Reality Defies Trump-Friendly Predictions

Israel and vote-rigging conspiracies get clobbered.

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We live in an era in which domestic politics and international events routinely plunge us into historically unprecedented circumstances. Although some humility should be in order before attempting to propound extravagantly definitive predictions, political operatives and pundits confidentially exude unwarranted certainty only to see reality confound their prognostications.

A year ago, not many foreign policy gurus would have predicted nonstop war would leave Iran, not Israel, on the rise in the Middle East; upend the U.S.-Israel relations; and severely undermine AIPAC’s political attack machine. (Likewise, not many foreign policy gurus doubted “the narrative put out by Russian propaganda, tacitly assuming that Ukraine, outmanned and outgunned, would eventually lose,” as Anne Applebaum recently observed.) These days, foreign policy prognostication is a fool’s errand.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and Donald Trump at the White House. (White House photo)

Domestically, many horserace political reporters and angst-ridden Democrats have insisted Donald Trump’s nonstop onslaught of election denial conspiracies would imperil free and fair elections. That does not seem so certain now either.

Given how frequently results contradict Trump’s preferred storylines, we should pay far less attention to hysterical doom-mongering about his power to shape events.

Iran/Israel

In launching last year’s 12-day bombardment of Iran to “obliterate” its nuclear weapons program, Israel’s right-wing government, bolstered by Trump’s war fervor, believed it found a path to rebound from its Oct. 7, 2023, national security debacle and worldwide condemnation of its conduct in Gaza. With scant evidence, too many observers accepted Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spin that they were in the driver’s seat and that intraparty fights over support for Israel would tear apart Democrats.

Now, the picture both internationally and domestically looks quite different. Israel faces condemnation across the U.S. political spectrum for dangling the prospect of Iranian regime change in front of Trump. The war has been a strategic failure for Israel and the U.S., endangering Netanyahu’s coalition government, turning American public opinion against Israel, and boosting advocates in Israel and the U.S. who want to curtail military aid to Israel. (AIPAC is in quite a pickle now that Netanyahu appears to favor curtailing U.S. military aid, the very position for which AIPAC vilified Democratic progressives.)

Matters got worse for the Trump-Netanyahu duo (and prognosticators certain of their triumph) when Iran bombed Israel, Netanyahu defied Trumps’ demand for restraint, and Netanyahu incurred Trump’s public tongue-lashing. Forced to halt his retaliation, Netanyahu was humiliated at home, which only affirmed his position as the snubbed junior partner in a disastrous war. (Now that Trump has retaliated for downing of a U.S. helicopter, Netanyahu looks all the more impotent.) Netanyahu’s rationale for retaining power — his supposed talent in manipulating the U.S. and garnering support for nonstop wars — is evaporating.

After that embarrassment, Netanyahu still faces, as Gideon Rachman explained, a “peace deal that Trump is working on seems likely to leave Iran in a stronger financial position — and still with a residual nuclear capability.” Netanyahu’s reliance on Trump and his preference for “an entirely military solution to Israel’s security problems — ignoring the political and diplomatic dimensions” render Israel more isolated and his coalition more precarious than ever.

Netanyahu’s arrogant insistence that Israel needed the support of only right-wing Republicans, permitting him to ignore bipartisan American opinion and legitimate concerns of American Jews, was a stupendous miscalculation. Instead of restoring his reputation, cementing an authoritarian alliance with the MAGA movement, and demonstrating the superiority of war over diplomacy, Netanyahu enters a treacherous election environment with Israel’s standing in the U.S. collapsing. Netanyahu apologists and observers who bought their spin certainly did not expect a seismic readjustment in U.S.-Israel policy, the hardening of Americans’ conviction that advocates of forever wars are dangerous, or a serious backlash against the Israel-right-or-wrong crowd. By contrast, Democrats who stuck with a morally and strategically defensible anti-war stance critical of Netanyahu have widespread public support.

Middle East developments remind us that extrapolating from unrelated events and assuming competency neither Trump nor Netanyahu possess lead to faulty conclusions. Remembering Trump’s uncanny preference for picking the wrong ally to pursue the wrong strategy — that is, betting against Trump’s utterly flawed foreign policy impulses — would lead to far more accurate results.

Trump’s election denial/voting rigging may run out of steam

Inarguably, MAGA Supreme Court justices’ evisceration of voting rights and re-imposition of Jim Crow along with Trump’s phony election fraud claims have done real damage to pluralistic democracy. Certainly, Republicans’ re-redistricting gambit threatens to disenfranchise millions of voters, make elections less competitive, and increase ideological extremism. Still, Trump’s political collapse and the anti-MAGA political environment (getting worse by the day, thanks to Trump’s Iran war-driven 4.2 percent inflation , which he loves) strongly suggest that “the House map is not red enough to protect Republicans,” as Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball confirmed. Bottom line: With Democrats are still favored “to flip the House in November,” panic over “stolen” or (even more hysterically) “cancelled” elections looks unwarranted.

Election law expert Rick Hasen recalled, “Trump has incessantly fueled beliefs on the right that voter fraud is prevalent in Democratic states, and in particular that California’s slow vote count shows that the system is ‘crooked.’” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson piled on when he told reporters California vote-rigging is “so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove.” In declaring “everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here,” however, Johnson gave away the game, Hasen dryly observed. (“Yes, the alleged voter fraud claimed by Trump and his allies is always the perfect crime: happening on a massive scale yet impossible to detect. It’s quite convenient to have a theory that is completely unfalsifiable.”)

With time, more voters, media outlets, public officials, and the courts have figured out that MAGA’s wild accusations are the fever dreams of losers desperate to excuse defeat. Trump’s early test runs (e.g., Fulton County, Georgia) of his election denialism risk inoculating the public against his specious claims. As Hasen noted, “[T]hanks to Trump himself, anyone paying any attention knows that California’s vote count is notoriously slow, that the ‘blue shift’ favoring Democrats routinely happens and that Trump has produced no evidence to support his claims.”

The legacy media now get it. “By baselessly framing [Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya] Raman’s rise as a Democratic scam, Mr. Trump extended his long-running project to erode public faith in elections — and gave an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake,” the New York Times reported, emphasizing “how little of this has survived contact with reality.” Perhaps keeping Trump’s laughably ineffective antics under wraps would have been smarter.

Democracy activists should remain vigilant about efforts to invalidate elections based on a jerry-rigged, inaccurate national registration database. They should challenge executive decrees that may create havoc with mail-in balloting. But hysteria about a stolen election now appears unwarranted, especially if Democrats maximize voter engagement and turnout. (The bigger the margin, the harder it is to cheat.)

Widely publicizing Trump’s and Johnson’s confession that they have zero evidence of fraud may be the best way to boost the credibility of our elections, fend off Republican election antics, and quiet hysteria over a stolen election.

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