Steve Benen notes that Defense Secretary Mattis likes the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the JCPOA, and Israeli defense chief says the JCPOA is working. Then Steve recounts Trump’s reaction when he was told that the Iran nuclear deal is working:
As president, Trump went into “meltdown” mode when his own team has told him that the policy is actually working as intended, because the facts were simply inconceivable to him. He knows the policy is a disaster, so when reality pointed in a different direction, Trump found it necessary to reject reality.
I’m not sure Steve has Trump’s psychology down pat. I think that Trump’s greatest success was as a reality TV star. In such a setting, the most important thing to accomplish in order to be successful is to satisfy the audience’s expectations. Firing XYZ would accord with the audience’s expectations? Fine, “the Donald” fires him. The show was a hit and undoubtedly fed into his ego. This is important because anything that inflates the ego also acts as a training process. That is, if if it makes you feel good, then you repeat it and learn how to make it bigger and better. You become addicted to it. Holds true for mice in labs, holds true for humans. Especially tremendously insecure humans like Trump.
Now he’s in a new reality TV role, and the audience, trained by a conservative media that puts politics over national security, expects him to say that the Iran nuclear deal is bad, won’t work, and needs to be dismantled.
It’s not that he “knows the policy is a disaster,” as Steve says, it’s that his audience, the GOP base, wants it to be wrong. It’s another Obama project, and because the GOP base, nevermind its conservative media handlers, can no longer be mature enough to admit that the political opposition can occasionally be right on anything, it must be a disaster. They were inflamed by the Republican leadership when the infamous letter from the Senate was written, they’ve been trained into thinking the deal is a bad thing, and Trump has simply ridden that wave.
But now the reality TV star is running into, ummm, reality. The Israelis are starting to admit that the JCPOA works. His own Defense Secretary says it’s well structured. Any ordinary politician might have the balls to admit that they were wrong and that it is successful. But Trump has sold himself as the politician who’s never wrong. Worse yet, his instincts are telling him that his survival depends on his keeping his audience satisfied. It’s a narrative that speaks to their need to believe they’re still on top of the world, that those damn experts and those allied with them with their damn patronizing liberal attitudes are wrong, and the man without a plan has it all right.
Trump cannot jeopardize that. Not even because he’ll lose his base – but because he fears he’ll lose all that positive reinforcement.
And so we’ll see the self-destructive behaviors of the addict.
