NR’s Noah Rothman writes in “Tulsi and Tucker Get Thrown Under the MAGA Bus” (behind NR’s paywall, links omitted):
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In remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday morning, Trump seems increasingly frustrated with the degree to which his intelligence community purports to speak for the president — particularly when sources within it retail a version of reality that Trump himself doesn’t seem to recognize.
“I didn’t say I was looking for a cease-fire,” Trump replied when asked about indications that his administration sought direct negotiations between his envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi — overtures that French President Emmanuel Macron made public. Instead, Trump clarified, what he sought was a “real end” to Iran’s uranium enrichment program in which the regime ends up “giving up entirely.” He later clarified his outlook: “I expect nothing less than their complete surrender.”
In regard to the dispute between [DNI Tulsi] Gabbard’s intelligence community and everyone else in relation to Iran’s race to a fissionable device, Trump sided definitively with everyone else. “I don’t care what she said,” the president said curtly of his own DNI. “I think they were very close to having them.”
Gabbard isn’t the only member of MAGA’s imaginative constructivist wing to find herself cast unceremoniously under the bus by the movement’s avatar. Gabbard wasn’t asking for that sort of treatment, but erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson certainly was.
Carlson and his ideological allies joined Gabbard in the effort to seed a pliant press with dubious allegations against Iran’s critics — particularly those who promoted the wholly uncontroversial notion that, before last Thursday, Iran was a threshold nuclear state. Carlson himself predicted that a parade of horribles would flow from an Israeli attack on Iran. “Thousands of Americans” would die in its “first week,” he said, when each of America’s near-peer competitors rose up to join with Iran in its righteous war against the West. Thus, Israel would inaugurate a “world war” in which “we’d lose.”
We have two days left before we reach the eschaton Carlson predicted, so we should have some humility in that regard. But within the first five days of this operation, Israel has disabled Iran’s air defenses, all but neutralized its offensive ballistic missile capabilities, struck dozens of nuclear targets across Iran, decapitated its military and paramilitary forces, decimated its nuclear science community, and targeted the Iranian domestic terror apparatus to such a degree that the edifice of the Islamic republic itself is starting to look structurally unsound.
Carlson’s agitation has been even more detached from our shared reality than the one Gabbard’s acolytes promulgated. So, under the bus he went, too.
Whole thing here.
