Yeah I haven’t bought this argument since day one of the whole thing. Trump didn’t go to war to distract from Epstein or ICE, at least not as directly as you make it.
Pre-war polling saw that Trump’s popularity was pretty much unchanged with likely R voters even through last summer, the December vote, and Bondi’s firing. He’s made it very clear he doesn’t feel like he needs to win over new supporters, either, and with both houses still R at least through November, there wasn’t much reason for him to care about Epstein. It was already out of the news and voters were buying the Bondi-scapegoat story.
The idea that Trump was actually super upset that people were mad about ICE and wanted a distraction is just funny. The show of force, shock, confusion, and coverage was the point, Stephen Miller said as much from day 1, and to reiterate: Trump wasn’t losing any R votes over these policies.
Right wing media had both of these under control with a good spin on them. There was literally no reason to do something so obviously doomed and tank the one thing every American (apparently) cares about, gas prices, to distract from either of these stories that were already on their way out.
Trump started a war with Iran because 1) it’s the thing Israel has been begging anyone to back them up on for fifty years and 2) he felt bullet proof (militarily and petrologically) after Venezuela.
/rant. I had a much better version of this typed up and then refreshed the page and lost it all :-)
Me every two years I try to do more than adjust transparency in gimp