Thread by @ThePlumLineGS

1) Trump called off Iran strike partly due to advice from Tucker Carlson, NYT reports.

Carlson said a costly quagmire was everything Trump ran against.

But a dangerously false idea related to Carlson's claim is taking hold. It needs pushback.

*THREAD*

nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/…

2) The story Trump told in 2016 was all about elite failure. This story was directly tied to his America First message.

It’s a story that Tucker draws on regularly as well, in his sermons against elites as a kind of prophet of Trumpian nationalism.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

3) Central to this story was the idea that the “elite consensus” on foreign policy had poured countless young lives from the Appalachian and Midwestern heartlands (from Trump Country) into costly Mideast quagmires.

I tried to sum up this story here:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

4) That story led to the absurd “Donald the Dove” take. Many now are reviving that line.

I think Trump deserves some tentative credit: He does seem resistant to getting pushed into war.

But this can be true, even as it’s *also* true that the “Donald the Dove” take is nonsense.

5) There was of course a lot of truth to the story that our elites failed catastrophically on foreign policy.

But it was never true that Trump ran as some kind of principled opponent of military adventurism.

Read this @zachbeauchamp article on that.

vox.com/world/2016/5/2…

@ZachBeauchamp 6) Trump vowed to avoid costly Mideast quagmires.

But he also vowed to rip up the “weak” Iran deal.

How did Trump square these two things?

Easy.

@ZachBeauchamp 7) Trump squared those two things by claiming elites were not just dumb, but also *weak.*

He would end the giveaway to Iran (negotiated by weak Obama and feckless Europeans), and substitute his “strength,” forcing total, glorious Iranian capitulation:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

@ZachBeauchamp 8) But international diplomacy *worked.*

Iran was being contained.

Ye this *couldn’t* be true for Trump, because Obama negotiated the deal, and because it constituted international diplomacy succeeding.

@ZachBeauchamp 9) Trump’s vow to replace a successful internationally negotiated deal with his unilateral “strength,” and with it a demand for total capitulation, is precisely why we’re in the current mess.

Read @IgnatiusPost on this:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/globa…

@ZachBeauchamp @IgnatiusPost 10) If Trump and Tucker were telling Trump Country the truth, here's what they'd say:

Yes, Iraq represented elite failure, but the Iran deal was a case where international diplomacy actually *did* set us on a course to avoid costly, foolish quagmire:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

@ZachBeauchamp @IgnatiusPost 11) Meanwhile, the story Trump told about elite failure had some truth on the economic side. But he abandoned the pro-worker talk by embracing GOP plutocracy, and his trade/immigration agendas are revealing populist nationalism as an utter failure:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

@ZachBeauchamp @IgnatiusPost 12) The Iran deal was a case of elites actually getting something very big *right.*

But Trump cannot permit this to be true, because his worldview doesn’t allow it.

Now war is *more* likely.

FIN

@ZachBeauchamp @IgnatiusPost CODA: For a concise statement of what's at stake here, see this terrific @EvelynNFarkas piece:

washingtonpost.com/outlook/whats-…

@ZachBeauchamp @IgnatiusPost @EvelynNFarkas CODA II: I botched Zack Beauchamp's Twitter handle. It's actually @zackbeauchamp.

And here's his essential piece on Trump's foreign policy worldview again:

vox.com/world/2016/5/2…