Trump allies shocked to discover he puts his own political interests ahead of theirs

It remains amazing how many elite political actors approach Trump like he’s a blank slate worthy of their mostly uncritical trust, even though he’s a full slate whose lack of trustworthiness and competence are both as well established as well as any fact in human history:

Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.

And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations.

[…]

But others more soberly grappled with the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu’s triumphalist rhetoric from early in the war had proved fantastical. He had repeatedly and confidently assured Israelis that the country and its alliance with the United States were “changing the face of the Middle East” to Israel’s advantage.

“We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on Thursday.

“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.”

Aside from the dark comedy of people “discovering” that Trump is neither competent not trustworthy, the larger strategic blunder here is obvious:

With the caveat that Gaza was a larger factor in polarizing the issue, it’s true that the elite bipartisan pro-Israel consensus is gone for the foreseeable future. And in that context persuading Trump to do what Obama and Biden wouldn’t an attack Iran is a particularly large political and strategic as well as moral blunder. If only that had spoken to some contractors in Atlantic City perhaps they would have avoided this.