Protocols of the elders of Trumpism

Tucker Carlson’s NYT interview is very long but also quite revelatory about a number of things. A Jewish friend of mine suggested to me that Carlson is at least strongly implying that people either in or allied with the current Israeli government are using Kompromat of some sort to get their way with Trump on Iran. I agree that this is a plausible reading of what Carlson is claiming. For example:

Trump refused to even criticize Netanyahu in public. Are you joking? That’s slavery. That is total control of one man by another.

I do think there’s a strong possibility that we’re heading for some version of the following sequence of events:

(1) The Iran catastrophe will drag on, and become the dominant symbol of the overwhelming failure of the second Trump administration.

(2) The midterms seem the most obvious inflection point for this narrative to become the conventional wisdom all across the political spectrum, but especially on the right.

(3) On the right, this narrative will increasingly take the form of: The second Trump administration was a smashing success, right up until “the Jews” coerced Trump into the Iran disaster. This purported coercion will have taken place, according to different theories, via Svengali-like manipulation by Bibi et al of an increasingly weak-minded and vulnerable Trump, or, in the most insidious versions, through the sort of straight-up blackmail that Carlson is at least hinting at.

(4) These neo-Doltchstosslegende narratives will enflame the at the best of times barely latent anti-Semitism among the heirs to the paleo-con tradition, with the remnants of the neo-cons being blamed for the destruction of what otherwise would have been the glorious summer of Trump and Trumpism. There will be various synergies here with those elements of leftist anti-Semitism that in turn have been exacerbated by the crimes of the Netanyahu government in Gaza and Lebanon.

(5) A potential further exacerbation of all this may come from the “Christian Zionists” in Carlson’s conspiracist narrative, who may themselves conclude that their eschatalogical fantasies have been betrayed by cosmopolitan treacheries of various sorts.

Obviously I hope I’m completely wrong about all this, but as of now events are trending towards finding some all too familiar villains at the center of yet another world-wide conspiracy, undermining the purity of our national essence.