And because he’s built a following, he has an army of people ready to leap to his defense. After all, if they stay silent, then the liberals will win, and no one can let the liberals win. Ever.
Against this backdrop, President Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was an inevitability. When he asked evangelicals for their political support, little did he know that he was walking into the house that Paul Pressler built.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about the Democratic temptation to support Graham Platner. He will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee to take on the Republican incumbent, Senator Susan Collins, in Maine. He also just recently covered up what appears to be a Nazi tattoo and has a long record of extreme and cruel statements online. A charismatic man has a troubled past. What could go wrong?
I don’t want politicians to be authentic. I want them to be decent. I want them to be honest. I want them to be competent. And if they fail those tests, they don’t redeem themselves by opposing President Trump.
If you’re a conservative watching Democrats talk themselves into supporting Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat who until recently wore what sure looked like a Totenkopf tattoo (he covered it up after it became a political embarrassment), you’re probably experiencing déjà vu. To a lesser but still familiar degree, I’m seeing Democrats engage in the same process of absurd accommodation and justification that Republicans use to excuse their deep love for Trump.
This week the round table discussion featured Michelle Cottle, David Wallace-Wells and me, and we talked about the Iran war. We covered a lot of ground, but I wanted to emphasize how much the Trump administration has lied. Among other things, it deceived America about the extent of the damage Iran inflicted on American bases:
I don’t think Americans realized the extent that we were subject to Baghdad Bobbery from our own government. And if you remember, the Iraq war in 2003, Baghdad Bob — he was the spokesperson for the Saddam Hussein government. “Everything’s going great.”
Iraq’s information minister, Mohammad al Sahaf: We are destroying tanks, personnel carriers, killing them, and we will continue.
And he’s saying, “Americans are nowhere near us,” etc.
al Sahaf: They are not even a hundred miles or whatever. They are not in any place.
We’re not used to having a Baghdad Bob administration. It’s not that our governments have always been truthful toward us. They have lied. But the sort of comprehensive dishonesty — and this war began with an avalanche of comprehensive dishonesty — essentially calling this a giant rout. “Why is the media not reporting more on the incredible success of American arms?” When the media was reporting on Americans hitting targets, what we were not reporting on, what was being withheld from us — and is still being withheld from us, but it’s having to leak out, as David was saying, in other ways — is the serious damage that has been done to American facilities.
