It is a bad state of affairs when the Republican party’s best candidate is also the one virtually guaranteed to lose if he ever won the nomination. The awesome thing about Trump is that he is sticking it to the Republicans on their absolute worst issue in decades and he’s doing it in a way that doesn’t humiliate them for it. Democrats have a nasty way of smearing anyone who disagrees with them, while Trump is exhibiting exactly the right way to do something like this and attack the power structure, not the follower, in cases where appropriate.
“Obviously the war in Iraq was a BIG. FAT. MISTAKE.” – Donald Trump / majority of Americans, including Republicans.
First – notice the bias in this video by CBS on how they chose a thumbnail in where Jeb is smiling and Trump is frowning when the actual video shows an upbeat Trump absolutely demolishing Jeb. It’s not a photoshop or anything – Trump and Bush both made those expressions – it just isn’t a thumbnail that summarizes the content well at all. Take a look –
This is an amazing point in history because everything he said feels true – a majority agrees with it – but its kindov actually *not* true – but for the most part *is* true.
And that is the problem with Donald Trump… he opens himself – in a very GW Bush kind of way, coincidentally – to unfair attacks and smears on himself and his policies by begin factual on a subject but not entirely accurate on a specific word choice within that bubble. That gives enemies an opportunity to attack and not be non-factual when they mislead the public with an attack.
Specifically: The “Buh lied” trope has never been proven and doesn’t have strong evidence to support it. All accounts show that Bush and his top administration officials actually did – and had reasonable reason to – believe that they would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To an extent, they did find such weapons – but never the most scary that they claimed were likely being worked on or hoarded in the country. That lack of validation to their claims plus the objectively bad management of the war has made a clear “wasn’t worth it” label on the effort. It cost billions, slaughtered thousands of innocents, and hurt America. So Trump starts 100% right with saying it was a mistake and then veers off into iffy territory by saying Bush knew he was lying the whole time.
That’s the biggest problem here and with this guy in general: Trump, used the Democrat talking point that Bush “lied” us into war. Which is wrong, but not wrong in the way that matters, because its “basically” right… meaning – it’s directionally right, just not specifically accurate in the exact words used. And that appears to be Donald Trumps whole thing. Probably due to his background in real estate and Hollywood showmanship – he speaks far too casually and that is both his appeal and likely his downfall. He’ll say shit like “we had a beautiful time, it was tremendous – beautiful – absolutely stunning – and then after – we went out, we got some ice cream – it was a beautiful time” and lying liars will call him a liar because he actually got frozen yogurt, not ice cream. (*this is a made-up quote & scenario to illustrate the point, btw. we all know Trump would never get frozen yogurt and is 100% an ice cream man).
Imagine Donald Trump actually won the nomination (lol) and that he somehow won the election (like, if Hillary was caught on video or audio exhibiting all those stories about how nasty and mean she allegedly is to staff behind the scenes, for instance) – the media and his hack enemies would have a Scrooge McDuck moneybin’s wealth of fodder to lie about alleging “Trump lied” for saying things – exactly like this – that are “basically true” but require clarification. When other politicians do this, its called misspeaking, being imprecise, or in this case – just having one wrong opinion stated among 4 other facts about the subject. Doesn’t matter. Republicans need to wise up and learn the game or they will get crushed.
In this situation, however, Republican critics don’t know what to do because they want to hate Trump, but… he agrees with them on the most important issue of the past 18 years… The GW Bush led Iraq war was a bad move. Bush deserves blame at least, impeachment as a moderate compromise, and prosecution for war crimes at most. Trump takes the moderate position here amidst a larger anti-war stance and no one knows what to do.
Except Republicans that is. They like it. Republicans and independent Bush voters on whole never liked the war garbage. It was always a stain that had to constantly be defended and was never articulated well by the administration. That’s why Trump is getting support.. he is literally more liberal in all the best ways – in this case, being more anti-war – than his democrat opponent.
It’s an amazing thing to see. But a dangerous view of where it could lead.