One of the most common symptoms of chronic Trump Derangement Syndrome is the tendency of the sufferer to blame the former president for everything. I do mean everything. If these people wake up severely constipated — as I suspect many of them do — they will quickly find a way to make Trump responsible for their suffering, rather than the cheese plate they had for dinner the night before.
Big or small, there is no global ill that the unstable TDS loons can’t tie to Donald Trump. All bad roads lead to the one monster under their beds.
This week’s example comes from New York Times Opinion columnist Thomas Edsall. If memory serves, this is Edsall’s second appearance in this column. Edsall’s shtick is querying leftist “experts” for confirmation that his latest diaper-filling moment over Trump is justified.
Here is the setup for Edsall’s latest Times cry for therapy:
According to Pew Research, the share of voters who said that the United States provides “too much” support to Ukraine more than quadrupled between March 2022 and December 2023, going to 31 percent from 7 percent. Among Republicans, the share grew to 48 percent from 9 percent.
A Gallup poll found even more opposition to American aid for Ukraine among Republican and independent voters. The share of Republicans agreeing that the “United States is doing too much to help Ukraine” rose between August 2022 and October 2023 to 62 percent from 43 percent and among independents to 44 percent from 28 percent.
Both polls reflect the rapid increase of isolationism in the American electorate.
We know this ends up being Trump’s fault, but let’s just examine some alternative explanations for the shift before we get to that.
Oh wait, many of Edsall’s “experts” do that for us. So let’s check out one or two of those.
The first expert says that the U.S. role in the world isn’t quite what it used to be because of, “failure in Iraq, failure in Afghanistan, the demise of democratic movements in the Middle East (heavily supported by the United States), Libya’s collapse into anarchy, the rise of destabilizing extremism in Africa.”
Another offers that, “Ukraine’s highly anticipated counteroffensive, designed to liberate territory and deliver a battlefield win or at least momentum that would set the stage for promising diplomacy, was largely rebuffed.” This same expert notes that, “Russia shows few signs of exhaustion.”
I promise that this gets to an Orange Man Bad moment.
If you’re keeping score so far, American military failures that had nothing to do with Donald Trump, along with Ukraine’s inability to make good use of American largesse could be factors in the growing weariness of Americans when it comes to attempting to fix other countries’ problems.
Thus far, Edsall is making a horrible case for everything being the fault of rightwing nutjob MAGA extremists.
Not worry, Edsall keeps the conversation going with that last “expert” long enough for him to offer that, “We are seeing a resurfacing of classic isolationism, mostly on the MAGA, i.e., Republican, right.”
BINGO!
But wait, sports fans, Edsall’s very next “expert” says:
Ordinary Americans are increasingly doubtful that the burdens of global leadership are worth bearing. Events since 9/11 have undercut public confidence in establishment thinking regarding America’s role in the world. That Trump’s views attract as much support as they do from ordinary citizens is an indication of the extent to which the establishment has forfeited public support.
There’s a lot to unpack there. Somehow, it’s Trump’s fault that “establishment thinking” has changed in the 22-plus years since the 9/11 attacks. Worse yet for the lefties, Trump is having some sort of weird voodoo influence on “ordinary” non-MAGA domestic terrorist folks.
Edsall wants to blame a growing isolationist fervor (such that it exists) among Americans solely on Trump, despite the offerings of his “experts” that provide many reasons that have nothing to do with their Public Enemy Number One. Because he is a leftist, Edsall completely dismisses the idea that the people who question the sanity of keeping the checkbook open for Ukraine with no end in sight may have come to their opinions on their own.
I’m no isolationist, but I’ve long had doubts that unending financial aid to Zelenskyy was going to make Putin go away. There’s a very good chance that millions of Americans feel the same way even though they don’t consider Donald Trump their foreign policy sherpa.
It appears that what Edsall really wanted to do was fulfill a wordcount minimum required by the Times and get to a couple of paragraphs at the end about Trump having diminished America’s stature in the global community.
Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media have said that about every Republican president in my politically aware lifetime. It’s boilerplate nonsense.
The notion that Trump’s four years in office, which saw no Russian overreach and historic peace agreements in the Middle East, was a permanent stain on the international reputation of the United States is, like everything else these people think, mentally unsound.
That’s an even more preposterous premise when considering the absolute toilet swirl that the world has become in just three years under Joe Biden. In fact, what Edsall and some of his “experts” are attempting to do is blame Donald Trump for the fact that global chaos is the hallmark of Biden’s weak presidency.
The Trump bogeyman of Edsall’s nightmares is both a president who was such a buffoon that the rest of the world hates us and a transcendent being whose touch can be felt in every international problem that media hacks refuse to be honest about and blame Biden for. Trump is an all-purpose scapegoat for these nimrods.
More and more, I hope he gets a chance to make their nightmares come true.
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