Spoiled Rotten Donald Trump Can't Buy His Way Out of the Mess He Made When He Started War With Iran |
US President Donald Trump, born with a golden spoon in his mouth, has been used throughout his life to buying his way out of any jams into which he got himself. He gave money to women (and probably girls) he assaulted in return for non-disclosure agreements. If he went bankrupt, he could find investors to float his next purchase, even if they were disreputable, or he could find a way to raise cash through money laundering. In rashly launching an illegal and aggressive war on Iran on February 28, however, he may have painted himself into a corner from which there is no escape.
In fact, this may be the end of Donald Trump. Not because Iran can directly harm him. But because it can keep gasoline prices and inflation high through the November 3 midterms. If there is a Democratic “blue wave,” Trump and his corrupt cabinet will face endless hearings on the Hill and he’d likely be impeached again. Moreover, it isn’t clear that, as an unpopular lame duck, he could keep Republicans in line.
Recent opinion polls find Trump is enormously unpopular, with approval ratings plummeting among independents, and that he is even being deserted by some of his base. Rural Americans with limited incomes who drive gas-guzzling trucks were blindsided when Trump raised the price of gasoline from $2.70 a gallon to over $4 a gallon nationally this spring and summer. For many of them, that is a reduction in their standard of living. Rural people spend 9% of their income on gasoline because they have longer commutes and they need trucks for hauling, whereas for urban people it is closer to 5%. By picking a fight with Iran in the cockpit of the world’s energy production, the Gulf, Trump took food out of the mouths of people in Appalachia and Kansas. And it isn’t just gasoline. Fertilizer shortages because of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz affect the price of food, which is going to go up over the next year. A shortage of sulfur hurts mining and mineral processing and makes many goods more expensive. A shortage of helium puts up the cost of anything with computer chips in them.
In short, this generation of Iranian revolutionaries may be planning to do to Trump what an earlier clique in Tehran did to Jimmy Carter. It is widely thought that Khomeini and radicals around him refused to release US embassy hostages, taken in autumn 1979, until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. The revolutionaries had a grudge with Carter because they saw him as having supported Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom they overthrew. They thus played a role in making Carter look weak in the lead-up to the November 1980 election, helping install Reagan. It was all about political revenge then, as it is now.
Last week, Iran’s clerical Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, shook up the security apparatus with a raft of new appointments. He brought to the forefront veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, who had suffered through WW I-style trench warfare and Iraqi use of mustard and sarin gas. That generation of leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) fought on for 6 years after Iraq offered an armistice. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had launched a war of aggression on Iran in 1980, aiming to grab the oil-rich Khuzistan province for himself, but quickly was drawn into a quagmire that some wags called a “sitzkrieg.” One reason Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and those loyalists who followed “the Line of the Imam” refused the offer of an end to hostilities is that they wanted revenge. They did........