Bulletins from an Alternate Reality

The Left's reaction to Trump's strike on Iran has been characteristically irrational

They never met a terrorist entity they didn’t love…to death…

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By ordering a series of air attacks to destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, President Donald J. Trump has defined his presidency—whatever happens next.

How successful was the American strike? How will the Iranian regime react? What will be the broader impact of the President’s momentous decision on America, the Mideast, the world? These remain open questions. The dust, literal and figurative, must be allowed to settle before they can be answered. I need time to think things over before attempting to answer them in a Substack article. But stay tuned.

One thing, however, has come clearly into focus: The broad Left stands opposed to Trump’s action. And the reasoning seems to be that whatever Trump does must be wrong. Here, for example, is a Substack Note from Biden court historian Steven Beschloss: “Please don’t presume this is now an American president making a serious decision for the good of America, rather than a malignant despot desperate to be seen as a strong man.”

If I were to ask Beschloss whether he thinks that it would be no big deal if the Iranian regime came into possession of nuclear weapons, he’d probably insist that the issue could have been resolved diplomatically—dodging around the inconvenient fact that Trump tried hard to strike a deal with the regime and came up empty. The President was then left with the choice of ordering a military strike or doing nothing. He chose to strike, and I think that was the right decision, because the Islamic Republic must never be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons. Beschloss, however, thinks that it was the wrong decision, because of who made it.

A rational person, however much he despises Donald Trump, would be capable of addressing the issue of the Iranian nuclear weapons program and the question of what to do about it with some objectivity. Here are the pros; there are the cons. But the Left cannot deal rationally with any issue involving Donald Trump. Much of what the comrades say of him is true or has an element of truth. But even more of what they say of him is simply delusional—bulletins from an alternate reality where mass deportation of foreigners is underway, martial law may be declared at any moment, fascism is just around the corner, etc. and so forth. Hence the knee-jerk reaction to the strike on Iran.

Beschloss claims that Trump’s strike on Iran was unconstitutional, lawless, grounds for impeachment—and he’s not alone. After all, the Constitution stipulates only Congress can declare war, and Trump didn’t get permission from Congress to wage war. Even for the Left, the Constitution sometimes comes in handy. I wonder, though, whether Beschloss and other Resistance progressives raised that point when Bill Clinton intervened militarily against Serbia over Kosovo, or when Barack Obama ordered Seal Team Six to assassinate Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, or when he ordered attacks on Libya. Somehow I doubt it.

Admittedly, there’s room for argument over the extent of the president’s warmaking powers. But people who couldn’t be bothered to make a fuss about past presidential decisions to commit US military forces to action without congressional approval are the most egregious hypocrites if they’re now denouncing Trump for the same thing.

And not only was Trump’s attack on Iran unconstitutional—it was unprovoked! Indeed, there were the ayatollahs, just going about their business, when suddenly, because he’s a horrible person, that “malignant despot” in Washington DC brought down the hammer on them. Not mentioned, of course, is the nature of their business: the brutal oppression of the Iranian people, the sponsorship and support of terrorist groups, the spread of mass murder and terrorism around the world. The Islamic Republic’s hands drip with the blood of countless victims, American included. Its favorite slogan is Death to America! Trump took the ayatollahs at their word and decided that it might be best if they didn’t get nuclear weapons. How wicked of him!

Then there’s that old standby, the specious analogy. One of those came my way in response to a comment I made on the issue:

Republicans are now trying to spin the attack as saving the world from weapons. Republicans admit that weapons have the potential to hurt others and controlling the weapons is people's best interest. Except for guns as you stated. Meanwhile, guns continue to be the leading cause of death for children, not nuclear weapons.

I simply dismissed this as ridiculous. There’s no point in arguing with a person who thinks that the enactment of “sensible gun laws”—whatever that means—in the US is just the same as preventing the world’s leading terrorist state from getting weapons of mass destruction.

There are of course people aligned with the Resistance Left who nevertheless recognize that the President did the right thing on Iran, but theirs is a distinctly minority opinion. And over on the Right, among the isolationist natcons, there are those who now revile Trump as a tool of the Jews and a closet neocon embarked on another one of those horrible forever wars. But theirs too is a distinctly minority opinion—all the chatter about a MAGA civil war to the contrary notwithstanding.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is the label usually applied to the Left’s more irrational tirades against Trump. But I prefer to think of it as a facet of a more general derangement, born of an ideology that compels otherwise normal and intelligent people to behave as if they’re ignorant and stupid. For instance, the oft-heard charge that Israel is a fascist, apartheid state that’s committing genocide in Gaza can only be accepted by deactivating a large number of one’s brain cells. It’s no coincidence that so many of the Resistance warriors are also “anti-Zionists,” i.e. antisemites. The same willful stupidity that’s necessary to believe that Trump = Hitler is required to believe that Israel = apartheid South Africa and National Socialist Germany.

In a comment on her recent article about the Iran strike, Substack’s leading cosmopolitan globalist, Clair Berlinski, said this:

I don't know how an average person of average reading skills—one who pays only slight attention to the news from overseas—is supposed to make sense of these events. There is so much disinformation and nonsense on social media. The mainstream media is doing a terrible job of explaining this—even worse than it usually does in matters of foreign affairs. It's hard to blame people for being confused and resorting to simple partisan algorithms to decide how they feel about it.

This is only too true, and much of that disinformation and nonsense comes from the Left, infiltrating the Democratic Party, amplified by the media. The bad behavior of the natcon Right is equally deplorable, but its influence is far less baneful—as shown by the fact that when the chips were down President Trump proved willing to throw the Tucker Carlson faction of MAGA under the bus.

Claire requests “a patient, earnest article explaining in detail why it was imperative to do what we did, when we did it.” I’m going to give that my best shot over the next few days. But I had to purge my mind of this other stuff first.