Iran Proves It: TDS Is An Incurable Disease

Before the dust had a chance to settle over Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, leading never-Trumper David Frum declared “Right move, wrong team.” (As though this attack would have been better carried out by the dimwit Frum voted for in the last election.)

“Trump did the right thing, but he did that right thing in the wrongest possible way: without Congress, without competent leadership in place to defend the United States against terrorism, and while waging a culture war at home against half the nation,” Frum writes from his perch in the Trump-loathing Atlantic magazine. “Trump has not put U.S. boots on the ground to fight Iran, but he has put U.S. troops on the ground for an uninvited military occupation of California.”

This is the same David Frum who, when Barack Obama was negotiating his horrid deal with Iran, declared that “A nuclear weapons-capable Iran is a priority-one threat to U.S. and Western interests in the Gulf area. That’s the thing we need to stop.”

It’s the same David Frum who confidently predicted – on Saturday, the day Trump dropped the bombs – that Trump would “chicken out” when it came to attacking Iran, partly because of his “unwillingness to ever do anything that Putin does not want.”

Then Trump achieved what Frum said was job No. 1 and what no president before him was willing to do. And Trump did it without boots on the ground. He did it without suffering U.S. casualties. He did it in close coordination with Israel. He did it in a way that, with the use of brilliant misdirection, surprised everyone, including David Frum.

And Frum’s first instinct is to decry Trump’s (court-sanctioned) use of National Guard troops to quell riots in Los Angeles sparked by Trump’s (perfectly legal) efforts to deport violent felons who entered the country illegally?

We don’t mean this to come across as picking on Frum, although he certainly deserves it. But Frum is emblematic of the warped reality that those who’ve made careers out of hating Trump live in.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, responded to the destruction of Iran’s nuclear ambitions by warning that “The United States is well down the road to dictatorship. Imagine what Trump would do with a state of war.”

The increasingly unhinged Robert Reich declared that “Anyone who has doubted Trump’s intention to replace American democracy with a dictatorship should now be fully disabused.”

Sen. Adam Schiff of California labored mightily to find a way to credit Trump without crediting him. “The destruction of these facilities is a positive, uh, in the sense that it will set back Iran’s program, uh, and look this is a nefarious regime, uh, that is the pre-eminent state sponsor of terror should have never been pursuing a nuclear program. … But it’s not an operation that should have ever been authorized by the president in the  absence of intelligence showing that Iran had made the decision to break out and build a bomb.”

AOC, however, is already calling for Trump’s impeachment for his “disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization.”

That led Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., to respond: “Barack Obama attacked Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen during his tenure, and never once did they call for impeachment. So, these folks are truly reaching new levels of Trump derangement in the aftermath of yesterday’s decision.”

There are, obviously, plenty of unknowns in the fallout from this attack. What isn’t unknown is how inveterate Trump haters will react.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

Editor’s note: The headline and lede were modified after this was originally published for stylistic reasons.