Israel thought that Trump was a trusted partner

The nasty guy has announced an agreement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have already signed it. And the more we hear about it the worse it is for America. The deal opens the Strait now and puts off the big issues to be resolved over the next 60 days (don’t hold your breath). One of the possible sticking points is Israel and Lebanon. Iran says that must be part of the deal. But the nasty guy doesn’t control Netanyahu – to the point of letting loose a few expletives. Merlin196360 of the Daily Kos community discussed that Netanyahu has the ability to blow up the deal. But does he have the chutzpah to use it?

There are two parts to this Israeli fantasy. The first is that the Iranian regime could be overthrown with just airstrikes alone. The American military knew this already, but Trump and Netanyahu just proved this point. The second part of the fantasy is that Netanyahu and the Israeli public thought that Trump was a trusted partner. The only people more delusional and gullible than Netanyahu and the Israelis about Trump are MAGA cultists.

Netanyahu was not told the nasty guy is capitulating and had no input to the terms. As the details of the deal are being made public the number of Israelis who object will skyrocket. They can’t take their anger out on the nasty guy. That leave Netanyahu to receive the backlash. The Israeli leader is surely hoping someone will stop the nasty guy. We’ve already seen such a person has already been shoved out of the way. The nasty guy signed the deal while in France and at the Palace of Versailles where he had dinner with French leader Emmanuel Macron. Emily Singer of Kos reported on the news:

“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said Wednesday at a news conference in France during the G7 gathering. “But all I know is, every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.” Trump’s comment is an accidental admission that Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz boxed him into this deal—in which Iran gets both sanctions relief and hundreds of billions to rebuild from the bombing carried out by the U.S. and Israel—because the longer the major oil passageway remained closed, the closer we got to economic collapse.

This is a wild admission from an Oval Office occupant. Iran holding the global economy hostage worked. They’ll surely do it again. “Even Republicans are saying that the deal Trump struck is itself a catastrophe.” Singer is sure Macron knew and that the nasty guy didn’t that the Palace of Versailles is where Germany signed its unconditional surrender in WWII. I just realized I’m getting conflicting information. One part says he signed the deal while at the fight on the White House South Lawn that was staged for his birthday last Sunday. This site says he signed it while in France. That’s in addition to the formal signing in Geneva in Sunday (or maybe Friday?). Kos community member chloris creator discussed who profited from the Iran war. This list isn’t complete. At the top of the list is the Military Industrial Complex. That include nasty junior and his brother. Next is insider traders, the same people who bet on various aspects of the war as it started. Oil companies raked in windfall profits. Iran is getting $300 billion in reconstruction funds plus a suspension of sanctions. It will likely start charging “tolls” or maybe “fees” for ships sailing through the Strait, even though that’s illegal under international law. China is filling in the void created by the chaos. What it is gaining is explained in a video I didn’t watch. On to the losers. Short answer: It’s the rest of us. First is paying maybe up to $90 billion in taxes to fund the military. Second is paying close to $59 billion (so far) in higher gas prices. That doesn’t include the higher prices of jet fuel. Third is American farmers facing higher fertilizer costs and export tariffs. Fourth is America’s reputation in the world. We started a war we didn’t need to, it affected the world economy, and we lost, leaving Iran stronger. Our remaining ally is Israel and the nasty guy now cusses when saying his name. Then to global losers: Inflation hit everyone. I don’t know if inflation is worse here than elsewhere. Other possible losers: Taiwan. China may be seeing the US as unable to defend Taiwan. Maybe renewable energy? See oil profits above. The disruption of oil may spur more countries to switch to renewables. Is the deal any good? The text hasn’t been released and the vice nasty is spinning it as fast as he can. That’s all you need to know. In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing for his Substack that some of the terms of the deal are yet to be worked out, but what is there may be enough to finish off Netanyahu.

As analysts like Danny Citrinowicz have noted, for 30 years the Netanyahu doctrine was based on the proposition that Iran was an existential threat, that only force could stop it, and that he alone could make Washington exert the necessary force. Every Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin feared the Iranian bomb. Netanyahu alone turned the fear into a brand. He carried a cartoon bomb to the rostrum of the United Nations. He lectured a joint session of Congress, over a sitting President’s objections, against the 2015 nuclear accord. He told Israeli voters, campaign after campaign, that he was the one man who could deliver an American President willing to finish the job. […] And the calendar is closing in on the prime minister. The Knesset has voted to dissolve itself, with an election due by late October and the ultra-Orthodox pressing for September — the same partners now drifting from Netanyahu over their sons’ exemption from the draft. The brief lift the war gave Likud is gone; the latest polling leaves his bloc around 51 seats, a long way from the 61 a majority requires. And the deal has already become a cudgel in the hands of his opponents, and some of his allies: Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman and voices inside his own camp are competing to brand it a gift to the Islamic Republic. The autumn vote will not turn on the deal’s clauses, but on the doctrine that produced them.

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo discussed the UFC fight that took place on the South Lawn:

Overall, the evening exemplified the new flavors of American life and power. By the time the last punch landed and the blood was wiped away, the night included suspicious stiff armed salutes, transphobic insults, and fresh allegations of sexual assault as well as pitches for Silicon Valley AI, crypto, prediction markets, and the Saudi regime.

Paul Krugman, in his Substack, compared today’s billionaires with the rich men of the Gilded Age:

Members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society… Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Ghosh again:

Long before the first American bomb fell on Iran this February, the US military had already fought this war dozens of times — on paper, in classified exercises, in rooms full of officers pushing markers around a map. It kept losing. Across more than two decades of these games, the script bent the same way every time: once the shooting started, Iran reached for the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and the global economy seized. The most famous of them, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, ended with the retired general playing the Gulf adversary crippling much of the American fleet using little more than small boats, couriers on motorbikes and the element of surprise. The umpires refloated the sunken ships and ran it again.

In the comments, which I’m able to see again, there aren’t the long list of cartoons, but memes still show up. Such as this one posted by exlrrp and credited to Cameron Corduroy, though I’ve seen variations with the same text:

Renames it to the Department of War. Names himself Secretary of War. Fights one war: Loses.

The nasty guy had the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial repainted and supposedly fixed because algae had been growing so well. The fix didn’t work and the algae is worse than before. So exlrrp posted a meme of a red cap in the muck with the slogan, “Make Algae Grow Again.”