Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare may feel like he has a chicken bone stuck in his throat:
I want to say a few words in defense of Donald Trump’s tweets and statements today on the abortive military operation against Iran. This is admittedly contrarian. It is an argument I have never made before and frankly don’t expect to make again. It is also an almost comical example of damning with faint praise. …
… [but even] collegiate-level argumentation is a dramatic breakthrough for a president whose more typical behavior has given rise to Dan Drezner’s famous Toddler-in-Chief thread. The president’s comments on the Iranian situation reflect thinking that is genuinely unusual for Trump, who normally articulates a kind of government by magic in which one can have it all and without costs. Here, by contrast, Trump is overtly acknowledging costs, nuance and complexity. The man who campaigned for president promising to commit war crimes is now acknowledging that brutality isn’t an objective but a negative and that restraint may be valuable. I cannot think of any previous set of statements in which Trump’s thinking seems so coherent and linear and logical—and also so complicated.
The point of difference between a committed independent and a relatively useless zealot is their willingness to step forward and admit that someone they loathe has done something good. How many Republicans could do that for Obama, or Democrats for Trump or Bush II? And how much less valuable are their thought processes once we realize that they start from an assumption that the leader of the other side is inherently evil or an idiot?
This is the danger of political cults.
OK, all that said, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that Trump was deliberately speaking to a different audience. To a great extent, Trump speaks to his base, a group committed to the idea that liberals are, well, evil or idiots. But, in this case, Trump may have been speaking to everyone and felt that a more nuanced approach was necessary. Why this would be, I’m not certain – but it’s worth considering during analysis of his behavior.
