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During President Donald Trump‘s first term, the dumbest talking heads of the Democratic Party deluded themselves into believing that rather than acting of his own volition, the president was blackmailed into acting at the behest of the Russian government. The ensuing decade debunked Russiagate so thoroughly that it really ought to have permanently dispelled the notion that Trump ever does anything he doesn’t want.
But a new iteration of the conspiracy theory has reared its ugly head. In this folie à deux peddled by the dregs of both parties, Trump is being controlled not by Russia but by Israel.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican congresswoman who resigned in dejection and disgrace earlier this year, asked during a podcast on Monday, “Who in the hell are these decisions being made for and who is making these decisions?”
TRUMP’S ATTACK ON IRAN’S REGIME IS AN ATTACK ON CHINA’S ECONOMIC SUPREMACY
“I think Israel, and I’m talking about the government of Israel. I think these people, they literally are trying to start World War III,” Greene said. “It’s completely out of control. It will never end. War will continue when Israel is pushing the United States and demanding that we wage war with them.”
Tucker Carlson fleshed out the we’re-going-to-war-for-Israel theory in slightly starker terms, insisting that “this war is not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives to make the United States safer or richer.”
“It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here. Benjamin Netanyahu did,” Carlson said in between swoons of apoplexy. “That gets to a deeper and more taboo problem, which is a real problem and whose fruits we’re seeing now, which is there are a bunch of people in the U.S. government who do not put the United States before the interests of Israel, period. You saw that very clearly with Mike Huckabee. We interviewed him last week in Tel Aviv, believe. There was no sense at all that he represents the United States or has any interest in what happens to the United States at all.”
The right-wing conspiracy theorists are still too scared of Trump’s omnipotence over the GOP to explicate the logical conclusion that he — yes, him, the president, personally — is sacrificing the sovereignty that elected him on behalf of a foreign country. But it’s Graham Platner, the Democratic front-runner in the Maine Senate primary, who said the quiet part out loud as to why a foreign government can supposedly control the leader of the free world.
“This is a war being pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu; he’s been trying to make this war happen for almost 30 years,” the self-described communist said. “This war is also being pushed because Donald Trump is in the Epstein Files.”
The millions of pages of document dumps that comprise the Epstein files have almost nothing to do with the Netanyahu government and even less to do with Trump. To the extent that they do touch on either of the two, they are exculpatory. All the available evidence indicates that Jeffrey Epstein colluded with Israeli left-winger Ehud Barak to attempt to take down Netanyahu’s right-wing government, and the only credible material mention of Trump is a reported phone call that the future president made to police to report Epstein long before he publicly pled guilty to soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old minor.
What do you think is more likely? That a nation of 10 million people have kompromat capable of cajoling Trump into fighting a war on that country’s behalf? Or that Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do for his entire political career?
Trump is admittedly capricious about all sorts of issues, oscillating between NIMBY and YIMBY, from pro-choice to pro-life, and across the spectrum on all sorts of down-ballot topics. But aside from his career-long insistence that the rest of the world has screwed over America when it comes to trade and hawkishness on border security, Trump has been more consistent on the issue of Iran than any other.
Even the most passive observers of politics have known that Trump opposed the appeasement of Barack Obama since the ink dried on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. When Obama originally brokered the Iran deal in 2015, Trump called the JCPOA a “dangerous” and “bad deal” that Obama negotiated “from desperation,” and a year later, Trump insisted that “under a Trump administration, Iran will never, never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.”
But Trump’s support for the possible use of military force against the ayatollah goes back decades. In 2011, the then-reality TV star said that he would “never take the military card off the table” with regard to Iran. He also said in 1987 that the U.S. should outright “attack Iran and seize its oil fields” and that we should have sent in ground troops after the Iran hostage crisis seven years before that.
Trump may post on X or Truth Social some dumb policy proposal on a whim because an adviser lobbies him on an issue he doesn’t really care too strongly about. But war, much less war against a foe that Trump has passionately reviled for almost half a century, is a different story. When the president gives a damn, nobody can make him do anything.
Beyond the fact that the Epstein files kompromat on Trump is as real as the Russian pee tape or Santa Claus, the Israeligate conspiracy theory also has the little problem that the entire rest of the Middle East is either defensively or offensively siding with Israel and the U.S. The Washington Post has reported that Saudi Arabia, which does not even recognize Israeli statehood, had lobbied Trump to go forward with a first strike on Iran, and since the start of Operation Epic Fury, Saudi Arabia has been joined by Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates against the Iranians.
If you really insist, along with Democrats such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), that there is a shadowy, global cabal called the “Epstein class” and — on an obviously related note — that Trump is implicated in said Epstein class, then he would have a better military target than Iran, which is a pedophile’s paradise on Earth. Officially, the Iranian government allows girls as young as 8 years and 9 months old to be married with paternal or judicial permission. Ayatollah Khomeini (the predecessor to the ayatollah Trump just sent to Hell) insisted that there is “no objection in other enjoyments like touching lasciviously, hugging and rubbing the thighs, even with a suckling infant.” A pedophilic “Epstein class” wouldn’t want to bomb Iran.
WHAT IF THE EPSTEIN FILES PROVE THAT ANTI-TRUMP ACCUSATIONS WERE ACTUALLY CONFESSIONS?
The fact is that Trump is bombing Iran because he wants to, and his base supports him. A staggering 85% of Republicans polled by CBS said they support military action against Iran, with three-quarters of the overall electorate agreeing so long as the conflict only lasts days or weeks. Republicans surveyed by the Washington Post gave the strikes a net approval rating of plus-69, with the majority insisting they want the strikes to continue.
If you disagree with Trump’s decision, you can criticize him directly. But if you must rely on Russiagate-caliber conspiracy theories to hint at his complicity, consider that you are the one who is compromised.
