The New York Times sulkily refuses to give President Trump any credit for eliminating the power structure of an authoritarian, murderous Islamic regime working hard to build a nuclear weapon, one that’s bedeviled America, Israel, and the Western world by supporting terror attacks for over 40 years.
The latest example of the paper’s petulance ran on Wednesday’s front page, a “news analysis” by Tyler Pager: “Initiating War Is Legacy Risk For President.”
Pager got off to a dismal start, with a dense parade of Iran negatives.
Six American service members were killed, and U.S. military jets were shot out of the sky. Investors are bracing for market turmoil, fearing prolonged disruption to oil supplies. President Trump says the military campaign against Iran could extend for weeks, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that “the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military.”
With his decision Friday to authorize war against Iran, Mr. Trump is taking the biggest gamble of his presidency, risking the lives of American troops, more deaths and instability in the world’s most volatile region, and his own political standing.
Mr. Trump, facing declining approval ratings and staring down the possibility that Republicans will lose control of Congress in the midterms, plunged the United States into what is shaping up to be its most expansive military conflict since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
It has all the markings of "heads I win, tails you lose" coverage. Pager continued the rhetoric of failure.
Even as he has struggled to provide a clear endgame for the military campaign, Mr. Trump has portrayed the operation as a resounding success. He has acknowledged the U.S. casualties as a cost of war but has spent more effort on boasting about the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, the destruction of military targets across the country, and his commitment to keeping Iran from ever being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
But interventions in the Middle East have bedeviled generations of American presidents….
One cheer for Pager for a rare “Democrats seized” moment....
Democrats have seized on the strikes to paint Mr. Trump as more focused in foreign intervention than addressing Americans’ economic worries at home.
...but he then left his paper open to polling hypocrisy.
Early polling after the attacks show most voters are not in favor of them. A CNN poll found 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s decision to launch strikes against Iran, and Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 27 percent of Americans approve of the military campaign.
Speaking of polls on America going to war: Back when Democratic President Barack Obama was invading Libya in March 2011, Times reporter Kirk Johnson had the nerve to blame the bad polling of that war on “compassion fatigue” on the part of Americans, along with other pathetic, Democrat-protecting excuses. The people were dissed in the headline “Inundated With News, Many Find It Difficult To Keep Up on Libya.”
But now, it's all about hyping the danger to the GOP:
Should the conflict go badly or Iran descend into turmoil, it could leave Republican candidates in the midterm elections faced with difficult choices about whether to distance themselves from Mr. Trump on the issue.
Pager ended by quoting a conservative to bolster his own case that Trump was failing.
[Raheem Kassam, editor of The National Pulse] said Americans will only be “just starting to feel better about the economy right as they start voting because they spent too much time on Elon Musk’s failed DOGE project,” arguing Mr. Musk had failed to meaningfully cut government spending. He added: “I agree with the critics that is a big problem.”
