No. of Recommendations: 12
No MAGAt will "square that circle" and the "cognitive dissonance you noted" will never be quieted. The MAGAts will engage in cognitive cacophony, if anything. It does not matter what the dear leader says or does, it will always be the correct path.
Yes, at the end of the day the base will probably get to a spot where dear leader is correct. However, they'll get there by adopting some argument that "squares the circle" between the positions they took on the JCPOA and the position they'll end up taking on the Trump deal. We saw this even with the J6 riot. For the base to get to a point where they didn't feel bad about the riot, they came up with a whole bunch of theories and arguments about what happened that day in order to get themselves comfortable deciding the riot was not the fault of MAGA.
With Iran, things are a bit more complicated, because we're not talking about rationalizing a past event. Trump has to give his blessing to any deal. He doesn't want to bless a deal that his supporters won't go along with. So he would like to see his supporters start to line up behind some theory of why it's okay to have an agreement with Iran, despite all the prior criticisms that Iran always has the desire and ability to cheat on any agreement without getting caught. He might cut a deal anyway, since the politics are bad on this: high gas prices and a Congress that's unlikely to give him the money he needs to keep fighting indefinitely. But if his base finds a story they can tell themselves to support "Trump deal good, Obama deal bad" it will get much easier for him to get there.
I was cautiously optimistic when the "It's all the Democrats' fault" line started to briefly pop up. That's a way of excusing a bad deal without it being anything negative about Trump, and it might have provided him an off-ramp. If MAGA blamed this on Democrats, somehow, then the outcomes don't reflect badly on Trump - this was a winnable war, but Trump was betrayed by the horrible Democrats. I suppose it never got traction because Trump probably can't abide his Iran deal being thought of as a loss, as something that was forced on him by Democratic conniving.
So I'm interested if there's any arguments out there explaining why we have a ceasefire and why we're engaging in diplomacy at all, if Iran will never comply with an agreement and has the ability to cheat without detection. Because if such an argument - whatever its merits - starts to emerge from MAGA and Trump's supporters, it means that a deal becomes more probable.
