> Something about the Silicon Valley fast-follower mindset seems to make these guys struggle to understand the basic nature of the political pendulum, and a lot of folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who used to have more progressive personas bought high on MAGA right after Trump won, when they should have hedged their bets.
Or it's because these people really liked getting tax cuts, and they like the fact that they believed they had access to an administration that could help choose winners and wanted to be part of that. Throughout history, we've seen that most rich and powerful people will side with authoritarian leaders who are prone to overreach. Another thing I've noticed is that really smart or successful people sometimes over estimate their ability to manage crisis or people with personality disorders and I see that playing out here with Trump...
In other news people in general forgot how exhausted they were at the end of Trump's first term, and they severely underestimated how being surrounded by sycophants who never break with you have finally influenced Trump's mind to the point that he doesn't seem himself as a President for all Americans but just for those loyal to him and his MAGA ideology. These people really loved the rhetoric but not the political outcomes.
What’s the case that big tech bet on the vibe shift vs just suck up because he’s willing to use a lot of coercive state power against businesses that don’t suck up?
The phrase: "irregular inflow of unselected immigrants" has to be the most Politically Correct Beltway term for Illegal Immigrants I've seen. It's rather humourous.
I think the New Hampshire example is a bit misguided as a counterpoint to discipline in the face of social media. It's just not a state that gets a lot of national attention, it's small, one of the oldest populations. Lot of confounding variables.
I appreciate the call for actually passing legislation rather than perpetuating an uncontrolled oscillation in executive policies.
But if we’re seeking bipartisan bills, we have to remember that the Republicans have a game plan that starts with “don’t give the Democratic President any wins, whether its something we want or not.” The conclusion mentions that the Republicans can be disciplined - I believe it! What’s the strategy to get legislation passed in the face of that intransigence?
That is a hard problem. I believe the strategy is to slowly drill away at it over a long time until you finally break through.
Matt has also recently written that activists should persuade the American people / voters, rather than pressure politicians to implement policies the people don't want. When you get to the point where you've won the argument and 2/3 of people agree with you, the changes will happen more or less automatically and without any fanfare.
Logically, the strategy in that case has to be "accept the fact that you're not going to pass anything at all other than reconciliation bills." I'm not sure if I agree with that advice, but it's rational. There are two benefits: (1) Executives who don't rock the boat tend to be popular and get reelected, which would prevent the other side from doing harm for a longer period of time. (2) Offering bipartisan bills that get rejected won't help the American people, but it might help you politically, which indirectly helps the American people for the same reason as in point 1.
It is interesting to reflect that this whole post is a paean to the political theory of slowly boring hard boards without ever once using any of the relevant terms.
I've read that the voters trust the Dems more on immigration so this notion that it's still a good issue for Trump quite puzzles me.
As for the Dems not pursuing better economic policy even though they get better economic results, well that strikes me as utter nonsense. Your theories trump reality?!
Where have you read that voters trust Dems more on immigration than Republicans? You'll need a citation for that. Matt has reported on polling showing the opposite many times. For example, a simple Google search leads me to this link which says on immigration 43% trust Republicans while 34% trust Democrats (https://navigatorresearch.org/special-report-who-do-americans-trust/).
The point is that immigration is still his best issue, so from a political standpoint it’s better for him to talk and argue about that as opposed to literally anything else.
Democrats “don’t pursue systematically better economic policy” is a spicy meatball. They support Fed independence and at least attempt to pay the bills. Can Republicans say the same?
Yeah, my comment about Fed independence might be a bit unfair to pre-Trump Republicans, if that is what you mean. But not paying the bills (thus driving up the deficit) has been the M.O. of Republican presidents since Reagan. And US voters remain shocked--SHOCKED--that regressive tax cuts don't lead to broad prosperity.
In hindsight, it's only gotten worse. Around 2010-4, I think you could be forgiven if you thought the business Republicans were about to turn the ship around.
I loathe and fear Trump. But after watching him withstand Bolton’s relentless pressure to invade Venezuela and start a war with Iran… I thought he would not do those things.
I was not surprised at Trump attacking Iran in his second term, but I was expecting it to be similar to other historical US strikes against Iran where it was much more limited. I'd also have figured that -- despite being *evil* and incompetent to varying degrees -- Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth would have all been aware of the risks to the Strait of Hormuz from larger scale action against Iran, which instead seems to have caught everyone in the administration by complete surprise.
I think you could interpret that there is still a “vibe shift” if you understood the vibe shift to be the entire overton window moving a bit to the right, meaning the Republicans got more crazy and evil, and the Democrats got less woke and become more moderate and palatable to voters.
Everyone moved right, and it just made the Democrats more popular and the Republicans less so.
Well yes I guess. But what I meant is that perhaps our political culture goes through pendulum cycles where the Overton Window lurches left and right and back and so on.
When the window shifts left, it first helps and then hurts the Democrats, and when it shifts right it first helps and then hurts the Republicans. The more left the window goes, the more Democrats lean into unpopular left-coded ideas and language and ultimately piss off the voting popultion, while the Republicans learn to moderate and take the win. The same mirror effect occurrs when the window goes right, the Republicans overreach, while the Democrats moderate and achieve a temproary victory.
Only it took several years to hurt the Democrats, but Trump and his ilk have leaned in so hard to obnoxious right wing idiocy that they have accomplished in 1.5 years what it took the excesses of wokeness and cancel culture 2-3 times as long to accomplish.
Many people are comparing Biden to Trump but I think there are a few things to note here:
1. I think "Team Transistory" was right on the merits, and if we look back in retrospect Biden's handling of inflation from a policy perspective largely worked. The unfortunate reality is that there's not much that any President can do on inflation in the short run except let the Fed do its job, and hire a competent Fed Chair. Biden did both of those things.
2. That being said politically Biden handled inflation terribly. Where I think Matt has been incredibly consistent is that Democrats need to moderate the central image of the party, and need to run more focused administrations focusing on solving concrete problems incrementally, not everything bagels. Here Biden failed miserably. He went along with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's everything bagel bill, largely listened to Elizabeth Warren types within his administration on executive power and refused to back Manchin ideas on deficit reduction which would legitimately be a long-term inflation reduction measure.
I think the lack of MODERATION from the MODERATE who won the 2020 primary is the big one here. Biden should have stepped in and focused his part in Congress, said "no" on a bunch of Progressive demands, and then (of course) not ran for re-election. He chose none of those things and we see the political result. Charles Cook has an article talking about how this isn't a blue wave in 2026 but a red anchor dragging the GOP down. I think this is correct (of course it was also correct in 2022 and 2024 that Trump was less popular than he seemed too but that's neither here nor there). Democrats are stubbornly refusing to address their own popularity concerns and they wont so long as they just listen to Progressives who want to model the next Presidential term after Trump's failures instead of looking at Obama and Clinton.
an added point: I think you can argue, reasonably, that Biden got really unlucky while Trump completely messed up his term. I might even partially agree. That doesn't mean that just wielding executive power is the right move.
It does seem like Yglesias was more open to the "inflation is transitory" idea than he let's on now, but I don't agree with your read on the immigration article.
He seems to be agreeing with the changes Biden made late in his term when his primary complaints are policies & lack of action from earlier on in his term.
It's true the article does attempt to explain the delay by referencing the Mexican elections, but that seems much more like Yglesias giving gbr administration's reasoning not necessarily him agreeing with it. He even says in that article that he wishes Biden had been more forceful on saying he wants to reduce asylum claims earlier on.
Re: tech leaders fast-following: my take is that they were basically single-issue voters on AI regulation. So they went “All In,” so to speak. That and they probably correctly believe that Trump is far more vindictive than normal politicians, and the dems were trying to antitrust them all anyways.
Dario Amodei is the most prominent pro-regulation guy, and he was conspicuously missing from the Trump lackey crew. Sam Altman is tougher to pin down. The others (Elon, Zuck, Andreesen, Jensen Huang, etc etc) all seemed to back the “Democrats are going to regulate this industry to death and China will kill us all” view at the time.
Obama was also interventionist (“hawkish” if you will) in the Middle East. He led the campaign in Libya that overthrew Qaddafi. He launched a serious campaign against ISIS in Iraq. He expanded drone strikes in Yemen, supported the Saudi intervention in Yemen, and he oversaw a military surge in Afghanistan, and sent special forces to/conducted airstrikes in Syria.
He’s right that Bush and Trump have serious problems with their foreign policies (Obama too), but it’s not just their inability to grapple with the “downsides of hawkishness and saber rattling”. For Bush it was specifically his dishonesty regarding intelligence in Iraq, his failed attempts at nation building with severe misunderstandings of the societies in which he pursued nation building, and his inadvertent strengthening of the Iranian regime and terrorists groups. For Trump it’s his alienating of America’s allies and his lack of preparedness and coherent strategy in its campaign against Iran.
Again, though the problem is not just generic “hawkishness”. And willingness to intervene in the Middle East is not unique to Republicans.
The lesson from all this is not to never intervene in the face of attacks and threats. The fact that Democrats have seemed to digest talking points that make it impossible for democracies to militarily defend themselves against nondemocratic societies that threaten and attack us or our allies is dangerous.
Was it indeed smart of Kelly Ayotte not to do a "MAGA style" gerrymandering of New Hampshire's congressional seats? Maybe a knowledgeable person can inform me, but I have a hard time looking at the map and seeing how she could have grabbed one of the two seats New Hampshire has. The Democratic and Republican votes (the House vote went 54% Democratic in 2024) seem almost randomly spread around the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_New_Hampshire
“They seem to primarily understand this as a question of good luck. But having watched both the George W. Bush and second Trump presidencies unfold, I think it’s because Republicans have systematically bad foreign policy that is inattentive to the downside risk of saber-rattling and hawkishness. Trump made a great show of breaking with the Bush-era “neocons” over their idealistic invocations of democracy-promotion. But the actual problem with Bush-era foreign policy wasn’t belief in democracy; it was excessive belief in the potential upside of coercive military force. Trump has retained the error while reconfiguring the goals.“
I think this analysis is entirely wrong. The problems with Bush foreign policy were their dishonesty with the American people about intelligence we had on Iraq, their attempts at doing nation-building while completely misunderstanding the societies, and inadvertently empowering the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was not just a generic downsides to “hawkishness”.
While I'm not a fan of the original analysis, I think this is also somewhat mistaken. Would be like claiming we had definitive intelligence that could have prevented 9/11. Not strictly wrong, but also not usefully correct.
Putting the pieces together was genuinely difficult and it is not surprising that it could go wrong. As an easy example, UNICEF and related organizations were flat out wrong on the deaths in Iraq during sanctions. Yet we don't say they lied on this. They were just wrong because Hussein had good control over the information that left the area.
On WMDs, I grant you that there intelligence that supported the administration's conclusion regarding Iraq's possession of WMDs, and that one could argue that they were mistaken and that the intelligence was flawed, rather than the administration being dishonest. However, the administration also misrepresented the uncertainty of the intelligence, and were also dishonest about specifics (like deeply buried WMD facilities). On the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the case is much stronger that the adminstration was dishonest. While there were contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, it never developed into a deep operational relationship, and the intelligence backed this up. The administration was dishonest by saying that Iraq and Al Qaeda had a partnership involving Iraq providing Al Qaeda weapons and training, that Iraq was planning to transfer WMDs to Al Qaeda, when they had no intelligence suggesting this was the case.
Or rather they had minimal intelligence that it was the case (some Iraqi expats were certainly claiming it). That's a source in intel terms...just not a quality one much of the time. Agreed that the WMDs were not a bold-faced lie as is commonly claimed: a. from a practical standpoint it was very surprising that Hussein did not preserve a WMD program leading to b. an exaggeration of certainty concerning the intelligence. The folks that post here sometimes claiming that "at the time I knew Iraq did not have WMDs" are, to put it charitably, poor historians of their own lives (which is the human condition after all).
"Or rather they had minimal intelligence that it was the case (some Iraqi expats were certainly claiming it)."
Hussein was the one claiming he had them - did you forget that part? The intel your looking for is the secret intel that would have told us he had actually destroyed them.
All fair, I think. I think motivated reasoning dominates pretty much everyone in politics. And it is just normal for people to use bluster in how they communicate to people they are trying to sway.
I think it is fully fair to say we should always try and move to more directly honest discourse. I just get a queezy feeling when it seems that people are convinced the other side flat out lies. Often, the other side is just wrong.
Of course... Trump came along and took advantage of this. Many in MAGA have been primed for so long to think that "everyone lies" so that now they don't care that he actively does so.
Trump has played hard and fast with the truth with regards to Iran, when he said that nuclear enrichment facilities had been obliterated in the 12-day war in June 2025. They'd been damaged, not obliterated.
However, the fundamental causes for the war are indeed true. Iran has enriched uranium to 60% (with no legitimate civilian use), and have furthered their capabilities to produce nuclear weapons. They have directed and funded terrorist proxies that have destabilized multiple countries and attacked an ally, both directly and through the proxies. They have been developing their their missile program, and they repeatedly call for the death of America. None of this is really in dispute.
> Something about the Silicon Valley fast-follower mindset seems to make these guys struggle to understand the basic nature of the political pendulum, and a lot of folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who used to have more progressive personas bought high on MAGA right after Trump won, when they should have hedged their bets.
Or it's because these people really liked getting tax cuts, and they like the fact that they believed they had access to an administration that could help choose winners and wanted to be part of that. Throughout history, we've seen that most rich and powerful people will side with authoritarian leaders who are prone to overreach. Another thing I've noticed is that really smart or successful people sometimes over estimate their ability to manage crisis or people with personality disorders and I see that playing out here with Trump...
In other news people in general forgot how exhausted they were at the end of Trump's first term, and they severely underestimated how being surrounded by sycophants who never break with you have finally influenced Trump's mind to the point that he doesn't seem himself as a President for all Americans but just for those loyal to him and his MAGA ideology. These people really loved the rhetoric but not the political outcomes.
What’s the case that big tech bet on the vibe shift vs just suck up because he’s willing to use a lot of coercive state power against businesses that don’t suck up?
The phrase: "irregular inflow of unselected immigrants" has to be the most Politically Correct Beltway term for Illegal Immigrants I've seen. It's rather humourous.
I think the New Hampshire example is a bit misguided as a counterpoint to discipline in the face of social media. It's just not a state that gets a lot of national attention, it's small, one of the oldest populations. Lot of confounding variables.
I appreciate the call for actually passing legislation rather than perpetuating an uncontrolled oscillation in executive policies.
But if we’re seeking bipartisan bills, we have to remember that the Republicans have a game plan that starts with “don’t give the Democratic President any wins, whether its something we want or not.” The conclusion mentions that the Republicans can be disciplined - I believe it! What’s the strategy to get legislation passed in the face of that intransigence?
That is a hard problem. I believe the strategy is to slowly drill away at it over a long time until you finally break through.
Matt has also recently written that activists should persuade the American people / voters, rather than pressure politicians to implement policies the people don't want. When you get to the point where you've won the argument and 2/3 of people agree with you, the changes will happen more or less automatically and without any fanfare.
Logically, the strategy in that case has to be "accept the fact that you're not going to pass anything at all other than reconciliation bills." I'm not sure if I agree with that advice, but it's rational. There are two benefits: (1) Executives who don't rock the boat tend to be popular and get reelected, which would prevent the other side from doing harm for a longer period of time. (2) Offering bipartisan bills that get rejected won't help the American people, but it might help you politically, which indirectly helps the American people for the same reason as in point 1.
It is interesting to reflect that this whole post is a paean to the political theory of slowly boring hard boards without ever once using any of the relevant terms.
I've read that the voters trust the Dems more on immigration so this notion that it's still a good issue for Trump quite puzzles me.
As for the Dems not pursuing better economic policy even though they get better economic results, well that strikes me as utter nonsense. Your theories trump reality?!
Where have you read that voters trust Dems more on immigration than Republicans? You'll need a citation for that. Matt has reported on polling showing the opposite many times. For example, a simple Google search leads me to this link which says on immigration 43% trust Republicans while 34% trust Democrats (https://navigatorresearch.org/special-report-who-do-americans-trust/).
The plot he's written about several times is shown on p. 14 of this pdf (https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%20Research%20Retrospective.pdf).
The point is that immigration is still his best issue, so from a political standpoint it’s better for him to talk and argue about that as opposed to literally anything else.
Democrats “don’t pursue systematically better economic policy” is a spicy meatball. They support Fed independence and at least attempt to pay the bills. Can Republicans say the same?
This paper came out in April 2016, when the last Republican presidential candidate was Mitt Romney
Yeah, my comment about Fed independence might be a bit unfair to pre-Trump Republicans, if that is what you mean. But not paying the bills (thus driving up the deficit) has been the M.O. of Republican presidents since Reagan. And US voters remain shocked--SHOCKED--that regressive tax cuts don't lead to broad prosperity.
In hindsight, it's only gotten worse. Around 2010-4, I think you could be forgiven if you thought the business Republicans were about to turn the ship around.
I loathe and fear Trump. But after watching him withstand Bolton’s relentless pressure to invade Venezuela and start a war with Iran… I thought he would not do those things.
I was not surprised at Trump attacking Iran in his second term, but I was expecting it to be similar to other historical US strikes against Iran where it was much more limited. I'd also have figured that -- despite being *evil* and incompetent to varying degrees -- Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth would have all been aware of the risks to the Strait of Hormuz from larger scale action against Iran, which instead seems to have caught everyone in the administration by complete surprise.
I think you could interpret that there is still a “vibe shift” if you understood the vibe shift to be the entire overton window moving a bit to the right, meaning the Republicans got more crazy and evil, and the Democrats got less woke and become more moderate and palatable to voters.
Everyone moved right, and it just made the Democrats more popular and the Republicans less so.
Maybe it just meant people got tired of all the scolding and cancelations...
Well yes I guess. But what I meant is that perhaps our political culture goes through pendulum cycles where the Overton Window lurches left and right and back and so on.
When the window shifts left, it first helps and then hurts the Democrats, and when it shifts right it first helps and then hurts the Republicans. The more left the window goes, the more Democrats lean into unpopular left-coded ideas and language and ultimately piss off the voting popultion, while the Republicans learn to moderate and take the win. The same mirror effect occurrs when the window goes right, the Republicans overreach, while the Democrats moderate and achieve a temproary victory.
Only it took several years to hurt the Democrats, but Trump and his ilk have leaned in so hard to obnoxious right wing idiocy that they have accomplished in 1.5 years what it took the excesses of wokeness and cancel culture 2-3 times as long to accomplish.
Many people are comparing Biden to Trump but I think there are a few things to note here:
1. I think "Team Transistory" was right on the merits, and if we look back in retrospect Biden's handling of inflation from a policy perspective largely worked. The unfortunate reality is that there's not much that any President can do on inflation in the short run except let the Fed do its job, and hire a competent Fed Chair. Biden did both of those things.
2. That being said politically Biden handled inflation terribly. Where I think Matt has been incredibly consistent is that Democrats need to moderate the central image of the party, and need to run more focused administrations focusing on solving concrete problems incrementally, not everything bagels. Here Biden failed miserably. He went along with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's everything bagel bill, largely listened to Elizabeth Warren types within his administration on executive power and refused to back Manchin ideas on deficit reduction which would legitimately be a long-term inflation reduction measure.
I think the lack of MODERATION from the MODERATE who won the 2020 primary is the big one here. Biden should have stepped in and focused his part in Congress, said "no" on a bunch of Progressive demands, and then (of course) not ran for re-election. He chose none of those things and we see the political result. Charles Cook has an article talking about how this isn't a blue wave in 2026 but a red anchor dragging the GOP down. I think this is correct (of course it was also correct in 2022 and 2024 that Trump was less popular than he seemed too but that's neither here nor there). Democrats are stubbornly refusing to address their own popularity concerns and they wont so long as they just listen to Progressives who want to model the next Presidential term after Trump's failures instead of looking at Obama and Clinton.
an added point: I think you can argue, reasonably, that Biden got really unlucky while Trump completely messed up his term. I might even partially agree. That doesn't mean that just wielding executive power is the right move.
It does seem like Yglesias was more open to the "inflation is transitory" idea than he let's on now, but I don't agree with your read on the immigration article.
He seems to be agreeing with the changes Biden made late in his term when his primary complaints are policies & lack of action from earlier on in his term.
It's true the article does attempt to explain the delay by referencing the Mexican elections, but that seems much more like Yglesias giving gbr administration's reasoning not necessarily him agreeing with it. He even says in that article that he wishes Biden had been more forceful on saying he wants to reduce asylum claims earlier on.
Re: tech leaders fast-following: my take is that they were basically single-issue voters on AI regulation. So they went “All In,” so to speak. That and they probably correctly believe that Trump is far more vindictive than normal politicians, and the dems were trying to antitrust them all anyways.
Were they single-issue voters that wanted AI regulation or that didn't want AI regulation?
Dario Amodei is the most prominent pro-regulation guy, and he was conspicuously missing from the Trump lackey crew. Sam Altman is tougher to pin down. The others (Elon, Zuck, Andreesen, Jensen Huang, etc etc) all seemed to back the “Democrats are going to regulate this industry to death and China will kill us all” view at the time.
MY’s analysis of the Middle East is skewed.
Obama was also interventionist (“hawkish” if you will) in the Middle East. He led the campaign in Libya that overthrew Qaddafi. He launched a serious campaign against ISIS in Iraq. He expanded drone strikes in Yemen, supported the Saudi intervention in Yemen, and he oversaw a military surge in Afghanistan, and sent special forces to/conducted airstrikes in Syria.
He’s right that Bush and Trump have serious problems with their foreign policies (Obama too), but it’s not just their inability to grapple with the “downsides of hawkishness and saber rattling”. For Bush it was specifically his dishonesty regarding intelligence in Iraq, his failed attempts at nation building with severe misunderstandings of the societies in which he pursued nation building, and his inadvertent strengthening of the Iranian regime and terrorists groups. For Trump it’s his alienating of America’s allies and his lack of preparedness and coherent strategy in its campaign against Iran.
Again, though the problem is not just generic “hawkishness”. And willingness to intervene in the Middle East is not unique to Republicans.
The lesson from all this is not to never intervene in the face of attacks and threats. The fact that Democrats have seemed to digest talking points that make it impossible for democracies to militarily defend themselves against nondemocratic societies that threaten and attack us or our allies is dangerous.
Was it indeed smart of Kelly Ayotte not to do a "MAGA style" gerrymandering of New Hampshire's congressional seats? Maybe a knowledgeable person can inform me, but I have a hard time looking at the map and seeing how she could have grabbed one of the two seats New Hampshire has. The Democratic and Republican votes (the House vote went 54% Democratic in 2024) seem almost randomly spread around the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_New_Hampshire
“They seem to primarily understand this as a question of good luck. But having watched both the George W. Bush and second Trump presidencies unfold, I think it’s because Republicans have systematically bad foreign policy that is inattentive to the downside risk of saber-rattling and hawkishness. Trump made a great show of breaking with the Bush-era “neocons” over their idealistic invocations of democracy-promotion. But the actual problem with Bush-era foreign policy wasn’t belief in democracy; it was excessive belief in the potential upside of coercive military force. Trump has retained the error while reconfiguring the goals.“
I think this analysis is entirely wrong. The problems with Bush foreign policy were their dishonesty with the American people about intelligence we had on Iraq, their attempts at doing nation-building while completely misunderstanding the societies, and inadvertently empowering the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was not just a generic downsides to “hawkishness”.
While I'm not a fan of the original analysis, I think this is also somewhat mistaken. Would be like claiming we had definitive intelligence that could have prevented 9/11. Not strictly wrong, but also not usefully correct.
Putting the pieces together was genuinely difficult and it is not surprising that it could go wrong. As an easy example, UNICEF and related organizations were flat out wrong on the deaths in Iraq during sanctions. Yet we don't say they lied on this. They were just wrong because Hussein had good control over the information that left the area.
On WMDs, I grant you that there intelligence that supported the administration's conclusion regarding Iraq's possession of WMDs, and that one could argue that they were mistaken and that the intelligence was flawed, rather than the administration being dishonest. However, the administration also misrepresented the uncertainty of the intelligence, and were also dishonest about specifics (like deeply buried WMD facilities). On the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the case is much stronger that the adminstration was dishonest. While there were contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, it never developed into a deep operational relationship, and the intelligence backed this up. The administration was dishonest by saying that Iraq and Al Qaeda had a partnership involving Iraq providing Al Qaeda weapons and training, that Iraq was planning to transfer WMDs to Al Qaeda, when they had no intelligence suggesting this was the case.
Or rather they had minimal intelligence that it was the case (some Iraqi expats were certainly claiming it). That's a source in intel terms...just not a quality one much of the time. Agreed that the WMDs were not a bold-faced lie as is commonly claimed: a. from a practical standpoint it was very surprising that Hussein did not preserve a WMD program leading to b. an exaggeration of certainty concerning the intelligence. The folks that post here sometimes claiming that "at the time I knew Iraq did not have WMDs" are, to put it charitably, poor historians of their own lives (which is the human condition after all).
"Or rather they had minimal intelligence that it was the case (some Iraqi expats were certainly claiming it)."
Hussein was the one claiming he had them - did you forget that part? The intel your looking for is the secret intel that would have told us he had actually destroyed them.
All fair, I think. I think motivated reasoning dominates pretty much everyone in politics. And it is just normal for people to use bluster in how they communicate to people they are trying to sway.
I think it is fully fair to say we should always try and move to more directly honest discourse. I just get a queezy feeling when it seems that people are convinced the other side flat out lies. Often, the other side is just wrong.
Of course... Trump came along and took advantage of this. Many in MAGA have been primed for so long to think that "everyone lies" so that now they don't care that he actively does so.
Trump has played hard and fast with the truth with regards to Iran, when he said that nuclear enrichment facilities had been obliterated in the 12-day war in June 2025. They'd been damaged, not obliterated.
However, the fundamental causes for the war are indeed true. Iran has enriched uranium to 60% (with no legitimate civilian use), and have furthered their capabilities to produce nuclear weapons. They have directed and funded terrorist proxies that have destabilized multiple countries and attacked an ally, both directly and through the proxies. They have been developing their their missile program, and they repeatedly call for the death of America. None of this is really in dispute.