Donald Trump has complete meltdown after Iran debacle doesn’t go the way he was hoping
This morning Palmer Report spelled out why Donald Trump’s attack on Iran was his last ditch “Plan D” at best, as he continues to cycle through increasingly bad ideas aimed at getting him reelected, with no success. Trump is far too unpopular to somehow gain votes in 2020 by dragging America into a war when the nation is already sick of his crap. Sure enough, none of this is playing out how Trump might have hoped.
If Donald Trump was hoping that taking out a rogue Iranian leader like Qasem Soleimani was going to earn him praise – or even deference – from those who disapprove of Trump’s presidency, he guessed wrong. The Democrats in Congress, and even some Republicans, are criticizing Trump for having made such a reckless move without even having warned them. America’s allies are up in arms over the boneheaded nature of Trump’s escalation. Large chunks of the media – even Trump’s sidekick Tucker Carlson – are focusing on how badly Trump screwed this up.
This all serves to give the Iranian government more leverage. It’s going to have to respond in some way, in order to save face with its own people. But Trump has blown this so badly and has backed himself into such a corner, he’s increasingly not going to be in a position to be able to respond back. Trump seems to know that he’s blown this play, too, as he’s now trying to shake up the chess board by making what anyone can see are hollow threats:
Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, & badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!
Here’s the thing. Just by announcing something this specific (the breadth and nature of targets, the plan to hit them simultaneously, etc), Donald Trump has made it almost impossible for the U.S. military to carry out this supposed mission. Attacks like this tend to succeed based on secrecy, as you can’t defend yourself if you don’t know where or how you’re going to be hit. So Trump isn’t tweeting this because he’s actually going to do it; he’s tweeting it because he’s not going to do it. He’s just hoping that you don’t catch on.
Donald Trump has a consistent history. When he does his most egregious stuff (locking kids in cages, extorting Ukraine, even taking out Soleimani), he almost never announces it, and he instead tries to do it in secret. When Trump announces his biggest threats, they nearly always turn out to have been hollow threats or distractions. This isn’t to say that Trump won’t end up getting us into a war with Iran; he’s incompetent enough, he might make it happen by accident. But even Trump understands that a war would drop his already-fleeting chances of reelection to zero. And we know that whatever he’s looking to do with Iran, it’s not contained in his latest tweet.
