots on the ground in Iran, Hegseth refused to rule it out. So has Trump.
Trump’s successes have not been cost-free. He didn’t go to Vietnam, but somebody else did. He lived the high life through bankruptcies that ruined others He was holding forth in the Oval Office taking questions from reporters as U.S. embassies closed and allies in the Middle East fended off attacks.
With a “big wave” of attacks on Iran still coming, and so much at play—certainly at risk—the “worst” case scenario he could imagine was, he said on the fourth day of war, that “you go through this and then in five years you realize you put somebody in (to lead the country) who was no better.”
Of course, by that point it wouldn’t be his problem. But it’s still a big failure, as much as he’d want to frame himself as having won.
