President Donald Trump may insist that he is winning the war in Iran, but a number of prominent commentators within his own party beg to differ — including one who advised the last Republican president to lead America into a Middle Eastern quagmire.“Trust is a rare commodity in our wretched times,” wrote Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, in a Wednesday Substack post. “These are the days of corruption, self-dealing, incompetence and faithlessness to the Constitution.”Schmidt used the epithet “tiny men and women” to refer to Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, then claimed that none of them truly understand the magnitude of what they have done by invading Iran. He further asserted that they do not have a coherent concept of what “victory” looks like in this conflict.“We deserve to know,” Schmidt wrote. “There is no plan. There is no strategy. There is only incoherence. There is only incompetence.” He singled out Hegseth for running the war with Dan Caine, who Schmidt described as “a highly political chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who should never have been confirmed by the Senate for the job. The result is a disaster.”Because the mullahs who run Iran define victory as “survival,” Schmidt condemned the war on the grounds that “Trump has already failed to topple them. Therefore, the reasons for the war change by the hour.”Concluding that “we should all dissent,” Schmidt warned that “what Trump is doing will not be easily stopped. We are in a most uncertain hour, and every American should appreciate that we had best get out of it as fast as possible. Disaster lurks.”Schmidt is not alone among conservatives in calling out Trump’s Iran war. The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last blasted Trump in a Wednesday editorial for seemingly believing unrealistic expectations about how they could succeed as established by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.“The American military is now telling the New York Times that, far from collapsing, the Iranian regime is adapting to the Israeli–American onslaught and finding our weaknesses,” Last argued. Pointing out that Iran has long prepared for the type of war now being waged by America and Israel, Last asked “how is it possible that the people in charge of running America’s war—by which I mean the commander-in-chief and his secretary of defense—could have misunderestimated Iran so completely?”In addition to questioning the soundness of Trump’s Iran war plan, conservatives are also claiming Trump lied to his voters by going to war at all.“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” conservative podcaster Joe Rogan said during the Tuesday episode of his podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois who like Rogan once supported Trump, argued in February that Trump supporters who refuse to abandon the president despite his flip-flopping on war are like “cult” members.“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh said. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” Yet if they still back him despite his unprovoked wars against Venezuela and Iran, as well as his threatened wars against Greenland and Cuba, “what are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”
Iran targets ships, Dubai airport and oil facilities as economic concerns mount
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