Schoolmarm DeSantis tries to longhouse President Trump for accurate Israel comments

These people are genuinely stupid

In June 2015, eccentric real estate and media mogul Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president. Although many (myself included) believed he was a longshot, he soon charmed the American public by doing something simple: telling the truth.

There were all sorts of things that everyone knew were true that people just weren’t allowed to say in polite society before Trump came around. When Trump burst onto the scene, it was remarkable. He could point out the obvious: the Iraq War was a mistake, there are too many immigrants, many of the people in prestigious roles with lots of degrees in the American government are actually complete idiots.

It was remarkable to see this happen in real time. When Trump first vocally came out against the Iraq War and advocated for a policy of de-escalation and non-intervention, everyone thought it would be political suicide. He started saying these things before the South Carolina primary. “South Carolina has lots of veterans,” all the political commentators cried, “they’re not going to take kindly to those comments.” Indeed, during the South Carolina primary debate a line of now-forgotten political hacks formed to attack Trump all at once for saying stuff that pretty much everyone who was even a little fair knew to be true.

The voters agreed with Trump. He went on to win the South Carolina primary in a landslide and then won the presidency too. President Trump, to the best of his ability, pursed a remarkably realistic foreign policy. He never backed down from threats but also was willing to make peace in ways that the previous regime considered intolerable.

Probably the crowning achievement of the Trump administration was his North Korea policy. North Korea was long considered to be a rogue state and had acquired nuclear weapons. They regularly menaced their region with unannounced long-range missile tests. In response to this, Trump engaged with Kim Jong Un personally. He bullied, he complimented, he gave candid public analysis that pretty much no mainstream figure would be allowed to give.

In one of my favorite moments, Trump did the unthinkable: He acknowledged that Kim Jong Un had to have something going for him. Trump said:

People are saying: 'Is he sane?' I have no idea.... but he was a young man of 26 or 27... when his father died. He's dealing with obviously very tough people, in particular the generals and others.

And at a very young age, he was able to assume power. A lot of people, I'm sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else. And he was able to do it. So obviously, he's a pretty smart cookie.

These comments generated enormous outrage from pretty much every mainstream journalist. Trump’s current primary challengers still echo that outrage today.

It really is a funny thing to watch. For starters, what Trump was saying was clearly true. Someone who is a complete idiot or pushover is unlikely to become the military dictator of a pretty large country and survive for years doing it. Just to acknowledge that simple truth was controversial.

Secondly, Trump’s comments were obviously intended to facilitate the then-ongoing negotiations with North Korea. For decades, a clown car’s worth of US diplomats and chief executives had tried to “resolve” the North Korea standoff by grandstanding about what a monster Kim Jong Un was, talking about how he needed to be put down, and then staging mock invasions of that country right off its coast. Trump made the revolutionary step of simply stopping the farce. It was pretty obvious in hindsight that this approach was the best way to deescalate situation, and it worked. A person on the street could have told you that this would have been the best approach, yet for some reason it eluded decades of American foreign policy “professionals.”

It’s not that the approach was very complicated or that it was particularly hard to do, it’s that the DC chattering class was unable to think these thoughts, much less say them out loud. If you proposed them, they’d mock you, attack you, and try to ruin your career. Big bloviating generals with chests full of medals and no wars won would sternly lecture you about how the real world works. Shrill office women would shriek that you’re enabling mass murder. In reality, these people simply did not want the problem solved because certain problems existing is an industry in of itself. If tensions cooled people might wonder why the US was subsidizing the defense budgets of all these very wealthy countries.

These shrill office women have returned, and they’re running Ron DeSantis’s Twitter page. Just today, DeSantis’s social media team posted the following tweet about Trump’s off the cuff comments on the recent attacks in Israel.

Trump’s remarks were reasonable: the people who carried out this attack are dangerous and intelligent. In order for the terrorists in the recent Hamas attacks to do so much damage, someone in Israel had to have messed up. Trump placed the blame, at least partially, on Bibi Netanyahu’s wishy-washy policy, revealing that Netanyahu had backed Israeli forces out of a planned joint operation to assassinate Iranian special forces commander Qasem Soleimani at the last minute, but then tried to claim credit for the assassination after the US carried it out alone.

It’s kind of pointless to have a controversy over this. By any objective standard, Hezbollah is smart. They’re long-running, well-organized, and successful paramilitary force that causes enormous headaches for the US and Israel, among many other nations. They could not do this if they were stupid. Underestimating these people can end in disaster, as recent events in Israel has shown.

DeSantis probably doesn’t write his own tweets. He has media consultants tell him how to pronounce his own last name. Still, this tweet really is a return to the group dishonesty of the pre-Trump era. It’s in essence, it’s the Republican Longhouse. If you say something that’s forbidden, you’re going to have all of these people coming out of the woodwork to henpeck you whether what you’re saying is true or not. Losing? Not a big deal. The real problem is going against the funhouse mirror wisdom of these (paid) hall monitors.

These people create impossible conditions. The dysfunction of modern America can largely be traced back to this phenomenon. Serious people can no longer discuss issues candidly, by design. Good ideas must be referred to through innuendo, lest a Den Mother catch on and call in the mob. Eventually, all public discourse becomes masturbatory performance art for entrenched political interests. Everyone claps when the think tank goon makes a stirring speech about human rights at the culmination of his career in which he accomplished nothing.

DeSantis has displayed catastrophically bad political instincts in recent months, it’s not surprising that he’d mess this up too. Instead of substantively responding to the (true) things Trump is saying, he pretends to be outraged. In essence, he puts on problem glasses and shouts “Wow, just wow.” If DeSantis wants to improve his rapidly declining poll numbers, he’s going to have to do a little better than that.

Perhaps the most striking thing to me is just how unnecessary these attacks are. It’s one thing to level legitimate criticism at President Trump, there are plenty, it’s an entirely different thing to stage a hissy fit when Trump tells the truth. DeSantis has no chance of winning the primary, even if Trump goes to jail. It seems like his campaign is just operating out of spite at this point. The comments don’t help DeSantis or add anything. When these people inevitably go down, they’ll take tens of millions of dollars that could have been spent on critical Republican election efforts with them.

For now, it looks like he’ll soon be overtaken in primary polls by hateful husk and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, a fate worse than the political death that DeSantis’s career no doubt deserves at this point. I suspect DeSantis’s upcoming and very ill-advised debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom will bury his once-promising national ambitions once and for all.