The “Find/Replace China/Iran” Edition

Trump as “Dexter”

You’ve certainly heard of the popular Showtime series “Dexter” (and the revived “Dexter: Resurrection) starring Michael C. Hall as the titular Dexter Morgan. Dexter is a serial killer who targets and murders other serial killers.

I can only assume Donald Trump loved the show, even though he may confuse Dexter for the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” – come to think of it, another serial killer who targets mostly unsympathetic people we don’t mind seeing killed.

It is with this image in mind that I process both Trump’s capture of Nicolas Maduro and now his assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These two men deserve whatever they get, but that doesn’t change the fact that Trump is far more like them than he is like anyone I’d want to see running my own country, nor does it change the fact that this war is totally illegal by any interpretation of domestic or international law.

Trump has said this war is about “regime change,” so the big question is how he interprets that. He certainly does not interpret it as “invade, take over, and establish a new government” – it is conspicuous that this massive U.S. military buildup in the Mideast includes none of the ground forces necessary for such an action. If the goal was “help the Iranian people rise up and overthrow their government,” we’d see at least some signs of more U.S. special operations forces in the area.

Robert Pape is the world expert on the utility of airpower in trying to overthrow a regime (and also on domestic extremism, so he’s a great twofer to follow), and his research, which matches my lived experience, says it never works. Air attacks alone against an authoritarian (admire the alliteration!):

1. Rarely kill off enough of the leadership to fundamentally alter that regime’s governance and behavior;

2. Tend to rally people around the regime and/or give the regime the needed excuse to act more harshly against their domestic opposition; and

3. Tend to lead to unanticipated retaliation, often asymmetric and on its own timeline.

But this is the analysis of rational people, and that’s not too useful when understanding Trump. He’s equally likely to equate “regime change” in Iran as he seems to have in Venezuela: decapitate the key leader, make some superficial deal with the successors, and declare victory. He doesn’t have the attention span to be concerned about long-run Iranian responses. In fact, I’m guessing that’s part of his plan.

Find/Replace China/Iran

A few days ago, the Washington Post, ABC News, and then Democracy Docket reported on a 17-page draft presidential memorandum developed by supporters of Trump’s fraudulent claims about 2020 election fraud. The memo proposes that Trump assert that China is attempting to interfere in the 2026 election, and declare a national emergency that would allow him to take over election processes, ban mail-in voting, and basically implement the Senate-rejected SAVE Act by presidential fiat. Presumably, their calculation is that a Supreme Court that claims to care deeply both about Presidential authority in national security and in states’ control of their elections will err for the former if the President asserts a national security risk.

This is, of course, bonkers. Even if the President asserted this authority, and even if the courts upheld it, it would be impossible to implement without the active cooperation of the states. Red states might well go along with this, but Blue certainly wouldn’t, and I question whether there are enough federal military and police personnel to oversee every polling station in even a few Blue cities. But of course, they don’t care about winning those seats; they just need to hold on to the majority they’ve got, and they certainly could manage that. At the very least, they can cause confusion in key localities – think Atlanta or Austin – to justify not seating anyone from those districts, on the grounds it’s just impossible to know who really won there.

There is one problem with this plan: Trump doesn’t want this kind of confrontation with China. He admires Xi Jinping and sees China as a great set of business opportunities. You’ll notice that while he used anti-Chinese rhetoric so much in his first term that his pronunciation of “CHAI-NA” became its own running joke, he’s really dialed it back in his second term. He doesn’t want enmity with China; as his own national security strategy says, he wants to agree on spheres of influence with them.

But if you took the same memo and replaced “China” with “Iran” throughout it… now you’ve got a plan! It’s plausible – Iran did try to interfere in the 2020 election. Of course, they tried to help Trump, but he’s never been a guy known for his gratitude. Iran evokes a much more visceral dislike in the U.S. than China does – not without justification. And now Iran wants revenge, and if they do kill a few Americans, that won’t trouble him much. I mean, he pursued COVID policies that killed hundreds of thousands of us, what’s a few more? Any inevitable Iranian retaliation simply will give him more justification for more election interference.

Trump can continue his military campaign and kill some more Iranian leaders if he wants, but for his purposes he’s probably accomplished all he needed to. We’ll see where this war with Iran goes over the next days and weeks - wars never play out as planned - but the critical point is that all this is more about his positioning against us than against Iran.

My sixteen-year-old saw the news on his phone when he woke up Saturday morning and asked if this put our family in greater danger. My answer: from Iran? Not really. From our own government? Oh, yes.