SWING AND MISS

| 3:10 pm EST January 8, 2020
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So much for Plan D. That’s the big takeaway from Donald Trump’s speech today, in which he essentially gave up on his Iran gambit after realizing that it wasn’t going to gain him a single vote in 2020, and was threatening to cost him votes. This was entirely predictable, of course. Even Trump likely knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with this. It’s just that he had nothing better to try.

Plan A was secretly conspiring with Ukraine to rig the election, which got him impeached. Plan B was somehow using his own impeachment to gain new supporters, which didn’t happen. Plan C was the DOJ Inspector General report, which went nowhere. Plan D was to assassinate an Iranian leader and then hope it all magically worked out for him.

The trouble for Trump is that war can only make an unpopular president even more unpopular, and he knows it. He was hoping he could take out Soleimani, it would make him more popular with voters, and then he could just ignore Iran’s proportional response. He was correct in that Iran’s response ended up being proportional. But Trump didn’t gain a single vote with the Soleimani assassination. Instead he’s left giving a humiliating speech on TV, trying to spin yet another loss into a win. Nice try.