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You might as well try to divine the opinions of Mamdani voters by asking Raytheon's Chief Diversity Officer.
Ex-Tea Party voters most likely are that part of Trump's base that broke with him over war in Iran, and just generally saw him as a vessel for "end forever-wars" and other forms of D.C. establishment skepticism. So what you see as an incoherent position is likely just a lack of understanding of the currents of the American Right.
Fox News being an establishment Republican MIC aligned mouthpiece, its position will not in fact inform you as to the position of these people. And, say, Tim Pool, would actually be a better bellwether.
God, I can only hope. I have been perpetually disappointed by the durability of Trump’s coalition. We’ll find out in November.
The coworkers I know who were shocked and appalled at the initial airstrikes almost immediately started saying things like “well, we should have done it in 1980.” You could hear them trying to convince themselves. Then again, our industry directly benefits, so…
Talked to them about it more recently? Never been part of Trump's coalition, so maybe I'm not the right person to answer this, but I'd have said something similar right after the initial airstrikes.
The real sin of ineffective interventionism against genuinely deserving targets -- of which the IRGC is a prime example -- is the ineffectiveness. If they'd actually pulled off regime change to someone comparable to the Shah, it'd have been a boon to America, the region generally, and most of all the Iranian people; it's hard to outdo gunning down 45,000 protesters in less than a year. Maybe that really was never the goal -- Trump never claimed it was, but I don't pay a lot of attention to what Trump says. Maybe that was never really plausible, but it seemed like it might be at the time: it happened in Venezuela, and that was without Mossad's help.
Of course, it didn't happen.
I know some people are still calling this a triumph, but not me. At this point I think it's clearly Trump's greatest blunder, and that's a competitive position. Are your coworkers still clinging to hope?
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