Yet it’s important to recognize that, as with so much else during the Trump presidency, the commander in chief takes his cues from the way the right’s media personalities think and talk about the world — and the way the right’s media personalities think and talk about the world derives in large part from the way its intellectuals taught them to think and talk about the world in the months and years surrounding the Iraq War.
Many of the same people anxiously fretting about the president’s damaging rudeness and lack of respect for international institutions and norms used to advocate and model precisely that. Trump called their bluff, taking their proposals both seriously and literally. It would be nice to hear why they’ve changed their minds — even if the explanation amounts to little more than an acknowledgment that rabblerousing garbage sounds better in the pages of a partisan opinion journal than it does emanating from the mouth of a know-nothing, demagogic president.
