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Notes -
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
You may or may not remember that back in January of this year President Trump, in his personal capacity, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in damages related to leaks of his tax returns by a contractor back in 2018-2020. I don't want to dig into the merits of the case as such, except I'll note the legal discussion I've read seems to have a consensus that the case is very weak. It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of. There are obvious conflicts of interest involved. So much so the judge in that case issued an order for the parties to explain how they are actually adverse to each other, how they disagree, so that the cases and controversies requirement of the constitution is satisfied.
As of today, it seems we may never find out how good the claims are or aren't, how adverse the parties are or aren't. Trump filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit, pursuant to the establishment of a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". It's not even clear to me the fund is going to be administered by the United States government, as paragraph C provides:
Is this going to be the new normal? If you're President and Congress won't give you the money you want to pay your friends and allies you can get however much you want with this one weird trick!
ETA:
ABC reports that the fund will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, but the members will all be removable at-will by the President.
We know we're living in the late republic, it's not culture war anymore. Oh, sure, the TDS crowd will get very conspicuously upset about Trump corruption again. But no one else cares.
At a time where consumer sentiment is at the lowest on record, with food and gas and general prices increasing from war/tariffs/etc other choices, I'm not sure "no one cares" is going to be true about a story of the president funneling their taxes towards his personal profit. This is the sort of behavior and outlook that has his approval rating collapsed and Dems sweeping the midterms. People already are struggling, the message of "they cut food support to pay for his friends" is gonna hit pretty hard.
"With crime increasing from rape/jaywalking/etc".
No one cares about tariffs or "corruption", but the war is a disaster.
War can be swept under the rug if it's won quickly and decisively, and it can't thought of as a war to the general public. Like the military operation to get Maduro out of power, that worked well, nobody thought if it as a lightning quick war.
The pentagon better get winning then. Personally I think that even genocide in Iran will be better for Trump than quagmire.
He should have just knocked out all the power plants and oil refineries and escalated as needed, if he was going to wipe out the IRGC leaders anyway. No half measures for a large decentralized military like Iran. A sizable ground troop force should have been mobilized.
High gas prices could be tolerated in the short term, even for the remainder of Trump's term if the long term benefit was the permanent neutralization of a hostile enemy state. It could have been spun as win that way.
Instead, we have this constant barrage of threats to do what should have already been done. The remnants of the IRGC see this as political weakness and are going to wait Trump out like Carter and get a better reparations/nuclear deal from whoever is the next democrat president. At the very least they will wait until November to see if the midterms are indicating weakness in the future.
I'm not sure that knocking out the power plants and oil refineries would affect Iran's ability to deter commercial ships from transiting the Strait of Hormuz or make the Iranian leadership more likely to make a deal.
Iran's drone and missile arsenal doesn't depend on the power plants and oil refineries. They might be able to keep the Strait closed to commercial shipping all the way until the midterms with their current remaining arsenal, unless the US launches a ground invasion.
The Iranian leadership likely sees this war as existential and views the idea of surrendering after getting their power plants and oil refineries knocked out as being the equivalent of putting themselves in Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi's position (killed by their own domestic political opponents after the West launched a military operation that allowed those political opponents to come to power). Even if they don't get killed after surrendering, they would probably get Maduroed, their lives as they knew them over. In any case, if they are not surrendering after being directly targeted for assassination, often successfully, I don't know why they would surrender after power plants and oil refineries get bombed.
Bombing their civilian infrastructure would weaken Iran long-term, but at the cost of a lot of bad PR for the US, a general reduction in the US' soft power in the world.
A ground invasion would work pretty swiftly and effectively, but Trump does not seem to have the will to do it for whatever reason.
Not in the short term, certainly, but it would impact the long-term economics of a future regime pretty negatively. IIRC Iraq didn't manage to fully rebuild its damaged infrastructure from 1991 until after 2003. Missile factories require power and raw materials.
But actually destroying it isn't cheaply or quickly reversible, and makes a friendly future regime less plausible.
If anything, it seems the Trump doctrine is more flexible with this than the Bush era: the rest of that regime is still running Venezuela, with the, uh, implication leading to some foreign policy changes, not "we're bringing democracy and planning elections".
And honestly the changes being requested don't sound that onerous to me: stop funding proxies and instability in the region, stop enrichment, and probably tone down the rhetoric on US/IL and internal jackboots, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Not saying it's an easy ask, but it doesn't seem to include "submit to international war crimes/human rights trials".
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Taking out the power plants is to reduce their industrial capacity to wage war, it's part of a total war strategy to defeat a resilient opponent. Taking out the oil facilitiies removes their oil income, income used to support their purchases of military hardware and raw resources. All this assumes ground troops will be deployed, or it will be just pointless destruction, as it has been so far.
This is the minimum commitment needed to subjugate Iran, otherwise surrender and reparations are likely. That can be a valid path too, but "surrender" is not part of Trump's vocabulary.
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