If Trump is unstable then how can you predict his actions? How is this an example of not acting in time / for deterrence, when it was in fact a preemptive strike? (And he did the whole "2 weeks" ruse).
In the same way you can predict what will happen to a bridge that is unstable. It doesn't matter which bad option he winds up choosing, the fact he's not choosing the good option is what makes him unpredictable.
Look, I'm no Trump supporter and not trying to defend his actions. But this comment just doesn't explain anything. Why would the Russians or Chinese choose to drive over the unstable bridge? The 'bad option he chooses' could be "bomb Three Gorges Dam" or something.
I'm also no fan of war or playing world police. I don't know whether destroying Iranian nuclear sites was ultimately the right or wrong decision. But there is clearly enough debate here in the rest of the comments that it's not obviously the wrong option. Even a broken clock can be right twice a day.
Was this dropping the ball? There seems to be a lot of debate about whether it was ultimately right or wrong long term.
In any case, it certainly doesn't weigh towards "not belligerent". I'm no Trump supporter or apologist, I just don't see how one can claim that this action changes the calculus for Russia and China. Maybe if he really had fully abandoned Ukraine then yes. But he's been happy to attack Yemen and Iran (and possibly Greenland for that matter) so why would China think they are immune? I suspect he also harbors more racism towards China than Russia.
I think looking at the news since we first started this conversation pretty clearly explains that this has been nothing short of a cluster as usual.
As usual he is contradicting his own intelligence apparatus saying the mission was a failure - he and his administration keep lying to us all making sure you always use the word “obliterated“ to sound big and strong. Even Israel says they didn't do the damage Trump is claiming.
Stupid people being back by other people doesn't mean they aren't stupid. It actually means the contrary - there's more stupid people than we previously thought...
I'm being a bit mean I suppose, it's not actually stupidity. It's naivety and fierce propaganda campaigns. Everyone longs for a simpler time and the domestic economic struggles of the US are plain.
OP predicted Trump will mess up not that he'll lose an election. His electorate is largely supporting him via emotional response, hence his constant appeal to emotions, morality, demonization, etc - it works very well. The title of the book on my manipulated mothers shelf is "Democrats hate America" not "Iranian nuclear enrichment policy” — because this isn’t about policy, it’s about identity. Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t have to withstand scrutiny; it just has to resonate. And it resonates because it offers a simple moral binary: good vs. evil, us vs. them. That’s why failures, scandals, or even authoritarian gestures don’t shake his base — they’re not evaluating him on outcomes, but on whether he reflects their emotional reality. The real danger isn’t just that he might “mess up,” but that the political incentives now reward this kind of performative grievance over competence.
So i don't buy into trumps instability being a factor here nor bidens deteriorating mental health as president being ok. Yet i still think this is false equivalence.
I've watched many people deteriorate mentally and their are many routes. Biden was clearly the "i misplace stuff" route, not "i will now attack an ally".
He definitely shouldn't have been allowed to run for president again but Trump is far more belligerent. I'm not even necessarily opposed to his actions in Iran. But he's now verbally, fiscally, or actually attacked several allies and enemies. He'll likely attack more. I think it's fine to argue for or against his actions. But it's silly to equate the scale of his actions, or risk of mental deterioration, with Biden. The stakes are much higher, the strong allies and enemies are all making reactive bold moves in response. Things are moving fast now.
Yes, thank you. Anyone who has taken care of old people recognized Biden as the passive type that was content to sit in a chair while other people did stuff around him - which wasn't all that problematic given our bureaucratic delegation-based style of governance. Meanwhile Trump is the manic aggressive type. The more you try to get him to recognize his limitations the more he denies he has any and acts out to prove it.
While we are arm chair quarterbacking, many Americans prefer to not let the government be led by what you are literally describing as the deep state (whether you agree or not with the terms people use).
No, many Americans think they do not prefer the deep state, because they do not realize how good they actually have it. A successful marketing campaign by the corporate government has played off their over inflated sense of self-independence and entitlement, to convince them that the problem with bureaucratic authoritarianism was the bureaucracy and not the authoritarianism. Now that bureaucracy, meaning the last little shred of nominally democratic government, is on the chopping block in favor of full blown corporate authoritarianism. And if you think the deep state was entrenched...
All politics is preference though, and the issue is that all bureaucracy fails to have a function that shrinks itself. We already spend about $0.25T paying people or entities that don’t exist according to the accountability office…
Sure, as a libertarian I'm well read on the failings of bureaucracy. As I said, the deep mistake here is letting our frustrations with bureaucratic authoritarianism be pinned on the bureaucratic aspect rather than on the authoritarian aspect. We're all acquainted with being on the wrong personal side of a committee member who is then able to vindictively hold up your application. Getting rid of the bureaucracy in favor of autocratic authoritarianism just drops the pretense of impartiality.
And sure, the resources spent on make-work bureaucracy running would be better used elsewhere, even if it was just paying people to walk through their local parks and pick up litter. But we're pretty bad at resource allocation, especially resources from that centralized fountain of new money that seems to be necessary due to Gresham's law. So make-work paper pushing is still better than just giving those resources to asset holders via banks bidding up the everything bubble. Given that those resources are going to be somewhat wasted somehow, the authoritarianism seems like the more important part to be focusing on.
(as for the numbers from the Ministry of LLM Slop, understanding is harder than generation, so I don't see the point of trying to scrutinize them rather than doing a good faith analysis to begin with)
