In the wake of President Donald Trump’s peace deal with Iran, many have characterized the agreement as a “surrender.” Now, a leading conservative publication has not only agreed with that appraisal, but says that the second year of Trump’s second term has so far been “defined” by three “significant retreats.”
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This is according to National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, who on Tuesday published a humiliating assessment of Trump’s performance, writing, “President Trump has been musing about whether he’s the most powerful man in world history, and judging by the results lately, the answer is definitely ‘no.’”
While the technological tools at Trump’s disposal would have amazed great leaders of the past, as Lowry notes, Trump’s power “isn’t defined by, say, the precision and explosive punch of the Tomahawk missile. As the leader of a constitutional republic that disperses power and depends ultimately on democratic consent, Trump is operating under constraints that routinely blunt his ambitions.” Because of these and other limitations, “if the theme of the first year of his second term was aggression on all fronts, his second year has so far been defined by significant retreats.”
The first was in Minneapolis, where Trump surged DHS forces. As Lowry explains, “When the operation was met by fierce opposition from city and state leaders and resistance in the streets, the Trump administration steeled itself for a gargantuan test of wills — before Trump, realizing he was losing the battle of political optics, sent Tom Homan to Minneapolis to unwind the operation.”
Then, “the Department of Justice settled a $10 billion suit against the IRS by Donald Trump over the leak of his tax returns. The department agreed to create a $1.8 billion fund for the compensation of victims of Democratic lawfare, a slush fund for his allies, presumably including January 6 rioters. Faced with adverse legal rulings and opposition in the Senate, the administration abandoned the scheme that it had initially touted as a means to ‘right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.’”
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Finally, “of course, Trump signed a cease-fire with Iran that wasn’t close to the ‘unconditional surrender’ that he had once demanded. The 14-point agreement included more American than Iranian concessions, and Trump admitted that the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz had forced his hand.”
Each of these instances involved specific intentions that Trump abandoned, and according to Lowry, they were also tinged by “overreach that displayed a heedlessness borne of hubris. Trump had already driven down overall migration when he surged into Minneapolis; already pardoned the January 6 rioters when his DOJ created the weaponization fund; and already struck a punishing blow against the Iranian nuclear program via Midnight Hammer when he launched Operation Epic Fury.”
As Lowry notes, Trump “fashioned a team that is loath to tell him ‘no,’” but he is still “subject to checks from the other branches of government and, even more, from routine political pressures. There was nothing that formally compelled him to remove DHS forces from Minneapolis, or to relieve the military pressure on Iran, both of which were within his legitimate powers. It was the poor polling, and the potential damage to Republican prospects in the midterms, that obliged Trump to declare victory and go home.”
In the end, concludes Lowry, the very democratic forces Trump attempts to circumvent have driven his “year of retreats.”
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