I have long argued that Donald Trump was just about the weakest candidate Republicans could have put up against the Democrats in 2016, 2020, and 2024; that any "normal Republican" (Trump is definitely not normal and isn't much of a Republican) would have beaten a despised Hillary Clinton in the popular vote by double digits, easily fended off the doddering Joe Biden four years later, and bested the inept Kamala Harris by a much larger margin than Trump did.

Going further, I've challenged my MAGA friends to identify any of the good things they think that Trump has done in the past year or so — closing the border, combating DEI and transgenderism, preserving tax cuts, repealing various regulations — that a President Haley, President Hutchinson or President DeSantis wouldn't have also done, minus the tariffs, Greenland, the Kennedy Center, appeasement of Vladimir Putin, the "Seditious Six," etc., etc., etc.

In the interest of fairness, though, I think I might have finally found something, a very important something, that Trump does that they might not have, or at least not to the same extent: employ American military force in an unapologetic manner to punish our enemies and protect our interests abroad.

Or, as I put it a few months back, after the extraction of Nicolas Maduro from Caracas, "if there is anything that can remotely redeem the otherwise loathsome Trump, it is his apparent willingness to use American power without inhibition and with a certain bracing confidence."

By the time this column sees print, lots will probably have changed regarding Iran, some of it perhaps unwelcomely so, but some tentative conclusions:

The admonition to not speak ill of the dead doesn't apply to the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose most recent in a long list of atrocities was ordering the slaughter of an estimated 30,000 unarmed Iranian protesters.

Khamenei's demise requires not mourning but multi-day celebration, as did that of some other tyrants and terrorists that left us for a scorching place below Earth in the past quarter-century, including Yasser Arafat (2004), Saddam Hussein (2006), Slobodan Milosevic (2006), Osama bin Laden (2011), Kim Jong-Il (2011), Muammar Gaddafi (2011), Fidel Castro (2016), and the Ayatollah's henchman Qasem Soleimani (2020).

And we can all count the days until they are joined down there by Putin, Raul Castro, and Kim Jong-un.

The hopefully by now also deceased Islamic Republic of Iran serves as a lesson on how a poor, weak and backward country, utterly devoid of any accomplishments or contributions to world progress and guided by a primitive, medieval religious code can cause great mischief for nearly 50 years when more powerful countries (us and our allies) refuse to stiffen their spines and stop it.

Iran has been waging war against the great Satan and the external world in general in every possible way while inexplicably suffering virtually no consequences, until now, until Trump 2.0.

Much of our cowardly accommodation of the murderous mullahs through eight presidential administrations was driven by a misguided conventional wisdom suggesting that there was little we could do about such state sponsors of terrorism and that the need for regional "stability" somehow required appeasement of a regime for which the primary goal was to destabilize all around it.

We were constantly told by the "prudent" sorts that any efforts to use military force against the bloody despots in Iran would only fan the flames of radical Islam and produce a massive anti-Western backlash in the mythical "Arab Street."

How refreshing and useful to have a commander-in-chief who rejects such drivel.

Rich Lowry got it precisely correct when he noted that "Oct. 7 was for Islamic radicals what Pearl Harbor was for the Japanese — a brilliant tactical success that carried within it the seeds of catastrophic strategic failure."

As of Oct. 6th, 2023, Khamenei and his brutish colleagues intimidated almost everyone in the Middle East and were busy expanding their influence through various terrorist proxies. But they overplayed their hand the next day and invited a righteous Israeli wrath that would leave the Islamic Republic what it is now, a pitiful, friendless punching bag.

In understanding how this all happened and happened so quickly, it is necessary to also understand that Israel was able to act so determinably and effectively only because first Joe Biden and then Trump stood behind Tel Aviv. At key junctures they resisted the demands of corrupt "world opinion" and pro-Hamas legacy media (the "Gaza genocide" lie) to pressure Israel to stand down.

In Biden's case this refusal to hand victory to Iran and the terrorists involved a principled willingness to ignore the large pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas (they are functionally one and the same) wing of a Democratic Party that has become increasingly anti-Israel and antisemitic (they, too, have become functionally one and the same).

In Trump's case, it was a willingness to ignore the loony, online antisemitic right represented by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, slimy creatures that have entered Republican environs only because it no longer has gatekeepers.

How naïve to ever believe that there could be a viable Middle East "peace process" or "two-state solution" so long as the Islamic Republic of Iran existed.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

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