“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning. You’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore,’” -Donald Trumpin May 2016.

I realize I’m showing my age, but I vividly remember the week the Iran-Contra revelations hit the news. I was a politics nerd and Thatcher-Reagan fan, and all I can say is that it was like a sudden, huge change in the air pressure. The era of Reagan’s sunny sincerity came to a swift, screeching halt. He’d lied, we all realized — which in those days, actually mattered. In a single month, he dropped close to 20 points in approval.

He recovered in due course but never completely. Something had been punctured, something essential to his brand. The same can be said, I think, of George HW Bush’s courageous decision to raise taxes in a budget reconciliation bill in 1990. It was good economics, but the betrayal of the pledge he made to the base was just too crude in the end to overcome. They had read his lips.

And so I find myself asking what happens when a president who campaigned on lowering inflation and never going to war in the Middle East … decides to go to war in the Middle East and thereby fuel inflation. What happens when a president who became his party’s nominee three times because he spurned neocon wars … turns around and embraces the regime-change war the neocons have been pushing for decades?

The Trump cult has survived so much. But this? I wonder. Those who joined MAGA for reasons other than celebrity worship have been publicly humiliated.Caldwell,Ahmari,Greene,Kelly, Carlson, Fuentes, Owens et al (in descending order of respectability) have all gotten off the train. Tucker evenapologizedthis week! And yes, the internet and podcastland are not reality — but these people do represent a real swathe of real opinion. To realize Trump has preferred Miriam Adelson’svisionto theirs all along must burn.

That’s the first strike against MAGA: the decision to go to war at all.

The second strike is how Trump has actually conducted the war itself.

For even the most propagandistic pro-Trump outlets, it’s just unspinnable. Gerard Baker’s timelinecapturesthe madness of it all:

Unconditional surrender. Regime change. Partnership with regime for tariffing the strait. Close the strait. Open the strait. No nukes. Some nukes. No missiles. Some missiles. Civilization wipeout. Ceasefire. War. Peace. And if all that fails, we’ll take the JCPOA.

This is the art of the deal? Please. Day-by-day contradictions, countless red lines crossed and crossed again, weird declarations of total victory, followed by even weirder threats to blow everything up again: at some point, even Goebbels would give up. Five deadlines have been set and five deadlines have passed without Iran capitulating. We are burning through munitions so fast — a staggeringbillion dollars a day— we’re now exposed globally. The memes are just brutal. As Tim Dillonnotes, the IRGC mullahs are actually beating Trump at shit-talking. He can’t even win at that anymore. And theLego movies! My God, the Lego movies.

Source: Drudge Report