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It's just bizarre behaviour from Trump too. He was already struggling with legislation, the SAVE Act is still not passed. That's critical electoral engineering to help prevent another Democratic admin sending him straight to prison the moment he leaves office (or before). The threat of lawfare really ought to be front and centre in his mind, given his experience since 2020.
What did Bibi have on him to prompt such an error? He should've had no illusions that starting a Middle East War would be short, cheap or popular. He campaigned on not starting any more wars. Higher fuel prices caused the Biden administration serious harm, why repeat the experiment? He was gullible in the extreme or actively compromised.
On twitter, I read reasonable arguments from Trump supporters saying that the war doesn't really matter and domestic concerns (getting rid of DEI and illegals) are paramount. The Democrats would struggle to make anything better on the battlefield but would likely make things worse for Trump supporters, sure.
Far be it for me as a foreigner to tell Americans how or why they should vote. But if the Trump base is so loyal that they can be taken for granted, there is nothing to stop the neocons playing Trump like a cheap electronic piano. He can count on his base's support no matter what idiocy he does but the neocons demand wars. The dynamics of the situation are bad even if loyalty is the Nash Equilibria. It's like a repeated prisoner's dilemma where the other guy defects but the payoffs are worse for you if you defect back. Are you supposed to just take it? Or alter the situation?
And the Trump base being loyal does not in itself guarantee success. To win elections Trump needs to persuade moderately apolitical people on the margins either way.
Starting a war isn't going to make it any easier to get rid of illegals or DEI, it takes away political capital that could be deployed elsewhere. War is not the price of deportations or slowly, barely winding back DEI a ratchet. War is a major distraction and a detractor against these domestic efforts. It should've been strongly lobbied against during the lead up period to the attack where aircraft were flown in but while the train wreck was still avoidable people seemed to think 'maybe it'll be fine, Venezuela went well'. They could've railed against the war up till the last minute when Trump was undecided. I don't remember any big names on the right doing that.
There are some tragic quotes from Lindsay Graham:
https://x.com/zarathustra5150/status/2103316151011074523
Trump is not smart enough to be a good President. Charismatic enough to get elected and manipulate the media, sure. But actually running a country requires different qualities. It's an enormously demanding job that would exhaust a clever man at the peak of his powers.
The SAVE Act's provisions would have hit Republican voters harder than Democrats in pursuit of a solution to a nearly non-existent problem and the Republican congressmen knew that, which is why it didn't pass.
Then why haven't Democrats passed Voter ID?
Voter ID and the SAVE Act aren't the same thing.
Then why didn't they support the SAVE Act if it was such an own goal? This one doesn't pass the smell test.
I think both Republicans and Democrats have a weak sense that there's a lot of cheating that goes on in the big blue cities and that clamping down would probably help Republicans.
Just because something hurts the other side's supporters more doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt your own supporters, and just because Republicans have lost all pretense that they aren't hacks willing to do anything for partisan advantage doesn't mean Democrats are willing to do the same.
Are you willing to actually defend the view that the Democrats aren't hacks willing to do anything for partisan advantage? It seems pretty trivial to argue that they are.
The Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not willing to risk being called racist by their own supporters in order to secure a partisan advantage. This is sufficient to explain their opposition to the SAVE Act or other dumb Republican voter-suppression proposals.
That doesn't sound like an answer to the question I asked. As to what you said, I'm skeptical of the direction of causality you're pointing to. I don't think there's an objective standard of "racism" that the Democrats fear transgressing, it seems more that anything that goes against the Dems will be called "racist".
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