Today, Trump and his allies are increasingly offering a different kind of alternative reality: one in which Americans never voted him out of office in 2020, and the major ills of this country and the world disappear as by magic – from inflation to war in Ukraine to war in Ukraine. war in Gaza.
But they are starting to go too far.
“This wouldn’t have happened if we were in power,” Trump said this weekend of Iran attacking Israel with an unprecedented air strike. “You know it, they know it, everyone knows it.”
“This attack on Israel would never have happened under a Trump presidency,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) reiterated.
“These attacks on Israel would never have happened under President @realDonaldTrump,” added Kari Lake, Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona.
“This would NEVER have happened under Trump,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), who, like the other two, has been mentioned as a possible Trump running mate. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
The advantage of this strategy is obvious, as you literally cannot prove Hunt wrong. It’s tamper-proof. And Americans seem inclined to at least somewhat embrace this concept, judging by the fact that their critiques of Trump’s presidency today are better than they ever were in real time. They trust Trump more than President Biden on foreign policy and national security, as well as inflation.
But rather than simply repeating this unfalsifiable claim, it is worth putting it into context. And trying to apply this talking point to Iran flies in the face of that claim.
It is true that we have not seen a war in Gaza under Trump’s presidency. But we have seen tensions between Israel and Iran threaten to boil over on several occasions. And not only that. We have seen Iran emboldened to attack not only Israel, but also Americans.
On January 3, 2020, a U.S. missile strike approved by Trump killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, who the U.S. government said was planning attacks against Americans.
Days later, Iran retaliated by striking a US military base in Iraq. One contractor suffered a serious eye injury and 110 soldiers suffered head injuries while sheltering in place.
The provocation implied by the direct attack on Israel last week is remarkable. But the actual toll of the attack – 99% of the projectiles were intercepted, according to the Israeli army, and only one seriously injured person was identified – is nothing compared to the 2020 attack.
It should be noted that this 2020 attack was also aimed directly at U.S. personnel, rather than against a U.S. ally. Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said Iran had warned him in advance that the Americans were the targets. (Trump appeared to claim last year that Iran had also warned him that it would deliberately miss the base, but Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler called that “ridiculous,” while noting that most missiles actually hit the base.)
The Iranian attack on U.S. personnel was also unprecedented — the first time in decades of tensions between the United States and Iran that Iran directly targeted a U.S. position in the Middle East.
The comparison between the two events aside, this does not exactly suggest that Iran was intimidated by the strength of Trump’s presidency. Even if we consider Iran’s retaliation for Soleimani’s assassination to be limited – Trump would later suggest this to justify his own lack of retaliation – the US government concluded that Soleimani was preparing to attack us under the watch of Trump.
It’s also worth noting that all of this happened in the last full year of Trump’s term — when he had plenty of time to take ownership of the country’s foreign policy. There were real fears that the events of January 2020 would lead not only to Iranian involvement in a war in the Middle East, but also to a war between Iran and the United States.
This does not happen. But at least one Trump aide who was present in the months leading up to the conflict with Iran in early 2020 said Trump’s speech was absurd.
“I just think Trump is wrong on that,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said on CNN on Sunday. “This is a point that no one can refute or confirm one way or the other. In this situation, he doesn’t know what to do in the Middle East.”
For now, it appears to be a talking point that Americans view with skepticism — at least when it comes to the other war Trump claims to have avoided, the one in Ukraine. In a Washington Post-Schar School poll last month, Americans said 51 percent to 34 percent that Russian President Vladimir Putin would have invaded Ukraine even if Trump was still president. Basically, only Trump supporters said they thought Putin wouldn’t have done it (and about 1 in 5 said Putin still would have done it).
Of course, Trump is going to keep saying this stuff and hoping people will swallow it whole.
washingtonpost
