The reason why he presented “evidence” that contradicts the argument he wants to make is that he has a severe mental defect that prevents him from understanding the information he is given. He cannot keep himself from making illogical arguments because he is mentally incapable of distinguishing a logical argument from an illogical argument.
In his old age, this severe mental defect is getting even worse.
Trump is an evil person. In other words, a sociopath.
We are morally justified in hating and despising Trump. But that said, I am inclined to think that our best public strategy is to exhibit pity for Trump.
Every sentient person has observed that Trump wants to use last night’s speech as the predicate for a variety of forms of election interference. Every sentient person is right in that regard. But his malevolence is greatly inhibited by his incompetence.
As a talking head said recently of his Iran strategy, the problem is not that he strategy is mistaken. The problem is that he does not know what strategy is. When all else fails, he may order a military coup. I don’t think it will work, but I am afraid we may find out whether it works or not.
The American people unwisely reelected a proven traitor. They wanted lower consumer prices. They got higher consumer prices—along with a firehose of ridiculous lies about consumer prices. They wanted no more wars. They got the war in Iran—along with a firehose of ridiculous lies about the Iran war.
Although Trump is fortunate to have legions of uneducated and gullible followers, the environment he has created—higher consumer prices and a war in the Middle East—is not propitious for his gullible followers’ acceptance of his firehose of lies about the election. He has cried “Wolf!” way too many times.
I would, of course, have taken a pass on the op-ed, except that it was written by Thomas Edsall, who is nobody’s fool.
The first part of Mr. Edsall’s article, in today’s New York Times, reads as follows:
Even now, according to a new survey by the left-leaning group Data for Progress, the Democratic Party has a net negative rating of minus 29 percentage points among swing voters, worse than the minus 25 for the Republican Party. Democrats seeking to restore their party’s credibility with the electorate as a whole, but especially among those crucial swing voters, might consider adding three planks — on immigration, urban disorder and transgender issues — to the 2028 Democratic platform.
Why? Because it is these three issues that serve to reinforce the perception that Democrats are willing to sacrifice the interests of the working and middle classes in favor of special interest constituencies.
I am more than a little queasy making these suggestions, but I think the Democratic Party needs to perform a kind of brutal surgery on itself.
The hard-edge character and language of what I am proposing is specifically designed to function as a public renunciation of the Democratic Party’s liabilities, its ties to special interest groups and its readiness to succumb to progressive orthodoxy.
The proposals amount, then, to an ideological exorcism.
On immigration, I would suggest — with plenty of room for amendment — the following:
Democrats will firmly enforce laws on illegal immigration, including tough border enforcement and deportation of unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes.
Unauthorized immigrants with no criminal record who have been in this country for at least five years, along with Dreamers, should be offered green cards with a path toward citizenship. More recent arrivals should be deported.
On crime:
The Democratic Party supports aggressive prosecution of those accused of violent crime, those who engage in crowdsourced “teen takeovers” of stores, as well as all forms of child abuse.
The party backs restoration of bail requirements in the case of felonies, lifetime sentences for offenders convicted of multiple violent crimes, tough enforcement of child support laws and the death penalty if supported by the voters in a state and endorsed by a jury.
Transgender and gender dysphoria:
There are two sexes: men and women.
A man can claim an identify as a woman, and the same in reverse for a woman. They have every right to do so. Their claim should be respected and they should be protected from any form of discrimination for their choice.
Their claim does not, however, alter their biological sex.
Consequently, it is legitimate in areas such as sports where a transgender person would have a competitive advantage over non-trans people to bar such participation. Similarly, a claim to a sexual identity does not give a trans woman the right to incarceration in a woman’s prison.
Finally, the debate over gender affirming surgery and hormone treatments is fraught with contradictory assertions. For now, because there are credible scientific claims of irreversible harms, such treatments for those under 18 should be barred pending further study.
There are some other planks I would add, including a strong commitment to free speech and an adamant rejection of all forms of cancel culture; an endorsement of equality of opportunity based on merit; the repudiation of socialism in favor of a free and open market accompanied by government regulation to prevent exploitation, monopolization and unfair trade practices. …
In exploring these issues with Democratic strategists, I was surprised to find significant support — with differences over language — from a variety of sources, albeit accompanied by a harsh rejection from a communications specialist for a firm headed by a major Democratic campaign strategist. …
Let me begin by apologizing to those who could not view the preceding post because they are not premium members of The Bulwark. I am almost 80, and this was my first mistake. At least I didn’t start a stupid, unwinnable war.
And BTW, you might want to consider paying some bucks to support The Bulwark. I find it to be money well spent.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board continues to tell it like it is:
Iran Is Winning the Battle of Hormuz: Tehran is using force to gain control over traffic through the Strait
Iran then hit a tanker carrying Qatari crude. The U.S. retaliated again against Iranian military sites and has escorted oil tankers with heavy air cover. Iran then fired drones and missiles at civilian targets and U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.
“It is very possible that they will never learn,” Mr. Trump wrote of Iran’s regime on Saturday night. Or is it U.S. decision makers who never learn? Vice President JD Vance has been touting Iran’s “transformed” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders ready to “turn over a new leaf” with the U.S. He even reached “gentlemen’s agreements” with them outside the memorandum, Mr. Vance assured critics.
Well, these are no gentlemen. It’s the same terrorist regime, and this is the Battle of Hormuz that Mr. Trump thought he had ducked. In case there was any doubt, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that Iran is solely responsible for managing the Strait under the memorandum. He said “no other country has any responsibility in that regard.” Mr. Araghchi is Iran’s chief negotiator with Mr. Vance.
It wasn’t enough that Mr. Trump gave Iran an oil sanctions waiver without safeguards, promised billions of dollars in frozen assets and stopped sanctions enforcement. The regime wants to conquer the Strait and turn it into a toll booth, with transit by permission only. On a ship-by-ship basis, Iranian foreign policy would determine who crosses. This is the opposite of free navigation and provides no security for energy flows.
Force is the regime’s means to make the world bend. Without it, shippers refused to heed Iran’s dictates for Hormuz during the deal’s early days. Vessels sailed out via the Strait’s southern, Omani lane. Tehran’s demands that ships transit only through the Iranian lane, request access two days in advance, and sign up for special Iranian “insurance” were ignored. Oil prices fell far faster than most experts expected.
In short, the Strait wasn’t going Iran’s way. It was becoming free again—hence the regime’s resort to force. Iran is intimidating Oman and other Gulf states. It may also offer them a cut of the spoils from a tolled Strait, but that hardly sweetens the foul deal for the rest of the world.
The question is why Iran still gets the cash, selling its oil free of sanctions and repatriating the revenue to fund its Revolutionary Guard. If Mr. Trump isn’t ready to resume the U.S. blockade, he can amend Treasury’s sanctions-relief license to require that all proceeds from Iranian oil sales be placed in escrow.
The U.S. needs the leverage for nuclear negotiations, and it was never wise to give Iran a blank check. All the more so now that the regime isn’t respecting the deal, which mandates a cease-fire as well as Iran’s “best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels.” That means don’t shoot at them, for starters.
More U.S. “love taps” against Iranian targets won’t impress the hard men in Tehran. They behave as if they have escalation dominance because they think Mr. Trump won’t return to war before the midterm elections. They don’t believe Mr. Trump’s social-media bluster because they see his reluctance to enforce the cease-fire terms.
In the bigger strategic picture, the regime is leaving the President a choice: surrender Hormuz to Iranian terror or fight for it, like he always should have once he started the war, and reopen the Strait by force.
Your father made you quit school in the middle of the eighth grade, to work in the cotton fields. But farming was becoming increasingly unprofitable in the 1920’s. Soon, everyone in your family looked for some other way to earn a living.
As car ownership spread, you saw the increasing demand for auto repair services, so you and one of your brothers taught yourselves how to fix Model T’s and keep them on the road.
When World War II came, you were not eager to join the army, but you knew the danger our country faced. When Uncle Sam called, you did your duty. Soon, the Army discovered your mechanical skill and put it to good use. After D-Day, as the Army moved across France and into Germany, you and your platoon followed just behind the front lines, repairing the tanks, keeping the trucks on the road, and making sure the jeeps remained serviceable.
You understood that, whatever the personal cost and sacrifice, we had to defeat the Nazis.
In a time of danger and crisis, you did what you had to do, to defend our country and our way of life, and to make sure I grew up in a free society.
America’s ailing one-trick pony: Trump’s excessive faith in military power is squarely within the US tradition
Count the obliterated targets. Tally the corpses of senior leaders. Behold America’s military prowess. By any measure, Iran has taken a pummelling. Yet threats of more US strikes are yielding no concessions. Donald Trump’s threats, including bombing Iran into the Stone Age, have sounded empty since early March. Yet he keeps repeating them. Threatening a failed tactic over and over again and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.
It is rightly observed that America has a greater margin of error than any other power. The US has the world’s most powerful military and is flanked by vast oceans to its east and west and benign neighbours to its north and south. But such blessings can induce lazy thinking. Decades before Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, America picked up the habit of confusing its military superiority with an ability to impose its will on faraway lands. The only thing that is novel about Trump’s Iran war is the immediate obviousness of its bankruptcy.
Epic Fury is no departure from American tradition. When Trump was a young man pulling strings to escape military service in Vietnam — a privilege he shared with other future US presidents, including George W Bush — the Pentagon announced regular “kill ratios” of the number of enemy dead versus American. The Tet Offensive in early 1968 was heralded as a major US victory since so many Vietcong insurgents had been killed. In reality, Tet delivered a crushing political defeat to America since it conveyed the enemy’s iron will.
The Pentagon did not see it that way. Pete Hegseth, the US “secretary of war”, is a very different figure to Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defence. But his playbook is similar. In crude terms, success is judged by how many things and people America can blow up. Hegseth’s favourite words are “precision” and “lethality”. The similarity between Lyndon B Johnson’s Operation Rolling Thunder and Trump’s Epic Fury is almost exact. Just as LBJ used carpet-bombing of North Vietnam to prod elusive concessions in negotiations, Trump’s missile threats are wasted on Iran. As the Taliban used to say during the two-decade US military operation in Afghanistan: “America has the watches, we have the time.” The Taliban regained power five years ago.
Trump seemed to grasp the limits of America’s one-trick ponies better than most US presidents. His denouncement of Bush’s Iraq war was a key propellant of his 2016 hostile takeover of the Republican Party. The irony is that he is now riding that pony into the same old quicksand. Trump can run the gamut of America’s greatest hits in the same interview. One moment he is proclaiming mission accomplished as Bush did at an early stage of the Iraq war. The next he is dangling peace with honour, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger branded America’s retreat from Vietnam. When his blood is really up he demands second world war-style unconditional surrender.
But his only way out is via sustained diplomacy on multiple fronts. On Monday he called off the next wave of strikes on Iran scheduled for Tuesday. He wanted to give the Pakistan-mediated talks another chance. At the forefront of Trump’s mind is that he must do better than Barack Obama did with his 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Nowhere in his mind, apparently, is the recollection that it took Obama’s negotiators 20 months to nail it down. The idea that much less knowledgeable US officials could do better in a few days is delusional. That Obama could have pulled off a serious agreement without once threatening to bomb Iran is inconceivable to him.
The lesson from Epic Fury is the same one that Obama drew from Iraq. Diplomacy should always be the first resort. There is no need even to mention US military power, still less to brag about it daily. To paraphrase a maxim, the military that fights best is that which fights least. The comforting take is to blame Epic Fury on Trump’s unique recklessness. But he is no aberration. Once you screen out his uniquely self-defeating verbal incontinence, you discern a Washington traditionalist. His approach is the reductio ad absurdumof one lost US war after another preceded by strings of victories on the battlefield.
As the world googles Thucydides and digests the emerging G2 China-US reality, the question is whether Washington is capable of reinventing itself. Better informed US figures than Trump are calling on him to “finish the job” in Iran. Had they learnt from the recent or distant past, they would be revising their advice. But that would require thinking. Good strategy is the product of intellectual humility. Trump’s lack of it puts him in plentiful company.
Facing MAGA 