Daly: Three Cheers for Neocon Don

President Trump threw some of his most loyal sycophants, attack-dogs, and cabinet members under the bus to do the right thing on Iran.

Last Saturday night, at the order of President Trump, the U.S. military bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities. The operation, according to the administration, caused “extremely severe damage” to those sites, and has presumably set back Iran’s march toward nuclear armament by several years (if not permanently).

Good.

While there are certainly risks of retaliation and other consequences to consider, the world is very likely a safer place today than it was before the strikes. Well done, Mr. President.

The plan was well-developed and well-executed, and its timing was key. Israel’s recent attacks on Iran had dealt significant damage to the country’s nuclear program, and taken out the regime’s air-defense systems and a good chunk of its military command. Trump wasn’t initially supportive of Israel’s offensive, but warmed to it pretty quickly (reportedly thanks to Fox News’s framing of the matter). And rather than let up at a time when Iran was at its weakest, the U.S. joined the offensive and acted decisively — something the U.S. had failed to do at opportune moments in the past.

It had to be a tough call for the president, but I suspect part of the decision was extraordinarily easy: throwing his most loyal sycophants and attack-dogs completely under the bus.

I’m talking, in part, about MAGA media hacks like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Mollie Hemingway who spent years aggressively casting Trump’s critics — especially those on the political right — as warmongering neocons eager to “bomb” other countries. According to these actors, our country desperately needed Trump in the White House to keep America out of wars, and end the war hawks’ supposed lust for U.S. military involvement abroad, so that we could focus on putting “America first” instead.

To be clear, a number of people in this bunch aren’t merely on-air talking heads. Some, including Carlson, Bannon, and Laura Loomer, have had a direct line to Trump, and have even been involved in major policy and staffing decisions. Others are actually in Trump’s administration, serving in top cabinent positions. They include Vice President J.D. Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. (Gabbard, you might remember, even claimed just three months ago that Iran wasn’t even building a nuclear weapon.)

As it turned out, however, these people’s hypothetical fears of foreign intervention were, for the most part, far less provocative and consequential than what Trump, in real life, just carried out in Iran. By the standards they themselves preached for the better part of a decade, what Trump did on Saturday made him the ultimate “neocon” — an individual more than worthy of the Code Pink talking points they’ve routinely wielded against others.

But unsurprisingly, virtually all of these people are currently… oh, let’s say, recalibrating their positions and rhetoric. They’re now essentially arguing that while they understand people’s concerns over U.S. military intervention, the type of action they had previously (and exhaustively) described as a catalyst for World War 3 is actually quite defensible. Why? Because, unlike his White House predecessors, Lord Trump is smart, special, and amazing.

I wish I was joking.

Gabbard has even been pretending in recent days that she never said what she publicly stated just three months ago.

Pathetic.

If these people had honor, they’d publicly apologize to all the bloodthirsty, globalist, neocon, warmongering bogeymen and bogeywomen they’ve built up over the years, from Nikki Haley to John Bolton to Mike Pence to Liz Cheney — none of whom, by the way, have ever ordered our military to bomb targets in the Middle East (as Trump had already done multiple times prior to Saturday). Maybe they could even throw in a mea culpa or two to the late John “Bomb, Bomb, Iran” McCain, whose purported foreign policy vision has finally come to fruition.

None of this will happen, of course, because such a thing would require shame.

Now, in all fairness, the Woke Right (as some have coined them) at least had some reason to believe they were on solid political footing with their non-interventionist positioning. Trump closely surrounded himself with their kind for a long time, has been glaringly unsympathetic to Ukraine’s plight against Russia, and has peddled a lot of hysterical anti-war rhetoric himself. Yet, Trump was never a non-interventionist. That narrative was merely part of an attempt by some of his political advisors to rationalize his whims and often off-the-cuff decisions as coming from principle.

Trump, as people with clear eyes have long seen, is not a man of principle. He’s perfectly willing to annihilate his staunchest supporters’ best, most impassioned defenses of him. And that’s what he did on Saturday with Iran.

Again, I’m very glad he did it. I give him full credit, and hope he continues to humiliate his “anti-war” sycophants in this fashion, because the world — especially embattled allies like Ukraine (who has only ever asked for the means to fight a merciless invader) — could use a little more of Neocon Don.